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October 2023

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Peek: Why is Biden ignoring Iran’s influence in the Hamas attacks? It’s simple — politics.

By on October 13th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4252577-why-is-biden-ignoring-irans-influence-in-the-hamas-attacks-its-simple-politics/

Critics of Joe Biden are furious that in his denunciations of the terror attacks on Israel he has not once mentioned Iran.

They don’t get it. If Biden blames Tehran for masterminding and funding the horrific killings of Israeli citizens, he will have to take the next step, which is to punish Iran’s leaders for the senseless barbarism. That next step would include harsh sanctions, including reining in Iran’s oil exports.  

But curbing the flow of Iranian oil would drive up the price of gasoline here in the U.S. Higher prices at the pump correlate closely with Biden’s approval ratings; if the cost of a gallon of gas goes up, his polling goes down. Biden cannot survive another downdraft in his approval ratings, which are already the lowest of any president in a generation. 

It is notable that oil prices have moved only slightly higher since the Hamas attack. The betting is that the White House has no stomach for real penalties on Iran.   

Joe Biden’s response to the horrors perpetrated by Hamas terrorists has been entirely inadequate. The bar is now set so low for this president that liberal media outlets were ecstatic that Biden could raise his voice and display anger at babies being beheaded and Americans being held for ransom. The New York Times’s Peter Brooks waxed poetic about the president’s 10-minute speech: “He bristled with righteous indignation as he denounced the bloody Hamas attack in unforgiving terms and vowed to stand by Israel without equivocation.” Good for President Biden! 

Unfortunately, that righteous indignation is not likely to translate into meaningful pushback against the region’s main sponsor of terror.  

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal insisting that Biden “reimpose extensive multilateral sanctions on Tehran and deny Iranian planes overflight rights. Impound the shipping vessels Iran uses to circumvent sanctions. Close Iranian banks with access to the West, and cease the Iranian operations of European businesses. Treat Iranian officials like pariahs and sink Iranian naval boats that threaten international shipping.”  

These are excellent suggestions. But first and foremost, the U.S. must cut off Iran’s oil shipments, its primary source of revenues.  

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hard Evidence Warranting the Impeachment of Joe Biden James D. Agresti

By on October 13th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/13/hard-evidence-warranting-the-impeachment-of-joe-biden/

In a staggering act of journalistic deceit, the New York Times is reporting that Republicans launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden without any “evidence of financial wrongdoing or corruption by the president.” Similar statements have been made by a massive array of media outlets and Democrat politicians.

In reality, overwhelming proof of Joe Biden’s corruption and wrongdoing has been found, including hard evidence like written records and corroborated testimonies from first-hand witnesses. Collectively, at least 12 sets of documented facts leave no reasonable doubt that Biden participated in his son’s illicit business deals, bribed foreign officials, and obstructed justice.

Moreover, no less than three major defenses of Biden are demonstrably false.

1) “Don’t Mention Joe”

Joe Biden claimed at least eight times that he had nothing to do with his son Hunter’s business dealings and never even spoke to Hunter about them. For example, he told a group of reporters on August 28, 2019:

I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period.

In May 2017, two of Hunter’s business partners exchanged several WhatsApp messages about the Biden family’s involvement in their dealings, and one of the partners wrote to the other:

Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.

2) “A Chairman’s Role”

In 2023, the business partner who was on the receiving end of the “Don’t mention Joe” message stated:

The American people don’t fully appreciate yet the key role Joe Biden played in the Biden family global influence-peddling… I would equate it to a chairman’s role in a traditional business structure.

3) “The Big Guy”

In May 2017, the same partner who wrote “Don’t mention Joe” sent an email to Hunter and two of their other partners in which he proposed how the “equity” of a joint venture with a Chinese energy company named CEFC would be “distributed.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Middle East Wake-Up Call Hamas’s atrocities make complacency much harder to sustain. But will we face up to the Iranian threat? By Walter Russell Mead

By on October 13th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-middle-east-wake-up-call-f0fb0cdb?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Almost a week after Hamas fanatics bent on murder slipped across the borders of Gaza, the world is still struggling to process the shock. It will be months or perhaps years before the full consequences of this attack can finally be assessed, and we do not know if the war in Gaza will spread across the Middle East and possibly beyond.

But three consequences of the attack can already be discerned. First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been seriously and maybe irrevocably wounded. Mr. Netanyahu has argued that he was the indispensable man who alone had the stature and vision to guide a small nation in a rough world—even if the price of his continued leadership involved bringing an unruly and chaotic coalition to power and a year of all-consuming domestic political strife. That seems harder to justify now.

Similarly, the belief among some on the Israeli right that Israel was strong enough and the Palestinians were isolated enough so that expanding settlements on the West Bank entailed no real risks or costs has been exposed as a dangerous delusion. The decision to plunge Israel into a year of turmoil over judicial-reform proposals also looks more questionable in light of the Hamas attacks.

Israel needs a sober government. Too many of the parties in the current coalition are too poorly led, impulsive and prone to wishful thinking to provide the leadership an embattled nation needs. Wednesday’s announcement of a wartime freeze on controversial legislation and a unity government with an experienced war cabinet will help Israel focus on the tasks at hand, but a serious political reckoning lies ahead.

Second, while the Israeli right has lost ground, the cause of the Palestinians has suffered even more. After these attacks, the two-state solution is sick, and the one-state solution is dead.

The time may come when the establishment of an independent Palestinian state returns to the agenda, but I see no prospect that any Israeli government of any party would embrace this cause now. The danger that Hamas-linked genocidaires would take over is too real to make the idea acceptable to Israelis. Israeli politicians must make the survival of Israel the supreme goal of their policies. Thanks to Hamas, the goal of Palestinian independence is further off than ever.

The idea of combining the two peoples into a single state is even more absurd. No sane person can imagine that Israelis would accept millions (or even tens of thousands) of Hamas supporters as fellow citizens of a common state. No serious person would ask them to.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ben Sasse’s Letter on Israel to Jewish Gators A model of moral clarity, compared with the mush from the Ivy League.

By on October 13th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ben-sasse-statement-israel-university-of-florida-hamas-gaza-3cd633e2?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

In the face of Hamas’s atrocities, some U.S. college administrators at first said little or issued equivocating mush, such as what Dartmouth College put out Tuesday in its “Statement on the Israel-Gaza War.” A notable exception: University of Florida President Ben Sasse.

Here’s what Mr. Sasse wrote Tuesday in an email addressed to “Jewish Gator Alums,” which deserves to be quoted at length:

“I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

“This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans. I am thankful to say I haven’t seen examples of that here at UF, either from our faculty or our student body. . . .

“In the coming days, it is possible that anti-Israel protests will come to UF’s campus. I have told our police chief and administration that this university always has two foundational commitments: We will protect our students and we will protect speech. This is always true: Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. . . .

“When evil raises its head, as it has in recent days, it is up to men and women of conscience and courage to draw strength from truth and commit ourselves to the work of building something better—to the work of pursuing justice and pursuing peace. That is what we aim to do through education, compassion, and truth here at the University of Florida.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Unique Hatred For Jews And Israel Among The Trendy Western Left Francis Menton

By on October 13th, 2023

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-10-11-unique-hatred-for-jews-and-israel-among-the-trendy-western-left

“I won’t try to justify everything that Israel has done, but I think there is no doubt that Israel needs to take aggressive steps to control ongoing violence and atrocities against their citizens. The steps taken by Israel are not remotely comparable to the real genocides and ethnic cleansings regularly carried out by Muslims against members of all other religions in their midst. Why the trendy Left never criticizes any of this, and reserves its ire uniquely for Israel, I cannot explain.”

Among the trendy Left, and particularly on elite academic campuses, hatred of Israel, and by association of all Jews, has long been on the ascendant. The Anti-Defamation League traces the origins of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement against Israel to the early 2000s. By the time we get to the most recent ten years, every elite academic institution has multiple student groups and scores of faculty members advocating for delegitimizing Israel as oppressors of the Palestinians, or even as an “apartheid state.”

And thus the current wave of atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israel has brought out statements of support from some 30+ student groups at Harvard, from the Student Bar Association at NYU, from a group of students at Stanford, and many other such around the country.

In the bigger picture, the treatment of Israel and Israeli Jews by Muslims is not at all unique. Around the world, the fact is that the Islamic religion and its members are not tolerant of members of other religions. And by “not tolerant,” I mean, absolutely willing to kill to force the non-believers to conform. I’m not saying that all adherents to the Muslim faith are so intolerant; but many are, and the rest support the intolerant ones, either explicitly or implicitly. The world is full of news — very sparsely reported by our dominant press — of persecution and killings of members of any and all other religions by Muslims when they are in a dominant position. Although our press systematically suppresses information on this subject — as they do with almost everything that it is important to know about — this activity is sufficiently widespread that it is inexcusable for well-informed people not to know about it.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

YORAM ETTINGER: WHAT WENT WRONG?

By on October 13th, 2023

https://bit.ly/46Mg5PK

No common-sense-observer of the volcanic Middle East and Islamic terrorism, in general, and Hamas/Palestinian terrorism, in particular, should be shocked by the October 2023 Hamas’ atrocities, which are not driven by the size of Israel and its policy, but by the aim to uproot the “infidel” Jewish State from the “abode of Islam.”

Ignoring the nature of Hamas

*Significant elements in Israeli, the US and Western policy-making and national security and the intelligence establishment have been in denial of the nature of Palestinian terrorism, as the Western establishment has been in denial of the megalomaniacally rogue nature of Iran’s Ayatollahs regime since its ascension to power in February 1979.

*They have eagerly attempted to pacify Hamas. However, they failed to realize the pivotal role of the 1,400-year-old fanatic, anti-Western ideology of Hamas, which views Israel as the beachhead of the “infidel” Western culture in the Middle East.  

*Their eagerness to advance the cause of peace has led them to sacrifice the frustratingly complex Middle East reality on the altar of a convenient, virtual reality, as was the case in the Israeli-initiated (and Western embraced) 1993 Oslo Accord and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement, which catapulted Palestinian terrorism to unprecedented intensity, paving the road to the 2023 atrocities of Hamas.

*They have based their approach to Hamas – as the Western policy has approached Iran’s Ayatollahs – on the assumption that generous financial benefits would induce Hamas to alter its order of priorities, and prefer standard of living considerations over its core, zealot ideology. They believed that dramatic economic gestures could lead Hamas to eventually comply with agreements, accept a reality of a manageable low-intensity conflict, or even peaceful-coexistence with Israel.

The centrality of the Hamas covenant

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Young Jews Brace for ‘A Day of Global Jihad’ At our institutions of higher education, the quads are alive with hate. By Maya Sulkin

By on October 13th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/young-jews-brace-for-a-day-of-global-jihad?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was a deeply unpopular student at Columbia for a simple reason: I was a Zionist. When I posted photos on Instagram of swastikas graffitied across campus, I received private messages telling me I was “attention-seeking.” When I hosted pro-Israel events, commenters online accused me of blood libel. 

I left Columbia earlier this year in part because of this bullying. And now, after more than 1,300 Jews were slaughtered by Hamas in Israel, the hatred that once hid behind my Instagram DMs is appearing in broad daylight right at my alma mater, an Ivy League bastion that has educated politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners. 

On Wednesday, female Columbia student Maxwell Friedman, 19, was arrested and charged with assault after she beat an Israeli student with a stick outside the school’s main library. 

The following day, hundreds of students gathered outside Columbia’s Alma Mater statue to cheer on the mass genocide of Jews. (In this, they were merely echoing the views published by tenured professor Joseph Massad, who described the scene of “Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence” as “awesome.”) 

For hours, students encircled the quad, waving Palestinian flags and chanting the ten rally cries sanctioned by on-campus activists, including “End the Zionist occupation” and “Stop defending apartheid.” 

Many covered their faces, pulling sweatshirts over their heads in the face of cameras. A few wore N95 masks, sunglasses, and hats all at once. Earlier, one of the student groups behind the event, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, encouraged participants to cover their faces “for safety from doxxing.” 

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