EDUCATION Comments turned off

108 arrested at Emerson College protest, 4 Boston police officers hurt CBS News Mike Toole, Penny Kmitt, Christina Hager

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.aol.com/108-arrested-emerson-college-protest-105000434.html

BOSTON – Boston Police arrested more than 100 people as they cleared out pro-Palestinian protesters and their encampment from Emerson College early Thursday.

108 arrests at Emerson College, 4 Boston police officers hurt

“108 arrests,” a Boston Police spokesperson told WBZ-TV in an email. “4 injured officers, 3 minor, 1 more serious. All non-life threatening.”

Police said none of the protesters in custody have reported any injuries “at this time.” Some of the 108 students were brought into Boston Municipal Court late Thursday morning. They were not arraigned, but had court dates scheduled for next week. Some thought police were too aggressive.

“I don’t think that they needed to use full riot gear. I don’t think that they needed to slam people into statues and then slam people into the ground. You can arrest people without assaulting them,” a student who only identified himself as Oliver told WBZ at court.

Attorneys showed up at court, volunteering legal representation for students who were arrested. “I think peaceful protest is really important and I think that’s the goal of these students right now and we’ll see how each individual case plays out,” said Marat Erkan, who’s with the National Lawyers Guild.

Emerson College protesters warned

Emerson students started camping out in the 2B Alley off Boylston Street late Sunday night and had remained there for three days. Boston Police warned them Wednesday that they were violating city ordinances in the alley, which is not solely owned by Emerson College.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

US, Qatar and Iran: Release the Hostages! by Michel Calvo

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20599/us-qatar-iran-gaza-hostages

The United States, France, Germany, Russia and Argentina, who had dual nationals taken hostage, did not try to bomb Hamas infrastructure and places where Hamas hid. Instead, they let Israel do it and then accused Israel of destroying the Gaza Strip.

Rather than putting any pressure on Qatar and demonstrating in front of Qatari-owned hotels in France, the United States and elsewhere in Europe, the families of the hostages have been putting pressure on the Israeli government, thereby doing exactly what Hamas would presumably like them to do. They are “working” for Hamas — and against their own interests — in the hope of seeing more hostages released. By their actions the value of the hostages only increases.

The demonstrators are doing what Hamas cannot do by itself: they are dividing Israel so that the unity government loses its strength in the negotiations, as well as any ability to bring the hostages home sooner — a triumph that was successfully accomplished by the IDF, left unfettered.

The hostages are not the Israeli government’s to deliver. They are unfortunately under the total the control of Hamas, Qatar and Iran –which is where the pressure should be applied, not on the government of Israel.

The only way a new Israeli government might negotiate the release of hostages would be by placing Israel’s entire population in incalculable danger. Any new Israeli leader hand-picked and pushed through by the current US administration would most likely be expected to agree to a terrorist Palestinian state next to Israel — meaning that the Israel would not be able to cross its border, if necessary, in “hot pursuit” of terrorists, and that the new state would soon be militarized, officially or not. Even if a new, sovereign Palestinian state were supposedly demilitarized, it would still be free to form alliances with any other entity it liked, including Iran, Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Qatar said it would invest in France 10 billion euros and in exchange France said it would be happy to try to save the terrorist group Hamas…. Everyone wins — except the hostages held by Hamas.

Without the US military base there, Qatar knows that it would be a rich, targetable oil-rig. America, “in exchange,” it seems, agreed to let Hamas continue its terrorist activities support the US quest for a Palestinian state. No remaining hostages were released; perhaps they were not even talked about.

Even though American citizens are among those still held hostage in Gaza, the US appears to have sided with the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups, and their terrorist-supporting patrons, Qatar and Iran.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

LATEST POLLS

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

Bloomberg Battleground State Polls
Wisconsin: Trump 48, Biden 44

Arizona: Trump 49, Biden 42

Georgia: Trump 49, Biden 43

Michigan: Biden 47, Trump 45

Pennsylvania: Trump 47, Biden 46

North Carolina: Trump 51, Biden 41

Nevada: Trump 51, Biden 43

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Princeton Students Prepare to Set Up Anti-Israel Protest Encampment By Abigail Anthony

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/princeton-students-prepare-to-set-up-anti-israel-protest-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

Princeton University students are preparing to establish an anti-Israel protest encampment, according to documents obtained by National Review. The students claim to have pro bono legal support and trained security.

A draft of a press release titled “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment Demands” states that the “goal” is to “put pressure on the Princeton University administration to divest and disassociate from Israel, and to call attention to the University’s active contribution to ongoing genocide and human rights catastrophe.”

The group is demanding that 1) Princeton call for an immediate cease-fire and “condemn Israel’s genocidal campaign,” 2) commit to full transparency in its investments 3) dissociate and divest its endowment from direct and indirect holdings in companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s ongoing military campaign, occupation, and apartheid policies,” 4) divest from private fossil-fuel companies 5) disclose and end research funded by the Department of Defense 6) “refrain from any form of academic or cultural association with Israeli institutions and businesses 7) “cultivate affiliations with Palestinian academic and cultural institutions” and 8) stop sponsoring and facilitating programs like Birthright Israel trips and Tiger-Trek Israel, and relations with the Tikvah Fund.

Encampments have been set up on campuses across the United States. The “Gaza Solidarity” encampment at Columbia University has now reached its seventh day, while police began arresting protesters and disassembling tents at Yale on Monday.

“We condemn the settler-colonial project and apartheid regime enacted by the State of Israel, which is conducting a genocidal military campaign against the Palestinian people and has, for decades, implemented a regime of apartheid within Palestine/Israel,” reads an email draft obtained by National Review.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard steps up to defend religious freedom – from her former political party Since leaving the Democrats, Gabbard has become one of the most important voices in the nation. For Love of Country may be the most important book of 2024. By Steve Gruber 

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/25/tulsi-gabbard-steps-up-to-defend-religious-freedom-from-her-former-political-party/

Religious liberty is America’s “first freedom.” The founders knew well how having a national religion could erode true faith and tear a country apart. At the same time, they knew that a self-governing people, as they envisioned America, must agree on basic moral beliefs, and understand that our human rights derive not from any government in any form but from God. Government, they knew, can be and often is the most imminent threat to human rights, including the right to freely practice or choose not to practice any faith.

America’s first freedom is under sustained and coordinated assault, according to former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in her bombshell new book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind. Like those old thriller movies in which the mysterious calls from the killer were coming from inside the house, the attack on religious freedom isn’t coming from any outside entity or country. It’s coming from inside America.

Gabbard grew up in Hawaii in an eclectic home, by most Americans’ thinking. Her parents read to her and her siblings from both the Bible and the Rig Veda, the 5,000-year-old set of Hindu beliefs. This upbringing shaped her worldview and also taught her tolerance of people with different beliefs than her own and sharpened her eyes to recognize insidious attacks on religion. Her father was subjected to such attacks when he ran for office in her native Hawaii.

It’s without any glee that Gabbard calls out the party she once proudly belonged to—the Democrats—as a party that has abandoned religious tolerance and become a party that seeks to undermine people of faith, and especially Christians, at every turn. Wokeness has turned the Democrats into a party that, for all intents and purposes, is organized around destroying religion in America.

And Gabbard brings the receipts.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Nightmares The Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/25/irans-nightmares/

Details of the recent limited Israeli retaliatory strike against Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan are still sketchy. But nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions.

Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance.

The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design. Israel showed Iran it could take out the very anti-missile battery designed to thwart an attack on its nearby nuclear facility.

The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage at Iranian nuclear sites with reasonable assurances that the incoming attacks could not be stopped. By comparison, Iran’s earlier attack on Israel was much greater and more indiscriminate. It was also a huge flop, with an estimated 99 percent of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles failing to hit their planned targets.

Moreover, it was reported that more than 50 percent of Iran’s roughly 115-120 ballistic missiles failed at launch or malfunctioned in flight.

Collate these facts, and it presents a disturbing corrective to Iran’s non-stop boasts of soon possessing a nuclear arsenal that will obliterate the Jewish state.

Consider further the following nightmarish scenarios: Were Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles ever launched at Israel, they could pass over, in addition to Syria and Iraq, either Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four. In the cases of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such trajectories would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of Iran’s recent aerial barrages were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory well before they reached Israel.

Iran’s strike prompted Arab nations, the US, the UK, and France to work in concert to destroy almost all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, that is a premonition of the sort of sophisticated aerial opposition it might face if it ever decided to stage a nuclear version.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

UIUC’s Department of Latino Studies Endorses ‘Jew Hatred’ “We know a free Palestine is only possible through queer, racial, gender, reproductive, and environmental justice.” by Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uiucs-department-of-latino-studies-endorses-jew-hatred/

In a “Letter to Our Students on Palestine” dated from December 18, 2023, the Department of Latina/Latino Studies sought to whitewash the atrocious actions of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. The date of the letter’s posting is significant in that it came two months after Hamas’s October 7th genocidal attack on Israel, long after the barbaric details had been established and confirmed—women raped and mutilated, children set on fire, and over 1200 civilians butchered for the sole crime of being Jews.

The narrative set out by the Department of Latina/Latino Studies in their letter, which was posted on their official university department webpage and co-signed by the departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and African-American Studies, focused not on Hamas’s brutal attack but exclusively on the “historical context of Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation of Palestine.” It placed all blame solely on Israel, the victim of this brutal ethnic crime, instead of condemning Hamas. The atrocities committed by Hamas are described merely as an “attack against Israel…which led to the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, both civilians and soldiers.”  The mention of “civilians and soldiers” is an obvious attempt to whitewash Hamas’s genocide. The terrorist organization attacked solely civilian targets—a music festival, a kibbutz—and overwhelming killed and raped civilians. The handful of “soldiers” who met their deaths were only present by happenstance or raced to the defense of the civilians who were attacked.

In that same passage, the letter refers to Israel as “the U.S.-backed nuclear power” which “has intensified its long-running siege on the Gaza Strip”—again, entirely obscuring the history of Gaza which Israel handed over to the Palestinians in 2005, as well as the Palestinians’ unceasing attempts to wipe Israel and its Jews off the world map. The letter goes on to quote Hamas-generated statistics—acknowledged by all independent observers to be highly suspect—that “the Israeli bombing campaign has killed over twenty thousand Palestinian people –the average age of the dead being just five years old.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden Admin Covered Up a Major Assault at Kabul Airport Why keep lying? by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-biden-admin-covered-up-a-major-assault-at-kabul-airport/

The Biden administration recently released a report clearing itself of any negligence in the Kabul airport terrorist attack that killed 13 servicemembers during Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal.

The report claimed that all personnel who contradicted the official story were confused and didn’t know what they were talking about.

Instead of shutting down questions, the report opened up some much bigger ones.

Video captured by a Marine’s GoPro camera that has not been seen publicly in full before shows there was far more gunfire than the Pentagon has ever admitted. A dozen US military personnel, who were on the scene and spoke to CNN anonymously for fear of reprisals, have described the gunfire in detail. One told CNN he heard the first large burst of shooting come from where US Marines were standing, near the blast site. “It wasn’t onesies and twosies,” the Marine said. “It was a mass volume of gunfire.”

An Afghan doctor who spoke to CNN on the record for the first time said he personally pulled bullets from the wounded, and with his hospital staff counted dozens of Afghans who died from gunshot wounds.

The Biden position was that a suicide bomber had gotten in close. Why keep that lie going?

Because the alternative would be to admit that the Taliban deal was a disaster. The Biden administration had relied on “our Taliban partners” to screen, secure and provide access to the area around the airport.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel and the Decline of the West Don’t think our enemies haven’t noticed our civilizational failure of nerve. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-and-the-decline-of-the-west/

The response of the U.S. and EU leadership to Hamas’ genocidal savagery against Israel, a Western liberal democracy, has been despicable and dangerous. Blustering protestations of support and solidarity by politicians have been undercut by schoolmarmish hectoring about Israel’s “disproportionate” tactics and alleged callous disregard for Palestinian Arab lives and well-being.

This geopolitical virtue-signaling has been correctly interpreted by Hamas and Iran as a green-light to double-down on its aggression, which won’t stop with Israel.

Last week Iran showed the way by launching an unprecedent, indiscriminate attack on Israel with a 300-strong barrage of drones and missiles. Aided by the U.S., Great Britain, and Middle East Sunni states, but mostly the result of Israel’s superb anti-missile defenses, Israel suffered only one casualty.

But consistent with the kinda, sorta support the West has been showing for the last six months, this aid was followed by criticism and warnings against retaliation that once again signaled Israel’s enemies that the West really doesn’t have Israel’s back, but can be depended upon to stick a knife in it.

The Biden administration took the lead. Biden himself instructed Israel not to retaliate, but “take the win,” an egregiously stupid comment bespeaking what Biden’s track-record has repeatedly shown: that he is a Chamberlain-class appeaser. But the Europeans and the Brits were just as short-sighted, not to mention displaying the usual “preemptive cringe” that for decades has been the West’s default posture when engaging its enemies.

As World Israel News reported, “French President Emmanuel Macron said the international community should do ‘everything we can to avoid a flare-up.’ He said he would attempt to convince Israel ‘that it should not respond by escalating, but rather by isolating Iran.’

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

These Are The Students Biden Wants You To Bail Out

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/25/these-are-the-students-biden-wants-you-to-bail-out/

It’s not entirely coincidental that just weeks after President Joe Biden announced his latest plan to cancel student loan debt, antisemitic protests broke out on elite college campuses across the country. Biden’s bailout schemes only embolden these entitled brats.

Students at some 18 colleges have staged anti-Israel “encampment” protests. At Columbia University (where a four-year degree will set you back north of $350,000), the protests got so out of hand and so virulently antisemitic that a rabbi at Columbia urged Jewish students to “return home as soon as possible” and the university moved to mostly hybrid classes.

This has been going on for more than a week at Columbia and, since colleges don’t have the stomach to stand up to students, protests have spread to Brown, New York University, MIT, Yale, Vanderbilt, Emerson, and Tufts, all of which cost well over $200,000 for an undergraduate degree, as well as other not-cheap schools, such as the universities of Michigan, Pittsburg, and North Carolina, the University of California, Berkeley and others.

Protesters have been heard shouting antisemitic slogans, namely “intifada” and “f–k Israel,” wearing keffiyehs and COVID masks, and carrying signs to “Honor The Martyrs Of Palestine” and express the solidarity of “trans people for Palestine.”

It’s these students who will, as soon as they graduate with their mostly useless four-year degrees in anthropology or peace studies or gender queer theory, start demanding that taxpayers cover the costs of their massive student loans.

After all, Biden is already promising that they won’t have to repay them. He tried to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt early in his administration, only to have the Supreme Court strike it down.