NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The murder of Charlie Kirk: cancel culture turns lethal The shooting of the conservative firebrand is the grim capstone to a decade of campus intolerance. Tom Slater

Posted By on September 16th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/11/the-murder-of-charlie-kirk-cancel-culture-turns-lethal/

Charlie Kirk is dead, aged just 31, gunned down at Utah Valley University doing what the conservative firebrand had been doing for more than a decade. Arguing, debating, talking in public. For that, he’s gone.

A manhunt is still underway, to find the scumbag who put a bullet through Kirk’s neck and deprived his wife and two children of their husband and father. We don’t yet know the motive. But it is impossible to ignore the climate in which this senseless killing has taken place.

Kirk was wearing a white t-shirt, with the word ‘Freedom’ emblazoned on it, when he was slain. It’s been the cause of his career. Bounding on to the scene in 2012, a co-founder of student group Turning Point USA, he was a seminal figure in the young-conservative pushback against the blue-haired intolerance of the campus left.

He dropped out of university himself, but cut his debating teeth touring campuses and taking on all-comers. He built an enormous following doing that most shocking of things in America in the 2010s: taking right-of-centre views to college campuses, arguing his case unapologetically, taking no prisoners but also treating those he disagreed with seriously.

Minds have turned to the rising temperature in America. To the bleak rise in political violence. To the bullet that ripped through Donald Trump’s ear last year. To Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in the back with a 3D-printed pistol.

I dare say the college campus is where this rot took hold. When Kirk was coming to prominence, students were rioting at Berkeley because Milo Yiannopoulos had dared to show up, or were manhandling academics at Middlebury for interviewing Charles Murray. Now, campus cancel culture has turned deadly.

Speech is violence. Words wound. These are the toxic fictions that have infected the West’s universities, media and cultural elites. Now we are confronted with the bloody consequences of it. For if speech is violence then surely violence is a legitimate response to speech?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jennifer Weber The Nation’s Report Card Shows How Education Policy Has Failed After a decade of low standards, student performance is slipping.

Posted By on September 16th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/nations-report-card-education-students-math-reading

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress—also known as the “Nation’s Report Card”—is now out. It shows 12th-graders’ performance slipping to a record low.

According to the report, one-third of seniors are reading at a below-basic level, and only 35 percent are proficient or above. In math, 45 percent are below basic, with just 22 percent meeting proficiency. The proportion of students at the 10th and 25th percentiles has fallen to historic lows, widening the gap between the highest-and lowest-achieving students and leaving many unprepared for life after high school.

The declines reflect the failures of more than a decade of educational policy—specifically, a retreat from expectations that began under the Common Core Standards and continued under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Declines have not always been so predictable. Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, passed in 2002, results were more stable. Reading scores remained 25 percent below-basic and 37 percent proficient, while math scores remained 33 percent below-basic and about 25 percent proficient. As Roberta Rubel Schaefer recently explained for City Journal, NCLB established rigorous, content-rich curriculum standards and tracked schools and students’ performance through regular testing, encouraging a culture of educational excellence.

After 2013, as states adopted the Common Core Standards and later, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) took effect in 2016, progress declined. Proficiency remained stagnant, while the number of students reading and doing basic math below the basic level increased.

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The Alarming Vulnerability of New York City by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on September 16th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21909/new-york-vulnerability

It is time to talk about the Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Not because he may well be the next mayor of one of the most important cities in America, and perhaps the world.

But because of what he represents: the core principles of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of which he is a staunch and unapologetic member.

Let us first recognize that his socialism is not the socialism that we often attach to the Great Depression policies of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s version of “socialism” saved the nation from the ravages of the Depression in the 1930s through programs that leveraged public works as a means of restoring paychecks and pride for millions. The creation of FDR’s Social Security allowed families to put aside money that would be returned to them upon retirement. It was government with empathy.

Mamdani’s “socialism” is a corrosive ideology that despises the very principles that have made America the envy of the word. Capitalism, the economic engine that powers opportunity, is to be demonized. (No small irony for Mamdani: it is capitalism that has made New York great since its founding.) The DSA platform also calls for dramatic cuts in American military spending and withdrawal from NATO. Not only would allies of America, such as Israel, forfeit any military assistance, but America would oppose Israel being recognized by any other sovereign nation across the globe.

Mamdani is now seeking to cloak his positions, such as defunding the police and weakening our criminal justice system, because he undoubtedly recognizes that if New Yorkers ever truly focused on what he actually believes, they would seek out literally anyone else other than him.

Because New York City has a six-to-one Democratic enrollment edge, all Mamdani needs to do is throw a bomb blanket over what he truly believes in between now and election day, and he may be able to declare victory in November. Through slick online video hype and an effective grassroots campaign, he has been trying to sanitize his contempt for American values. If successful, the DSA would undoubtedly use his victory as a template for similar political seduction elsewhere across our nation.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Israel Helped the Gaza Strip Before by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on September 16th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21910/israel-helped-gaza-strip

Which European country would tolerate 50,000 rockets, mortars and missiles fired at it — or even one rocket or missile?

Before the October 7, 2023 attack…. Egypt, Qatar, the United Nations and other international parties kept assuring Israel that the best way to achieve calm and stability in the Gaza Strip was by improving its economy and issuing more permits for Palestinian laborers to enter Israel.

When Israel imposed restrictions on the Gaza Strip to protect its own citizens and prevent terrorism, it was condemned for imposing suffering and pain on the Palestinians living there. When Israel started easing restrictions and handing out thousands of permits to Gazan workers to enter Israel (while Egypt and other Arab countries refused to accept Palestinians), it faced criticism for allegedly strengthening Hamas.

When Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, there was a lot of talk in Israel about turning the enclave into the “Singapore of the Middle East.” Israel’s goal, or dream, was to transform the Gaza Strip into a prosperous, thriving area, similar to how Singapore developed from a small, poor country into a wealthy, technologically advanced hub. Israel clearly wanted to open a new chapter in its relations with the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and work together on economic and technology projects for the benefit of both people.

Israel had been led to believe that jobs, money and humanitarian aid would bring stability and calm, and had hoped that the humanitarian and economic aid would prevent, or at least reduce, terror attacks from the Gaza Strip. However, Hamas and many Palestinians viewed these conciliatory measures as signs of weakness on the part of Israel.

What the international community fails to understand is that since the establishment of Hamas more than 35 years ago, its stated goal has been the elimination of Israel. For Hamas, the conflict with Israel has never been about the economy or settlements or improving the living conditions of the Palestinians. Hamas regards Israel as one big illegitimate “settlement” that needs to be uprooted and replaced with an Islamist state.

Israel is damned both for helping the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and damned for not helping them enough. When Israel allows funding and economic aid sent into Gaza, as it did, Israel is blamed for helping fund Hamas’s war against Israel. If Israel had refused to allow funding and economic aid to be sent into Gaza, Israel would be accused of starving and brutalizing the Palestinians. Everyone, it seems, wants to have it both ways so that whatever Israel does is “wrong.”

Several years ago, Israel came under pressure from many in the international community to ease restrictions on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, in order to alleviate the suffering of the two million Palestinians living there. The pressure came despite Hamas’s repeated terror attacks against Israel, including more than 31,000 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza at the civilian communities of Israel, a country the size of New Jersey, before 2023, accompanied by violent riots by the terror group at Israel’s border.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia’s Fantasy of Social Cohesion by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21906/australia-fantasy-of-social-cohesion

As early as 1974, the Islamist agenda to dominate Western nations was disclosed by Algeria’s Houari Boumedienne in his speech to the United Nations: “One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.”

Australia’s decision to recognize a fictitious Palestinian state, as well as France’s, Britain’s and Canada’s, totally contravenes the current requirements of international law for nations.

The Australian government apparently believes that Islamophobia adversely affects social cohesion. What it has yet to comprehend is that the concept of Islamophobia is a two-edged sword, sometimes employed to suppress genuine criticism of some of the tenets of Islam, but also to neutralize any criticism of the religion before it can even begin

“Hamas is not just at war with Israel. It is at war with Jews, Christians, and the very foundations of civilization itself…. This is not politics, this is a religious war. Its purpose is to replace Judaism and Christianity with radical Islam. If the world does not understand this, everyone will pay the price.”– Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, jns.org. August 17, 2025

“The hardest decision any leader has to make is to thwart a danger before it fully materializes.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, israelhayom.com, June 13, 2025

Europe’s weak leadership has failed in this regard, resulting in a catastrophic social crisis for their nations. The question is whether or not Australia will follow a similar course of submission, a recipe for losing the West.

In accordance with a policy of purported social cohesion and ostensibly to prevent “Islamophobia,” Australia’s Labor Party government, primarily represented by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, perturbingly appear to be minimizing the malignant, often violent Jew-hatred now occurring in the major cities of Australia.

While many acts of terror are being perpetrated against the Jewish community (here and here), the Australian government has been fast-tracking hundreds of potentially dangerous Palestinians into the country as refugees without proper vetting.

The only country really suited to properly vetting Palestinians and potential jihadist radicals would be Israel. Israeli representatives however, are regarded almost as “personae non gratae” in Australian these days. Some have actually been barred entry.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Latest Jihad Terror Attack in Jerusalem Why Israel fights. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-latest-jihad-terror-attack-in-jerusalem/

The manic focus on the IDF’s war in Gaza, and the denunciation of the Jewish state by much of the world for its putative “war crimes” and “genocide” in the Strip may have just been temporarily halted, as the latest terror attack in Jerusalem reminds the giddy globe of why Israel fights. More on the jihad attack can be found here and here: “Six killed, 6 seriously injured in Jerusalem as terrorists open fire on bus, pedestrians,” by Emanuel Fabian, Charlie Summers, Jeremy Sharon and Nava Freiberg, Times of Israel, September 8, 2025:

Six people were murdered Monday and 12 were wounded, six of them seriously, when a pair of Palestinian terrorists opened fire on vehicles and pedestrians in Jerusalem’s Ramot Junction.

The two gunmen, residents of the West Bank, arrived at the junction shortly after 10 a.m. — according to some reports, by car — and opened fire at people waiting at a bus stop as well at a bus that had just stopped there.

Police said that a soldier and a number of civilians who were present at the scene fired at the terrorists and killed them.

The military said the soldier was an off-duty squad commander in the military’s new Hasmonean Brigade, a unit for ultra-Orthodox troops. Magen David Adom said four of the victims were declared dead at the scene, while two others were rushed to hospital and later succumbed to their wounds.

At least six others were listed in serious condition, as well as two whose status was moderate and three who were lightly hurt, according to MDA.

The dead were named as Levi Yitzhak Pash, 57, Yaakov Pinto, 25, Yisrael Matzner, 28, and Rabbi Yosef David, 43, Rabbi Mordechai Steintzag, 79, and Sarah Mendelson, 60.

The two terrorists were identified by the Shin Bet security agency as Mohammad Taha, 21, from Qatanna, and Muthanna Amro, 20, from Qubeiba. Neither had prior arrests, according to the Shin Bet.

“Why they fight” — why the Israelis fight — has just been brought, again, to our collective attention.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The Qatar Lobby Is Real — and a Real Problem Andrew Doran

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/the-qatar-lobby-is-real-and-a-real-problem/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

The Israel lobby (if there even is one) is merely a distraction from the Qatar lobby — perhaps the most pernicious foreign influence inside America today.

Adecade ago, a colleague and I developed a proposal for a project that would provide legal representation to Christian, Yazidi, and other ISIS victims then residing in the U.S. against those who had materially cooperated in the terrorism they had endured.

There was considerable evidence that wealthy individuals and even some governments — one prominent among them — had financed the terrorists, especially in Syria and Iraq, using various financial institutions and transfer mechanisms along the way, in violation of several U.S. laws. The goals were to punish the financiers, compensate the victims, and deter such conduct in the future.

We approached a law firm led by a distinguished attorney, someone we believed, as a former public servant and avowedly devout Christian, would be sympathetic. At the second meeting, a snag arose: The firm could not, or perhaps would not, represent the victims pro bono.

Months later, that law firm was retained by Qatar. The firm had sold its services to one of the leading financiers of extremism, which precluded the firm from pursuing legal action against Qatar or individual Qataris who funded U.S.-designated terror groups, and made their lawyers aware of possible legal vulnerabilities. It was a bitter reminder that Beltway ruthlessness can know few limits — and that the most influential also tend to be the quietest.

Foreign influence has been a challenge since America’s Founding, when domestic factions often favored alliances with either Britain or France. In recent years, the malign influence of adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran has made headlines. But it is Israel’s putatively disproportionate (and putatively malign) sway over U.S. foreign policy that has been the most enduring controversy.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mind Your Language, Lefties Phil Shannon

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-left/mind-your-language-lefties/

There is a push by some of the less insane lefties in the US to get the Democrats to talk normally, like the rest of humanity, instead of in their progressive pidgin patois.  According to a liberal (i.e. leftist) think-tank calling itself The Third Way, Democrats “who wish to stop Donald Trump and MAGA” should first stop using “words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying”.

So, it’s out with terms like “birthing person” and “LGBTQIA+” and it’s in with words like mother and gay or homosexual.  Out, also, go the lazy, dismissive labels and clichéd epithets which the more highly strung reaches of the Left use for people of differing political opinions, terms such as ‘cookers’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ (of course), the go-to slur of ‘far right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ (who are often further vilified by the adjective ‘fringe’ and sometimes additionally dirtied by a second adjective making them ‘dangerous fringe conspiracy theorists’).

Calling everyone who marches for curbs to immigration an evil Nazi white-supremacist, which I’m sure we can all agree is a deeply original and compelling political critique the likes of which nobody has heard for at least ten, oh even twenty, seconds, may actually be a little overwrought and not all that conducive to halting the steady stream of sensible Democrats who are deserting their political home.

The words and phrases to be exiled from leftist discourse are classed under six categories:  Therapy-speak, Seminar Room Language, Organizer Jargon, Gender/Orientation Correctness, The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs and Explaining Away Crime.

The following examples give a flavour of just how far the linguistic gangrene has spread in the progressive patient and which The Third Way wishes to excise (my suggestions about what these terms really mean are added in italics):

♦ incarcerated people [criminals]

♦ justice-involved individuals [ditto, for example the repeat offender Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr., with at least fourteen prior arrests, who offed the Ukrainian lass on the train was a justice-involved individual].

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ignorance and idiocy of Hollywood’s Israel boycott These Israelophobic luvvies care about one thing only – their self-image. Jake Wallis Simonsn

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/14/the-ignorance-and-idiocy-of-hollywoods-israel-boycott/

In Israel, there is a thriving television and film industry, which in recent years has become admired around the world. If you are one of the few people who have not watched the thriller, Fauda, a global sensation in Hebrew and Arabic that is particularly popular in the Arab world, binge it immediately; a new season is due for release in the coming months.

Shtisel is another example of Israeli creativity, though in a very different way; it is a profound and reflective series about life in ultra-orthodox Jerusalem. And the brilliant Hatufim, or Prisoners of War, which was the model for American smash hit Homeland, is harder to track down but well worth the effort.

For those with arthouse tastes, I’d recommend The Band’s Visit, a lovely little film about the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra travelling from Egypt to perform in Israel and getting lost in a small town in the Negev desert.

Good stuff. It’s no surprise, really. As the only democracy in the Middle East, which faces enemies on every border and holds a remarkable history of anguish and triumph, the Jewish State has much material on which to draw.

The fact that it has a vibrant gay scene – Tel Aviv hosts one of the best Pride parades on Earth, I’m told – is testament to its liberal heart, despite the far-right thugs temporarily in its governing coalition. And where you find an open society, you find a vibrant arts scene.

Palestine, not so much. Whether on the West Bank or in Gaza, this is a place where it can be fatal to be homosexual. This was appallingly demonstrated by the 2022 murder of Ahmad Abu Marhia, a gay Palestinian who was kidnapped from Israel where he was seeking refuge, dragged back to Hebron and beheaded.

Television programmes and films are produced by Palestinians, of course, but suffice to say that none of them has appealed to Western tastes. Our enthusiasm for their culture seems limited to that which we can appropriate, like the keffiyeh. Anything that requires a deeper engagement with the autocratic society that has laboured so long under corrupt and brutal leaders is rather more tricky.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald An Ideology Whose Logic Leads to Murder It was grimly fitting that Charlie Kirk was slain on a college campus—source of the “hate speech equals violence” ethic that demonizes opponents and demands that they be silenced.

Posted By on September 15th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/charlie-kirk-murder-speech-violence

Not even Utah Valley University is immune.

On August 31, 2025, a Change.org petition titled “Stop Charlie Kirk From Spreading Hate on Utah Campuses” started circulating. Motivated by Kirk’s upcoming appearances at Utah Valley University and Utah State University, the petition embraced the equations favored by student narcissists everywhere when those students seek to censor and exclude:

Proposition one: speech that challenges campus orthodoxies is “hate speech.”

Proposition two: people who disagree with campus orthodoxies are “haters.”

Proposition three: “hate speech” and “haters” cause harm.

Proposition four: because of that harm, “hate speech” and “haters” should be silenced, stigmatized, and excluded from college campuses and other citadels of tolerant, inclusive culture.

The petition dressed up those equations with the familiar tropes of student sanctimony and fragility:

Kirk’s presence on campus would be a “threat to the inclusive, respectful environment that our campuses are supposed to represent.”

Universities have a “responsibility to protect students from harassment, hostility, and the legitimization of hate under the banner of ‘debate.’”

“When speakers with a record of targeting marginalized groups are given the microphone, the result isn’t dialogue—it’s harm.”

Were Utah Valley University and Utah State University to allow Kirk to speak, they would be “endorsing rhetoric that directly undermines their stated commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

These hothouse phrases are usually associated with the denizens of the Ivy League and other selective colleges, but the ideology of totalitarian safetyism has spread to every college campus that is not explicitly and militantly countercultural—including, it would seem, Utah Valley University.