ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

NY Times’ erroneous cover photo of Gazan child joins series of media blunders framing stories against Israel Joseph A. Wulfsohn

Posted By on August 10th, 2025

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ny-times-erroneous-cover-photo-100031670.html

The New York Times recently attempted to downplay a significant error that was plastered on its front page. But when it comes to the legacy media’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, the Gray Lady is in good company.

Last month, the Times ran the somber headline, “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing.’” Accompanying it was a grim image of a malnourished infant and his mother. The caption read, “Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. A doctor said the number of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza had risen sharply.”

Critics quickly called out the Times for prominently featuring Mohammed, whose image was featured by numerous other media outlets, without mentioning that he has a genetic disorder.

The Times finally addressed the major omission on Tuesday with an editors’ note buried underneath the lengthy story that had already circulated for more than four days.

“This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, the Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems,” the editors’ note stated.

A spokesperson for the Times released a statement saying, “Children in Gaza are malnourished and starving, as New York Times reporters and others have documented. We recently ran a story about Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians, including Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, who is about 18 months old and suffers from severe malnutrition. We have since learned new information, including from the hospital that treated him and his medical records, and have updated our story to add context about his pre-existing health problems. This additional detail gives readers a greater understanding of his situation.”

“Our reporters and photographers continue to report from Gaza, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war,” the statement added.

Notably, that statement was shared by the Times’ communications account, which has less than 90,000 followers on X, and not the Times’ main account, which has more than 55 million followers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU ‘Elites’, Part I Corruption and Foreign Influence Operations by Robert Williams

Posted By on August 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21823/eu-corruption-foreign-influence

[T]he EU organization itself… — once again –- is at the center of a new corruption scandal….

While Huawei has been effectively banned in the US – and has closed all its official and direct lobbying operations in Washington in early 2024 – the company has been free to do its influence peddling in the EU, where it is not banned. China’s influence in Europe in a multitude of areas is already highly present…

The Belgian raid came roughly two years after the so-called Qatargate: In December 2022, Belgian authorities uncovered the bribery of Members of European Parliament by Qatar…

Politico reported on the leaked files, dubbed “the Qatargate files” in December 2023: “The actions recorded in the documents include some with a significant impact on the workings of the European Union — such as scheming to kill off six parliamentary resolutions condemning Qatar’s human rights record…”

Qatargate is far from over. Trials are only scheduled to begin in late 2025. The EU, therefore, currently has not just one, but two huge corruption scandals on its hands.

The president of the unelected European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, in her second term in the position, having first maneuvered her way into this post after serving as a scandal-ridden minister of defense in Germany for many years, is herself under scrutiny in what has become known as “Pfizer-gate”…

Qatar has not only bought and invested in large swathes of European real estate, it is also a huge contributing factor to the Islamization of Europe. Qatar funneled — at an extremely conservative estimate — at least €71 million (approximately $78 million) to build 140 mosques and Islamic centers in Europe just as of 2014, according to the latest authoritative report on the issue, the 2019 book Qatar Papers by French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot.

“The European Union is one of the least corrupt regions in the world,” boasts the European Commission on its website.

Oh really? Let us take a look at the EU organization itself, which — once again –- is at the center of a new corruption scandal.

Belgian police raided more than 20 locations in Belgium and Portugal in March in an investigation of alleged “active corruption within the European Parliament,” for the benefit of China’s tech giant Huawei, according to Belgium’s federal prosecutor’s office. Huawei’s main lobbying office in Brussels was raided, alongside European Parliament offices.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Derek Chauvin Will Languish in Prison—Regardless of the Facts The George Floyd case shows how America traded the rule of law for the rule of narrative—leaving Derek Chauvin to serve the sentence the storyline demanded. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 10th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/10/why-derek-chauvin-will-languish-in-prison-regardless-of-the-facts/

I missed Rachel K. Paulose’s column about George Floyd—sorry, Saint George Floyd—when it appeared in The Spectator World at the end of May. Knowing of my interest in the case, a public-spirited individual brought the column to my attention. I thought it was an appalling regurgitation of the established, but erroneous, narrative about the larcenous, drug-and-woman-abusing miscreant George Floyd and the former police officer primarily involved in his arrest.

Paulose is worried that President Trump might pardon Derek Chauvin, the former policeman who is now rotting away in prison for a long list of federal and state crimes, including multiple counts of murder, manslaughter, and “civil rights deprivation.”

Paulose pretends to be concerned about Donald Trump’s legacy among blacks. He has made such impressive inroads with black voters, she notes. Pity to throw it all away by pardoning someone like Derek Chauvin, a brute who all the world knows callously murdered the noble George Floyd in cold blood by kneeling on his neck and depriving him of oxygen. “President Trump,” she writes, “should respect the verdict of the people and protect his own legacy by rejecting the ignoble calls to absolve the fired officer of his guilt.”

Paulose notes with satisfaction that Trump’s pardon power extends only to federal crimes. To be released from prison, Chauvin would also need to secure a pardon or commutation from the governor of Minnesota. Yes, the governor’s office is overdue for a serious upgrade. Currently, however, the position is held by the great hunter and dispenser of feminine hygiene products in boys’ bathrooms, Tim “Nimrod” Walz. The contingency of Walz granting Chauvin a pardon is, as Jeeves might put it, remote.

I wonder whether Derek Chauvin ran over Paulose’s bicycle when she was a little girl? In her column, she hauls out gigantic hairballs of evidence from Chauvin’s trial to remind readers of what a despicable chap he is. Her most prized evidence comes from Dr. Martin J. Tobin, “an internationally renowned doctor, pulmonologist, and academic” (well then!) who testified that “the cause of Floyd’s death was the position in which Chauvin detained him.” “A healthy person subjected to what Mr. Floyd was subjected to,” quotes Dr. Tobin, “would have died.”

Case closed? Not quite. As I noted in The Spectator in 2021,

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Nazis would have been proud of Hamas’s vile propagandists Opinion by Zoe Strimpel

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/09/nazis-would-have-been-proud-of-hamas-vile-propagandists/

The terror group’s continued stranglehold in the Strip and refusal to hand back the hostages is the only thing prolonging the war

Desperate people clamouring around a truck begging for food. An emaciated child on death’s door. Women, girls, children, babies: no innocent is immune from Israel’s psychotically cruel campaign of bloodlust in Gaza. It is unbearable to see. Who can stand by and watch such crimes?

This, at any rate, is what most of the world’s media, from the most respectable broadcaster to the grimiest freesheet, is eager for you to think. It is also what Hamas wants you to think. As long-term masters of some of the most cynical propaganda the world has ever seen, Hamas is succeeding in its plan with resounding success.

Keir Starmer last week appeared to speak for the whole of Britain when he said that scenes from Gaza fill us with “revulsion” – against Israel, of course.

Largely because of such images of suffering, Starmer wants to reward the forces of Palestinian terror with the recognition of a state. “I think people are revolted at what they are seeing on their screen,” he said. The next day he spoke of “starving babies, children too weak to stand, images that will stay with us for a lifetime”.

Pictures. Images. Screens. These are what appear to be deciding Israel’s – and the Palestinians’ – legal status on the world stage.

It is not that there isn’t immense suffering in Gaza. There is. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are in dire straits, have lost family members, are in pain, injured, hungry, homeless, desperate, scared, the terrorist group’s blood-soaked grip always around their necks. It’s a tragedy.

But a lot of what sets the world alight is massaged, manipulated and in many cases downright fake.

One of the most iconic images of the last few weeks, which helped consolidate the false worldwide consensus that Israel has become a rogue, genocidal state while the Palestinians deserve a state, was the skeletal boy allegedly nearly starved to death by an Israeli blockade, held in his mother’s arms.

What the great and the good left out in their haste to publish this picture, posed as a tableau reminiscent of Mary holding Jesus, was that the boy suffered from a congenital disease. It was later quietly acknowledged by The New York Times – way too late – that he had pre-existing health problems and they would have highlighted this if they had known before publication.

We see lots of pictures of desperate people clamouring for food banging pots and pans. Some of these might represent the strangled reality on the ground.

But as the German tabloid Bild bothered to discover, one of the most prominent pictures of such clamouring hunger in recent weeks has photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, a freelance journalist commissioned by the Turkish news agency Anadolu, snapping the photos in the manner of a director.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Using a Double Standard on Race to Handicap ICE A federal judge ruled that agents impermissibly used race in questioning suspected illegal aliens—but she’s hardly color-blind in her own courtroom.

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ice-race-ruling-judge-maame-ewusi-mensah-frimpong?skip=1

The Justice Department just filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to vindicate its authority to enforce immigration law. A federal judge in Los Angeles had declared ICE’s questioning of suspected illegal aliens unconstitutional. U.S. District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled on July 11 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been impermissibly using race to decide whom to detain for questioning about immigration status. Yet Frimpong’s rules for litigating in her courtroom are themselves a violation of the principle of color-blindness.

According to the plaintiffs in Pedro Vasquez Perdomo v. Kristi Noem, ICE’s immigration operations in Southern California single out suspects based on race and three additional factors: a Spanish accent or inability to speak English; presence at a location, such as a day laborer pick-up site, known to harbor illegal aliens; and working at a job, such as at a car wash, known to be dominated by illegal aliens. Frimpong ruled that those four factors, alone or in combination with the other three, did not provide ground, known as “reasonable suspicion” in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, for stopping and questioning a suspect for illegal presence.

ICE had disputed the advocates’ characterization of its stops. Its officers have more particularized suspicion based on their experience and on additional observed facts about the setting and the suspect, ICE argued. Frimpong’s rushed briefing and hearing schedule had not provided the government sufficient time to make its defense, the Justice Department attorneys alleged, to no effect.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Letitia James Is in Big Trouble Now Matt Margolis

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/08/08/doj-launches-explosive-grand-jury-investigation-targeting-letitia-james-n4942521

For years, New York Attorney General Letitia James has fancied herself as the scourge of Donald Trump, chasing him with a vengeance to fulfill her campaign promise of getting Trump at any cost. Now, in a stunning turn of events, the Department of Justice has launched a grand jury investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James over her sham civil fraud case against Donald Trump. The partisan hit job that scored James a bloated $454 million judgment against Trump is now facing the heat of federal scrutiny, and the tables may finally be turning.

Beyond the baseless 2022 civil fraud charges she leveled against him, James has been a key player in mounting legal attacks on the current administration’s executive actions. This isn’t about impartial justice; it’s political warfare by another name.

And now James herself is being targeted by federal prosecutors. 

Fox News Digital has the story:

The investigation is being run out of Albany, New York, and focused on possible deprivation of rights allegations, two well-placed sources familiar with the probe told Fox News Digital. 

The investigation is in an early stage, but Fox News Digital has learned that James’s office received subpoenas for documents this week, including for information related to her civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. 

James, a Democrat who was elected attorney general in 2018, has long been a target of Trump. James successfully brought civil charges against him for business fraud in 2022 and has had an instrumental role in challenging his current administration’s executive actions in court. [Fox News Digital]

What we’re seeing play out is the raw, ugly reality of Democrats weaponizing justice in America. James, who made her name by trying to destroy Trump’s business empire, now finds herself the target of federal subpoenas as the DOJ asks tough questions about her own conduct. 

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Regime Is Plotting Its Comeback — Do Not Let It Happen by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21821/iran-plotting-comeback

Iran’s regime is built on the belief that it must export its revolutionary Islamist vision, overthrow secular governments, and unify the Muslim world under a single Shiite Islamist state. This project is its purpose. It is what gives the Islamic Republic of Iran its identity. Its constitution enshrines that vision, and its institutions — from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to its intelligence services — are structured around advancing this goal.

A regime built on these foundations does not abandon its mission when it suffers setbacks. It adapts, regroups and strikes again when the world is distracted or divided. It is important not misread its current weakness as evidence of defeat.

This danger is not limited to the Middle East. It is now reaching deep into Europe and North America. Recently, the United States, joined by thirteen NATO members and Austria, issued a joint statement accusing Iran of carrying out a growing number of plots on Western soil…. The goal is clear: to silence critics, spread fear and expand Iran’s ability to operate with impunity on foreign soil.

Iran is not a normal country acting in pursuit of its people’s national interest. It is a fundamentalist theocratic regime committed to conquest. It thrives on conflict. Every dollar that flows into its coffers is a dollar that funds terrorism. Every embassy it maintains abroad is a potential command post for espionage and assassination. Every day the West relaxes its vigilance is a day the Iranian regime uses to regroup and retaliate. That is why the international community must stay united and focused — not just on holding Iran to account for past behavior, but on thwarting its future plots.

Iran must not be allowed to rearm under this regime. It must not be allowed to continue its campaign of terror. This objective means keeping “maximum pressure” in place. It means cutting off Iran’s oil exports. It means denying it access to the global economy. It means shutting down its diplomatic outposts, which serve as centers of espionage. It means reimposing UN sanctions and enforcing them without compromise.

The world cannot afford another mirage of Iranian “reform” or “moderation.” Iran is rebuilding its war machine. The mission to stop it must continue, relentlessly and without apology.

The Iranian regime does not think in terms of four-year election cycles or short-term political wins. It thinks in decades and acts on long-term strategic objectives. Its leadership, unelected, is essentially permanent. Iran is ruled by a Supreme Leader, who occupies the office for life, and by a military and clerical elite who are driven not by pragmatism but by an Islamist revolutionary ideology.

Over the past 46 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has become a primary source of instability in the Middle East, a hub of global terrorism, and a headache for Western democracies. The Iranian regime’s survival has been the result of relentless ideological focus, brutal repression, and an ability to exploit the weaknesses and short-term thinking of its adversaries.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Thanks, Obama Barack Obama’s presidency didn’t just strain America—it shattered its social fabric, fueling the political divide that made today’s bitter polarization inevitable. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/09/thanks-obama/

Someday, when today’s young Americans look back in anger at what their country has become—and believe me, they will be angry—they will have their pick of culprits to blame for the sad state of affairs. If there is any justice in the universe, however, they will focus their resentment and frustration on one man: Barack Obama. Although the United States (and the West more generally) had been drifting toward collapse for decades, Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the nation were, in retrospect, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Now, to be clear, I’m not referring here to something as small and meaningless as policy, foreign or domestic. As Presidents Trump and Biden amply demonstrated, policy can be changed and then changed back again, over and over and over. To be sure, the effects of these changes may be deleterious, and they may create substantively different outcomes than would have occurred otherwise. For the most part, however, the effects of policy changes are limited and, if corrected, temporary. Obama, for example, may have thrown the entire Middle East into flux and threatened the very future of the planet with his policy of appeasing the Mullahs of Iran, but Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, between them, undid most of that damage and returned the region to its pre-Obama status quo.

And nor am I referring to Obama’s inarguable and inarguably troubling role in the scheme to undermine Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign (and, eventually, his presidency) by painting him as an agent of Russian influence. Russia-gate is ugly and treacherous, and a significant number of players—perhaps including Obama—should be held to account for what they did and how they manipulated the nation’s intelligence apparatus to serve partisan political ends. Some of them—perhaps including Obama—deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison. This “scandal” is far more serious and far more perfidious than any other in American history—save, perhaps, the scandal of saddling the American people with an incoherent and incompetent president for a full four years, while others, still to be named, ran the country surreptitiously.

Nevertheless, Obama’s true offense is even more damning still.

As I have argued in these pages and elsewhere, none of the people who deserve to go to jail for the crimes involved in the scandals noted above will ever actually do so.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Explaining the Geyser of Jew-Hatred By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/08/explaining_the_geyser_of_jew_hatred.html

Since the day that Israeli Jews were attacked, tortured, murdered, raped and burned to death on October 7, 2023, the entire world, save for a tiny minority, has vilified, excoriated, and blamed — ta-da! — the Jews!  The victims!

Why?  It’s really not that hard to figure out.

We live in a world of eight billion people, the vast majority of whom have never seen or spoken to or met a Jew…a Jew whose numbers constitute a microscopic 16 million, only half of that number in Israel, another approximate seven million in America, and about another million throughout the world.  This represents less than an almost invisible micro-droplet in the Atlantic Ocean.

If you questioned the bought-and-paid for Jew- and Israel-hating “protesters” on college campuses and their simpatico administrators and professors, and if you asked fulminating Jew-haters like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the astoundingly long list that includes the pooh-bahs at the N.Y. Times, the American mainstream media, the BBC, et al. if they had ever been physically assaulted or robbed or cuckolded or beaten in sports by a Jew, 99% of them would say no, although they may have suffered true narcissistic injuries when all those smart Jews got better marks in school and beat them on the medical and law boards, and made more money — on drive and merit — than their jealous critics ever dreamed of.

Like oozing gangrene, a deadly systemic infection, or the metastasis of invasive cancers, Jew-hatred comes in many malignant strains.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

In defence of whataboutery It’s the only tool we have left to call out the Gaza fetishists’ savage indifference to the suffering of humankind. Brendan O’Neill *****

Posted By on August 9th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/09/in-defence-of-whataboutery/

Did you know that 652 children have starved to death in Nigeria over the past six months? Did you know that in the north-east of that benighted nation, where a jihadist insurgency is raging and international aid is running thin, a savage hunger stalks the land? Did you know that five million people there are ‘severely hungry’, and that the World Food Programme is only able to feed 1.3million of them? Don’t feel ashamed if you haven’t heard about any of this. Few have. For it has been cruelly drowned out, ruthlessly demoted down the hierarchy of human concern, by what can only be described as the unhinged Gaza infatuation of our Israelophobic elites.

I only found out about the human calamity in Nigeria last week, and in the most telling way. It was the final item on the BBC’s News at Ten. The show opened, as it does almost every night, with the latest from Gaza. There’s a serious risk of famine in Gaza, the Beeb’s reporters intoned. Some children have already perished from malnourishment, they said. Then, later, like an afterthought, came news of an actual famine in Nigeria. Of a horror that has claimed the lives of hundreds of kids, and threatens to claim the lives of thousands more. An editorial decision was made here, right? Someone somewhere in BBC HQ decided that the death of hundreds of black African children is less newsworthy than the death of scores of Palestinian children. And that should horrify us.

We need to talk about the Gaza fetish of our media elites. It is suffocating. It’s a feverish moral fixation. No instance of human suffering – not even the agonised starvation of Nigerian infants in a world full of food – can be allowed to interfere with the Palestine myopia of our supposed betters. The war in Sudan, with its tens of thousands of deaths and its millions of displaced, famished souls; even the war in Ukraine, where an average of 42 civilians are killed or wounded every day – every earthly horror has been made morally subordinate to the Gaza infatuation. Even raising those other apocalyptic injustices is a risky business. You might find yourself accused of that greatest sin in the era of Israelophobia: ‘Whataboutery.’

Well, you know what? I’m standing up for whataboutery. Whataboutery might just be the only tool we have left to counter the cultural elites’ maniacal obsession with Israel, and their savage indifference to the suffering of the rest of the human species. So, yes, what about Sudan? What about Nigeria? What about Ukraine? What about – I’ll just say it – all the pain, hunger and death that cannot in any way be blamed on the world’s only Jewish nation? What about that?

So much as mention a patch of land on this troubled planet that isn’t Gaza and instantly the West’s virtue-hoarders will wail: ‘Whataboutery!’ French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy got flak online this week after writing a piece for the Wall Street Journal about the ‘brutal, forgotten war’ in Sudan that never pricks the consciences of ‘Greta Thunberg [or] America’s campus leftists’. The flap over Lévy was born from defensiveness. They know he’s right. They know the keffiyeh-adorned poseurs of the Western university couldn’t give a solitary shit for the suffering of the Sudanese. Even though it’s ‘the most nihilistic conflict on Earth’, as Anne Applebaum reminded us this week, in which more people have been displaced than in ‘Ukraine and Gaza combined’.