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May 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Arabs See Trump’s ‘Separate Peace’ and Deals With Islamists by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21632/trump-deals-with-islamists

In the eyes of Iran and the Houthis, Trump’s separate peace deal that excluded Israel is a captivating green light to continue their attacks on “The Little Satan”, while obligingly halting their assaults on vessels in the Red Sea.

Trump’s deal with the Houthis sent everyone in the Middle East the message that the Trump administration has finally thrown Israel under the bus.

Worse, Trump’s agreement does not require the Houthis to abandon their jihad (holy war) against either the US or Israel.

“[The Palestinians are] ecstatic that their employer, Qatar, just “purchased” the US presidency with a $400 million 747 jet and a Golf Course….” — Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Palestinian political analyst, X, May 11, 2025.

Qatar wanted the American-Israeli hostage released as a gesture to Trump on the eve of his visit to the Gulf state. Hamas leaders were not able to say no to Qatar, and immediately complied.

This event shows that Qatar has enough influence over Hamas to instruct it to release all the hostages. Qatar could have used its influence from the beginning to force Hamas to release all of them; but it did not.

Qatar wants to make sure that its long-standing allies, Iran and Hamas, remain strong and in power after the current war.

Trump and his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are being played and appear not even to know it. If they do know it, personal friendships and financial rescues have apparently taken priority over hard-nosed negotiating. Their only priority seems to have been raking in trillions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, a Trump golf resort in Saudi Arabia, a $400 million “flying palace” from Qatar, a Trump hotel in Dubai and the promise of a Trump Tower in Damascus.

“Donald Trump may go down in history as the American President who empowered Islamism around the globe [by funding Syria’s al-Sharaa], more than any other president in the history of the USA.” — Nervana Mahmoud, Egyptian political analyst, X, May 13, 2025.

Trump and his advisors undoubtedly have good intentions, but… trying to strike deals with Iran and its Hamas and Houthi terror proxies, instead emboldens these terrorists and enemies of the US.

After Trump returns to Washington, he will quickly discover that the Islamists and their sponsors in the Middle East have not changed. Iran, Hamas and the Houthis will continue to call for death to Israel and America. Qatar will continue to provide political and financial support to anti-American Islamists and other Jihadis. As for Syria’s jihadist president, the belief that he will transform himself into a moderate pro-Western Arab leader and a democrat is, unfortunately, nothing but a joke.

Saudi Arabia, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also appears to be moving in that direction, though at a much slower pace. MBS will not join the Abraham Accords. Trump’s wish that he would sign onto them “in your own time” is a sweet, naïve dream.

If Trump were to use military force against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it would not only be a blow to Tehran and its terror proxies, it would enormously empower the moderate Arabs and Muslims who correctly view the mullahs as a threat to their national security and stability.

If Trump wants real peace and prosperity, he must, unfortunately, act against Iran and its terror proxies, and distance himself from jihadists and their sponsors, especially Qatar. Such a move would be the best way to expand the Abraham Accords and encourage other Arabs to seize hold of Trump’s great promise.

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Eurovision fans’ glorious f-you to the Israel haters Yuval Raphael winning the audience vote reveals the chasm between the new elites and the silent majority. Tom Slater

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/18/eurovision-fans-glorious-f-you-to-the-israel-haters/

So Austria edged out Israel to win last night’s Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland. Amid a resurgence of anti-Semitism among the cultural set, one might be tempted to reach for some crude historical references – given Basel was the birthplace of the modern Zionist movement, the venue for the First Zionist Congress in 1897, and Austria was the birthplace of, well, Hitler. But where the Jews and the Jewish State are concerned, last night’s grand final was a moment of triumph, even if contestant Yuval Raphael didn’t quite make it over the line.

In the run-up to this year’s Eurovision, there was all the usual frothing agitation, demanding the Jewish State be banned from the competition because of the ‘genocide’ activists insist Israel is committing in Gaza. Seemingly, they have no idea what genocide actually means and have forgotten that Hamas started this war when it butchered 1,200 people in Israel on 7 October 2023, targeting civilians for murder, rape and torture. That 24-year-old Raphael is a survivor of 7 October – indeed, the last major music event she attended before last night was the Nova festival – hasn’t dimmed their zealotry.

All the usual suspects dusted off their old open letters. They claim this is about the war, even though they’ve been calling for a boycott for decades. That Eurovision is organised by broadcasters, not by governments, never seems to phase them. It seems that all Israelis must be held accountable for the alleged misdeeds of their government – particularly for having the gall to defend itself and its people from genocidal Islamists.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites by Ilya Shapiro

By on May 19th, 2025

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a build­ing and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect oppo­nents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
File and fight constitutional lawsuits
Advise Fortune 500 companies
Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

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Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again Hardcover – May 20, 2025 by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

By on May 19th, 2025

From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration

“Explosive.” —The New York Times

“[The] most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline.” — The Atlantic

“Superbly reported . . . Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids.” — Los Angeles Times

“The book Biden allies fear the most.” — Politico

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Medicaid: End It, Don’t Mend It

By on May 19th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/19/medicaid-end-it-dont-mend-it/

As soon as Republicans mentioned cutting spending on Medicaid as part of their “reconciliation” bill, the usual suspects started rolling out their standard talking points. They’re cutting health care for the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich! Millions will lose coverage! The disabled will suffer! Oh, the humanity!

Well, if the GOP is going to be accused of destroying Medicaid when all they are proposing is a minor haircut, why not go all out and scrap this hopelessly flawed, fraud-riddled, budget-busting disaster of a program and start over from scratch?

First, let’s dispense with the claim of “devastating” cuts to Medicaid. The House reconciliation bill would reduce Medicaid spending by $625 billion. That might sound like a lot, but it’s stretched out over 10 years, at a time when Medicaid is on track to spend $8.6 trillion. Medicaid spending will still go up every year under the House bill, just a tiny bit more slowly.

What Republicans should really be talking about is giving Medicaid the USAID treatment. Shut it down and start over from scratch.

Let’s line up the reasons.

It was sold on a lie. The original claim made in the mid-1960s was that the federal government and the states would split the cost of Medicaid. But that happened only once: in the program’s first year. Ever since, the federal share has grown while the states’ shares have shrunk. By 2005, states were paying only 42% of Medicaid’s bills. In 2022, the state share dipped below 30%.

Over the past 60 years, states have pressured federal lawmakers to make a multitude of exceptions to the 50-50 split, which lawmakers were only too happy to provide because there is no cap on federal Medicaid spending.

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Trump: Israel not sidelined, no frustration with Netanyahu By David Isaac

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/trump-israel-not-sidelined-no-frustration-with-netanyahu/

Donald Trump is not frustrated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the U.S. president said, addressing a question from Fox News anchor Bret Baier during a May 16 interview following his tour of three Arab Gulf states.

Trump told Baier that it was important to keep the Arab states “in our fold. … They’re back loving the United States again. That was a full embrace.”

The trip, which skipped the Jewish state, had been characterized in the media as “shrugging off” or “sidelining” Israel, particularly as Trump appeared to ignore Israeli concerns about Qatar, a funder of Islamist groups, and met with Syria’s new leader, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, whom Netanyahu’s government said is a “jihadist.”

However, Trump expressed empathy for Netanyahu in the wide-ranging interview with Baier, saying Israel’s prime minister is dealing with a difficult situation.

“[Netanyahu] is an angry man, and he should be because of October 7. And he’s been hurt badly by that. But in another way, he’s been sort of helped because I think he’s fought hard and bravely,” Trump said.

Trump had already attempted to allay fears that his Mideast trip meant a change in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

On Air Force One from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, Trump told reporters he wasn’t shunting Israel aside. “No not at all,” he said. “This is good for Israel, having a relationship like I have with these countries, Middle Eastern countries, essentially all of them.

“You have to remember, there was an October 7 that everyone forgets. It was one of the most violent days in the history of the world, not the Middle East, the world. When you look at the tapes, and the tapes are there for everyone to see,” Trump told Baier, referring to video of the massacre filmed and distributed on social media by the Hamas terrorists.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Disunited Kingdom New SNP leadership and an unpopular Labour Party may yet force Scottish independence back onto the political agenda.John Lloyd

By on May 19th, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/05/19/a-disunited-kingdom-snp-swinney-forbes-europe/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Many European states have political parties that exist to convince a part of their population to secede and make their own way in a separate polity. Most of these parties are small, electorally insignificant, and only occasionally violent (as on the French island of Corsica). But they are all likely to be assisted by the turbulence of our political moment.

Germany hosts two separatist parties—the Bavaria Party and the Free Voters of Saxony, both of which have local followings but attract only a small number of votes. In Italy, the Northern League was established in the early 1990s to create “Padania,” a new state freed from the corruption of Rome. It has since contracted its name to The League to become a small right-wing party and a partner in the current right-wing government. Belgium is divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. The country was expected to split after the 2024 election, but the far-right secessionist party in Flanders, Vlams Belang, came second to the more moderate, centre-right N-VA. After seven months of talks, the N-VA formed a national coalition government with Wallonia’s centre-right party, and Belgium is holding together—for the time, at least.

Spain is a country of passionately autonomist regions and it is currently experiencing a period of strong economic growth. But the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, is under constant attack, and the fragile coalition he leads has been dependent on the support of Catalonian independence parties. An election in the region last year, however, showed a significant rise in support for Catalonia’s pro-government socialist party. This has weakened both of the region’s secessionist parties and the grip they exercise over Sanchez.

So, a tentative peace has settled over the governments of Europe, relieved for now of the immediate worry that their borders will be challenged and that politics will return to a hectic series of late-night meetings called to avert a national break-up. Yet one country still threatens to split into separate states through the process secessionists like to call liberation, and it is the state that most boldly proclaims its national wholeness: the United Kingdom.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Stephen Eide Marijuana and the Mentally Ill Legalization is pushing community mental health to the brink.

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/marijuana-legalization-weed-mental-illness-health

America’s ongoing marijuana-legalization experiment will have many consequences. That goes especially for the seriously mentally ill, a sliver of the adult population but overrepresented among the ranks of compulsive pot users. Treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is never easy; even when treatment is available, the seriously mentally ill often fail to comply. A schizophrenic who spends most of his days in a dark room smoking weed is not a clinically promising case.

Modern mental-health systems are community-based and thus shaped by community norms. Decades ago, clouds of pot smoke were not often encountered on city streets. Now that they’re ubiquitous, a seriously mentally ill individual may be inclined to wonder what’s so objectionable about an activity that normal Americans do daily, in public and even during working hours.

The issue is only partly whether pot causes mental illness. A large body of research studies, involving tens of thousands of people, has suggested, with impressive replicability, that heavy cannabis use increases the risk of developing mental illness. Legalization proponents reject this, contending that, while the rate of marijuana consumption has soared over recent decades, the rate of serious mental illness seems to have stayed flat.

But this debate has eclipsed interest in the effect of continued cannabis use on those already mentally ill. What can be done about that? For scores of clinicians and families of the mentally ill across the nation, it’s the more pressing question.

In recent years, countless family memoirs and nonfiction accounts of mental illness have extensively chronicled the descent into madness. This literature often highlights marijuana more than any other intoxicating substance. Pot plays a notable role in several recent book-length treatments of mental illness, including Randye Kaye’s Ben Behind His Voices (2011), Patrick and Henry Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons (2011), Paul Gionfriddo’s Losing Tim (2014), Mindy Greiling’s Fix What You Can (2020), Miriam Feldman’s He Came in With It (2020), Meg Kissinger’s While You Were Out (2023), and Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds (2023).

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ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Cannes Celebs Virtue Signal in Pro-Hamas Letter to Industry All the usual Progressive suspects signed on. by Mark Tapson

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/cannes-celebs-virtue-signal-in-pro-hamas-letter-to-industry/

The 78th annual Cannes Film Festival is underway and the pretentious participants wasted no time virtue-signaling their support for the savage terror group Hamas and their self-righteous indignation over Israel’s right to self-defense.

On the filmfest’s opening day, an open letter was published in French on the website of France’s Libération newspaper (which, by the way, was founded by nihilist Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 as a far-Left daily), in which 380 artistes called out their industry’s purported “silence” over what they ludicrously call a “genocide” in Gaza. The hundreds of Hamas supporters included the usual Progressive suspects Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Pedro Pascal, and Susan Sarandon.

The letter begins by acknowledging correctly that the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel were “terrible massacres” (although the letter does not state who committed them or why, because to do that would be to shift the focus/blame from Israel to Jew-hating Palestinians). But then it regurgitates the standard Progressive lies about the Israeli military action in Gaza: “The Israeli army is targeting civilians. More than 200 journalists have been deliberately killed. Writers, film-makers and artists are being brutally murdered.” [Emphasis added]

Let’s set the record straight before moving on. As has been noted many times elsewhere and always ignored by the mainstream media: not only are the Israeli Defense Forces not “targeting civilians,” they are unique in world history for their extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties, especially considering that the enemy Hamas ruthlessly and intentionally puts its own civilians in harm’s way in order to maximize their casualties and exploit them for propaganda purposes. Similarly, the IDF is neither “deliberately” killing journalists (except for ones that moonlight as terrorists) nor “brutally murdering” filmmakers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Philly Funds Sharia Josh Shapiro just gave away the largest Muslim grant in state history. Why? Aynaz Anni Cyrus

By on May 19th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philly-funds-sharia/

Local and state outlets reported it—and even quietly celebrated it. But no one asked the hard questions. No one challenged the ideology, the curriculum, or the dangerous precedent. That didn’t happen until Liberty Sentinel and journalist Alex Newman blew the lid off what this really was: a taxpayer-funded expansion of Sharia under the banner of “diversity.”

In March 2025, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania awarded $5 million in taxpayer money to Al-Aqsa Islamic Academy—a Philadelphia-based Islamic school currently serving about 300 students. With this grant, the school now plans to expand to 3,000. It is the largest Muslim-specific education grant in Pennsylvania’s history—and likely one of the largest in the United States.

Governor Josh Shapiro made the announcement during a Ramadan iftar dinner, cloaking the moment in the usual buzzwords: “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “fighting hate.” He called it bridge-building. But what he built was a bridge to ideological conquest—not cultural unity.

Governor Shapiro didn’t just make the announcement. He used it to signal virtue with a now-familiar script:

“We are building bridges… promoting inclusion… and standing up to hate.”
— Gov. Josh Shapiro, Ramadan 2025

No, Governor. You’re funding religious indoctrination—an ideology rooted in supremacism and submission, not pluralism.

The $5 million came from Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP)—a fund that’s supposed to support infrastructure, economic growth, and public benefit projects. Roads. Housing. Public safety.

Instead, it’s being used to triple the size of a religious school with a documented ideological agenda.

This isn’t economic development. It’s state-funded ideological expansion.

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