Displaying posts published in

February 2024

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Palestinian Terrorists, Hospitals, and Plans for Palestinian State by Bassam Tawil *****

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20360/palestinian-hospitals

In light of the aversion of the Palestinian Authority (PA), its ministry of health, and its security forces to expelling the three terrorists from the Jenin hospital, the US administration’s plan for bringing the PA back to the Gaza Strip to replace Hamas and create a Palestinian state seems more than foolhardy.

In addition, a Palestinian state without Israel’s consent would be a massive violation of the Oslo Accords. The nonstop actions, or rather inactions, of the PA serve as further evidence that, contrary to what the US administration believes, the PA cannot be “revitalized.”

The PA indisputably has no intention of changing its policy of glorifying and financially rewarding terrorists. PA leaders continue to praise terrorists as “heroes” and refuse to halt their policy of paying monthly stipends to Palestinians who murder Jews.

The incident in Jenin is further proof – more is hardly needed – that the PA cannot be trusted to enforce law and order or rein in terrorists in the Gaza Strip, were there to be a state. The PA, in its current location in the West Bank, does nothing to stop Hamas and other terrorists from pursuing their activities to murder Jews and obliterate Israel. There is no evidence to assume that it would behave any differently in Gaza. There is much evidence to assume that it would.

The Ibn Sina Specialized Hospital is one of several medical facilities in the West Bank city of Jenin, which is under the exclusive control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). As such, the hospital operates in accordance with a license from the PA’s Ministry of Health.

On January 30, Israeli security forces found and killed three Palestinian terrorists who were hiding inside the hospital. A statement issued by the Iran-backed Hamas group identified the three terrorists as Mohammed Walid Jalamneh and brothers Mohammed and Basel al-Ghazawi. Al-Jalamneh was described as a commander of Hamas’s armed wing, the Izaddin al-Qassam Brigades, while the two brothers were labeled by Palestinians as mujahideen (holy warriors) belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist proxy group.

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The State Department Has Lost the Plot Noah Rothman

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-state-department-has-lost-the-plot/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm

Since the October 7 attacks, the State Department has exposed for all to see a level of rot within the institution that was once apparent only to Republicans, who would inherit the agency from Democrats only to find their imperatives implemented with conspicuous lethargy — if they were implemented at all.

Like so many agencies within Joe Biden’s administration — up to and including the White House itself — the State Department is struggling to navigate a mutiny among the lower-level functionaries who are beside themselves over the president’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Unlike most of those other executive agencies, Foggy Bottom has tried to appease the insurrectionaries under its roof. The latest example of that foolhardy impulse is apparent in its reported commitment to fast-track American recognition of a Palestinian state.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the details:

The Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy. This initiative is based on the administration’s efforts prior to Oct. 7 to negotiate a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.

Ravid adds that the U.S. could pursue this strategy either passively, by declining to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution admitting the territories as full member states, or actively by recognizing Palestine directly and encouraging its allies to do the same. Either way, it is an ideologically blinkered enterprise.

It is not as though there is no rationale for supporting Palestinian statehood today, even within the context of Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign. As Ravid notes, it could serve as an inducement to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel. Past presidencies, Trump’s included, have paid lip service to the desirability of a Palestinian state as an aspirational objective as part of a broader regional normalization strategy. But to consent to that approach today would be to reward terrorism.

As many have rationally speculated, including Joe Biden himself, the impetus that led Hamas to execute the October 7 massacre was to advance the interests of the terrorist group’s Iranian benefactors by derailing the ongoing normalization process between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. Simply deeming Palestine a state as a direct result of Hamas’s attack will not impose sobriety on the Palestinian Authority, which the White House seems to regard as the only viable alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza. It would only create incentives for more terrorism — conduct in which the party in control of the Palestinian Authority is more than capable of engaging in, too.

The second, most intractable obstacle before Palestinian statehood is that “Palestine” is a fiction. No rational observer looks at the two noncontiguous territories in the West Bank and Gaza — two places with distinct governments (which, by the way, hate each other), disparate economies and foreign policies, and wildly divergent social contracts — and sees the Westphalian ideal. It’s especially telling that the State Department is evincing so much frustration with the uncooperative world that it appears inclined to simply impose statehood on the Palestinian territories in the absence of any reliable Palestinian negotiating partner. The whole initiative is an outgrowth of a variety of narratives to which America’s diplomatic class is beholden but do not much reflect the world it is tasked with understanding.

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Say Goodbye to America Chris Queen

By on February 1st, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/01/30/the-border-crisis-isnt-just-an-immigration-problem-its-a-national-security-issue-n4925952

It’s no stretch to say that the crisis at the border is the most pressing issue we face today. There are ripples from what’s going on at the border that reach out into every area of society. Our already stretched social safety net is beginning to rip at the seams. Law enforcement is feeling the effects of increased crime from people whose existence in the country breaks the law. 

Citizens across the country — but especially in border states — are fed up with the border crisis and the Biden administration’s refusal to deal with it. On the surface, the massive influx of illegals across our borders is simply an immigration issue, and that’s true to a point, but it’s worse. The border crisis is a national security problem, but you won’t see the mainstream media reporting on it.

But do you know who is reporting on it? That’s right: we are! Just last week Catherine reported on the mind-blowing influx of Chinese men of military age who are flooding across the border:

The number of illegal Chinese migrants pouring into the U.S. shot up astronomically last year, and the dangerous trend continues, with the overwhelming majority being young adults — especially military-age men.

With over 24,000 illegal aliens from China encountered by Border Patrol in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023, and over 9,000 so far in FY 2024, America clearly has a national security risk on its hands, especially since so many of these migrants are military-age youth.

Oh Really?: White House Says Border Surge ‘Not Unusual’

Robert has written tons of content about how terrorists are coming across this porous border, including this piece that’s exclusively from our VIP readers:

At least six people on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, which oddly enough isn’t yet completely filled with angry parents protesting at school board meetings and people who dissent from the Biden regime’s line on vaccines, have been caught at the line in the dirt that used to be known as America’s southern border as Title 42 was consigned to the dustbin of history. An unknowable number of terrorists, meanwhile, got across unimpeded and unnoticed. What could possibly go wrong? Celebrate diversity!

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Go woke, go broke, college edition By Silvio Canto, Jr.

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/go_woke_go_broke_college_edition.html

October 7th, when Israel came under a major terrorist attack, was a horrible day for the victims, their families, and all of us who do not believe that young women should be raped at a music festival. 

It was also a bad day for institutions like Harvard which showed us just what the students are being taught.   

In comes Harvard donor Ken Griffin and out go donations, or, the latest version of go woke, go broke. 

This is the story:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin ’89 said he is pausing donations to Harvard over its handling of antisemitism on campus, a move that comes less than one year after donating $300 million to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. Griffin, however, left open the possibility that the University could win back his support.

“I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

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How’s Life in Obama’s Fundamentally-Transformed America Working Out for You So Far? Vigilance is necessary this time around to insure a free and fair election and to keep the cement of fundamental transformation from hardening into unbreakable rock.By Albin Sadar

By on February 1st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/31/hows-life-in-obamas-fundamentally-transformed-america-working-out-for-you-so-far/

It should be painfully obvious to everyone by now that we are living in the fast-hardening cement of what Barack Obama promised to wildly cheering crowds on the campaign trail in 2008—”a fundamental transformation of America.”

Anyone who can remember back to the decades before the Obama presidency will recall a country committed to fairness and common sense: judging a person based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; welcoming a person who came lawfully into this country who applied for citizenship through traditionally prescribed means; never giving a second thought about girls’ and women’s sports being reserved only for a person born female and without a speck of steroids, let alone testosterone, in their bodies; expecting that immensely immature men dressed as fat-slob, over-face-painted, faux women would remain hidden inside “special” bars and clubs and not held up as twerking examples to kindergarten children; acknowledging unequivocally that Marxism was a bad idea and not a glorified ideal; realizing that only a tyrant would actually jail their political opponents for simply questioning highly-suspicious presidential election results; and, generally, in a more fair-minded time: no one even considered ever gleefully calling “evil good and good evil.”

This, of course, is but a very short list of the slop that is being shoveled on a daily basis down the throats of ordinary, common-sense Americans. (We will leave it to the reader to shout out a few dozen more.)

All of this slow-boiling of the pot, with the American-citizen frog paddling lethargically within, began with the nomination of Barack Obama.

People so desperately wanted what Obama was peddling, “Hope and Change,” that they inserted into that second word whatever it was their hearts desired most. And certainly the color of the man’s skin was the huge selling point. Sure, the candidate had no track record, and, let’s face it, had he been white, Hillary Clinton would have been the Democrats’ candidate that election season. But the biracial aspect was seen, perhaps even symbolically, as a way of finally unifying this country after so much racial tension throughout the previous decades.

Many conservatives like to push back on the charge that America is “systemically racist” by pointing to the 2008 election. The basis of their argument: “Would a racist nation vote a black man into office?”

However, isn’t it more accurate to say that voting for someone based on their skin color is also racist? Racism goes both ways. That’s why anyone who says that Blacks cannot be racist is making a racist statement.

“It’s not about skin,” a friend once told me, “it’s about sin.”

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Gazans Chant: ‘The People Want to Topple Hamas!’ Finally daring to speak out against the real cause of their misery. by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gazans-chant-the-people-want-to-topple-hamas/

While the IDF continues to provide safe corridors for civilians fleeing from Khan Yunis, Hamas operatives try to hold them back, for they are the human shields Hamas relies on to discourage IDF attacks. Now Gazans are openly expressing their anger with Hamas, which wants to keep them imperiled, and also has been appropriating much of the humanitarian aid that has been trucked into the Strip. More on this public display of anger directed at Hamas can be found here: “Gazans call for overthrow of Hamas as they flee through IDF humanitarian corridor,” by Gadi Zaig, Jerusalem Post, January 27, 2024:

The IDF has established a humanitarian corridor in recent days for Palestinian residents of western Khan Yunis to move from combat areas to the town of Al-Mawasi in southwestern Gaza, IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee announced on Saturday.

Adraee said that Gazan residents would be safe in Al-Mawasi and that the corridor has been opened to evacuate civilians every day so that the IDF can focus on fighting the Hamas terrorist organization and deepening its incursion into Khan Yunis without the risk of civilians being injured in the process.

Tens of thousands of Gazans have already passed through this corridor safely, according to the spokesperson.

Adraee also quoted a number of Gazan civilians passing through the corridor, who informed IDF soldiers that Hamas was preventing them from leaving combat areas, using threats and violence. Additionally, IDF soldiers were also assisting civilians at the scene, including the elderly and sick.

The humanitarian corridor remains open until 4 p.m. for residents to cross over to Al-Mawasi.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Here’s How To Turn The Tables On Biden’s Brazen Border Lies

By on February 1st, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/01/heres-how-to-turn-the-tables-on-bidens-brazen-border-lies/

After spending three years denying that there is a border crisis, President Joe Biden wants the public to believe that the reason more than 6 million immigrants have flooded over the southern border on his watch is because of Republican intransigence.

Now he’s taking this up a notch. He claims he desperately wants to “shut down the border,” but Republicans are standing in the way … for political gain. This is a lie for the history books.

Just how dumb does Biden think the public is?

On his first day in office, Biden started signing executive orders rescinding policies that President Donald Trump put in place that had dramatically cut the number of illegals trying to sneak into the country. Biden stopped construction of the wall. He hamstrung border agents. Those actions – none of which required congressional action – had exactly the effect everyone expected. Illegal crossings exploded. (See the chart below.)

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Why Do Black Pastors Oppose Israel? Henry Louis Gates had an answer more than 30 years ago. By Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-do-black-pastors-oppose-israel-7d131f24?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

More than 1,000 black pastors are pressing President Biden to restrain Israel in its war with Hamas and threatening that if he doesn’t do so, it will cost him black support in November. “We see them as a part of us,” the Rev. Cynthia Hale of Decatur, Ga., told the

New York Times

, referring to Palestinians. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.” Barbara Williams-Skinner of the National African American Clergy Network said: “Black clergy have seen war, militarism, poverty and racism all connected.”

Yet their focus on the Middle East is perplexing. “The Israel-Gaza war, unlike Iran and Afghanistan, has evoked the kind of deep-seated angst among black people that I have not seen since the civil-rights movement,” Ms. Williams-Skinner said. Why? The world is filled with victims of oppression—the Uyghurs of China, the Kurds of Iraq, the Ukrainians. The black citizens of Sudan have been subjected to mass killing and enslavement at the hands of Arabs. What makes the Palestinians more worthy of sympathy—especially since, unlike these other groups, they have turned down numerous offers of statehood and have made terrorism their tactic of choice?

Perhaps it is that their antagonists are Jews. In a 1992 article, the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. pondered the causes of rising antisemitism in the black community. He considered the influence of “Christian anti-Semitism, given the historic importance of Christianity in the black community.” But he laid the primary blame on black demagogues who were vying for leadership in the new “Afrocentric” movement.

Mr. Gates noted that many Jews were surprised by the “recrudescence of black anti-Semitism, in view of the historic alliance between the two groups.” He cited the “brutal truth” that the “new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance, but because of it.” The alliance had been formed by a previous generation of black ministers, led by Martin Luther King Jr., who sought integration. The new generation of Afrocentric leaders, including pastors, needed to keep blacks isolated to establish their own power.

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The Return of Another Bad Idea — The Two-State Solution by Jonathan Rosenblum

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.jewishmediaresources.com/2283/the-return-of-another-bad-idea-the-two-state

Students of American Mideast diplomacy will be quickly be struck by the number of doctrines that have persisted long past their “sell by” dates and after having been refuted by events.

For decades, it was a fundamental tenet of the State Department that the Arab-Israeli conflict lay at the heart of the failure to thrive of virtually every Muslim regime, as if Muslim leaders deliberately kept their countries backward and unfree to spite Israel. And then came the Arab Spring of 2010.

As Jackson Diehl, deputy editor of the Washington Post editorial page, wrote in late March 2011, “A reasonable person might conclude from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, et al., that the Middle East’s deepest problems have nothing to do with Israel and that the Obama administration’s almost obsessive focus on trying to broker an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in its first two years was misplaced. But Obama isn’t one of those persons.”

Another article of faith of American policymakers was that no Arab country would make peace with Israel absent resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But then came Anwar Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem, followed by the 1978 Camp David Accords. Forty years later came the Abraham Accords between Israel and three Arab states.

And Saudi Arabia was widely seen as likely to join the Abraham Accords prior to October 7, despite the absence of a Palestinian state. Indeed, that prospect is thought by many to have lain behind Hamas’s October 7 attack, orchestrated by Iran.

Yet at the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confidently asserted that Saudi Arabia would never join the Abraham Accords absent a clear pathway to Palestinian statehood. In that they may be right, but only because their public pronouncements made it impossible for the Saudis to move forward with Israel. Diplomatic relations with Israel, however, would not be an act of largesse by the Saudis toward Israel, but rather a calculated strategic decision that Israel is their best possible ally against Iran and an assessment of the economic advantages of partnering with the more advanced Israeli economy.

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THE QATARI MONEY BEHIND ADVISERS TO FAMILIES OF GAZA HOSTAGES: BARBARA LEDEEN

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2024/01/31/advisers-to-families-of-hostages-held-in-gaza-backed-by-qatari-funding-

Some of the families trying to free their loved ones held hostage by Hamas in Gaza are getting advice from individuals and entities that have received funding from Qatar, Daniel reports — an unusual arrangement given Qatar’s role as one of the chief mediators between Hamas and Israel and that the country is home to Hamas’ political leadership.

— As hostage families work to keep their relatives in the news and urge the Qataris to get Hamas to release them, a consultant working for the Qataris, Jay Footlik, has also met with the families in both Washington and Israel to prep them for their meetings with Qatari officials and also help organize them, according to two people familiar with the matter.

— Footlik’s consulting firm ThirdCircle Inc. has been registered under FARA since 2019 to help arrange trips to Qatar for American elected officials on behalf of the Qatari Embassy, which pays the firm $40,000 per month, according to filings with the Justice Department.

— Footlik, a former special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and liaison to the American Jewish community, told PI his work with the hostage families began because he had a long-standing relationship with Israeli businessperson Eytan Stibbe, who asked for his assistance since Footlik had relationships with Qatar.

— He said that he then contacted Qatari ambassador Meshal Al-Thani and asked if he would meet a relative of several of the Israeli hostages, Avichai Brodutch. Al-Thani immediately agreed and soon asked Footlik to help facilitate direct communication with hostage family members who wanted to meet with Qatari officials, he said.

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