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The Return of the Black Flags The conditions that first produced ISIS have been left to fester as part of a wider malign neglect toward the Muslim Middle East in the aftermath of the Iraq war. Brian Stewart

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/10/10/the-return-of-the-black-flags-isis-iraq-syria/

We seem to have reached a hinge moment in the long-running battle against the Islamic State. In recent months, the jihadist outfit has been mustering forces in Syria’s Badiya desert, recruiting and training a new band of holy warriors to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. The rallying of jihadist forces and the corresponding outburst of violence have not been out of the ordinary in this vast ungoverned space, but they may yet prove combustible enough to engulf Syria and parts of Iraq.

This year, the number of attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets of the growing insurgency have been US garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led troops whom the US helped to defeat the militant group five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counter-terrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates from jail, where they have languished since the SDF and US-led coalition recaptured the Islamic State’s last bastion.

Since laying waste to the caliphate in 2019, the US has maintained a small but robust military presence in Syria and Iraq, conducting a largely surreptitious campaign to suppress the remnants of IS. US warplanes carry out airstrikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces conducting raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos undertake missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. In 2024, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of kinetic activity mirrors 2023, when the US carried out four strikes against Islamic State. 

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Nobody Fights for a World Economic Forum Flag By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/nobody_fights_for_a_world_economic_forum_flag.html

Good luck finding anyone willing to go to war for globalism.

One of the peculiar things about our stark civil divide is that Americans who are extremely unhappy with the direction of our country are more likely to wave the U.S. flag than those actually steering the country on its current course.  Consider how strange that is!  When the civil rights movement and anti-war protests reached their peak over half a century ago, hippies, peaceniks, revolutionaries, agitators, and anarchists burned the American flag whenever they got the chance.  They bought in to the revisionist narratives of Marxist historians, who taught an entire generation of young people that America is an evil, imperialist, exploitative, genocidal, fascist, slaveholding nation that can never be redeemed.  

These students, in turn, grew up to become the current custodians of the federal government.  One of Barack Obama’s first initiatives as president was to undertake an “apology tour” around the world so that he could rub salt in old wounds and provide America’s enemies with planeloads of rhetorical ammunition (and pallets of cash).  In deriding President Trump’s MAGA movement, Joe Biden has repeatedly insisted that America was never that great and never lived up to its promise.  Globalist mosquito John Kerry flies around the world to praise the virtues of one-world government and bemoan America’s stubborn constitutional safeguards for individual rights such as free speech.  Having bought in to the gospel of Howard Zinn, those who hold the reins of power in Washington, D.C. are some of the most anti-American zealots on the planet!

That contradiction has produced this odd historical moment, in which people who largely dislike America run the U.S. government and people who love America largely despise the U.S. government.  If you travel through patriotic regions of the country filled with Americans who either served in the armed forces or have family members who currently do, you will find U.S. flags flying from almost every home.  Not only is Old Glory ubiquitous in neighborhoods, cemeteries, and town halls, but also other patriotic flags — including the Gadsden and Bunker Hill flags — are draped prominently from porches, barns, storefronts, and trucks.

Once you head to a coastal city, however, not only does the sea of patriotism abruptly disappear, but also out-of-town visitors are much more likely to discover newspaper editorials arguing for perplexing things — such as the idea that it is “racist” for schoolkids to dress in Americana clothing or that it is psychologically “triggering” for unsuspecting bystanders to be “accosted” by images of the U.S. flag.  When townsfolk visit big cities, the strain of anti-Americanism is downright jolting.

There are questions that hover over the United States today, much like toxic plumes in windless skies.  Are the divisions in our country too great for the Union to overcome?  Can the federation of fifty states persevere while prominent politicians call for an end to the Electoral College (an essential constitutional check against the power of big, wealthy states) and the further diminishment of the states’ sovereign authority?  Can we talk about an “American nation” united by common principles and shared history when the foreign-born population has steadily risen to over fifty million residents today?  Are we still bound together by a love for freedom and a commitment to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or has Marxist-socialism’s takeover of America’s educational institutions combined with a half-century of immigration from communist nations created a majority who wholly reject the structure and character of the American Republic as founded?  These are questions that weigh heavily on Americans’ minds as they increasingly see those within driving distance not as neighbors, but rather as strangers from indecipherable cultures.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Topsy Turvy in the Middle East: The Case for Total Victory by Gwythian Prins

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21017/middle-east-total-victory

Such were the mutilations that not a single corpse of a girl or a woman was in a state fit to be shown to her family before burial.

[W]ithin days of the atrocities, the global moral compass had swung 180 degrees. Starting significantly in London, and long before the IDF had marshalled itself to go into Gaza, street protests in Western cities and reporters in mainstream media were portraying Hamas as the victims and Israel as the violent aggressor…. This accusation has been the biggest lie of the past year.

If one is among the modern cult “perfecti”…. one’s inherent virtue confers special privileges and exemptions which are not available to less-perfect people. By definition, one can do no wrong. Any respect for the integrity of history is lost. As in the former Soviet Union, but no longer a joke: the future is certain, only the past is ever-changing…. and the mandatory projection of modern values onto the past is popular among the self-righteous.

[I]n Israel’s war of self-defence… tactical operations show that minimisation of loss of life of everyone except the terrorist enemies has been a prime concern…. To a degree that is unmatched, the IDF routinely warns civilians to leave targeted zones before attacks.

Iran’s proxy groups hide their attack tunnels, command posts and weapons caches in Gaza and Lebanon under residential buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques, in an express flouting of the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war…. The tunnel complexes which, in the instance of Gaza, exceed the length of the London Underground, were not built for the protection of civilians in time of conflict, but only for the protection of Hamas terrorists, as Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, readily admits…. Not by choice, these are the circumstances under which the IDF has been forced to fight.

It is all the more so because since October 7, 2023 the IDF’s actions on the ground in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon show the best record of any modern armed forces in discriminate targeting, even in combat with terrorists who deliberately use civilians as human shields…. On the basis of such data, former British Army Infantry Commander Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, has called the IDF “The World’s Most Moral Army.”

When one’s enemy has no war aim other than genocide, and has said so consistently for 90 years, there is most likely zero probability of a diplomatic route to peace. After six refusals of land offered for peace since 1922, there is now no prospect of any diplomacy this side of Israel’s total victory, and the terrorists’ total defeat. “Mugged by reality” is now… the realisation that, whatever else people may think about him, Netanyahu is the indispensable war leader for present times. The historian Andrew Roberts has called him “The Churchill of the Middle East.”

By and large the Western administrative class — whose worldview is framed by the assumption that with enough meetings in convivial places (“diplomacy”) deals can be reached that split differences — still does not rise to a sufficient level of geopolitical and comparative historical appreciation. This weak intellectual grasp only contributes significantly to the risk of a third world war.

The need for a strategy of total victory needs to be underscored. For decades, Iran and its proxies have been trying, as Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it, to “wipe Israel off the map.” Israel’s enemies are still trying. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad warned a year ago that Hamas would repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel was annihilated.

With the high probability that if Iran were to be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, it would use them on Israel, the avoidance of World War III now depends upon Israel eliminating that threat. Once again, President Joe Biden must not be obeyed. Products of the Western mind-set, as mentioned, it was the disastrous naivety of President Barack Obama and Biden in seeking to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme (the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — and illegitimately, with no mandate, to boot — that allowed Iran’s regime to play the US for fools and in so doing to acquire vital foreign currency inflow – and time — that enabled the Iranian theocracy to resume and hasten its road to nuclear weapons.

“Iran is reeling… insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated. Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.” — Jared Kushner, advisor and son-in-law of President Donald J. Trump, X, September 29, 2024.

The threat is not just to the Jews but to the world order and the West…. Israel rightly feels unleashed. This tiny nation has both moral mandate and customary international legal right (which long predates the experiment of UN-drafted papers) to be so. Like Ukraine’s, Israel’s victory matters to the entire free world.

The world currently divides unequally into those who understand this and the majority who do not, or who may just not want to admit it.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: 3 reasons why Kamala Harris still can’t define her vision

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/3-reasons-why-kamala-harris-still-cant-define-her-vision

Who is Kamala Harris?

Despite an uptick in interviews, several weeks on the stump, three years as vice president, months spent campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, four years as a senator and seven as California attorney general, many Americans still don’t think they know the “real” Kamala Harris.

How can that be? Remaining undefined after all this time as a public figure is astonishing. Equally shocking is Harris’ obvious terror of being in the spotlight. That’s the only plausible explanation for the “word salads” that are tossed to interviewers when a teleprompter goes missing. Or the ill-timed bursts of laughter meant to cover her anxiety. 

As Maureen Dowd wrote recently in The New York Times, “Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.” 

True, she did well during her debate against former President Donald Trump, but that performance required weeks of rehearsal and memorization, a giant assist from partisan moderators and – let’s be honest – an inexpert opponent.

Why is Harris so insecure? One possibility is that it is because she knows she is not qualified, and that she has landed on this lofty perch for all the wrong reasons. That she became V.P., because Joe Biden had promised to pick a woman of color, and not because of her accomplishments. And that she was tapped to be the 2024 nominee because Democrat pooh-bahs realized a diminished Biden could not beat Donald Trump and ran out of time to find someone better. 

Another explanation is that Kamala Harris is pretending to be something she is not: a moderate politician. She may be struggling to mask her progressive beliefs, the ones she ran on unsuccessfully in 2019. Her father was a Marxist economist and her mother a liberal activist; both presumably had some influence on their daughter as she grew up in San Francisco.

Harris has said her core values have not changed, but that would suggest that her flip-flopping on important issues like fracking and Medicare-for-All are political gambits, meant to reassure critical centrist voters. After all, she didn’t hold leftist opinions in college; she held them just five years ago.  To broaden her appeal, she may be lying about a great many things; that would make anyone uncomfortable. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Preserving America’s Technological Leadership by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21016/america-technological-leadership

There is no small irony that Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to mock the Biden Administration’s “green energy” policies and its flawed decision to rely on wind and solar as our nation’s future sources of essential electricity.

Consider: The exponential growth of AI is now powering the next generation of innovations that range from spacecraft to speech, and it is creating an enormous demand for energy to run the servers that drive this technology. Fortune believes that AI electricity requirements could consume as much as a quarter of all electrical power in the United States within six years. That is a mind-boggling amount of electricity, and it comes at the expense of every other industrial sector as well as our residential requirements. There is just so much electrical power generated in the United States to go around.

The opposite side of that coin is if American AI innovators cannot access the needed power to operate their data centers, we will have no choice but to cede our nation’s AI leadership to those countries fully prepared to do what they must to dominate this field.

Like China.

To be clear, the competition to take the lead in AI will make the Cold War space race competition look like a JV touch football game.

All of this comes at a time when the White House will have us believe that the pathway to the future lies in electricity generated by wind and solar. Even the most optimistic estimates say that those sources cannot meet America’s immediate or long-term energy requirements, despite billions in federal subsidies.

One response comes from an AI leader that wants to ensure it can be in the vanguard of innovation in this crucial area: Microsoft.

In a decision that must be driving Progressive “greens” to distraction, a reactor unit in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania is now scheduled, pending regulatory review, to reopen by the end of this decade.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Rushes to Downplay Explosive Evidence of Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism Robert Spencer

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/10/14/media-rushes-to-downplay-explosive-evidence-of-kamala-harris-plagiarism-n4933333

Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.

JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”

The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’” 

That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Anti-Semitism? What anti-Semitism? The ‘anti-racists’ seem desperate to ignore the Jew hatred in our midst. Tom Slater

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/14/anti-semitism-what-anti-semitism/

“The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ since 7 October won’t have surprised anyone who has been paying attention. But it must deprive the woke set of the moral high ground for good. After years of raging against cultural appropriation, microaggressions and inanimate objects, they clammed up when genocidal terrorists achieved the most deadly assault against Jews since the Holocaust, and anti-Semitic marches became part and parcel of British city life. They showed once and for all that they don’t care about racism, particularly when it’s levelled against Jews. Never let them forget it.”

If you take the mainstream media’s word for it, Britain and much of the West have been gripped in recent years by a long-overdue reckoning with our racist past and present. 2020 – the year Black Lives Matter went global – was supposedly a high watermark for ‘anti-racist’ activism, which was only bristled against by bigots or dumb proles oblivious to their own privilege.

None of that was true, of course. As was clear even at the time, the BLM convulsions had nothing to do with a bottom-up backlash against racism and everything to do with a top-down attempt to mainstream woke racial identity politics – an ideology that is by turns divisive (carving people up along racial lines) and trivial (insisting that the existence of a statue in Bristol was among the primary obstacles to black British success).

But if you were still labouring under the misconception that our cultural elites are now all dogged anti-racists, entitled to indulge in their incessant moral preening, witness their stony, silent reaction to the sulphurous re-emergence of anti-Semitism over the past year. Following Hamas’s pogrom in Israel, Jew hatred has made a devastating comeback on Britain’s streets, and the knee-takers have had bugger all to say about it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Western ‘solidarity’ is a death sentence for Palestinians The Battle of Northern Gaza confirms that Hamas and its woke apologists are the greatest threat to Palestinians. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/14/is-the-death-cult-of-hamas-on-its-last-legs-lets-hope-so/

Many grim things are happening in northern Gaza right now, as Israel puts the screws on Hamas. But there’s one thing in particular that leapt out at me from this bloody showdown between the Israel Defence Forces and the army of anti-Semites that started this infernal war with its pogrom of a year ago. It’s a thing that isn’t being widely reported. A fact you will need to dig deep to find. You certainly won’t spy any mention of it in the toilet of Israelophobia known as social media. It’s this: the IDF is pleading with Palestinian civilians to leave northern Gaza, while Hamas is instructing them to stay.

Even the BBC – so hostile to Israel that it refuses to refer to its fascistic persecutors as ‘terrorists’ – felt compelled to chronicle this most telling of stories from the benighted north of Gaza. In a typically breathless piece alleging that Israel is pursuing the military strategy of ‘surrender or starve’, the Beeb reports that where the IDF has warned Gazans that it will be ‘operating with great force’ in the north, and thus they should ‘evacuate immediately’, Hamas has told them to stay. In fact, Hamas has warned the 400,000 souls still left in the north to not even think about moving. It has used falsehoods and fear to cajole women and children into staying put, telling them the south is ‘just as dangerous’ (not true) and that if they leave ‘they will not be allowed back’ (bastards).

Reuters has likewise clocked these disturbing accounts from the ground. ‘The Israeli military [is] calling on Palestinians to evacuate south’, it reports, while Hamas is ‘telling them not to leave because it [is] too risky’. The IDF has gone to great lengths to convince civilians to flee, posting messages online in Arabic clearly stipulating that even ‘shelters’ in certain parts of the north would shortly become ‘dangerous combat zone[s]’. It has distributed maps with a ‘large yellow arrow’ showing civilians where to go. Hamas, meanwhile, has all but forbidden an exodus. There are even reports that it is using physical force to make people stay. One Gazan has claimed that their Islamist rulers are ‘beating them with sticks’ if they try to access the IDF’s mapped-out ‘humanitarian corridor’.

How do we make sense of this? According to the intellectuals and activists of the Western world, Israel is a demented genocidal state, hell-bent on slaughtering Palestinians and especially keen on killing children (blood libel, much?). Hamas, meanwhile, is a ‘resistance’ movement, if an iffy one, whose strikes against Israel are an understandable stab at protecting Gazans from the violent bloodlust of psycho Zionists. And yet here we have the ‘genocidaires’ pleading with Gazans to move out of harm’s way, and ‘the resistance’ ordering them to stay in it. Providing civilians with maps to safety? Israel is surely the most rubbish genocidal entity in history.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Matias Ahrensdorf, Leo Grunschlag A New Hope for K-12 Education Emet Classical Academy is the first Jewish school devoted to the core texts of Western civilization.

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-new-hope-for-k-12-education

In early September, as New York’s children returned to the classroom, the city witnessed a landmark in educational history. Forty pioneering students—fifth-, sixth-, and ninth-graders—became the inaugural cohort at Emet Classical Academy, the first Jewish school founded on the principles of classical education. 

The need for classical alternatives to traditional public education has intensified in recent years, as political indoctrination—often including anti-American rhetoric, gender ideology, and anti-Semitic propaganda—is increasingly inflicted on public school students. The classical education movement’s response to these developments is to remove political bias from the classroom, focusing instead on equipping students with foundational knowledge and fostering logic, critical thinking, and an appreciation for the core texts of Western civilization.

Emet Academy’s commitment to “take your child as far as he or she can go” is a useful encapsulation of its approach. Along with teaching classic texts, the school also offers a rigorous STEM program. Its Judaic studies program, which encompasses the Tanakh and Talmudic reasoning, sets it apart from other classical institutions. Classes are taught seminar-style to facilitate serious discussions about the material, and to allow students to hone their public-speaking and debate skills. Electives are offered by experts in their respective fields—music, by an orchestrator from the Manhattan School of Music; theater, by a professional Shakespearean actor; a philosophy-of-math course—for the most advanced ninth-grade students—by a renowned mathematician.

Dr. Abraham Unger, Emet’s founding head of school, highlighted the importance of keeping political bias out of the classroom. “To impose ideology on a text is really to halt the progress of humanity,” he said. An emphasis on ideology has led many curricula, he said, to lose a sense of “how to move the human prospect forward.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Dark New Greta Thunberg and Our Celebrity-Industrial Complex By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dark-new-greta-thunberg-and-our-celebrity-industrial-complex/

“Now as we watch Thunberg insist that the only way to be a true climate activist is by adopting the notion that Israel cannot continue to exist — that’s what those “decolonize from the river to the sea” signs mean, whether those holding them understand it or not — can we all now recognize that perhaps turning a troubled young teenager into the face of a global movement wasn’t such a swell idea?”

Way back in the ancient time of 2015, Matt Drudge found himself befuddled about why he was suddenly seeing actress Amy Schumer everywhere, when he didn’t find her particularly funny, insightful, or enjoyable. “Who is Amy Schumer? Where did she come from? Why is she being force-fed on population?” (The actress is Chuck Schumer’s cousin, and looking back I wonder if Drudge was implying that family connections were a driving force behind her then-burgeoning fame.)

Every now and then, you see some figure plucked from obscurity who is touted as the Next Big Thing, often with very little sense of why this person is so magnificent and head and shoulders above the rest. It is as if someone — some Hollywood super-agent, or magazine editor, or television network executive — has hand-selected a person and declared, “This person is going to be a star, come hell or high water.” A switch gets flipped, a high-tech pop-culture media whirligig swings into action, and suddenly that person is everywhere.

Sometimes you see it in Hollywood — Why was Ezra Miller in so many Hollywood blockbusters for a stretch? Why did Shia LaBeouf become the sidekick to every 1980s pop-culture icon? — and sometimes you see it in the world of politics — Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams come to mind. Back in 2022, I jokingly referred to it as the “celebrity-industrial complex,” all those glossy magazines that can put someone on the cover and make someone’s face recognizable and their presence seem ubiquitous.

I thought of that as I saw Greta Thunberg now wearing a keffiyeh and leading pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel marches in Europe, declaring, “If you as a climate activist don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist. . . . You cannot be neutral in a genocide!”