Putin “Begins Gas Blackmail of Europe”: The US Must Give Ukraine Warplanes to Defeat Russia by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18477/putin-gas-blackmail

Now, following Russia’s dramatic decision this week to cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the West and its allies must give serious consideration to upgrading the level of military support they provide to Ukraine.

The real reason, though, [that Russia cut gas supplies] is that Russia is trying to blackmail Poland and Bulgaria, which have become high profile supporters of the Ukrainian war effort, to end their support for Kyiv.

“Russia is also proving that energy resources are a weapon. That is why the EU needs to be united and impose an embargo on energy resources, depriving the Russians of their energy weapons.” — Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, The Guardian, April 26, 2022.

It is also an excellent time for the European Union finally to green-light the EastMed gas pipeline, in the works for years, but also scuppered by the Biden administration in capitulation to Turkey. The EastMed, however, remains an ideal solution to diversify the supply of gas to Europe and only awaits the European Union’s approval.

The best way for the West to respond, therefore, is not to concede to the Russian demands to scale down its support for Kyiv.

It is to do the opposite, and provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs not just to defend itself against Russian aggression, but to go on the offensive and win the war. Putin is desperate and needs to understand that if he goes for the nuclear option, Russia will cease to exist.

With the conflict now entering its third month, and Mr Putin showing no inclination to stop his barbaric assault on the people of Ukraine, it is clear this policy of appeasement has failed.

Consequently, the West should now concentrate its efforts on providing Ukraine’s forces with the military equipment they require not only to defend their country from Russian aggression, but to defeat the Russians and liberate their country from Mr Putin’s tyranny.

As a top priority, the Biden administration must therefore reverse its decision to block the transfer of 70 MiG fighters to Ukraine. Supplying Ukraine with extra warplanes, together with tanks and other military hardware, is essential if Kyiv is to have any chance of inflicting a serious defeat against Russia.

Such a change in policy is certainly in the West’s long-term interests. If the Ukrainian forces can achieve victory over their Russian invaders, it will act as a strong deterrent to Mr Putin not to launch any more unprovoked attacks on European soil, as well as to other potential aggressors waiting in the wings.

The best way for the West to respond to Russia’s blatant attempt to blackmail Europe into dropping its support for Ukraine is to provide the Ukrainian forces with the military hardware they need to win the war.

Some Harsh Words About the Cult of ‘Kindness’ Declan Mansfield

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/some-harsh-words-about-the-cult-of-kindness/

“We’ve established that kindness per se is not a sufficient condition for decent behaviour because political ideologies determine who can be treated with kindness and who can be treated with cruelty. This gets to the crux of the present situation because underpinning the current notion of kindness is the contemporary moral and ethical system of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), which has been introduced into almost every institution in Western liberal democracies. The HR department in your workplace, and workers’ rights legislation in your state or country, will almost certainly be infused with this ideology.”

One of the most witless, inane and paradoxically evil ideas to contaminate contemporary culture in recent years is kindness, or, as what amounts to a campaign slogan says, ‘Be Kind’. On the surface, what could possibly be wrong with being kind to each other? Only brutes and criminals would find something wrong with such an obviously decent notion. The problem, though, is that beneath its beautiful and superficially moral surface, kindness, in its contemporary iteration, is surreptitiously ideological and smuggles into everyday life entirely new ideas of metaphysics, logic and epistemology, ones that have profoundly negative consequences for liberal democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

The photo featured atop this article is of workers — colleagues, in fact — who are being respectful, courteous, and, yes, kind to each other. The scene is Central Europe in the summer of 1944. Apart from the uniforms, nothing is unusual; the photos could have been taken at any off-site staff training session anywhere in the world. What most people who view the photos won’t know, though, is that the happy, collegiate staff were taking a break from murdering 600,000 Hungarian Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. They are members of the Schutzstaffel, abbreviated as SS or, in more simple terms, Nazis.

The New Disinformationists We have seven more months before the midterms. Expect more disinformation ministries, censorious czars, and hack grandees to emerge. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/01/the-new-disinformationists/

The Biden Administration feels that it must now use federal resources to attack “disinformation.” So the Department of Homeland Security recently announced the creation of a “disinformation governance board.”

The board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, at least has clear qualifications for the post. She previously had spread false rumors on social media that Donald Trump voters would show up at the polls in 2020 armed, and joined the mob’s chorus that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps the idea behind her hiring was “it takes one to know one.”

Although the new board’s mandate is unclear, the idea seems to be that Jankowicz and her colleagues will use the federal government’s powers to adjudicate what Americans say as either true or false—and to suppress as “disinformation” anything it doesn’t find useful.

The new war against “disinformation” follows the narratives of the “insurrection” on January 6, the “democracy dies in darkness” return of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin as a mastermind gasoline price-spiker. Such narratives are intended to distract us from the Biden disaster and the ongoing assault against constitutional freedom. 

When things turn south for the administration, Barack Obama—a sagging Netflix’s $50-million “idea man”—usually emerges from one of his three mansions in Hawaii, Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama to lecture clingers and deplorables on various threats they pose to the anointed. 

His sermons usually project his own transgressions. Recently, Obama went to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to admonish us that new free speech platforms might tolerate incorrect expression that he and the Left smear as “hate speech.” 

But is not Barack Obama ill-suited to lecture anyone on disinformation? Do we remember his Obamacare version of disinformation: “You can keep your doctor; you can keep your plan”? Do we recall “shovel-ready jobs”?

Obama was caught secretly promising Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev that the United States would deal away missile defense in Eastern Europe for Vladimir Putin’s good behavior (“but it’s important for him to give me space”) during his 2012 reelection bid. Was this transparency or another example of how, but for a hot mic, “democracy dies in darkness”? Could Eastern Europeans have used such a discarded anti-missile system today?

Who employed the misinformationist Christopher Steele to slander presidential candidate Donald Trump? Was it James Comey’s FBI? Or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? Or the Democratic National Committee? Or the Perkins Coie legal firm? Or Fusion GPS? Or all combined? And which president was briefed regularly on his administration’s disinformation war against Trump?

Hallelujah! UN official tells the truth about Palestinian violence By Barry Shaw

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/hallelujah_un_official_tells_the_truth_about_palestinian_violence.html

God bless Tor Wennesland!

This Norwegian UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process told the truth.

This is a rare quality among UN officials when it comes to getting to the heart of why there is no progress to peace with the Palestinians: they always point the finger of blame at Israel, and never at the perpetrators of hate and violence.

Mr. Wennesland is a brave exception.

His report  identified what really happened on the Temple Mount during Ramadan and Passover and pointed to the real perpetrators.

“On 15 April, during the early morning hours, a large number of Palestinians gathered at the Al Aqsa compound. Some Palestinians threw stones, fireworks, and other heavy objects toward Israeli Security Forces. (snip)

Several dozen Palestinians entered a mosque in the compound, with some continuing to throw stones and fireworks toward Israeli security forces.”

Following a standoff with those inside, Israeli police entered the mosque and arrested those barricaded inside, but not without a fight.

“During the clashes,” he reported, “some damage was caused to the structure of the mosque.”

He went on to report that Israeli forces only entered the Al Aqsa Mosque after the rioting Palestinians had barricaded themselves inside.

And Tor Wennesland actually praised the Israeli police, who were only attempting to restore law and order so that thousands of Muslims could peacefully pray atop the Temple Mount as part of their Ramadan rituals, thus confirming what every Israeli watching TV news already knew, that Israeli officials had “reiterated their commitment to upholding the status quo and ensuring that only Muslims would be allowed to pray on the holy esplanade.”

Jordan is Palestine By Ted Belman

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/jordan_is_palestine.html

Yes it is.

The Arab propaganda machine, aided and abetted by the UN, EU, US and most of the global media would have you believe otherwise.

They demand that the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria and Gaza be granted statehood on all lands not controlled by Israel when the cease fire lines were agreed upon in 1949.  This is referred to as the “Two-State Solution.” This solution is at the heart of the Arab Peace Initiative that was agreed to in 2002 at the Beirut Summit which provided:

“(a) Complete withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories, including the Syrian Golan Heights, to the 4 June 1967 line and the territories still occupied in southern Lebanon; (b) Attain a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees to be agreed upon in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution No 194. (c) Accept the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the Palestinian territories occupied since 4 June 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Like most peace plans since, it was based on a deliberate misreading of 1967.UN Security Council Resolution 242.  This resolution did not require Israel to withdraw from all lands “occupied in the ’67 War and it allowed Israel to remain in possession of said lands until she had “secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force”.

However, this resolution also included a preamble:  “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security.”  

On top of this, the UN Charter provides for the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by war”, international law allowed for the retention of land acquired in a defensive war, which the ’67 War undoubtedly was.

But that is not the whole story…

The Master of Misinformation is Still in Charge Obama touts more “regulation” of the internet — in his quest for a fourth term in 2024. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/master-misinformation-still-charge-lloyd-billingsley/

At the White House on April 5, former president Barack Obama introduced “vice president Joe Biden,” claiming “that was a joke!” Joe Biden wasn’t laughing. The Delaware Democrat is clearly incapable of exercising national office, and after the Afghanistan debacle openly said he was “instructed” to call on certain reporters.

“He is not in charge,” observed Stephen Miller of The Spectator, and as Tiana Lowe of the Washington Examiner wondered,  “who the hell is in charge here?” That became clear on April 5, but it was already apparent long before.

“The country was in better shape now than it had been when I’d started,” claims POTUS 44 in A Promised Land, released two weeks after the 2020 election. This 751-page auto-hagiography is a bloated rehash of the 2015 Believer, by “Obama’s narrator” David Axelrod. The former Barry Soetoro touts his “calling,” leaving little doubt that Biden is the front man in his current third term.

Joe Biden had a “handsome face always cast in a dazzling smile,” A Promised Land explains. On domestic issues Joe was smart and “his experience in foreign policy was broad and deep.” And so on, in vintage Axelrod style.

On Biden’s watch, Putin invades Ukraine. On the domestic scene crime, inflation and gas prices are soaring, and only 17 percent of Americans rank the economy as excellent or good, the lowest since 2014. Even so, two weeks after the Obama White House appearance, Biden let it slip that he is running for re-election in 2024. The way things are now, the Delaware Democrat says in effect, is the way they are going to be moving forward. That too relates to The Promised Land author.

Monster Who Sent Infected Patients Into Nursing Homes Says Lack of Child Mutilation Should “Shock Our Conscience” Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/05/monster-who-sent-infected-patients-nursing-homes-daniel-greenfield/

This monster, not having a conscience of his own, would like to “shock your conscience”.

A state senator from Franklin County has called for the immediate resignation of Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Richard ‘Rachel’ Levine, saying his actions were a major factor in the large number of covid-19 cases and deaths in the state’s nursing homes.

Wolf’s Secretary of Health, Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine, had transferred his own mother out of a nursing home and to a hotel.

To date, state figures show that nursing homes residents have accounted for 2,529 of the state’s 3,707 reported covid-19 deaths. That is a pattern that has been echoed in most states across the country, however.

In a policy guidance issued in March, the Health Department stated, in part: “Nursing care facilities must continue to accept new admissions and receive readmissions for current residents who have been discharged from the hospital who are stable to alleviate the increasing burden in the acute care settings. This may include stable patients who have had the covid-19 virus.”

The death toll is a good deal higher now. 

Biden decided to pick Dr. Rick, who wrongly identifies as a human being, as Assistant Health Secretary. Now he’d like to “shock your conscience”.

Biden Administration’s Post-Title 42 Border Plan: More of the Same How today’s disaster will become tomorrow’s catastrophe. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/biden-administrations-post-title-42-border-plan-joseph-klein/

Title 42 has allowed Border Patrol agents to deny entry to illegal border-crossers because of COVID-19 health concerns without having to conduct any kind of hearing first, even on an asylum claim. The Biden administration is still planning to lift the Title 42 entry restriction on May 23rd. However, that may be on hold for a while following a federal district judge’s issuance of a temporary restraining order on April 25th requiring the administration to keep Title 42 in place for now.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), admitted in an April 26th memo that when “the Title 42 public health Order is lifted, we anticipate migration levels will increase, as smugglers will seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants.”

Not to worry, according to Secretary Mayorkas, who says that DHS has a new plan to deal with that. 

The DHS Secretary’s April 26th memo is entitled “DHS Plan for Southwest Border Security and Preparedness,” which discusses various measures the Biden administration intends to implement once the Title 42 termination goes into effect.

Secretary Mayorkas uses benign sounding terms in his memo like “vulnerable migrants” and “noncitizens” to obscure who they really are – illegal immigrants.

They Call Them the ‘Koran Riots’ Scandinavia’s Islamization proceeds on schedule.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/they-call-them-koran-riots-bruce-bawer/

It began on Easter weekend. In response to a rally in Örebro, Sweden, by Stram Kurs, a Danish party that opposes Islamic immigration and whose members threatened to burn copies of the Koran, mass violence broke out in Stockholm and several other Swedish cities, with scores of Muslims – mostly young men, both also women and children – throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at cops and setting cars, buses, dumpsters, and buildings on fire. Injuries resulting from these disturbances – widely dubbed the “Koran riots” – were in the mid two figures, with police officers the hardest hit. Further Stram Kurs events had been planned, but the party’s appropriately named leader, Rasmus Paludan, paladin of Denmark’s anti-Islamization movement, canceled them on the grounds that Swedish police had shown themselves to be “completely incapable of protecting themselves and me.” By the end of the month Swedish police had forbidden any further public gatherings by Stram Kurs.

Of course, the tumult didn’t spring from out of nowhere. Among young Muslims in Sweden, car-burning is old hat. But the scale of these events was new – and, to Swedes who still have their heads in the sand about this issue, alarming. Still, for many observers in Scandinavia, the real affront wasn’t the physical brutality but the very notion of harming a Koran. Hanan Abdelrahman, a college teacher in Norway, wrote a teary op-ed on the topic in which she asserted that Paludan and his ilk made her “feel a bit scared and unsafe.” She asked: “How many camels is one really supposed to swallow? To what degree and for how long should a group of people have to tolerate feeling unsafe and unwanted?” Yes, the danger to human safety that weekend wasn’t the savagery that sent people to the hospital – it was a peaceful rally. Abdelrahman charged that if Paludan and his friends had been “braver” and “smarter,” they’d have invited somebody like her to engage in a discussion of their differing views. A pretty weird proposal, given that if she’d actually read her beloved Koran, Abdelrahman would know that it tells her not to consort with infidels but to kill them – especially if they seek to talk her out of her beliefs.

Tulsi Gabbard Suggests Obama Devised Biden’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Disinformation Board: Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-implies-obama-devised-ministry-of-truth-disinformation-governance-board/

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard implied that former President Barack Obama devised the formation of President Biden’s recently announced Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have likened to the “Ministry of Truth” from George Orwell’s 1984.

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard tweeted Sunday. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Gabbard’s tweet was in reference to Obama’s speech at Stanford University last week, where he declared that tech companies have an obligation to more strictly police disinformation and called for the government to facilitate that.

“Now the good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms, and they’re investing in large team of people to monitor it,” Obama said during the speech. “Given the sheer volume of content, this strategy can feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole.”