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Does The World Care About Gaza’s Future Under Hamas?By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on January 24th, 2025

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/does-the-world-care-about-gazas-future-under-hamas/

The Palestinians of Gaza were the overwhelming focus of international concern during Israel’s 15-month-old war with Hamas, and their plight was the driving force behind global pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

But lest anyone believe that Israel’s detractors in the region and across the world really care about innocent Gazans, events on the ground since the ceasefire took effect show that’s truly a farcical notion.

Remember all that talk in Washington and elsewhere – as then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed the other day – of ensuring that the genocidal terrorists of Hamas who ignited the war by slaughtering 1,200 Israelis, and who have ruled Gaza with an iron fist for nearly two decades, never regain a governing role? Remember all the talk of turning Gaza over to a reformed Palestinian Authority that, with international aid, would rebuild the Strip to better serve the Palestinians?

Well, look around, as Hamas and its terrorist allies declare victory, retake control of Gaza’s streets, welcome home blood-stained prisoners from Israel, and promise to resume their terror against Israel – all of which ensures more war and hardship for innocent Palestinians caught in the crosshairs.

Where’s the global outrage over what’s sure to come? Where are the denunciations from UN and Western leaders? Where are the human rights activists who know how Palestinians suffer under Hamas rule? Where are the editorialists and campus protesters who pledge allegiance to the Palestinian cause?

The ceasefire deal, which is supposed to be implemented in three phases but still requires further negotiations for the second and third phases, provides “for the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian Prisoners and the return to a sustainable calm which would achieve a permanent ceasefire between the two sides.”

Sounds nice. But just days into the first phase, as the world chooses to look away, what’s happening in Gaza?

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For Peace in the Middle East, Trump Must Move the US Al-Udeid Air Base from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates by Robert Williams

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21341/move-us-military-from-qatar

“This is Qatar’s classic game: support the Islamist terrorists and then present itself as a mediator, liaison, and even peacemaker – the arsonist playing firefighter. As in Afghanistan, as in Egypt in 2010, and as in every Muslim country. In every Muslim country where there is a battle between the Islamists and the secularists, Qatar supports the Islamists, as in Gaza supporting Hamas for years, building its military might and enabling October 7.” — Colonel Yigal Carmon (ret), MEMRI, January 21, 2025.

[Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa], who claims to have broken completely with Al Qaeda, apparently did so only because of strategic disagreements, not because he suddenly abandoned its plan to create an Islamic state in Syria.

Hurrying to the next scandal, the Biden administration practically threw itself at Sharaa’s feet. It rushed to meet with the terrorist leader, then immediately removed the $10 million bounty for his arrest, without even waiting to see what he would do.

The US cannot continue to reward terrorism. President Donald J. Trump would do well to declare as a Foreign Terrorist Organization the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the font of all Sunni Islamist terrorism and is effectively promoted worldwide by Qatar’s television bullhorn, Al-Jazeera. Trump would also be well-advised to move American forces completely out of Qatar’s enormous Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of the US Central Command, move them to the United Arab Emirates, and effectively cut ties with Qatar, a country “pretending to be an ally.”

“Biden failed miserably. Trump should not recycle Biden’s approach, and should recognize that Qatar and Erdogan are enemies despite their incredible skill in presenting themselves as friends, and as firefighters when they are actually arsonists. Trump would achieve the release of all the hostages if he were only to hint that it is conceivable that the CENTCOM base could be relocated out of Qatar. In fact, he owes this to the Saudis and the Emiratis, who are his true allies. If Trump clings to Qatar and Erdogan against these allies, he should not then wonder why his true allies, the Saudis and the Emiratis, are drifting towards America’s adversaries, China and Russia” — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, January 9, 2025.

Qatar, the world’s foremost terrorist state, which seems never to have met an Islamist terrorist entity it did not support — from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda and ISIS — has gained yet another win. It is Syria, the latest country seized in a hostile Islamist takeover by the formerly Al Qaeda affiliated organization Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by his “nom de guerre,” Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani.

Throughout Sharaa’s decades-long career as a terrorist — from being a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, to founding Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front), which he led from 2012-2017, to forming HTS as a conglomerate of various jihadist groups — Qatar has been a constant factor. The Qataris have financially supported Al Qaeda wherever it went — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria -– so the final victory of Sharaa, is an even greater victory for Qatar, proving that its “investment” paid off.

Qatar’s State Security Chief Khalfan Al-Kaabi visited Damascus on December 12, 2024, just days after President Bashar al-Assad fled the country on December 8, following HTS’s final offensive. In no time, the Qataris reopened their embassy in Syria.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Hamas became invisible The greatest trick these vicious Islamists ever pulled was convincing the world they didn’t exist. Tim Black

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/22/how-hamas-became-invisible/

Almost as soon as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was declared on Sunday, footage of Hamas fighters on Gaza’s streets was being broadcast to the world. We saw masked assailants, armed with Kalashnikovs and sporting green headbands, riding pick-up trucks through crowds of cheering men in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We heard reports of thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform emerging on to rubble-strewn streets. Most striking of all, Hamas fighters were filmed swarming around three Israeli hostages during their handover to the Red Cross in Gaza City. The message being sent around the world was clear: this movement of violent anti-Semites is still a force. It’s still in control of Gaza. And it’s still a threat to the Jewish State.

The sight of Hamas out and about over the past few days should have surprised no one. After all, they’re the reason Israeli forces have been waging a painful, brutal military campaign there for the past 15 months. Yet incredibly, too many in the Western media did indeed seem shocked. It was as if it didn’t compute. ‘That was the one image that really knocked me back a bit’, said Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, on Monday morning’s Today programme. ‘[Hamas fighters] just emerged… in their trucks, which were somehow still intact’, he said. In an attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable, he added, ‘I presume they must have been parked in some kind of tunnel perhaps’.

Bowen wasn’t the only member of the press corps to have to scoop their jaws off the floor. Others called the ‘remarkable’ scenes a ‘stark reminder’ that Hamas continues to exist.

This shock and surprise at the seeming re-appearance of Hamas is telling. After all, it is coming from those same press outlets that have spent the past 15 months of this devastating conflict erasing Hamas from the picture. Since Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, too many Western reporters, pundits and politicians have presented the subsequent conflict as if it involved only one combatant: Israel. In fact, watching or reading the media coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Israel Defence Forces were not really fighting Hamas at all, but Palestinian civilians.

This erasure of Hamas from the conflict it started serves the anti-Israel narrative that has long been dominant among the right-thinking classes. It allows for the fiction that this is not a war at all. That it’s an act of aggressive ‘colonisation’. An act of ‘ethnic cleansing’. An act of ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘7 October was a war against civilisation’ Melanie Phillips on how the West failed the moral test posed by the new wave of anti-Semitism.

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/23/7-october-was-a-war-against-civilisation/

The first three Israeli hostages were freed at the weekend under the terms of the new ceasefire deal struck between Israel and Hamas. Their return is a chilling reminder of the depravity of 7 October 2023, the day those hostages were first taken captive, and when more than a thousand Israelis were massacred and brutalised. In the weeks and months since, not only has this barbarism been largely forgotten in the West – many self-styled progressives have ended up siding with the barbarians.

As broadcaster and Times columnist Melanie Phillips puts it in her new book, The Builder’s Stone, the West failed the moral test of 7 October. Melanie was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What impact did 7 October have on you?

Melanie Phillips: It was a shattering event, because what happened on 7 October was something that very few of us thought would ever happen again. We knew about the hostility in the Arab and Muslim world. As Jews, we live with it all the time, both inside and outside Israel. But we never thought we would see again what can only be described as Nazi-style behaviour.

This was not just murdering Jews or murdering Israelis. This was the seeking out of Jews and Israelis. It was almost like a kind of ritual mutilation. Hamas militants beheaded some of them. They burned some of them alive. They tortured them. They raped them, both men and women. This was bestial and depraved behaviour and a level of sadism that Jews collectively remember from the Holocaust. And while we should not compare anything to the Holocaust, because it was sui generis in both scale and nature, this had very clear parallels and resonances.

The second terrible shock was simply the awfulness of what happened – the murders, the rapes, the beheadings, the burnings alive, the slaughter of children in front of their parents. Then, of course, there was the abduction of the hostages into Gaza. There was the sight of both militants and ordinary – if I can call them that – people exulting over all this and abusing the hostages, whether they were dead or alive.

The next terrible thing that happened was the aftermath. One would have expected, in a civilised world, that the West would have stood with Israel. But it turned on Israel. It represented everything Israel did to defend itself as aggressive, and completely ignored the fact that Israel was going to unprecedented lengths to preserve the lives of civilians. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an absolute tsunami of anti-Jewish hatred swept across Britain and the West.

This had a tremendous effect on me. It brought to a head something that I had long been considering – namely, the decline of the West. When the West turns on itself, what is it turning against? It’s turning against its core, foundational values. Those values were largely embedded by Christianity, but Christianity didn’t come out of nothing. Christianity came from Judaism. If the West wants to stop itself from going off the edge of the cliff, then what it has to do is reconnect itself with those foundational Jewish values.

The West didn’t understand that 7 October wasn’t just a war against Israel. It was a war against civilisation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Addicted, Petty, and Hysterical Left Years of leftist hysterics and hollow attacks on Trump had desensitized voters, leaving the public weary, dismissive, and ultimately handing Trump a resounding 2024 victory. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/23/the-addicted-petty-and-hysterical-left/

Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.

After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support—and for two simple reasons.

One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides”—the shrill left became predictable.

So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.

Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.

Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.

Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and “ultra-MAGA!”

The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin—or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.

Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.

Worn-out voters began to understand these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.

Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.

So, what did ten years of such derangement achieve for the left?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald An Inauguration Both Exhilarating and Problematic President Trump has laid out a policy agenda of conservative dreams—but a touch of magnanimity wouldn’t have hurt.

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-inauguration-speech-biden

The 1619 Project is routed, at least for now.

“Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers,” declared Donald Trump in his second Inaugural address. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. . . . Our American ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on earth. . . . Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand.”

Anyone steeped—voluntarily or involuntarily—in the critical historiography that culminated in the New York Times’s post-George Floyd hit job on America was thinking at that point:

“Wait! You can’t say that! What about the Indians? What about instituting slavery—not just allegedly “ending” it [insert ironic air quotes]? What about the three-fifths and the fugitive slave clauses of the Constitution? What about the oppression of women, LatinX, gays, and every manner of “marginalized Other?” What about environmental rapine and imperial conquest? Surely one needs to acknowledge the many sins that the just-departing president insisted are written into America’s (or at least white Americans’) very soul?”

Nope.

Those days are over, at least in official Washington and its tributaries throughout the federal and state bureaucracies.

Trump aims to make America patriotic again. Many Americans never stopped being patriotic, but their patriotism was viewed as a mark of ignorance by the coastal elites and the academy.

In fact, it was the reflexive left-wing critics who were ignorant. They are seemingly untouched by any awareness of how hard-won was the vast catalogue of Western achievement, whose roots were laid millennia ago, before accelerating during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, until today modern man takes for granted the freedom, affluence, comfort, and health that were unthinkable for most of human history.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Mass Deportation Operation Begins with Over 300 Criminal Aliens Rounded Up on Day One David Zimmerman

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trumps-mass-deportation-operation-begins-with-over-300-criminal-aliens-rounded-up-on-day-one/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested at least 308 illegal immigrants on President Donald Trump’s first full day in office, border czar Tom Homan announced Wednesday.

On Tuesday, immigration authorities began arresting hundreds of illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes, including murder and rape. Over 1.4 million immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally will be prioritized in the early days of Trump’s second term.

“We’re concentrating on the worst first,” Homan told Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones Wednesday morning, noting ICE is focusing on arresting “public safety threats” and “national security threats” as Trump promised.

“Some of them were murderers. Some of them were rapists. Some of them raped a child. Some sexually assaulted a child,” the border czar said of the 308 detainees.

National Review contacted DHS and ICE for comment on additional details of the arrested criminal aliens.

“ICE is doing their job” and “performing excellently right now out in the field,” Homan added.

On Monday, Trump declared a national emergency to secure the southern border and halt the historic surge of illegal immigrants that proliferated under former president Joe Biden for four years.

About 11 million immigrants were living in the U.S. illegally as of 2022, according to an April 2024 report from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. That figure is likely higher now due to record border crossings under Biden.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Execution Frenzy in Iran How much longer will the West turn its back? by Struan Stevenson

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/execution-frenzy-in-iran/

The world can no longer ignore the crimes against humanity being committed in Iran. Last year over 1,000 executions took place in 86 of the mullahs’ medieval prisons. Those hanged included 34 women and 7 juvenile offenders, executed after they turned 18. Among those executed were 119 Baluchis, highlighting the disproportionate targeting of this marginalized and oppressed ethnic group.

Barbarically, 4 of the hangings were carried out in public in an attempt to terrify the rebellious youth into placid submission.  Public hangings are generally from a construction crane, an especially slow and agonizing execution method.The frenzy of executions, over 70% of which took place since the so called ‘moderate’ president Masoud Pezeshkian took office in August, are testimony to the theocratic regime’s fear of imminent overthrow.

The psychotic and ageing Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has watched the gradual unraveling of his warmongering stranglehold in the region, with the decapitation of his proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The sudden and unexpected fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Islamic Republic’s greatest ally, has sounded the death knell for the mullahs’ regime. Now, Khamenei can only shudder in anticipation of the arrival of President Donald Trump, with his maximum pressure sanctions campaign and his unwavering antipathy to the Iranian regime’s sponsorship of international terrorism.

Ever since the mullahs hijacked the popular revolution that ousted the dictatorship of the Shah in 1979, they have resorted to bouts of brutal repression at times of crisis to subdue the populace. But their atrocities only strengthen the determination of the Iranian youth to overthrow the fascist tyranny. The regime must be ostracized by the international community and any dealings with it should be conditional on an end to executions and torture. Its leaders must be brought to justice. There can no longer be a business-as-usual approach by Western appeasers. Too much innocent blood is being spilled as Khamenei sets new records for crimes and executions in a bid to delay his inevitable downfall.

According to Amnesty International, the number of executions in Iran in 2023 accounted for about 74% of all documented executions worldwide. That record has been surpassed in 2024. Undeterred, the regime began the New Year with a fresh wave of hangings. 12 people were executed on 1 January 2025. Five prisoners were executed in Qezelhessar prison, five in Bandar Abbas and two more in Yasuj and Malayer. Among those executed were 119 Baluchis, highlighting the disproportionate targeting of this marginalized and oppressed ethnic group.

MEDIA Comments turned off

First Leftist Hysterical Fit of New Trump Era: Musk Gives Nazi Salute Spoiler alert: he didn’t. Robert Spencer

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/first-leftist-hysterical-fit-of-new-trump-era-musk-gives-nazi-salute/

The left has just suffered a series of staggering rebukes. Not only did their campaign to destroy Donald Trump and his movement fail spectacularly, but his second Inaugural Address was a forthright and comprehensive declaration of war against the policy agendas they have pursued for decades now. The establishment media, meanwhile, has likewise been rejected on a grand scale, with Elon Musk even proclaiming repeatedly that citizen journalists and news analysts on his X platform “are the media now.” That is likely why Musk became the target on Monday afternoon of the first leftist freakout of the new Trump administration: it seems that he gave a Nazi salute, and that reveals what this Make America Great Again business is all really about, now, doesn’t it?

A CNN talking head said: “It’s a salute. It was quick. I think our viewers are smart and they can take a look at that, but it certainly was, it’s not something that you typically see at American political rallies.” Rolling Stone was all over the big story, claiming that actual National Socialists were thrilled: “Right-Wing Extremists Are Abuzz Over Musk’s Straight-Arm Salute.”

The New Republic was in just-asking-questions mode: “Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump’s Inauguration?” was their headline, but they were ready in the article itself to run with the insinuation: “During a speech at Capitol One Arena Monday following Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk appeared to deliver a Roman salute not once, but twice. The gesture is associated with Nazi Germany, and Musk was speaking triumphantly about Trump’s election victory when he made the salute.” The New York Times was a trifle more circumspect, going with “Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture: Speaking at a celebratory rally in Washington, Mr. Musk twice extended his arm out with his palm facing down, drawing comparisons to the Nazi salute.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Two Days, Trump Answered More Reporter Questions Than Biden Did In Four Years – And Without A Cheat Sheet

Posted By on January 23rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/23/in-two-days-trump-answered-more-reporter-questions-than-biden-did-in-four-years-and-without-a-cheat-sheet/

OK, we admit, we haven’t actually counted the number of reporters’ questions President Donald Trump has answered since being sworn in. And four years is certainly an exaggeration. In any case, someone covering the White House should keep track, because it won’t take long for Trump to beat Biden on this score.

Biden held the fewest number of press conferences of any modern president. He would answer questions only from pre-selected reporters. He had to have a cheat sheet with him at all times to give his answers, and even then the White House would often have to rush out to correct the record.

Biden’s first press conference wasn’t until March 2021 – and it was a disaster. As the BBC reported it:

Biden’s performance was more akin to a cautious walk across a not-quite-frozen lake. Every step was careful and calculated, lest an unexpected crack led to a dark, icy fate.

He relied heavily on notes and called from what appeared to be a pre-determined list of reporters – one that didn’t include Fox News or any other right-leaning outlets.

At one point, in an answer about the filibuster – an arcane Senate rule that has thwarted many a president’s ambitious agenda – Biden appeared to lose his train of thought, ending his sentence with the wave of a hand.

On Trump’s first day in the White House he answered reporters’ questions for 45 minutes while signing hundreds of executive orders. On Tuesday, he held an impromptu press conference after announcing a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence, taking questions for half an hour.