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June 2025

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Why Hamas Rejected Witkoff’s Ceasefire Plan by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21666/hamas-witkoff-ceasefire

The leaders of the Iran-backed Hamas terror group do not seem to be in a rush to end the war with Israel: after all, they and their family members are not living in the Gaza Strip…

Hamas’s political leaders, billionaires funded by Iran’s mullahs and the rulers of Qatar, live in several Arab and Islamic countries, including Qatar, Turkey, Algeria and Lebanon. They and their family members lead luxurious lives in these countries and do not have to worry about lack of food or medicine.

Hamas leaders are in no rush to accept any deal because, unlike most of the residents of the Gaza Strip, they do not have to stand in line and risk being shot by Hamas terrorists for trying to receive food from a humanitarian organization.

Moreover, the Hamas leadership will never accept any ceasefire without prior permission from the Iranian regime. The mullahs in Tehran also appear in no rush to end the war against Israel. They want the war to continue: it distracts attention from Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

For [Hamas’s leaders], the No. 1 priority is to make sure that Hamas remains in power the day after the war

For Hamas, “the end” (eliminating Israel) justifies “the means” (sacrificing Palestinians as “martyrs” in the jihad against Israel).

Hamas staying in power would be great news for the Iranian regime, jihadis, and Islamist terror groups who consider the US the “Great Satan,” and are committed to killing Americans, Christians, Jews and all other “infidels.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Two Charged with Smuggling a ‘Dangerous Biological Pathogen.’ Guess Where They’re From? Sarah Anderson

By on June 4th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/06/03/researchers-smuggled-in-a-dangerous-biological-pathogen-guess-where-theyre-from-n4940416

United States Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr., along with Cheyvoryea Gibson, a special agent in charge with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Detroit Division and Marty C. Raybon, Director of Field Operations with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, announced on Tuesday that two people had been “charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements, and visa fraud.” 

According to the announcement, the two were smuggling “a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, which scientific literature classifies as a potential agroterrorism weapon. This noxious fungus causes ‘head blight,’ a disease of wheat, barley, maize, and rice, and is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year. Fusarium graminearum’s toxins cause vomiting, liver damage, and reproductive defects in humans and livestock.” 

Who were the two people, you ask? They were 33-year-old Yunqing Jian and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Zunyong Liu of China. 

Jian is a a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan and has been working at the University of Michigan’s Molecular Plant-Microbe Interaction Laboratory since 2023. Lui works at a Chinese university where he conducts research on the same pathogen.

Last year, Liu, who apparently came to the U.S. on a B2 tourist visa, brought the materials in question, and when asked about them by agents, lied and said he had no idea what they were and that they’d been planted in his bag. Later, he changed his story and said he “hid the samples in his backpack because he knew there were restrictions on the importation of the materials,” and he just wanted to come work with his girlfriend. Sure.  

Recommended: Guess What Chinese Nationals Are Stealing Now?

Not only has Jian reportedly “received Chinese government funding for her work on this pathogen in China,” but she also allegedly owns electronics that “contain information describing her membership in and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.” 

FBI director Kash Patel told Fox News Digital that the situation “demonstrates a serious national security threat to America’s food supply.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Doctoring the Truth About Gaza Gregory Rose and Lewi Stone

By on June 4th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/israel/doctoring-the-truth-about-gaza/

Last week hundreds of Australian doctors circulated a call to the Australian government for action against Israel. We want to believe that all were motivated by universal humanitarian concerns. But their call made minimal demands of Hamas and claimed that Palestinian terrorists held by Israel are hostages. The doctors’ repeated misinformation that has its sources in Hamas propaganda.

The Gaza Health Ministry information office, its data and its doctors are deeply complicit in the Hamas disinformation campaign. They are extensively supported in their spread of disinformation by Hamas-affiliated Gazan journalists who, in turn, are contracted by our own media. They accuse the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of atrocities by “targeting children, women, the elderly and civilians”. There is no such evidence concerning Gazan casualties in the armed conflict, as we have detailed in depth in a report for the Henry Jackson Society noted under this masthead.

A controlling presence of Hamas military command at Gazan hospitals reflects its control over health information and its misuse of civilians in a human-shield policy, which accounts for many civilian casualties. Their presence is also a Hamas crime against hospitals, which lose their status as sites protected for humanitarian functions when they are repurposed as military bases.

A pitched armed battle between Hamas and the IDF at Kamal Adwan Hospital that took place over the 2024/2025 new year resulted in the deaths of 19 identified terrorists and the arrests of 240 others. Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Ahmed Kahlot, and his successor, Hossam Abu Saffia, held ranks within Hamas of Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel respectively.

Hamas’ control of the Kamal Adwan Hospital was confirmed by the account of a visiting Kurdish volunteer doctor, Baxtiya Baram, in May 2024. “I saw with my own eyes that hospitals were used to hide Hamas leaders,” he reported. “We saw them and even spoke with them.”

Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, was a major Hamas military base and the scene of other pitched battles. It is also where Israeli hostages were held and where spaces were dedicated for military command, prisoners, interrogations, communications, and military transport (by ambulance).

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The media’s dangerous lies about Israel The world was told the IDF massacred starving Palestinians. Now the BBC admits it was ‘incorrect’. Brendan O’Neill

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/03/the-medias-dangerous-lies-about-israel/

1 June 2025. Make a note of that date. For there is a good chance it will be recorded as a day of infamy. As a day when the Jews were once again libelled as the slayers of innocents. As a day when the intellectual classes mimicked their benighted forebears of the medieval era and falsely accused the Jewish nation of spilling blood for sport. For many it was just an ordinary Sunday – but for those who will come to write the history of our times, it will stand out as a day of frenzied hearsay in which Jews were once again branded demons and bloodlusters.

Reports of a massacre in Gaza came early that day. It took place in Rafah, we were told, at one of the distribution centres overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the US-Israel group that’s providing aid to Gaza’s needy. With depthless cruelty, IDF troops opened fire on the half-starved Palestinians queuing for meals. Thirty-one souls were slaughtered in the ‘aid-centre attack’, as the BBC swiftly called it. A venomous fury spread through the internet. No one can deny it now, people cried: Israel is ‘replicating’ Nazi tactics. Just as the Nazis told Jews they were being put on trains for a better life, so the New Nazis promise Palestinians food as ‘a pretext for slaughter’.

There was one problem with these breathless accounts of a wicked massacre: it seems no such thing took place. Last night, the BBC backtracked. It said it has now studied the ‘graphic video’ of the ‘aid-centre massacre’ and has ruled that it is ‘incorrect’. We were told the ‘massacre’ took place early in the morning, yet the ‘direction of the shadows’ in the clip point to an event that took place ‘after 7pm local time’. More devastatingly, the Beeb geolocated the clip and found that it was filmed in a part of Khan Younis that is 4.5km from the nearest aid-distribution centre. A journalist in Gaza confirmed it: the events in the viral clip are ‘unrelated to any aid-distribution site’.

If what the BBC is now saying is correct, then we have just witnessed something truly horrifying. We have watched as an untruth spread with uncommon speed to every corner of the Earth. We have seen a serious calumny be taken as good coin by newsmakers and influencers. Worse, we’ve witnessed an eruption of bigotry. Reports of an ‘aid-centre massacre’ unleashed untold Jew hatred. Across social media, the cry went up: they’re demons, they’re Nazis, they claim to be the ‘Chosen People’ and yet they use food to tempt innocents into the path of murder. All were in agreement: the Jewish nation is the most evil nation.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard has brought this reckoning on itself Free speech and the pursuit of truth were abandoned long before Trump. Sean Collins

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/04/harvard-has-brought-this-reckoning-on-itself/

In its war on Harvard, the Trump administration has dropped some serious bombs on America’s most prestigious university. It is investigating Harvard for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by tolerating racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. It has frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding and cancelled the government’s remaining contracts with Harvard. Trump himself has threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. A Republican budget bill, meanwhile, would impose higher taxes on Harvard and other universities’ endowments. Most recently, the administration has sought to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students for allegedly failing to comply with requests for information about ‘pro-terrorism conduct’ on campus (a court has temporarily halted that attempt).

These aggressive moves follow Harvard’s decision to sue the administration for threatening its funding, unless it complied with demands outlined in a letter sent in April. These demands include allowing the government to review hiring and admissions decisions, audit faculty, students and staff for viewpoint diversity, ban students ‘hostile to American values’, and provide regular updates to the administration, among other stipulations.

While Harvard has an immense $53 billion endowment, the Trump funding cuts, if enacted, could still be financially devastating. Barring foreign students would be particularly damaging, as they make up 27 per cent of Harvard’s total enrolment and an even greater proportion of its revenue. One Harvard professor has called it ‘an extinction-level event’.

Harvard and its president, Alan Garber, have refused to negotiate with the administration and instead appear to be relishing the fight. Opponents of Trump – the broader Harvard community, Democrats and sympathetic media – hail Garber as a hero, the face of a renewed ‘Resistance’. Bernie Sanders has congratulated Harvard ‘for refusing to relinquish its constitutional rights to Trump’s authoritarianism’. Garber received a standing ovation at Harvard’s recent commencement ceremony.

Harvard claims it is focussed on resisting government overreach into academic affairs, specifically the administration’s ‘demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the “ideology” of its faculty and students’. But underlying its resistance is the belief that criticisms of Harvard are largely unfounded, and that the university does not require significant reforms. Trump, in Harvard’s view, is motivated by animus toward higher education, and the issue of anti-Semitism is merely a pretext for destroying institutions he sees as hostile. Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who has previously criticised his university on free-speech issues, recently wrote that Trump and other critics suffer from ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome’. Trump’s ‘obvious motivation is to cripple civil-society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch’, he says.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s War on Elon Musk: A Campaign of Smears and Slander By Liz Peek

By on June 4th, 2025

https://lizpeek.com/daily-rant/the-lefts-war-on-elon-musk-a-campaign-of-smears-and-slander/

Elon Musk is apparently now fair game, open to any kind of vicious accusations and ad hominem attacks. ALWAYS described as “the world’s richest man”, as though that’s a bad thing instead of an extraordinary achievement, the Left goes after Musk because they’re afraid of slamming Trump.

Last week Jamie Raskin, a senior Democrat congressman from Maryland posted this on X (owned by Musk!):

“This ketamine, ecstasy and mushroom-using government contractor, the richest person in the world, sacked thousands of excellent government workers, caused the deaths of thousands of poor children in foreign lands, stole Americans’ data and destroyed government services but he did pick up billions more in government contracts while he was in town!”

Ignore the preposterous notion that Musk’s businesses need more government contracts and the drug-use issue, which surfaced in a hit piece by the NY Times using – guess what – anonymous sources!!! (I know you’re shocked). It’s the accusation that Musk “caused the deaths of thousands of poor children in foreign lands” that is appalling, as it is almost certainly not true.

Incredibly, David Brooks, a respected writer at the NY Times, echoed what I would consider a slanderous remark in an interview on PBS, naturally, saying “So far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected; 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in. You add that all up and accumulate that over four years the number of dead grows very high.”

What did Musk and DOGE do? They uncovered shocking amounts of corruption and wasteful spending at USAID, and cut some programs. Reports of children dying almost immediately followed, though if you read those accounts carefully you will find the accusations mostly made by people who have lost their jobs and their funding. They are angry, and working to convince the gullible anti-Musk press that he is evil incarnate.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Rape Gangs and Liberal Silence B. Duncan Moench

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rape-gangs-liberal-silence

Few issues expose the self-blinding of the Western progressive left more than the sexual violence waged against working-class girls in the UK by predominantly-Pakistani grooming gangs. The scandal, long ignored by polite society and actively buried by both law enforcement and politicians, only broke into a broader American consciousness when Elon Musk began posting about it on X. The king of the techno-barons is no friend of the working class but, on this issue at least, he has successfully played the part of a working-class champion far more convincingly than his progressive counterparts.

The scandal continues to horrify not just because of the systemic sexual violence waged on children and teens, but because it reveals the deliberate sacrifice of vulnerable population groups who in theory should be able to count on the protection of the administrative state. Instead, institutions operating under a calculated bureaucratic plan offer poor and working-class adolescents up as sacrifices to the altar of multiculturalism.

For over a decade in towns like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford, young native British girls—some as young as eleven—were groomed, drugged, raped, and trafficked by networks of immigrant men from East Asia. The young girls were first love-bombed with gifts and flattery, then lured into private spaces—plied with alcohol and pills—then passed between grown men who raped them repeatedly. Sometimes lines of abusers waited their “turn” to ravage these teens in a manner that merely describing here would provide the reader with images so harrowing that they’re impossible to forget.

Girls who physically resisted their rapists were beaten and threatened with death. Some resistors were threatened with guns, others doused in gasoline with the captors threatening to burn them alive. Some were thrown from moving vehicles. If all this weren’t insane enough, the families who reported the crimes were firebombed by the perpetrators. Those who continued to contact authorities had their windows smashed and often faced further threats of arson.

For years, UK authorities resisted doing anything to address this mass sexual terror inflicted on children. Why? Well, every educated Western liberal person knows exactly why. Because some things are unsayable. To acknowledge the horrific crimes committed against young girls would also mean acknowledging the ethnic and religious backgrounds of their attackers, which might in turn suggest that not all foreign cultures are automatically compatible with the basic norms of Western civilization. And then what?

Educated civil servants and elected officials dehumanized their own citizens—not out of hatred, but out of commitment to a different kind of utopian eschaton.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Sally Satel This Program Is a Lifeline for the Severely Mentally Ill Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics serve as a one-stop shop for people with psychotic conditions.

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mental-illness-certified-community-behavioral-health-clinics-funding-grants

The Department of Justice is brainstorming ways to clear homeless encampments and increase involuntary hospitalization, focusing on people with serious mental illness. Fortunately, the federal government already has a resource for people with such conditions: Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics. CCBHCs serve as one-stop shops for people with serious mental illness, providing coordinated physical and specialty behavioral health services. As part of their congressional mandate, the clinics turn no one away, regardless of ability to pay. 

But according to an April 10 document leaked to the media, the White House was considering defunding grants for the CCBHC program. This would have eliminated a crucial lifeline for the seriously mentally ill. 

CCBHCs have been a bipartisan effort. In 2014, Congress and President Obama established the clinics under an eight-state Medicaid demonstration project that launched three years later. In 2020, Congress and President Trump adopted the CARES Act, which expanded the demonstration and provided grant funding for additional CCBHCs. Today, nearly 500 CCBHCs serve 3 million patients across 46 states.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo On Israel-Palestine, You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Pick a Side What the Gaza war reveals about America’s domestic politics

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israel-palestine-gaza-war-hamas-domestic-politics

Intellectuals, rarely short on opinions, often fall back on a familiar dodge when confronted with a controversy they’d rather avoid: calling the issue “complex.”

The war in Gaza is one such case. To be sure, the tangled history, religion, and culture behind the Israel–Palestine conflict make it genuinely complicated. Partisans on both sides accuse their opponents of ignorance while promoting their own preferred narratives and facts to claim authority over the subject.

I should acknowledge that I’m no expert on Israel and Palestine. I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I haven’t visited either territory. For that reason, I’ve written little about the conflict and don’t claim to grasp all its intricacies.

But I do understand American domestic politics. And I can see the shadows the Gaza war has cast here at home. On one side stand Palestine’s domestic proxies: the decolonization theorists, keffiyeh-clad campus leftists, and, increasingly, the radicalized individuals now out for blood.

These elements are connected. The ideology is hatched at places like Harvard, where it trickles down to student activists who occupy campus buildings and make lithographs of Hamas paragliders. It then gets refracted on social media, flipping the switch within the minds of those predisposed to violence, giving them a rationale to lash out at Jews. Consider the recent spate of property bombings, the cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy employees, and the injuries inflicted by Molotov cocktails on a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado.

I don’t need to speak Hebrew or Arabic to recognize this domestic movement as an enemy. It’s enough to read its literature and observe its supporters’ actions to see that it embodies the forces of barbarism—forces that, if left unchecked, would tear down the pillars of civilization both abroad and at home.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

We Don’t Need To Welcome In People Who Hate Us Francis Menton

By on June 4th, 2025

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

Yesterday in Boulder, Colorado, a perpetrator sprayed a flammable liquid on a group of mostly elderly Jews protesting the continued holding of hostages in Gaza. Then he threw Molotov cocktails to set several of the demonstrators on fire. The New York Post reports here that 8 were injured, ranging in age from 52 to 88 years old. Police arrested a man named named Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was caught on video committing the acts. Oh, and also shouting slogans, including “They are killers! How many children you killed?” and “End Zionists.”

It quickly emerged that Soliman was an Egyptian illegally in the country. He had originally entered legally in 2022 on a tourist visa, but then overstayed. In 2023 he was granted a permit to work in the U.S. by the Biden administration. That expired in March 2025, after which he stayed on illegally.

Which raises the question, why was Soliman in the country in the first place, or granted permission to stay and work, or not thrown out when the permission expired? Whatever you might think about the illegal immigration situation, why on earth do we welcome into the country people who hate us? Did anybody vet this guy, even a little?

Add Soliman to a long list of Middle Easterners in the U.S. at the grace of the government who make no secret of their hatred of the U.S. and of Israel. And who are only too happy to lead groups in acts of trespass, vandalism, and violence. To refresh you on some of the names and roles, here is a May 15 piece from Al-Jazeera with a brief list of some of the most prominent:

Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri are among the students targeted by US President Donald Trump.

These four are all student leaders of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and pro-BDS movements at elite university campuses — Mahdawi and Khalil at Columbia, Ozturk at Tufts, and Suri at Georgetown.

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