ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The strange reluctance to see Jews as victims Even the sight of three emaciated hostages was not enough to shake the lie that Jews are oppressors. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/10/the-strange-reluctance-to-see-jews-as-victims/

The words of Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet writer, rang in my ears on Saturday: ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, [and] I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.’ For as those three weak, skeletal, stolen Jews finally tasted freedom after 16 months of bondage in Gaza, it became clear that Hamas is guilty of the very crime it accuses the Jewish State of committing. Famine. The use of hunger as a weapon of war. The infliction of humiliating malnourishment on those judged a lesser people. The Jews are starving us, Hamas cried, when in truth Hamas was starving Jews.

The scenes were chilling. Surrounded by well-fed and heavily armed Hamas gunmen, Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami cut frail, gaunt figures. Their 491 days in the captivity of that neo-fascist militia had clearly been hellish. On its Instagram page, Israel posted images of the men before and after their kidnapping. Three fit, tanned men had become haggard creatures. They’d clearly been deprived of both food and sunlight – the stuff of life – while chained in Hamas’s dank tunnels. The glee of their loved ones gave way to dread. ‘He [looks] like a skeleton’, said Ben Ami’s mother.

Hamas’s inhumanity continued even during the men’s release. There was a profoundly unsettling moment when Eli Sharabi, flanked by Hamas brutes, said into a mic that he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. As Hamas knew very well, his wife and daughters are dead. They were murdered in the 7 October pogrom. They were shot to death by Hamas militants who invaded their home crying, ‘Die Israel!’. Their bodies were found ‘cuddled together’. For Hamas militants to watch as a man they starved expressed his hope of being reunited with his family that they butchered is a testament to their depthless moral depravity.

It is unimaginable cruelty. You would need to wade back decades to find equal acts of wanton savagery against a Jewish family. Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, was a British citizen. She was from Wales. Their daughters, aged just 13 and 16, will have been Welsh-Israeli. The silence of Britain’s ‘progressives’ on Hamas’s slaughter of these British women for nothing more than the fact that they were Jews in Israel is horrifying. Hamas’s calculated cruelty towards Eli Sharabi finds its echo in the pitiless indifference of Lianne Sharabi’s fellow Britons towards the barbarism inflicted on her and her girls on 7 October.

Or Levy, 34, also didn’t know his wife was dead: she was slain alongside 363 others at the Nova music festival. These men were robbed of their liberty for 16 months and then freed into unthinkable grief. Yet the virtuous of the West look the other way.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vance Is Right About the Limits of Judicial Restraints on Executive Power By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vance-is-right-about-the-limits-of-judicial-restraints-on-executive-power/

In its awful 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld one aspect (out of four) of Arizona’s contested immigration statute — a provision requiring state police, in certain circumstances, to verify a detained person’s immigration status with the federal government. This was a rejection of the Obama administration, which had argued that this provision was preempted by federal law and that its enforcement would interfere with Obama administration policy.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruled against President Obama on this point, the Obama administration announced that it would cease cooperation with Arizona’s efforts to verify a detainee’s immigration status. That is, after Obama lost in the Supreme Court, he decided he was going to ignore the Supreme Court because, under the Constitution, it was his job, not the justices’ job, to decide immigration enforcement policy.

This is nothing new or unusual from Democratic administrations. When FDR initially didn’t get his way on New Deal programs, he threatened to pack the Court until the justices got their minds right. When Biden didn’t get his way on socializing student load debt onto the rest of us, he bragged to his progressive base — which he was desperately trying to turn out to vote for Democrats against Donald Trump — that he didn’t care what the justices said, he was going to keep figuring out ways to do what they said was illegal.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Musk Fumes After DOGE Team Discovers ‘FEMA Sent $59 Million LAST WEEK to Luxury Hotels in NYC’ to House Illegals By Debra Heine

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/10/musk-fumes-after-doge-team-discovers-fema-sent-59-million-last-week-to-luxury-hotels-in-nyc-to-house-illegals/

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was still sending millions of taxpayer dollars to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal aliens as recently as last week, according to DOGE chief Elon Musk.

In a post on X early Monday morning, an irate Musk wrote that his team had just discovered that “FEMA sent $59 million LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants.”

Trump signed an executive order on January 24 to create a council to review FEMA, address the agency’s failed responses to recent disasters and come up with a plan “to drastically improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (“FEMA’s) efficacy, priorities, and competence.”

Trump also signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to…disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities.”

The freeze affected funding on thousands of federal programs, pending review by the administration, but a federal judge put that action on hold late last month.

Musk said FEMA’s transfer of funds to the luxury hotels “violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”

He added: “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Hostages Return Gaunt and Skeletal A glimpse into Hamas’ diabolical depravity. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israeli-hostages-return-gaunt-and-skeletal/

During their release, the Israeli hostages have been made to suffer various indignities. Some of the girls and women, obviously frightened, have been surrounded by rifle-toting bezonians, pressing against them, screaming at them, pushing and pulling them this way and that, making it difficult for them, even with their Hamas guards, to make it to the Red Cross officials who were waiting to receive them.

Some of the hostages have been paraded on stages in front of Allahu-akbaring Hamas men. Some have been forced to sign documents expressing their “appreciation” for the “good treatment” they received from Hamas. All of them have apparently been told by their captors to smile for the cameras; some of the girls and women being released were ordered not just to smile, but to engage in joking banter with their guards, for if they did not, Hamas would take it out on those those Israelis still in captivity.

Three of the captives released — Doron Seinbrecher, Emily Damari, and Romi Gonen — were videotaped as they were handed “gift bags,” brown paper bags, really, that were said to contain mementos from their time held in captivity in Gaza. On each bag was the logo of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. In each of the bags, there was a special certificate, also bearing the logo of the Al-Qassam brigades, titled “Release Agreement” in both Hebrew and Arabic, with Israeli media reporting that the document was signed by the Red Cross at the moment of handover.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hollywood Rages Impotently About Anti-Fascist Trump Clinging to a failed strategy. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hollywood-rages-impotently-about-anti-fascist-trump/

In the wake of a recent poll which only confirmed what Donald Trump’s election landslide proved – that celebrities have become politically irrelevant – Hollywood continues to rage impotently against the new President with their tired, old, ineffective smears that he and his new administration are “fascists” and “Nazis.”

To recap: the Left has spent every waking moment since Trump announced his presidential run back in 2015 trying to demonize him as Hitler 2.0. The coordinated media smearing of Trump as a more dangerous fascist than Benito Mussolini was so relentless and demonstrably false that it ultimately backfired; last November, voters rejected the fear-mongering propaganda and embraced a positive, hopeful movement to make America great again.

But the Left refuses to take the lesson to heart. Hollywood in particular still teems with bitter, angry, self-righteous elites who cannot accept that those cisgender white nationalists in the flyover country they so despise voted this fascist strongman into the White House. To paraphrase the quote attributed to film critic Pauline Kael about Richard Nixon, “How could Trump have won? Nobody I know voted for him,” the Hollywood elites wonder.

One giveaway that the Left was hyperbolizing about Trump was their kneejerk (ab)use of the word “fascist,” which they won’t or can’t even define correctly. To the Left, “fascist” is the go-to label for anyone and anything that stands in the way of their lust for one-party hegemony – and no single person is more of an obstacle to that obsession than Donald Trump. In fact, “fascism” is best defined by the man so closely associated with it that he is called the Father of Fascism – Il Duce himself, Mussolini: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

This is a Big Government slogan. This is the slogan of a Party that wants to consolidate all power into a State that maintains that power by crushing dissent.

But Trump is a man who campaigned on dismantling the Deep State, and in whose first couple of weeks in office he has taken a wrecking ball to the bloated, corrupt bureaucracy of an out-of-control federal government. But Hollywood won’t let the truth get in the way of a necessary narrative.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Gabriel Rossman How to Get More Conservatives in Academia Universities’ ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem.

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological

Academia skews sharply leftward and is increasingly illiberal. Many academics have abandoned the fact/value distinction, which had long served as both a source of rigor and a sort of epistemological Peace of Westphalia. That trend is worsening, as graduate students are much likelier than faculty to support suppression of heterodox ideas. The academy’s ideological imbalance has made it easier for younger academics to define themselves around polemical, “praxis-oriented” scholar-activism.

The politicization of the university is not only an obstacle for the Right but for academia itself. Schools’ “sectarian” reputation undermines trust among those who (more or less correctly) perceive them to be hostile to their views. More important, academia’s ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem, as it gives license to theory-laden interpretations of reality and declining rigor. For instance, a 2023 article in JAMA Surgery asserted that “structural racism” may cause mass-shooting events, even though the paper’s analysis showed that plausible structural-racism measures had no effect beyond that of race itself. Likewise, a celebrated 2020 article in PNAS showed that black babies in Florida died less often under the care of black doctors—but as a 2024 replication by Manhattan Institute scholars demonstrated, that effect obtained only because the original authors had failed to control for birth weight, a variable so obvious that its omission must be considered a failure of peer review. Such a left-wing bias—and the errors that it enables—should embarrass the academy.

It also should prompt conservatives to address their human-capital problem: without right-wing academics, there are fewer experts to conduct research and staff bureaucracies. The problem is easy to see. Proposing a workable solution is much harder.

When a fire breaks out in the kitchen, the first step in stopping its spread is to turn off the stove. Likewise, a key part of the solution to the Right’s lack of representation in universities is to identify the source of the Left’s capture of the academy and put a stop to it. Manhattan Institute fellow John Sailer has thoroughly discussed the problems created by DEI statements and “cluster hires” and how trustees and state legislatures can end these anti-intellectual practices. These policies, which require applicants to profess their commitment to an ideologically oriented mission as a condition of employment, certainly contribute to the demand side of the Right’s academic-employment problem.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOGE Cancels $180,000 Anthony Fauci Museum Exhibit David Strom

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/02/08/doge-cancels-180000-anthony-fauci-museum-exhibit-n3799632

Well, well, well. 

As DOGE rampages through the federal budget in the most glorious way possible, they keep finding the most egregious spending. 

The worst spending tends to be the anodyne-sounding programs that are sold to make our lives “better,” but the funniest and often most infuriating are the smaller and more ridiculous things like transgender comic books and operas. 

This spending item stands out for another reason: it celebrates Anthony Fauci as a American hero and not the evil villain that he is. 
Someday, and I hope that day comes soon enough for Fauci to see it happen, he will be exposed to all the world as the man who gifted us both COVID and the tyranny and social destruction that followed in its wake. Perhaps then it would make sense to spend hundreds of thousands or millions to expose him and hold up as an example of why bureaucrats should never be allowed to become too powerful. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Big Lie About Trump’s NIH Cuts

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/11/the-big-lie-about-trumps-nih-cuts/

As day follows night, Democrats and various other big-government parasites screamed that the Trump administration’s decision to cut back on National Institutes of Health grants to colleges and universities would prove cataclysmic.

What’s really happening? Donald Trump is choking off a slush fund that colleges and universities have used for decades to finance left-wing causes.

On Feb. 7, the NIH announced that it would pay only 15% in overhead costs to colleges and universities instead of the average 26% it paid out in 2023.

The primal screams were immediate.

Rosa DeLauro, the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, claimed that “they are causing irreparable damage to ongoing research to develop cures and treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, ALS, Diabetes, Mental Health disorders, opioid abuse, genetic diseases, rare diseases, and other diseases and conditions affecting American families.”

A Johns Hopkins University professor wailed that “the lives of my children and grandchildren – and maybe yours – will be shorter and sicker, because discoveries will not be made.”

Harvard President Alan Garber said that it would “cut research activity at … every research university in our nation.”

Attorneys general from 22 states have filed suit against the overhead cap, claiming the harm will be “immediate and devastating.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Tests Trump’s Resolve by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21378/china-tests-trump-resolve

If the US fails to support its ally by treaty, the Philippines, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda machine and Chinese diplomats will likely seek to sow doubts about US resolve into the capitals of America’s Pacific allies.

China seems to claim a lot of waters, such as “almost all” of the South China Sea, as well as land, including Tibet; Arunachal Pradesh in northern India; the “near-Arctic,” and Taiwan, which has never been part of mainland China.

The Trump administration immediately needs to short-circuit all “exploratory” moves by China. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might order Seventh Fleet and US Pacific Command’s air assets to strengthen their presence near the Philippines and the Pacific. Any firm message to China that America will stand by its allies throughout free Asia would be of help.

The “Tariff Wars” have begun.

China’s State Council Tariff Commission released a list of 72 items that would fall under the 10% tariffs. Much of that list was related to agriculture, including several types of tractors, harvesters and other large pieces of farming equipment.

The list of U.S. imports that will be subject to 15% tariffs was far shorter, listing just eight types of coal and natural gas.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) President Xi Jinping might gin up further crises to test the mettle of President Donald J. Trump, just as he has tested the resolve of all recent incoming administrations.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Douglas Murray :Will Britain follow America’s lead on aid? Am I so immune to the obvious advantages of the British taxpayer giving $140,000 to a theater company in Bolivia?

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

http://Douglas Murrayhttps://thespectator.com/topic/will-britain-follow-americas-lead-on-aid/

The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: “That’s not fair — it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in power.”

The American left are in a particular funk about the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — as though railing against the proposed reduction of federal spending and reduction of the American deficit is a natural vote-winner. But good news does just keep on coming. On Monday, Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to shutter USAID — the US government money spigot that sprays money around the world, much of it to people who hate America.

Like Britain’s Department for International Development, the British Council and others, it is one of those entities which might just justify itself if it actually promoted the values of the donor country. But all these organizations were long ago taken over by insane people who hate the taxpayers that give them their money and think the best way for a nation to act in the twenty-first century is as a sort of large NGO.

This week, various White House spokesmen had fun pointing out some recent projects which might not have been the best use of US taxpayer dollars: $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” $47,000 to fund a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala. And hundreds of millions of dollars to provide better irrigation systems for Afghan poppy-growing projects as well as hundreds of thousands of meals for al Qaeda-related terrorists in Syria. It is one thing to actually feed your enemies, or fund their illegal drugs trade, but it might be even worse to go around the world paying people to display the worst woke excesses which took over America and most of the rest of the West in the past decade.

It reminds me of that classic from some years ago, when American “educators” were paid to introduce Afghan women to conceptual art, including Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal. The Afghan women in the class (caught on video) giggled as this poor western chump tried to get them up to speed on the twentieth century. You could see on their faces what they were thinking: if this is the crap the West is going to push on us, maybe our husbands were right about the western infidel after all. It was, as many a wag said at the time, literally money down the toilet.