RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/16/the-biden-administration-attacks-democracy-abroad/

A friend sent me a link that, upon opening it, I initially thought I had been directed to The Babylon Bee. I rubbed my eyes and pored over the blurb again. Amazed, I remembered Mr. Biden’s State of the Union declaration: “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at—both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Of course, I was aware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters have been assiduously attacking American democracy. Indeed, in recounting how the Democratic Party is anything but democratic, Victor Davis Hanson concluded:

The Left talks grandly of ‘democracy dies in darkness’ as Joe Biden beats the dead horse of January 6 to warn that democracy is in its greatest peril. But all such rhetoric is projection. The verbiage masks the most comprehensive effort in modern American history to radically change, destroy, or warp American laws, customs, and traditions for the short-term aim of gaining and retaining political power.

The rationale is that the left is of such superior morality and wisdom that it has the right to violate the Constitution or the hallowed traditions of the country to achieve the higher end of ensuring a progressive agenda.

However, I was unaware of how Mr. Biden and his leftist supporters had been attacking democracy abroad. Of course, I knew the Authoritarian Axis of communist China, Putin’s revanchist Russia, terrorist-state Iran, and the Cuban and Venezuelan dictatorships had been persistently attacking democracy. But none of these rouge states besieging free peoples were the target of the Biden administration’s call for regime change.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/palestinian-authority-security-forces-regavim-report-israel-terrorism-hamas-gaza-e0514b62?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank. Photo: Mohammed Turabi/Zuma Press

The Biden Administration is pitching its “two-state solution” to Israel with the lure of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, as if the doctor ordered a trip to a day spa for PA leaders. A new report by Regavim, an Israeli NGO, shows that real reform is going to take a lot more.

The report reveals a pattern of Palestinian police “turning their Western-supplied guns on the State of Israel” and then being glorified for their terrorism by the PA. It specifically identifies 76 officers of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) who have been killed or arrested while carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis in the past three years.

Take Capt. Ziad al-Zar’ini, who helped hide a Hamas terrorist wanted for murder, then opened fire in March 2023 at the Israeli forces in pursuit. “The PASF and Fatah,” the PA’s ruling party, “issued glowing tributes and eulogies,” says the Regavim report.

The latest example is Capt. Muhammad Manasrah. He had already served two sentences in Israeli prisons when, hired as a police officer, he shot up a gas station on Feb. 29, murdering two Israelis, ages 16 and 57.

The PASF was created to fight Hamas terrorism in collaboration with Israel, but for too long it has abetted, committed or celebrated terrorism. Why again does Secretary of State Antony Blinken think this PA gang will deradicalize Gaza?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20486/biden-should-threaten-qatar

Biden’s reported threat to halt or suspend US military supplies to Israel if the IDF enters Rafah is what encourages Hamas to continue fighting and reject every proposal to release the hostages. When Hamas leaders hear that Biden is threatening Israel to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, they must say to themselves: “Why should we make any concessions to Israel? America doesn’t want the Israelis to destroy the four remaining battalions. The US administration is opposed to Israel’s plan to eliminate Hamas, so let’s wait!”

A total defeat means the elimination of all of Hamas’s battalions. An Israeli victory will never be complete as long as one, or even half, a Hamas battalion remains intact.

Biden is actually sending a message to Hamas and Iran’s other terror proxies, including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, that America is about to throw Israel under the bus. Cutting off US weapons supplies to Israel is the ultimate fantasy of the terrorists.

The administration could show impressive leadership and in fact “bring this to an end as quickly as we can” — not just for Israel but for all in the region who are seeking peace — by encouraging Israel to take out the terrorists in Rafah without delay.

Instead of pressuring Israel, Biden should be pressuring his friends in Qatar to force their Hamas puppets to hand over the Israeli hostages and surrender. Instead of threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he should be threatening the leaders of Qatar with the withdrawal of US forces from the country’s Al Udeid Air Base and to officially designate Qatar as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (for its funding of Hamas, Hizballah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabab, Al Nusra Front, among others).

This is the way – the only way – to end the war quickly, as well as to send a signal to America’s adversaries looking on, that the US is prepared to uphold the values of civilization, not the values of terror.

US President Joe Biden will consider conditioning military supplies to Israel if the Israeli army moves forward with a large-scale invasion of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to four US officials.

Biden has also told MSNBC that a Rafah operation would cross a “red line,” although he balanced that statement with a commitment to support Israel’s right to self-defense.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aramean-christians-train-to-fight-for-israel-e284ed6d?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Forty-eight Israelis graduated in February from Kinneret, a premilitary program, or mechina, in Kibbutz Beit-Zera, near the Sea of Galilee. They spent seven months undergoing training, lectures and field exercises to prepare for army service. Unlike the country’s dozens of other mechinot, Kinneret’s founder and half of its students are Aramean Christians.

The Jewish state is home to some 185,000 Christians, including around 15,000 Arameans, whose ancestors lived in the Levant before the Arab conquest and were early followers of Jesus. For decades Israel registered them as Arabs over their objection.

In 2014 Israel recognized the Aramean Christian community. That recognition was an important step toward fuller integration into Israeli society, says Shadi Khaloul, who founded Kinneret in 2017.

Mr. Khaloul, 48, was born in Jish, a mixed Christian-Muslim community in north Galilee, and educated in Haifa. His uncle served in the Israel Defense Forces, and his father was an Israeli policeman. It was no surprise, then, when he joined the army and became a paratrooper at 18. “I was taught that the Jews are our brothers and our allies,” Mr. Khaloul says. “This state is our state. We need to defend it too.”

He laments that young Aramean Christians study in Israel’s Muslim educational system, where they aren’t taught about their own heritage or historical ties with the Jewish people. Students “become anti-Israel under this system,” Mr. Khaloul says. “It’s what they are taught.” He says he filed a complaint two years ago with the Education Ministry after a Muslim teacher in Jish reprimanded an Aramean high-school student for honoring Israel’s fallen soldiers on Memorial Day. “This is not our holiday,” the teacher reportedly told the teenager. Mr. Khaloul says there are many such incidents in the schools.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-schumer-israel-benjamin-netanyahu-75bf4d58?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Israel-Hamas war is melting brains on the Democratic side of the aisle, and the latest evidence is a remarkable speech Thursday by Sen. Charles Schumer calling for new elections to replace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, the Majority Leader is telling Israelis to replace their government—or the U.S. “will have no choice” but to intervene to “change the present course,” whatever that means.

Mr. Netanyahu is the duly elected Prime Minister of an American ally. Israeli voters will have a chance to hold him accountable, if they choose, for whatever policy and security lapses left his country vulnerable to Hamas’s vicious invasion on Oct. 7. He also will have to answer for how effectively he has prosecuted the war, including whether he has struck the right bargains in exchanging temporary cease-fires for the release of Israeli hostages, and whether the ultimate end-state for Gaza leaves Israel safer or otherwise.

But precisely because Israel is a democracy, accountability for Mr. Netanyahu is baked in. The Prime Minister at this moment represents a broad consensus in Israeli society that the country can’t afford to allow Hamas to continue its violent and corrupt control of Gaza after the horrors unleashed on Oct. 7.

Mr. Schumer knows all this and said as much in his speech on the Senate floor. He blamed Hamas for the atrocities of Oct. 7, and he noted that the terror group has “knowingly invited an immense civilian toll during this war” by using Gazans as human shields. The Senator also allowed that Israel “is surrounded by vicious enemies.”

So what does the Democrat from New York want? He hopes a different Israeli Prime Minister would advance a two-state solution of the sort Mr. Netanyahu has resisted. This reflects the political neurosis developing among Democrats, who wish some deus ex machina would allow Israel to “win” the war against Hamas in a way that would minimize the anger of the anti-Israel left in the U.S.

https://www.newsweek.com/zone-disinterest-oscars-opinion-1878405

When a British writer-director accepted an Oscar Sunday night for Zone of Interest, a fictional movie set against a backdrop of the very real Holocaust, he showed that his own grasp of reality is dangerously lacking.

In repugnant, victim-blaming remarks, Jonathan Glazer said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

Note to Glazer: No one is hijacking your Jewishness or the Holocaust. That idea is an antisemitic myth popular among some deluded people who call themselves “progressive.” It’s a myth that fuels terrorism and attacks on Jews all over the world.

The differences between the real world and the imaginary one that Glazer described could not be more stark. In his imaginary world, an “occupation” somehow “led to” the October 7 terrorist attacks. In the real world, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and the Palestinian Authority has long controlled Palestinian areas of the West Bank. Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the most unimaginably evil terrorist attacks of modern times because years of brainwashing children in UNRWA-backed schools and training them to seek Jihad have created a radicalized population that celebrates the slaughter of Jews with candy and fireworks.

In Glazer’s imaginary world, the Holocaust is “hijacked.” In the real world, Jews (the people of Judea) have spent centuries trying to return to Israel, their indigenous homeland that they were expelled from by empires—long before the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed. The largest population in Israel is made up of Jews who had to flee Arab nations (not Europe) for their lives, losing everything.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-holiday-from-history-is-over?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT:

Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages. 

But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.

Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight? 

Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.

I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20481/palestinian-authority-revitalized-hamas

For [Palestinian] leaders, revamping the Palestinian Authority means forging an alliance with Hamas by inviting the terror group to be part of a new governing body that would rule the Gaza Strip in the post-war era.

From Biden’s perspective, it is as though Netanyahu and the Israelis are responsible for the devastation in the Middle East since Hamas’s October 7 carnage, and not Iran, and Hamas’s main sponsor, Qatar, whose “protection money” evidently came “without protection.” As such, it would be no surprise if the Biden administration were to welcome a “Palestinian unity” agreement between Abbas’s Fatah faction and Hamas – a deal that would be no doubt presented to the world as the US-made revitalization plan; in reality, just a tee-up for the next war.

Would the Biden administration like to stop the war this week?

All the US would have to do is to inform Qatar that it was cancelling the agreement the Biden administration signed in January — in return for nothing -– to extend for another ten years America’s use of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of CENTCOM, and move it to a Middle Eastern country that does not, as Qatar does, have record of supporting Islamic State (ISIS/Da’esh), Hezbollah, al Shabab, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al Qaeda as well as Hamas.

In addition, the United States could simply tell Qatar that, regrettably, the US has no choice but officially to change Qatar’s designation from “major non-NATO ally,” which it is not, to State Sponsor of Terrorism, which it is. The US could have the war over and all the hostages — not just the Americans — released in a minute.

The Biden administration — or simply concerned citizens — could also demonstrate with placards advertising Qatar’s support for terrorism, a public relations campaign it might not relish.

By stationing its forces at Al Udeid Air Base, the US is doing Qatar a monumental favor, not the other way around. Without the US airbase, Qatar is just a rich, extremely vulnerable sandbar, as its rulers are undoubtedly aware.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/biden-revises-history-to-shame-israel/

Trying to pressure the Jewish state into ending its war on Hamas by appealing to America’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is breathtakingly cynical.

For the better part of a month, Joe Biden’s anxious Democratic allies had indulged the fantasy that the president could shore up his ailing support among what should be his base voters if only he did more interviews. The president took their advice over the weekend. But in sitting down with Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, even for the tightly edited ten-minute interview NBC News released, Biden demonstrated why he is better off sticking with the teleprompter.

Rich delved into the president’s self-abasing effort to walk back the strongest moment of his State of the Union address — an ad lib in which he displayed a small measure of the passion shared by the millions of Americans for whom the migrant crisis over which Biden has presided has become intolerable. And Phil identified the incoherence in Biden’s attempt to placate the unappeasable rabble for whom the exercise of Israel’s right to self-defense is anathema. But it’s also worth pointing out that in trying to reconcile his desire to see Hamas defeated with his desire for Israel to stand down before that objective is achieved, Biden descended into a historical revisionism that serves only to indict the country that made him president.

In his insistence that Israel’s effort to neutralize Hamas has gone too far, Biden has presented himself as the Jewish state’s best friend — devoted only to dispensing “tough love” to America’s wayward ally. In his interview with Capehart, Biden noted that his advice is a product of America’s experience in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

“Don’t make the mistake America made,” Biden began. “We went after Bin Laden until we got him, but we shouldn’t have gone into Ukraine – I mean, we shouldn’t have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary. It just caused more problems than it erased — than it cured.”