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WORLD NEWS

UN and Hamas: Partners in Crime by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20192/united-nations-hamas

To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip…

“The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what’s going on… They all knew Hamas’ terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn’t attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil.” — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, November 16, 2023.

[T]he UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.

When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, [UN Secretary-General António] Guterres expressed that he was “horrified” with Israel’s action, while ignoring Hamas’s war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.

Above all, the UN’s transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.

Since October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and massacred at least 1,200 and kidnapped another 240 Israelis and people of other nationalities, the United Nations has been acting as the unofficial propaganda arm of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.

The propaganda campaign’s main aim – besides smearing Israel – appears to be to build overwhelming international pressure on Israel to agree to an indefinite ceasefire , which will give Hamas the needed time to regroup and replenish to continue its terrorist activities and to avoid being eliminated by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Why Belgium, Norway, Spain and Everyone Should Refrain from Recognizing a ‘Palestinian State’ Just Now by Drieu Godefridi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20194/recognizing-a-palestinian-state

In the case of a “Palestinian State”, there is no territory on which even the Palestinians agree. Indeed, the charter of Hamas — designated as a terrorist organization by many countries in the West, and which has reigned unchallenged in the Gaza Strip since 2007 when it forcibly expelled the Palestinian Authority, in part by throwing its members off 15-storey buildings — calls for the “liberation” of “every inch of Palestine” through jihad.
The Palestinian Authority also lays claim over all of the territory, including all of Israel…
In addition, the Palestinian Authority is counting on the Palestine Liberation Organization’s 1974 “Ten Point Plan” (also known as the “phased plan”) for the “comprehensive liberation” of all the land stretching “from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea” — a euphemism for the elimination of Israel. The plan calls for the PLO to use whatever territory it is offered as a base of operations to get the rest.
Belgium’s possible recognition of a “Palestinian State” makes no sense in terms of international law. It comes, in reality, less as the result of a desire to help the Palestinians — whose lives will not be improved by it — than of a fierce and increasingly undisguised hostility towards the State of Israel, and most likely also Jews.
Recognizing a Palestinian state with no authority, no realistic territorial demands and no acceptable leadership — and with a long-term, outspoken desire to militarize and destroy its neighbor Israel — right after a jihadist pogrom against Jews, will not add to the happiness of any of the parties involved, or, for that matter, anyone else.

Ukraine: The Decimation Point by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20193/ukraine-decimation-point

[B]oth Russia and Ukraine have passed what military theoreticians call the “decimation point” when you see that you have lost at least 10% of your fighting manpower.

In the West, public opinion saw the war as a means of keeping the Russian giant in chains, while anti-West forces admired Putin for challenging the American big bad wolf.

Thirsting for a bit of good news in these bad times of war, Ukraine’s media headlined what it saw as a victory: The return to Kiev of a haul of artefacts from Crimea that had been on exhibit in European cities before Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014.

The return came after a ten-year legal battle in which Russia claimed that it should receive the artefacts because they were made before the 1950s when the then Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev “handed Crimea over to Ukraine.” Ukraine counter-argued that the artefacts were loaned to a Dutch museum before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops annexed Crimea.

Well, in every war even the tiniest bit of good news could help divert attention, even momentarily, from bigger bad news.

Though actual and sustained fighting started in February 2022, Russia’s war against Ukraine started almost a decade ago when Crimea was annexed. Since then, the fratricidal war has offered no good news for either side. Putin called the war “special operations”, implying it would be over in a matter of weeks if not days. Although not as starry-eyed, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky also dreamed that thanks to support from NATO, the biggest military machine in history, his side would quickly emerge victorious.

The bad news that didn’t get the headlines either in Moscow or Kyiv is that both Russia and Ukraine have passed what military theoreticians call the “decimation point” when you see that you have lost at least 10% of your fighting manpower.

Islamic Terrorists Bomb Catholic Mass in Philippines It’s a religious war. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamic-terrorists-bomb-catholic-mass-in-philippines/

It’s not just Israel. Islamic terrorists are coming after the entire world.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr condemned a deadly bombing on Sunday, blaming “foreign terrorists”, as police and the military strengthened security in the country’s south and around the capital Manila.

At least four people were killed and at least 50 injured after a bomb exploded during a morning Catholic Mass in a university gymnasium in Marawi, a city in the south of the country besieged by Islamist militants for five months in 2017.

The blast in Marawi, capital of Lanao del Sur province, followed a series of military operations against local pro-Islamic State groups in the southern Philippines, the military chief said, including one on Sunday in Lanao del Sur that led to the killing of a leader of the Dawlah Islamiya-Maute group.

The Islamic State-linked Maute seized Marawi on May 2017, seeking to make it a Southeast Asian “wilayat” – or governorate – for Islamic State. In the ensuing five-month battle, Islamist fighters and Philippine forces killed more than a thousand people, including civilians.

Hamas or its counterparts are everywhere that any sizable Islamic colonial population has been embedded.

It’s not a coincidence that they targeted a Christian religious service. Much as it’s not a coincidence that on Oct 7, Hamas struck on a Jewish religious holiday.

The red-green alliance against the West by Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky

https://romirowsky.com/27373/red-green-alliance-against-west

The murderous Hamas attack on Israel can be described as a success only in a limited and horrific tactical sense: More Jews were murdered in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. The surprise was achieved thanks to elaborate planning and lavish Iranian funding and to Israeli complacency on the part of the military and distracted political echelon. The price was immense and terrible.

But in a strategic sense, the attack was a failure and illustrates a truism of Middle Eastern history: The Palestinians, in this case Hamas, are their own worst enemies. Even their successes are, or will be, failures. Consider some of the unintended consequences of the Hamas attack. These range from local to regional to global effects.

To begin, Hamas has set back the Palestinian movement and destroyed Gaza. The Palestinian movement has long been characterized by two theoretically distinct but interrelated strands: Islamic rejection of Jews and a nationalist strand that played on contemporary concepts such as Third Worldism, liberation movements, and, most lately, decolonization. In practice, however, these were mutually reinforcing and in neither case contributed to the conception of a functioning nation-state. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas has run or can run a state.

The resurgent Islamic violence — the Oct. 7 raid was at one level a classic Muslim razzia of unconstrained violence, rape, and looting, in the tradition of Muhammad — proved again that Hamas, Islamic governance, and the Palestinian movement as a whole are addicted to violence. The reconfiguration of Gaza, using international aid money, into a gigantic base in which civilians existed only as human shields is another aspect of this failure. Add to this the complete collapse of Hamas on its own carefully prepared battlefield, which proved the ineptitude of its strategy, leadership, and field capabilities. The self-victimization of Gaza by Hamas, the intentional “martyring” of innocents along with terrorists, was a fundamental part of this plan. But the scale of destruction, apparently unanticipated, that has reduced northern Gaza to near-uninhabitable rubble proves the failure of that plan as well.

We mustn’t let the left erase the truth of 7 October Owen Jones’s reaction to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities speaks to a serious sickness in the bourgeois left. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/29/we-mustnt-let-the-left-erase-the-truth-of-7-october/

There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.

The IDF has put together a graphic 43-minute video of the savagery Hamas filmed itself committing against the Jews of Southern Israel on 7 October. The morally deracinated cynics of the liberal Western media say the video is an IDF ruse to whip up support for its war in Gaza. In truth, Israel felt compelled to put out this gross footage of anti-Semitic mass murder because there has been so much 7 October doubt in influential circles in the West. It was the atrocity denialism of unhinged Israelophobes that forced Israel to say: ‘Okay, here are the atrocities.’ They showed the film in London last week and Mr Jones was in attendance.

To be clear, Jones does not deny that Hamas committed ‘grave war crimes’ on 7 October. He is not an October denialist as some on the viscerally anti-Israel left are. And yet his reaction to the footage is chilling nonetheless. He casts doubt on many of the claims about 7 October. He sows seeds of suspicion. It is a masterclass in moral obfuscation. Yes, Hamas did wicked things, he says, but where’s the evidence for the really wicked things it is said to have done? The beheaded babies. Raped women. Children killed ‘intentionally’. There’s no ‘conclusive evidence’ for that, he says. I am trying my best to understand the mind that can see images of the corpses of Jewish children and wonder, ‘But were they killed intentionally?’. But I cannot. It is beyond my moral bandwidth to understand this.

Frank Furedi:The woke scapegoating of the Jews The Western left’s response to Hamas’s atrocities has exposed a virulent new form of anti-Semitism.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/12/the-woke-scapegoating-of-the-jews/

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled ‘progressives’ have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that ‘the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid’.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an ‘All Out for Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent ‘comedy’ material. ‘As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time’, he said, ‘until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters’. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this ‘joke’ about the mass murder and kidnapping of ‘several dozen hipsters’ with gales of laughter.

Diversity Rape of the Day by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/13949/diversity-rape-of-the-day

Have you ever been to Hamburg’s Stadtpark? They call it the “green heart” of the city, over 350 acres of woods and lakes and meadows, playgrounds and sports fields and concert stages, plus Germany’s largest planetarium. It’s also a great place to rape someone.

So a fifteen-year-old girl gets dragged into the bushes by a gang of four “youths”. They rape her, and take the trouble to film themselves doing so. Because, after all, if you gang-rape someone, you want to have something to show to the lads who weren’t able to make it. When they’re sated and push off, the girl gets to her feet and staggers away only to run into five more chaps, who rape her all over again. And film it all over again, in what by now is enough video for a full-length feature – over two-and-a-half hours. That’s getting close to Lord of the Rings – and with a cast to match: the semen of nine different men was found in and on her body. And from all over the map: Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Montenegro, Poland, Armenia… That’s a lot of diversity: it’s like the UN General Assembly of semen …although officialdom was eager to characterise most of the rapists as “German”, with two said to be of “uncertain nationality”. There’s a lot of that about.

The rape of a schoolgirl is a terrible thing – especially for the guys. As the eminent lady psychiatrist assigned to the case, Nahlah Saimeh, was at pains to explain, “a migrant background can push offenders to the margins of society” and lead to “fantasies of grandeur as an attempt to compensate for one’s own misery”.

Yeah, but two-and-a-half hours? That’s some fantasy of grandeur.

Muslim Assimilation and its Malcontents Rachel Kohn

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/muslim-assimilation-and-its-malcontents-rachael-kohn/

I was recently called “Islamophobic” on Facebook by a Muslim convert I met once many years ago. The prompt was nothing I said about Islam, but about assimilation being the road to integration for Aboriginal Australians, as it has been for most other individuals and ethnic-religious groups in the West. It was a telling leap to make, given that for twenty-one years my program, The Spirit of Things on ABC RN, featured many Muslims, but perhaps the former community leader and school teacher remembered only the ones who rankled, those who advocated a modern, assimilated version of Islam and denounced some of its belligerent and oppressive expressions.

Marnia Lazreg is a Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and CUNY in New York, and when I went visited her in 2010, I remarked that she was the only faculty member without a photo of herself on her website. She told me that after writing her book Questioning the Veil, it was “dangerous” for her to be recognisable, given the resurgence of Islamist thinking in post-9/11 America. Her own mother took off the veil at the age of fifty after the independence of Algeria, and Marnia’s generation of students never thought of wearing the veil as they contemplated living a new kind of life, reflecting modernity. But Professor Lazreg’s writing about women and their desire to be free from the tyranny of a patriarchal Islamic tradition that confined them to full bodily coverage and the ambit of the home, was ironically problematic in mid-town Manhattan in twenty-first-century America.

Like Lazreg, a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji, was also imperilled by the publication of her book The Trouble with Islam Today, and when I interviewed her during a visit to Sydney in 2004, she had security around her at all times. Her book begins with her experience as a young bright student in a madrassa in Vancouver where she was punished by her teachers for asking questions about the Koran. Expected to recite the sacred text without understanding it, she questioned why Muslims are instructed to avoid Jews and Christians, when to her as a young Canadian they were friends and fellow citizens. As a highly successful young host on TV Ontario, where her boss was Jewish, she spoke and wrote about the irrationality of Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Consequently, her books are banned in many Muslim countries.

Iran’s Regime Soon to Have Nuclear Bombs; Hezbollah Is Next by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20191/iran-nuclear-bombs

The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Iran’s regime has frequently threatened to wipe a whole country — Israel — off the map, and is also increasing military cooperation with Venezuela and Cuba to threaten the US. Europe, too, remains a rich target for nuclear blackmail. Iran would not even have to use its nuclear bombs; the threat would be enough.

It is high time for the Biden administration and the European Union at least to stop Iran from selling its oil. If not, much of the planet will soon see itself either in World War III or a surrender.

It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he sent the German army across the Rhine in 1936. Perhaps US President Joe Biden is trying to bribe the mullahs not to create any more mayhem before next year’s US presidential election – but the only result of such timidity is that the price goes up – with a worse war to follow. Biden would not have won WWII.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, has already attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria at least 74 times since October 17. US retaliation – against the proxies, not Iran – apparently could not impress Iran’s regime less. Someone else takes the bullet: that is why Iran has proxies in the first place… The Biden administration is not only allowing to Iran’s mullahs to create a war cost-free, it is paying them to do it.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Once Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it will most likely provide some of them to its proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Image source: iStock)

Iran is closer than ever before to obtaining nuclear bombs; meanwhile, the Biden administration’s only policy toward the ruling mullahs of Iran is to keep “rewarding” them with billions of dollars.

After the Iran-backed Hamas terror group launched its genocidal war against Israel and Jews, the Iranian regime ratcheted up its enrichment of uranium. The regime claims it now has enough enriched uranium to make three nuclear bombs, according to one of the two confidential reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and seen by Reuters.