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The Irish President’s Holocaust Address Was a Predictable Disaster Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on January 28th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-irish-presidents-holocaust-address-was-a-predictable-disaster/
The European impulse after the Holocaust is a kind of utopian death wish. The Zionist impulse is a thrilling will to live.

Above the expressed objections of the Jewish community in Ireland, Irish president Michael D. Higgins was invited to speak at the National Holocaust Memorial commemoration yesterday.

He managed to bungle it, of course. Twice he referred to the “attempted genocide” of the Holocaust. Not once in the last year has he qualified the word “genocide” when using it to describe Israel’s policy in Gaza. A granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor was physically dragged out of the ceremony.

Higgins gave what I have come to call the European religious answer to the Holocaust:

We must never lack the courage to challenge hatred and persecution in whatever forms they are sought to be manifested by promoting a world that is free from persecutions based on difference, such as faith or ethnicity, by embracing diversity, by working for equality, peace and justice, thus making possible a world that is free, too, from so many of the sources of war and conflict based on a distorted reflection of the ‘Other’.

Theologian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw such a peaceful state as being achievable through a species evolution in human consciousness, believing that humankind is not only capable of living in peace but by its very structure cannot fail eventually to achieve peace.

It’s hard to communicate to the Irish mind how offensive this is. The closest I can come is to say that this is preaching Raglan Road manners to kids who have to grow up in Crumlin. But it’s something worse than that.

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The Covid Iconoclasts Were Right About Everything Noah Rothman

Posted By on January 28th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-covid-iconoclasts-were-right-about-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

Over the weekend, the CIA issued an updated assessment indicating that the agency now believes, albeit with low confidence, that Covid likely originated in a Chinese laboratory. That intelligence agency joins the Department of Energy and the FBI, both of which favor the lab-leak hypothesis.

It wasn’t that long ago that lending credence to that notion would have branded you a “conspiracy theorist,” and that was gentle treatment. In accordance with the elite consensus, social media outlets attempted to limit the reach of those who failed to summarily rule out that prospect. Heterodox voices at scientific institutions were defamed and intimidated by their colleagues. One unnamed whistleblower described by House Republicans as a “highly credible senior-level CIA officer” alleged that his colleagues who were amenable to the lab-leak theory were offered “a significant monetary incentive to change their position.” Too many in the scientific community led a concerted effort to mislead investigators, like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, and make them, in his words, a “victim of deception.”

Despite this history, the country responded to the CIA’s revelations with a gaping yawn. That’s understandable, even if it is regrettable. Those who knew long ago that the lab-leak theory had too much going for it to be so easily dismissed are underwhelmed by this late confirmation of their priors. Others who enforced the omertà around China’s role in the pandemic don’t want to dwell on their embarrassment. Thus, a conspiracy of silence has been replaced by a conspiracy of boredom. It should not be so. The unduly confident arbiters of American public discourse who raked dissenters over the coals — and whose faith in their own sagacity is matched only by their incuriosity — should be forced to confront their failures.

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Desperate Dems Throw Eggs At Trump

Posted By on January 28th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/28/desperate-dems-throw-eggs-at-trump/

After four years spent denying that inflation was a problem, Democrats are suddenly screaming at President Donald Trump for not having lowered the price of eggs already.

“Democratic lawmakers slam Trump for not making good on promise to ‘immediately’ lower food prices amid egg shortage,” shouts NBC News, pointing to a letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other leftist lawmakers who accuse Trump of backtracking on his promise to deal with Bidenflation.

This is all part of a coordinated – and rather pathetic – campaign by the left, which is saying things such as “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, egg prices in the United States have hit an all-time high,” “What is Trump going to do about the price of eggs?” and “Donald Trump lied, he did not bring down the price of eggs on day one.”

Social media “influencer” Harry Sisson posted on X that “Trump has been president for 3 days and egg prices are at all-time highs. TRUMP’S AMERICA!!!”

(Sisson is the same guy who last June posted that “Inflation is going down … and grocery prices are falling. Thank you, President Joe Biden!”)

What’s amusing – or depressing, depending on your perspective – is that all this handwringing is the result of a Consumer Price Index report released a week ago that found that egg prices are up almost 40% compared with last year.

There’s just one problem. That CPI report was about price increases in December 2024 – a month before Donald Trump took office. The more recent spate of egg shortages and price hikes is due to the avian flu.

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Qatar’s ‘Day After’ Plan for Gaza: Keeping Hamas in Power by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21346/qatar-gaza-hamas-power

Qatar wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) government to collect the garbage, rebuild destroyed houses, and pay salaries to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while Hamas is busy rearming, regrouping and getting ready for the next attack on Israel.

[T]he PA government in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians in the West Bank, decided to suspend the broadcasts of the Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera television for supporting and promoting Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Israel and some Arab states had also shut down the broadcasts for the same reason.

The Qataris do not want the PA in the Gaza Strip to rein in Hamas and other terrorist groups, or to prevent attacks against Israel. Instead, they want the PA to act as a front to maintain Hamas’s hold on power — as a cover for keeping Hamas in power.

Qatar has one main purpose: to safeguard its friends in Hamas, continue promoting radical Islam, and deceive Westerners into believing that the Jihadists are a better alternative to the Arab world’s present regimes. Whether the new US administration will be as gullible as other Westerners in trusting Qatar remains to be seen.

Why does Qatar, the largest funder and sponsor of Hamas, have such a strong desire to restore the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Gaza Strip? To guarantee Hamas’s continued domination of the Gaza Strip.

Qatar has no problem with the PA, which was expelled from the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007, taking up its duties there again as long as Hamas is permitted to maintain its grasp on power and preserve its security and military forces and capabilities.

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The debasement of the Holocaust Auschwitz has been robbed of its historical and moral significance. Frank Furedi

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/the-debasement-of-the-holocaust/

On 27 January 1945, Soviet forces liberated those then still imprisoned at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. Eighty years on, millions of young people in the West know nothing about Auschwitz or indeed the Holocaust itself. They are ignorant of the gravest crime of the 20th century.

A recent survey has shown that one in nine young Germans has not heard of the Holocaust. A quarter cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. It also showed that ‘nearly half of American adults could not identify any killing sites of the Holocaust’.

A poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov in 2023 made for equally disturbing reading. It showed that more than a fifth of young Americans, aged between 18 and 29, agreed with the statement that ‘the Holocaust is a myth’, while a further 30 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed. That means that less than half of young Americans firmly believe the Holocaust actually happened.

This growing historical amnesia is worrying enough. But of even greater concern is the way in which the meaning of the Holocaust has been distorted and inverted by our cultural and political elites, and weaponised by anti-Israel zealots.

Indeed, Auschwitz itself – a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews – is fast being turned into something else: an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It is becoming Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an easy moral message.

Take UNESCO, arguably the most powerful international cultural institution in the world. In its official assessment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a World Heritage site, it talks of its ‘outstanding universal value’. It claims that the camp serves as a symbol of ‘humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century’.

To treat Auschwitz as a generic symbol of cruelty, as UNESCO has done, renders it totally banal. There are countless examples of humanity’s terrible cruelty throughout history, but there is only one Holocaust. Its unique historical significance derives from the fact it was an industrialised extermination campaign singularly directed at Jewish people. And it’s that meaning we are now in danger of losing altogether.

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How Jews were turned into the ‘new Nazis’ Eighty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust is now routinely weaponised against Israel. Daniel Ben Ami

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/how-jews-were-turned-into-the-new-nazis/

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, we are marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It ought to be an occasion for sombre reflection on the systematic extermination of six million Jews. A chance to contemplate the unique moral horror of the Holocaust.

But that is becoming more difficult than ever. And that’s because so many ‘progressives’ today are eroding the terrible significance of the Holocaust by casting Israel, and by extension Jews in general, as the new Nazis.

How did it come to this? How did the victims of the greatest evil in modern history come to be likened to its perpetrators?

Those portraying Israel as the new Nazi Germany will, of course, point to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to substantiate their claims. But such a comparison is absurd. Israel is hardly behaving like Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was an expansionist, imperial power. Israel simply isn’t. It is responding to the horrific, genocidal actions of Hamas after it carried out a pogrom on Israel on 7 October 2023. Since then, Israel has been fighting a war of self-defence not just against Hamas, but also against an anti-Semitic alliance from across the Middle East (including Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen), which is hell bent on Israel’s destruction.

Claims that Israel is a new Nazi Germany speak to a more profound problem – namely, the ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust. That is, instead of being seen as a specifically anti-Jewish act, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jewry has increasingly been cast as an example of man’s inhumanity to man in general. Hence, even Jews can apparently be guilty of Nazism.

Many now downplay the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. They will point out that the Nazis’ mass-killing operations took the lives of 13million civilians, of whom less than half were Jews. Other mass casualties included Soviet prisoners of war, civilians killed in anti-partisan operations, disabled people and the Roma. From this perspective, it is possible to argue that Jews were just one group among many who were slaughtered by the Nazis.

However, this misses the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology. It is not that the loss of an individual Jewish life should trouble us more than other lives. It was that the Nazis were driven by an overriding racial animus towards the Jews – they were the specific targets of the Nazis’ Vernichtungskrieg, their ‘war of extermination’.

There was a reason for this. In the fevered imagination of the Nazis, the Jews represented the combined evils of capitalism and Communism. As historian Paul Hanebrink explains, ‘Communism and global capitalism always functioned in [Nazis’] minds as two sides of the same international (and anti-national) Jewish evil. In their paranoid fantasies, Jewish Communists and Jewish financiers invariably worked together to pursue world domination, each feeding off the power of the other.’

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Islamic Republic of Iran: Two girls arrested for dancing could face ‘years in prison or death penalty’ Robert Spencer

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://jihadwatch.org/2025/01/islamic-republic-of-iran-two-girls-arrested-for-dancing-could-face-years-in-prison-or-death-penalty?utm_source=rss&utm_

The Ayatollah Khomeini said it: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

“Teenage girls arrested by Tehran over viral video of them dancing on Iranian war memorial could now face ‘years in prison or the death penalty,’” by Tom Midlane, Daily Mail, January 25, 2025:

Two young women were detained by police in Iran for posting a video of themselves dancing.

The viral Instagram post features the two girls, who appear to be teenagers, purportedly dancing at the Monument to the Unknown Martyrs of the Sacred Defence war memorial in Tehran.

The monument was built by Italian architect Marcello D’Olivo and honours those killed in the Iran-Iraq War that raged between 1980 and 1982.

Both of the women are wearing jeans, with one wearing a knitted jumper and the other a blue top covered by a cardigan.

Iranian authorities have said the girls’ outfits were ‘inappropriate’ and both girls have had their Instagram accounts blocked, according to Iran International.

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White House: Colombia ‘Has Agreed to All of President Trump’s Terms’ Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/01/26/white-house-colombia-has-agreed-to-all-of-president-trumps-terms-n4936389

The government of Colombia has officially caved to President Trump, according to the White House.

“The Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement recieved by Pj media. “Based on this agreement, the fully drafted IEEPA tariffs and sanctions will be held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honor this agreement. The visa sanctions issued by the State Department, and enhanced inspections from Customs and Border Protection, will remain in effect until the first planeload of Colombian deportees is successfully returned.”

Leavitt added, “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again. President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.”

This is a tremendous victory for President Trump. After Colombia unexpectedly refused to accept U.S. military flights carrying deported illegal immigrants over the weekend, President Donald Trump responded with epic force. 

In a post on Truth Social, Trump criticized Colombia’s socialist president, Gustavo Petro, accusing him of jeopardizing U.S. national security. In retaliation, Trump announced immediate measures, including tariffs on Colombian imports, visa bans for officials and their families, enhanced cargo inspections, and financial sanctions. Petro quickly reversed course, offering his presidential plane to assist in repatriating the deportees, signaling a victory for Trump’s tough stance.

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Leor Sapir Gender Medicine on the Ropes From the courtroom to the ballot box, the trans movement has taken some hits.

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/gender-medicine-trans-movement-donald-trump-election

The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse,” Donald Trump declared in a 2024 campaign video. “On Day One,” Trump vowed, he would sign an “executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He would also ask Congress to ban child sex-change procedures, prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars “to promote or pay for these procedures” in adults, “support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children.” He pledged to unleash the Department of Justice to “investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients.”

Demonstrating how even gender ideology’s critics have been conditioned to use its language, Trump said that he would ask Congress to pass a bill declaring that there are only “two genders,” which are “assigned at birth.” Presumably, he meant two sexes, which are determined at conception and recognized at or before birth.

Assuming that these are not empty promises, Trump’s victory in November poses a serious threat to the gender medicine industry. That industry, however, was already on the defensive on the eve of the presidential election. Since 2021, 24 states have passed laws banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for youth who feel discomfort with their sex. An additional two—Arizona and New Hampshire—have prohibited the use of surgeries, but not hormones. A challenge to one of these laws, from Tennessee, is on the Supreme Court’s 2025 docket. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, will determine how states can regulate gender medicine—and, with its 6–3 conservative majority, the Court likely will rule in Tennessee’s favor.

Nearly two dozen de-transitioners—young men and (more often) women who were given drugs and surgeries, only to realize later that what they really needed was counseling and time to mature—are now suing their doctors and clinics for medical mistreatment. Though these lawsuits are tough to win, even a single multimillion-dollar verdict or out-of-court settlement could send malpractice insurance premiums soaring and create a chilling effect in states where “gender-affirming care” remains legal.

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Trump and His New Frenemies, Abroad and at Home In an address to the World Economic Forum, President Trump criticized Europe’s regulatory and environmental policies, advocating for U.S.-led free-market capitalism to enhance Western prosperity. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 27th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/27/trump-and-his-new-frenemies-abroad-and-at-home/

President Trump recently gave a video talk to the World Economic Forum (WEF) assemblage in Davos.

He expressed fondness for Europe. He praised many for their attendance—and then tore into the evils of hyperregulation, high taxes, radical environmentalism, and the DEI/ESG commissariat of both the prior Biden administration and indeed the European Union.

One might have thought the attendees’ heads would have exploded when Trump referred to oil as “liquid gold.” And he topped that by referring to the venerated Green New Deal as the “Green New Scam.”

“I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful Green New Deal—I call it the ‘Green New Scam,’ withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, and ended the insane and costly electric vehicle mandate.”

But then a strange thing happened.

The questions from international bankers and financiers that followed were not all that critical. In fact, one could characterize them as curious and carefully encouraging.

So, what prompts the polite European reception to such green and economic heresy?

A careful hearing of Trump’s entire speech would reveal it was not confrontational as much as aspirational. He was trying to envision a new European partnership—albeit one under American leadership.

“Under our leadership, America is back and open for business . . . So, you know I’m trying to be constructive because I love Europe. I love the countries of Europe.”

The U.S. economy has grown to nearly twice the size of the European Union’s since its inception more than two decades ago. Indeed, over 20 years, the gross domestic product of both was roughly comparable.