ISRAEL Comments turned off

The indestructible myth of famine in Gaza Universalism’s falsehoods are protected by a doctrine of infallibility Melanie Phillips

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Yet again, the myth has been revived that there is a famine in the Gaza Strip.

This claim, which has done so much to incite attacks on Jews, has been promulgated repeatedly by mainstream western media during the past 18 months of war. It is a lie that distorts yet another lie.

Time and again, UN agencies and NGOs have warned that famine and starvation are imminent. But this has never happened. More food has been admitted to Gaza than people need.

The problem has been that Hamas took much of it to feed themselves and to sell it on the black market to finance their infrastructure of war.

Nevertheless, the Gazans have overwhelmingly remained conspicuously well-fed, while the people who really have been starved are the Israeli hostages they hold captive. Yet the media has continued to insist that civilians in Gaza are being starved to death.

Two months ago, with an estimated four months’ worth of food supplies remaining in Gaza, Israel instituted a blockade on further aid transports to force Hamas to release the remaining hostages.

The Israel Defence Forces will now oversee food distribution in southern Gaza in order to stop Hamas stealing it and to funnel civilians into those areas, isolating and weakening Hamas to enable the IDF finally to destroy it. The United Nations has refused to accept this plan, demonstrating that its aim is not to alleviate Gazan suffering but to aid Hamas in its war against Israel.

Stupefyingly, it is simply impossible to change the wicked media narrative that Israel is starving Gazan civilians to death. Facts and evidence get absolutely nowhere. Many believe that this is because of the false and obsessive belief that Israel is a colonial oppressor. But this embrace of revolutionary Marxist ideology is only part of the reason.

These lies have penetrated far beyond the keffiyeh-clad hordes of demonstrators. In Britain and elsewhere, it’s now the accepted unwisdom across great swathes of the professions, administrative class and business world that Israel is starving children and committing war crimes in Gaza.

When confronted with facts contradicting every one of these claims, such people ask incredulously: “Are you really saying that you are right while everyone else — the UN, the international legal tribunals, the entire humanitarian establishment — is wrong?”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where’s the Beef? It’s in Trump’s Unprecedented Trade Deal With Britain Victoria Taft

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2025/05/08/wheres-the-beef-its-in-trumps-trade-deal-with-britain-n4939594

The first of the cascade of trade and tariff deals expected under the new Trump administration was announced in the Oval Office on Thursday. The “unprecedented” deal was the first time in decades that American producers will have freer and “streamlined customs” access to the U.K. markets.

The announcement allows the sale of U.S. beef into the U.K. for the first time in decades and ensures an increase in the purchase of Boeing commercial jetliners.

Flanked by Vice President J.D. Vance and on a conference call with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Donald Trump announced an agreement “worth billions of dollars” with the U.K. that reconfigures tariff prices on goods, expands the market for American farmers and ranchers, and added a phalanx of Boeing jetliners to that nation’s commercial fleet.

The Trump White House called it “a breakthrough” and “a good deal.”

The “unprecedented” deal not only includes U.S. tariffs but also a reduction in tariffs by the U.K. The deal introduces a reset of the baseline framework for trade, which will create a $5 billion in exports opportunities for American farmers, ranchers, and other producers can sell into the U.K. That includes beef. 

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that the beef deal with “exponentially” increase the amount of beef that ranchers sell. 

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s fight for civilisation Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults is a vital account of 7 October and its aftermath. Cory Franklin

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/israels-fight-for-civilisation/

“Along with spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, Douglas Murray one of the two best writers in the English language about this conflict. As Murray writes, history is constantly being rewritten and that’s why this book is so important. In writing it, Murray has done the cause of democracy, and the victims of one of our century’s most unforgivable crimes, an important service.”

Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of the West is a must-read on the Israel-Hamas war.

After 7 October 2023, Murray spent the better part of 18 months in Israel and Gaza, documenting the Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath. His account of what Hamas did is instructive, harrowing and tragic. There was indiscriminate rape and murder, including that of babies and the elderly. Families were burned alive when attackers could not breach their safe rooms and so set their houses on fire. And partygoers were gunned down at the Nova music festival.

Murray points out that, in contrast with the Nazis, who tried to hide evidence of their mass slaughter, Hamas fighters recorded and proudly broadcast their own crimes. Who could forget the notorious young terrorist who, on the day of 7 October, called his parents in Gaza and boasted:

‘Hi dad… Open my WhatsApp now and you will see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!… I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her and her husband. I killed 10! Ten with my own hands! Put mum on.’

His mother then expresses regret – only that she was not there with him to savour the moment.

Much of Murray’s focus is on the reaction in the West. He dismantles the myth that the world’s sympathy was with Israel in the immediate aftermath of 7 October, a solidarity which it supposedly forfeited with its subsequent invasion of Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. He reminds us of the immediate reaction on the streets of London and on Ivy League campuses in America. These protests were not entreaties for peace, but calls for the eradication of Israel. Within days of the massacre, student groups at Harvard issued a joint statement expressing solidarity with Hamas: ‘We, the undersigned student organisations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.’

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DOJ Investigating Human Trafficking Operation Involving Deported ‘Maryland Man’ Kilmar Abrego Garcia By Debra Heine

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/07/doj-investigating-human-trafficking-operation-involving-deported-maryland-man-kilmar-abrego-garcia/

The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly investigating a human trafficking operation involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the alleged MS-13 gang member and wife-beater who was deported to El Salvador in March, sparking outrage among Democrats.

As American Greatness previously reported, Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) caught Abrego Garcia driving a van full of suspected illegal aliens in Tennessee on November 30,  2022. Abrego Garcia, who did not have a valid driver’s license or proof of insurance, was caught speeding midway through a trip with seven passengers from the Texas border to Maryland. Garcia reportedly told police they’d been working construction in Missouri. THP detained the crew until the FBI under then-Director Christopher Wray directed the officers to release them, law enforcement sources told the Tennessee Star, last month.

Now ABC News reports that federal investigators have recently questioned a convicted felon in at the Federal Correctional Institution in Talladega, Alabama, about his connections to Abrego Garcia.

The inmate, Jose Ramon Hernandez-Reyes(38), was the registered owner of the van Abrego Garcia was driving when he was stopped by THP in late 2022. With a lawyer present and the promise of partial immunity, Hernandez-Reyes reportedly told federal investigators that he had hired Garcia on “multiple occasions” to transport illegal aliens from Texas to various locations in the United States.

Hernandez-Reyes, who allegedly met Garcia in 2015, told investigators that he had previously operated a “taxi service” based in Baltimore.

Garcia crossed the border into the United States illegally in 2011 and claimed he had to flee El Salvador to escape gang violence when he was arrested in 2019.

Body camera footage of the 2022 traffic stop shows a Tennessee trooper telling a fellow officer “he’s hauling these people for money.”

Despite their well founded suspicions, and the fact that Garcia was driving without a valid license or proof of insurance, Abrego Garcia and his passengers were allowed to drive on with just a warning.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Would the Left Finally Explain the Inexplicable? The left broke norms, erased borders, and weaponized justice—not to govern, but to crush Trump and cling to power by any means necessary. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/08/would-the-left-finally-explain-the-inexplicable/

Somewhere between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens were invited into the United States by the Biden administration.

As far as logistics go, Biden could not flee Afghanistan without getting 13 Marines killed and abandoning to the terrorist Taliban $50 billion in munitions, a billion-dollar embassy, and a $300 million retrofitted huge airbase.

But Biden and his handlers proved far more logistically capable when their target was fellow Americans.

After all, they somehow managed to stop the congressionally approved continuance of the border wall, to subvert federal immigration law, to emasculate the border patrol, and to ensure that millions of people around the world could simply walk into the U.S. illegally, unaudited and with impunity.

But why did Biden or his puppeteers do something so anarchic, so injurious to their fellow Americans?

Why cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars in massive new entitlements?

Why swamp the social services of our own poor citizens?

Why turn loose half a million criminal aliens and gang members to prey on our own weak and defenseless?

Was the idea to alter the demography in one fell swoop? To grow the dependent class, thereby expanding government?

Was it pure spite born of hatred of half the country?

Was it to ensure future constituencies, given that the Democratic agenda no longer appeals to most Americans?

Was it a globalist gambit to demonstrate borders are anachronistic?

Was it to fast-track new voters under the laxity of post-2020 early- and mail-in voting protocols?

Those who perpetrated the greatest ruse in American presidential history by staging the Biden presidency will never tell us what their ultimate agenda was.

ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

David Christopher Kaufman Andrew Cuomo Is Betting on Jewish Voters. But Do They Want Him as the Next Mayor? The former New York governor has said that anti-Semitism is his campaign’s most important issue.

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-mayor-race-andrew-cuomo-zohran-mamdani-eric-adams-jewish-voters

Even by the madcap standards of New York City mayoral races, the 2025 campaign for City Hall looks like a doozy. The election’s most unanticipated elements are the surprise surges of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo—who survived short-lived political exile to become the race’s frontrunner—and his chief rival, Queens socialist and state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

One of Cuomo’s big bets is on Jewish voters. Anti-Semitism, Cuomo declared in early April, is his campaign’s “most important issue . . . the toughest issue facing the city of New York and the country.” He’s made fighting the city’s anti-Semitic outbreak central to his tough-guy persona—and used it to present himself as the ideal foil to Mamdani, an outspoken opponent of Zionism.

Though Mamdani is trying to connect with Jewish voters—including making an appearance at an annual breakfast event hosted by the Orthodox-heavy Council of Jewish Organizations of Flatbush, in Brooklyn—he has a long road ahead of him in that effort. Mamdani has called Israel’s war with Hamas a “genocide,” and he protested with other Democratic Socialists in anti-Israel rallies just after Hamas’ October 7 massacre. He has taken part in a hunger strike—alongside celebrity activist Cynthia Nixon—in support of a Gaza ceasefire. And he introduced a bill that would make it harder to donate to charities that support West Bank settlements, part of his well-documented support of the odious Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

When it comes to the Jews, Mamdani also has questionable taste in allies. The mayoral hopeful recently called it “an honor” to meet with Rev. Al Sharpton, instigator of the infamous Crown Heights riots. And late last month he earned the endorsement of French Communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has a long history of playing footsie with anti-Semites.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Collision of Islamic Culture With Western Civilization Importing Sharia. by Aynaz Anni Cyrus

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-collision-of-islamic-culture-with-western-civilization/

There was a time when Europe stood as a beacon of liberty — the birthplace of Enlightenment ideals, the defender of individual rights, the champion of human dignity.

Today, that same Europe hosts classes to teach adult men — not boys — that women are not public property, sexual objects, or spoils of war.

Not because these men are mentally unstable. Not because they come from war zones. But because they come from Islamic countries, where modesty is law, where female autonomy is rebellion, and where sexual violence is normalized — by culture, by clerics, and sometimes by the law itself.

These aren’t fringe cases. They are embedded practices. This is not satire. This is policy.

In Norway, asylum seekers — overwhelmingly from Islamic-majority nations like Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan — are now enrolled in government-sponsored “rape prevention classes.” These men are shown images of Western women in dresses, walking alone, drinking wine, or dancing — and are told: “This is not an invitation.”

They are taught that a woman’s smile doesn’t mean she consents. That women are equal. That sex without permission is rape.

Here’s the chilling part: to many of these men, this is news. This isn’t remedial education — this is reprogramming.

Because the worldview they bring isn’t just incompatible with Western norms.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Nigeria: Sharia-Based Discrimination Against Christians Including blasphemy laws and extrajudicial mob violence. by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nigeria-sharia-based-discrimination-against-christians/

Christians in Nigeria are murdered almost daily through indiscriminate attacks led by Muslims. Nigerian Christian women are abducted, raped, gang-raped and sexually abused on a widespread scale. Violence is only one of the many forms of persecution that Christians in Nigeria face. They are also subjected to systematic, Sharia-based discrimination, a situation which is particularly routine in the majority-Muslim northern states.

One of the methods used to silence Christian voices utilizes the deadly blasphemy laws. In many cases, Muslim mobs take the law into their own hands and execute Christians who they accuse of blasphemy.

In 2022, for instance, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a second-year Christian college student, was stoned and burnt to death by a mob of Muslim students in Sokoto, Nigeria, after being accused of blasphemy against Islam.

The Council on Foreign Relations reported:

Ms. Yakubu was thought to have ‘blasphemed’ Islam and Prophet Muhammad after a voice note that she left on a WhatsApp group responding to another student’s post on the theme of Islam rubbed her colleagues the wrong way. After forcibly extracting her from a safe room where the school authorities had hoped to hide her, a mob comprising Ms. Yakubu’s colleagues struck her repeatedly with stones and clubs before eventually setting her lifeless body on fire, all the while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great).

Footage of the killing would later appear on various social media platforms.

A Nigerian analyst said:

Christians have to be very careful in discussions with Muslims as their words can easily be used against them. Christians have been killed when they were accused of speaking ill of Muhammad or Islam. Many opinions spoken by Christians are deliberately misconstrued and regarded as blasphemous. In several instances mobs have killed Christians for simply preaching in public or expressing opinions on issues.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Let’s Face It, Dems Have Always Been ‘Dark Woke’

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/09/lets-face-it-dems-have-always-been-dark-woke/

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “dark woke.” It’s supposed to represent a new, edgy, gloves-off messaging strategy among Democrats.

But what’s new about this? Democrats have always taken the low road.

A recent New York Times feature says “As liberals try to get their groove back, some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump’s no-holds-barred version of politics.”

An article posted on Yahoo News claims that “While traditional Democrats may still be pushing the idea of reaching across the aisle and finding a way to bring a fractured country together, this online faction is taking the gloves off and going ‘Dark Woke.’”

It’s all supposedly a response to Donald Trump’s abrasive personality.

But who are they kidding? Are we actually supposed to believe that Democrats were polite and deferential before Trump? That they were the ones reaching out to the other side for compromise? That they were the champions of civil discourse?

That’s how Democrats are routinely portrayed by their patrons in the media. But it is laughably detached from reality.

This is the party that, back in the 1960s, attacked a Republican presidential candidate with an ad showing a girl picking petals off a flower only to be obliterated by a nuclear bomb. Ronald Reagan was routinely on the receiving end of vicious attacks from Democrats. In 2003, Charles Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to describe the unhinged hostility Democrats had for George W. Bush.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Here on Island Israel, Bewilderment and Tough Questions It’s been a rough week and it’s not over yet. P. David Hornik

Posted By on May 9th, 2025

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?

It was reported Thursday evening that Israel’s Transportation Minister Miri Regev, Economy Minister Nir Barkat, and heads of Israeli airlines were holding an emergency meeting on what to do about thousands of Israelis who have been stranded abroad since Sunday—the day a Houthi ballistic missile from Yemen penetrated both Israeli and American air defenses and hit the perimeter of the main terminal of Ben Gurion Airport, injuring six people.

Those Israelis have now been stranded all that time because the Houthi airstrike prompted almost all foreign airlines to immediately cancel flights to Israel. Many of them now say their flights to Israel will be suspended until at least mid-May; for British Airways, at this point, it’s until June 14.

The two Israeli ministers and the airline chiefs were discussing ways to help the far-flung, stranded Israelis get home; the option of the local carriers, for the time being, reducing ticket prices; and “emergency plans in case of another wave of cancellations.”

Since October 7, 2023, the feeling of being isolated on Island Israel is not new to Israelis; many of the international airlines had suspended flights to Israel since that day and only resumed them in March or April this year.

Indeed, there was something almost bizarre about what happened on Sunday. Since March 18, when Israel resumed fighting in Gaza, the Houthis had launched 26 ballistic missiles and several drones at Israel, and all had crashed into the sea before getting here or been shot down.

Yet Sunday’s missile, aimed at the airport, managed to evade both Israel’s Arrow defense system and the US THAAD defense system, deployed to Israel amid heightening tensions with Iran.