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May 2023

The Palestinians’ Other Jihad Against Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19651/palestinians-jihad-against-israel

The Palestinian Authority (PA) wants the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders and punish them for speaking out against, or combatting, terrorism.

Instead of demanding that ICC punish the terrorists — who are intentionally firing rockets at Israeli civilians — the PA is asking the court to prosecute Israelis for launching operations to counter terrorism.

The PA… according to the Oslo Accords is officially supposed to be Israel’s peace partner and to prevent terrorism and violence….

At the heart of the PA’s campaign against Israel is the argument that Israel has no right to target terrorists… involved in terrorism against Jews. Instead, Israel should agreeably allow its citizens to be killed.

Mahmoud Abbas and his associates, instead of denouncing the terrorists for indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli civilians, is actually supporting the terrorists — both financially in a pay-for-slay “jobs program,” as well as verbally. In this regard, the PA is not only abrogating its commitments under the Oslo Accords and international law, but is acting as an enemy of Israel — not a peace partner.

The Palestinian Authority has proven that it cares more about the terrorists than about the civilians they injure and kill.

Nabil Abu Rudaineh, a spokesperson for Mahmoud Abbas… described the airstrike that killed the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) commanders — who had instigated the attacks against Israel — as a “crime” … His complaint, in other words, is that “It all started when he hit me back.”

Abu Rudaineh, however, “forgot” to mention that the Israeli airstrikes had come in response to more than 100 rockets that terrorists had fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel a few days earlier. He also “forgot” to mention that the three commanders belonged to PIJ, a group that rejects Israel’s right to exist and is opposed to any peace process.

The goals of PIJ are: “The liberation of the whole of Palestine and the liquidation of the Israeli entity, and the establishment of Islamic rule on the land of Palestine which guarantees the achievement of justice, freedom, and equality.”

PIJ aims to “inspire and mobilize the masses of the Islamic nation everywhere and urge them to fight the decisive battle with the Israeli entity.”

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh also joined the chorus of senior Palestinian officials who chose to blame Israel for the fighting rather than the terrorists who had begun the conflict by firing more than 100 rockets at Israeli towns and cities the week before.

Shtayyeh, too, “forgot” to mention that the Israeli operation was directed not at civilians, as the Palestinian operation had been, but specifically against commanders of an Iranian-backed, designated terror group, PIJ.

Abu Rudaineh and Shtayyeh then called on the “international community,” the United Nations and the Biden administration to hold Israel to account as a rogue state in the international arena for being so inconsiderate as to defend itself against the rocket attacks of PIJ and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

It is no surprise that the UN, which has a long record of bias against Israel, would hold an event that calls the establishment of Israel a “catastrophe.”

By hosting Abbas and organizing such an event, the UN is essentially complicit in the Palestinian Authority’s war on Israel.

So is the European Union, which came out against the Israeli military operation that was countering the terrorists in the Gaza Strip, and described Israel’s actions as “intolerable.” Instead of calling on the Palestinian terrorists to stop targeting Israeli civilians, the EU urged the two parties to “exercise maximum restraint.”

The EU actually tried to put a democratic country, Israel, and Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip, on equal footing.

Iran and its Palestinian terror proxies, meanwhile, proclaim that Israel should be destroyed – through a nuclear bomb, or Jihad, or rockets, or other forms of terrorism, such as suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings and car-rammings.

The latest round of fighting shows that the terrorists in the Gaza Strip have not even remotely relinquished their dream of eliminating Israel and killing Jews. Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority – Israel’s “peace partners” – are working to achieve the same goal through legal and diplomatic warfare and incitement against Israel.

It is time for the Biden administration and the international community to wake up and see that there is no real difference between PIJ, Hamas, Hezbollah – and the Palestinian Authority. They all share the same aspiration of seeing Israel wiped off the map. They only differ regarding the best means to accomplish that. Iran’s terror militias are convinced this goal can be achieved through terrorism and rockets, while the Biden administration’s friends in the PA believe that with the help of the UN, EU, ICC and other international parties, they can finally exterminate Israel by delegitimizing it through the legal and diplomatic route.

The latest attempt by Iran and its Palestinian terror proxies to kill as many Jews as possible just ended with another “ceasefire” between Israel and the Palestinians that was brokered by Egypt. During the five days of fighting, the Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip, in particular Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), fired more than 1,200 rockets at Israel — a country the size of New Jersey — killing two people and damaging several homes and other buildings.

In Scathing Report, Durham Finds FBI Had No ‘Actual Evidence of Collusion’ to Justify Crossfire Hurricane Investigation By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/in-scathing-report-durham-finds-fbi-had-no-actual-evidence-of-collusion-to-justify-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

In a damning 300-plus page report released Monday afternoon, Special Counsel John Durham said that the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence to justify the Trump-Russia investigation into President Donald Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016.

The Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane probe was ostensibly opened to determine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the presidential election. Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham to “investigate the investigators” in May 2019 when it became clear that the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe was a political “witch hunt” meant to hobble Trump’s campaign and then his presidency.

According to Durham’s report, “neither U.S. nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Notably, the report states, “on July 26, 2016, Clinton allegedly approved a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to tie Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Igor Danchenko, a Clinton subcontractor, invented the most explosive allegations in British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s dossier—including the so-called “pee tape,” and fraudulently sourced the rumors to Sergei Millian, an innocent Belarusian-American businessman.

Steele was hired by an Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, on behalf of Perkins Coie, the law firm for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December 2019 that the dossier played a “central and essential” role in the FISA Court’s approval of the FBI’s secret surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Durham’s report noted the the FBI failed to corroborate any of the dossier’s key claims: “Our investigation determined that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the Steele reporting.”

The report added: “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report.”

Hang All the Members of the Liars’ Club? In the great scheme of lying things, George Santos is a prevaricating minnow who was snagged to great acclaim because the lying sharks swim and circle with impunity. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/15/hang-all-the-members-of-the-liars-club/

Federal prosecutors last week announced the indictment of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-N.Y.) on a host of charges, including misuse of federal campaign funds and wire fraud, almost all of them resulting from his pathological lies.  

Certainly, Santos deserved the attention of prosecutors for lying on federal documents and affidavits that may have helped him win a congressional seat as well as personal lucre. 

But if that’s the case, why haven’t federal prosecutors also gone after Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)? She clearly lied her way into a Harvard Law School professorship and an erstwhile presidential candidacy by claiming, in part, quite falsely she was a Native American, supposedly Harvard’s first indigenous law professor. 

Her Senate colleague, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flatly lied (he said “misspoke”) about being a Vietnam War veteran. He never confessed to “misspeaking” about his résumé until caught. Both senators, apparently like Santos, gained political traction in their various campaigns from such lies, but the two apparently never put them in writing, or at least not as blatantly as did Santos. 

New Federal Standards? 

Are federal and states prosecutors now setting a new moral and legal standard by criminalizing Santos’ lies? If true, congratulations—it is long overdue. 

Now can we please extend the long arm of the law to reach far beyond a bit player like Santos? 

Why not reboot with the really big liars? Their lies far more undermined the integrity of our key agencies and indeed our national security. 

So let us start with John Brennan, the former CIA director. He lied on two separate occasions, in one case while under oath before the U.S. Senate. His untruths were not mere campaign finance fabrications. They involved falsely swearing that the CIA did not spy on the computers of Senate staffers (“Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”). He also lied that U.S. drone missions in prior years had not killed innocent bystanders (“There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop.”).  

Brennan, only when caught, admitted to both lies. But he faced zero consequences and, in fact, was soon rewarded with an on-air analyst job at MSNBC.  

Richard Dreyfuss and the Difference Between Cultural Capitulation and Cultural Sensitivity To cave in here is to lose our souls. by Michael Brown

https://www.frontpagemag.com/richard-dreyfuss-and-the-difference-between-cultural-capitulation-and-cultural-sensitivity/

There is a massive difference between cultural capitulation and cultural sensitivity. We should resist the former and practice the latter.

What do I mean by cultural capitulation? I mean bowing down to the latest cultural fad, of kowtowing to the most current manifestation of what is PC, of becoming slaves to whatever the societal elites decide is acceptable.

A current example would be the cultural mandate that requires us to give our preferred gender pronouns or to deny biological realities when talking with a trans-identified person. We rightly say no to that mandate for many reasons. (For a listing of relevant articles, go here.)

This, of course, is quite different than cultural sensitivity, by which I mean recognizing what could legitimately offend someone in another culture or be easily misunderstood. This is something we often learn the hard way, especially when traveling to other countries or hosting people from other cultures. There are cultural taboos of which we know nothing until we cross a forbidden line.

The difficult question is to be able to determine when something is a matter of unacceptable cultural capitulation and when it’s a matter of legitimate cultural sensitivity.

All this can be illustrated in a recent interview on PBS’ Firing Line with the famed actor Richard Dreyfus.

He was asked by Margaret Hoover for his views on the new Oscar rules in a which a film would not be eligible for best picture unless it met certain requirements for inclusion and representation.

He responded, “They make me vomit.”

How so? “Because,” explained, “this is an art form, it’s also a form of commerce, and it makes money, but it’s an art. And no one should be telling me, as an artist, that I have to give in to the latest most current idea of what morality is.”

He continued, “And what are we risking? Are we really risking hurting people’s feelings? You can’t legislate that. And you have to let life be life

Chinese Fifth Column USA Chinese entries through our southern border are up 900%. by Scott S. Powell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/chinese-fifth-column-usa/

When the winds of war are blowing as they are now, it is essential to recognize new developments and extraordinary activities by the enemy.

Since Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, most Americans have been dumbfounded by his open border policy and its administration by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has continued to gaslight us with the claim right up to the present that, “the southern border is secure.”  In fact, the records show anything but a secure border. In just 28 months since Biden’s inauguration, over six million illegal aliens have entered the United States—including criminals, terrorists, and human, child, sex and lethal drug trafficking cartels—all of whom put enormous burden on American schools, health care facilities and law enforcement.

And now that Biden has allowed Title 42 to expire, with record numbers of immigrants having gathered at the southern border to enter the U.S., many now recognize that this chaos may be intentional Biden administration policy.

Some have observed the parallels with what is happening with the priorities of the Biden Administration with the Cloward-Piven neo-Marxist theory that was conceived and developed at Columbia by left-wing political activist sociology professors—the husband-and-wife team of Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. That theory became an 8-step plan designed to overload the U.S. public welfare system to bring about a crisis. That plan, now updated with a mass replacement migration component, could be called Cloward-Piven 2.0, and it has even greater potential to bring the United States into collapse, chaos, and bankruptcy by expanding lawlessness in addition to exploding the rolls of  poor immigrants who become dependent on a variety of social welfare programs—including food stamps, health care and more.

The strategy is quite simple—call it “fundamental transformation,” which is to radically increase the costs and national debt from an enlarged social welfare and law enforcement infrastructure driven by the surge of millions of poor new immigrants—many from various failed states. Since these immigrant arrivals include criminals such as cartel members involved in human, sex and drug trafficking and others carrying infectious diseases, there are obviously additional large law enforcement costs in addition to the increased health and welfare expenditures. Unchecked, the overall cost becomes so great that it can bring down the targeted host country—even a rich country like the United States.

But it gets worse.

Joe Biden’s Habitual Race-Baiting Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-bidens-habitual-race-baiting/

Joe Biden ascended to cruising altitude over the weekend to issue a comprehensive critique of the evil lurking in his fellow countrymen’s hearts. In a commencement address before the student body at the historically black Howard University, Biden took the measure of American history and found much of it wanting.

The story of American life “has not always been a fairytale,” the president said of the straw man he came to bury. It is a narrative of constant struggle between “the best of us” and “the worst of us,” symbolic of the “harsh reality that racism has always torn us apart.” Speaking of the permanent conflict for the soul of the nation, Biden said it demands that Americans of good faith “stand up against the poison of white supremacy,” as he has. He reiterated that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”

Biden’s elision of the word “domestic” from his identification of white nationalists as the nation’s primary terroristic adversary forecloses on invoking the FBI statistics that might have justified a narrower claim. But to include this qualifier would have taken all the sting out of the president’s contention, which, despite his explicit insistence that his comments were not audience-dependent, was likely designed to reinforce negative racial assumptions.

Joe Biden long ago sacrificed the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his forays into racial agitation. We don’t need to sift through the annals of history for examples of his reflexive race-baiting — the notion that Republicans sought to put black Americans “back in chains,” the idea that African Americans who declined to vote for him “ain’t black,” the implicit contrast between Barack Obama, an “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and other “mainstream African American” political leaders. We need only look at the president’s record in his first term in office.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Media Malpractice: Russian Hoax Confirmed by the Durham Report By Greg Byrnes

https://pjmedia.com/columns/gregbyrnes/2023/05/16/pulitzer-prize-winning-media-malpractice-russian-hoax-confirmed-by-the-durham-report-n1695646

Seven years later, we learn from Special Counsel John Durham’s report what was obvious seven minutes into this nonsense: The Russian hoax story was a childish prank. The puerile document was created by political opponents of Donald Trump. Duh — and double duh. Those who perpetuated it helped avert peace abroad and destroy tranquility at home. Divide countries, divide the public, and engender paranoid hate; that’s one heck of a prank.

In 2016 this Hilary Clinton paid-for schlock piece of fabulist political fantasy was discussed in a White House briefing. Were these a confederacy of dunces, devils, or serious intelligence analysts? You be the judge. And ask yourself what was the collective IQ in that meeting as CIA Director John Brennan breathlessly went over Hilary’s hoax documents with President Obama, Vice President Biden, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI Director James Comey ooing and ahhing. Confirmation bias? Lack of critical thinking? Lack of judgment? Or just any stick to beat a dog named Trump with?

On August 3, 20I6, within days of receiving the Clinton Plan intelligence, Director Brennan met with the President, Vice President and other senior Administration officials, including but not limited to the Attorney General (who participated remotely) and the FBI Director, in the White House Situation Room to discuss Russian election interference efforts. According to Brennan’s handwritten notes and his recollections from the meeting, he briefed on relevant intelligence known to date on Russian election interference, including the Clinton Plan intelligence [the Dossier]. Specifically, Director Brennan’s declassified handwritten notes reflect that he briefed the meeting’s participants regarding the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on 26 July of a proposal from one of her [campaign] advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.

The Great Debt Ceiling Deceit

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/15/the-great-debt-ceiling-deceit/

At the heart of all fearmongering over the debt ceiling “crisis” is the claim that if the federal government can’t borrow more money it won’t be able to pay interest on its existing debt, leading to a default.

But that’s poppycock. The government will collect more than a trillion dollars over the next three months. (It collected $638 billion in taxes in April alone.) That will be more than enough to pay interest on the debt. And it will be enough to pay all Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid bills, welfare checks, food stamps. There will even be enough money to pay for Joe Biden’s new electric car subsidies.

There just won’t be any money left for anything else. Nothing for the military, infrastructure, education, the environment, law enforcement, or any other program the federal government currently operates.

That’s because, as it stands today, every penny collected in taxes goes to pay interest on the debt and a category described as “payments for individuals.” Everything else is paid for with borrowed money.

Paper Or Plastic? The Fanatics Tell Us We Can’t Have Either The Eco-zealots never sleep

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/16/paper-or-plastic-the-fanatics-tell-us-we-cant-have-either/

The Biden administration and the Democratic regime that rules California and other states are so busy banning things that it’s hard to keep up with what’s allowed, what isn’t and what won’t be tomorrow or next year. Much of the black list is made up of high-profile targets, such as gasoline-powered automobiles, diesel engines, gas stoves and plastic straws. But the prohibitionists work in small ways too, and it all adds up.

Scolds and eco-temperance harpies never rest, their eyes always on the lookout for another modern convenience to outlaw. Having successfully interdicted single-use plastic bags in at least eight states, they’re now aiming for their only reasonable replacements: paper bags.

“Paper can’t be a solution to plastic waste,” says the headline of a recent story posted on Canada’s CTV News site. New Jersey enacted a paper bag ban last year, the first in the country, because, well, that’s just what blue states and cities do now: satisfy the deranged urges of petty tyrants.

The CTV story is as agenda-driven as any NPR article in the U.S. Various “experts,” “researchers” and activists screech and nag about “deforestation and forest degradation,” “increased pressure on the world’s forests” (caused by the plastic bag bans they have demanded), and “a really critical moment” in which “we need to take steps to keep forests standing.” One insisted that consumers have to “rethink and reorient themselves towards a reusable mind frame.”

Israel at 75 Is Threatened but Strong It can no longer take its relationship with the U.S. for granted, but it may not need to. Walter Russel Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-at-75-is-threatened-but-strong-america-alliance-oil-mid-east-russia-china-e4bf6321?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

It’s been 75 years since the Jewish community in British Palestine rejected a last-minute plea from the Truman administration and declared independence as the last British forces left the embattled land. It wasn’t the most auspicious moment. One day earlier, the strategically located Gush Etzion bloc of Jewish agricultural settlements fell to Arab assailants following a bitter siege.

Disregarding Truman’s pleas and warnings from Western military leaders that they faced certain defeat, the Jews of Palestine voted for independence. They went on to win the War of Independence, thanks largely to an influx of Soviet-bloc weapons from Czechoslovakia, but 75 years later questions about its future still swirl around the Jewish state.

In recent weeks we’ve seen rocket attacks from Gaza, reports that Russia will deliver advanced fighter jets to Iran, and the readmission of Syria to the Arab League. A few months ago, Israelis were speculating over the likelihood that Saudi Arabia would join the Abraham Accords. Today, they are working to understand the ramifications of the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian thaw.

But the most important question facing Israelis today is the future of their relationship with the U.S. There is nothing written in the stars that guarantees its permanence. For the first 25 years of Israel’s independence, American presidents were more interested in cultivating Arab leaders and blocking the Israeli nuclear program than in aligning with Jerusalem. Only after Richard Nixon concluded that an Israeli defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War would empower the Soviet Union across the Middle East did Washington move toward a strategic relationship.