Displaying posts published in

July 2025

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Do Not Rely on Egypt or Any Arab State to Bring Security to Gaza by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on July 7th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21732/gaza-security-egypt

There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The Egyptians chose to ignore the smuggling as long as the weapons were making their way into the Gaza Strip and not staying in Egyptian territory. After all, these weapons were being used against Israel, not Egypt. The weapons did not pose any threat to Egypt’s national security. In addition, Egyptian military and police officers apparently benefitted by accepting bribes.

By turning a blind eye to the massive smuggling industry, Egypt significantly contributed to transforming the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip into a major base for Islamist terrorism, paving the way for the October 7 attack on Israel.

Egypt never did anything to stop Hamas from staging a coup against the Palestinian Authority and seizing control of the Gaza Strip. Egypt failed to stop the flow of weapons into the Gaza Strip. Egypt does not care about the Palestinians or Israel. It only cares about its own interests, and that is why it would be a big mistake to rely on the Egyptians or any Arab state to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.

Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, 2023, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have discovered an estimated 90 tunnels crossing under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The tunnels have been used by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups to smuggle rockets and weapons into the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli military sources, there may be additional tunnels that have not been discovered. There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The smuggling, which increased after Hamas’s violent and brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, took place under the watchful eyes of Egypt, if not with its willing assistance.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In Melbourne, the Latest Pogrom Roger Franklin

By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/in-melbourne-the-latest-pogrom/

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.

Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free Speech vs Personal Safety Peter O’Brien

By on July 7th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/free-speech-vs-personal-safety/

“Yes, Jewish Australians – even though you have contributed to this nation since the First Fleet and even though your families and friends are being murdered in Israel, and elsewhere, by the very forces these wielders of free speech are promoting – toughen up.”

Free speech has gotten a bit of a run recently, following, inter alia, the Glastonbury kerfuffle and the Wassim Haddad ruling.

Our esteemed editor in chief, Rebecca Weisser, has a powerful piece in the Spectator about Glastonbury, the appalling behaviour of some of the performers, and the crass stupidity of the BBC in allowing some segments to go to air.  She makes some pretty uncontroversial points – indeed, unarguable, in my view.  And yet, she attracted a number of unfavourable comments, a couple of which I reproduce below.

John Jacobsen opined:

Rebecca Weisser’s piece reads like someone clutching pearls while the rest of the world’s trying to have an honest convo. Yeah, some stuff said at Glastonbury was intense—but that’s literally what free speech protects: the right to say provocative, uncomfortable things. You don’t have to agree with the artists, but trying to paint a whole music festival as a jihadist warm-up act is just unhinged. Art is messy. Politics is messy. Get over it. This is like the Trumpification of conservatism. Dumbed down into right-wing “woke”.

And Sirtony added:

If you support free speech, and I do, you have to put up with stupid speech that you find offensive. You, of course, are fully entitled to argue about those views and to say why you find them wrong or offensive. Free speech is useless if we only allow those we agree with to speak. As fashions ebb and flow, what else might be banned that you might actually be sympathetic towards. Stop and think before agreeing to many limits on free speech. Our traditional limits have been on the incitement to violence or the classic shouting “fire” in the crowded theatre not the expression of a political idea.

Is chanting “death, death to the IDF” inciting violence? The argument can be made that it is, but seriously does anyone expect any of these idiots to take on the Israeli military; it is performative nonsense.

The aim of this article is to provide a counterpoint to these opinions, but a couple of specific comments before I proceed.  Firstly, the performers were undoubtedly trying to turn the festival into a ‘jihadist warm-up’ act, and the organisers allowed them to politicize an artistic event. 

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

How the media echoes Hamas propaganda Natasha Hausdorff on the lies used to demonize Israel.

By on July 7th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/07/how-the-media-echoes-hamas-propaganda/

Israel has come to be the most demonized nation on Earth. Its actions in Gaza are continually vilified as ‘genocidal’. Last month’s air strikes against Iran were denounced as ‘unprovoked’ and ‘illegal’. In the one-sided narrative that is now dominant in the West, the Jewish State is the aggressor, while the terror groups and regimes that attack it are cast as innocent victims. Natasha Hausdorff – barrister and legal director at the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust – joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to debunk the lies we are constantly told about Israel. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How degraded has the debate become around Israel right now?

Natasha Hausdorff: It’s been deteriorating extremely rapidly – but this is perhaps unsurprising. For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.

O’Neill: What did you think when you saw a very large crowd of privileged Britons chanting ‘death to the IDF’?

Hausdorff: Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.

I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.

O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim Israel is guilty of genocide?

Hausdorff: Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.

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ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Frightening Dream House of Zoran Mamdani Zoran Mamdani built his dream on radical chic—but now that he’s winning, he’s scrambling to bury the blueprint. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 7th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/07/the-frightening-dream-house-of-zoran-mamdani/

After his first-place win in the New York City mayoral primaries, Zoran Mamdani is furiously denying everything that he once glibly thought was cutting-edge and cool.

So, like a good postmodern relativist, Mamdani now claims he didn’t really mean that violence was merely a “construct.”

I suppose Mamdani asked Jewish New Yorkers—the target of 44 percent of all hate crimes in the city—and discovered that their concussions and blood were all too real.

As a good soldier in the ranks of Black Lives Matter, Mamdani now insists he did not trash the police and advocate defunding them. Neither did he really, really mean to claim falsely he was African-American when he applied to college nor did really, really mean to do a video mocking the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.

Mamdani once thought it was cool to boast about defunding the police when he was an edgy, rising, left-wing community activist.

But then it was smarter to play it down as a candidate. And now it is essential to lie and deny it as a front-runner.

As a good communist, Mamdani echoed Karl Marx by bragging about his ultimate agenda: “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

But whose “means of production” would Mamdani start seizing?

Trump Tower? Tesla dealerships? Amazon warehouses?

Mamdani warns us, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly.”

Then, please tell us, how would you get rid of them?

Confiscate their money? Tax them at a 99 percent rate?

Maybe dox them and let the public handle the rest?

Mamdani brags he would “globalize the intifada.”

Given that most define the intifada (“shaking off”) as the two violent Palestinian waves of terrorism against Israel, what then does Mamdani mean by globalizing it?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Combatting Classroom Chaos A major problem that must be dealt with. by Larry Sand

By on July 7th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/combatting-classroom-chaos/

On April 23, President Trump signed an executive order directing public schools to develop student discipline policies without considering race and ethnicity. The order states, “The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology.”

The administration is justified in taking action. Restoring order to America’s classrooms requires reversing years of misguided federal policies that focused on racial quotas and therapeutic interventions. These policies have harmed academic achievement, endangered students, and made it more difficult for struggling students to get help. To succeed, the administration must respect local control while overcoming strong resistance from a deeply rooted education bureaucracy, whose radical agenda remains its primary goal.

Our current problems were intensified by a 2012 report from the Obama administration, which found that black students were “suspended, expelled, and arrested” at higher rates than white students. In response, the administration sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to state and local education agencies in 2014, warning of federal investigations if rates of “exclusionary discipline”—suspensions and expulsions—were racially disproportionate.

Not surprisingly, Obama’s redirect has been a disaster. Where schools have tried the racial bean-counting regimen, the results have been less than noteworthy. A North Carolina school districttried to improve discipline by implementing a policy that paid a non-profit over $800,000 to help develop. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools had fewer suspensions during the school year and no expulsions, part of a broader shift toward “equitable discipline.”

However, the district reported a higher crime rate than the previous year. Critics say the changes have worsened conditions for students because disruption in class is not being addressed.

Surveys consistently show that student behavior has declined over the past decade, with school violence and overall classroom disorder now at all-time highs.

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ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Struggles to Explain Why It Reported News to Traumatized Readers. – Jonathan Turley

By on July 7th, 2025

https://jonathanturley.org/2025/07/06/new-york-times-struggles-to-explain-why-it-reported-news-to-traumatized-readers/

This week, the New York Times experienced an uprising in its ranks and among its readers. The paper was denounced by its own staff and liberal pundits called for the entire editorial staff to be canned. Why? Because The New York Times actually reported news that was deemed harmful to the Democrats, specifically Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The newspaper took the additional step of publishing a cringing explanation of why it reported the news that Mamdani lied on his Columbia application in claiming to be black.For liberals, it was an utter nightmare. For a party still defined by identity politics, Mamdani’s false claim over his race left many uncertain about how to react.The left has always maintained a high degree of tolerance for false claims by its own leaders, from Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming to be a native American to Sen. Richard Blumenthal claiming to have served in the Vietnam War.

The problem is when a news eco-chamber for many readers is shattered by an errant outbreak of journalism. Many Times readers live within a hermetically sealed news silo, relying on MSNBC for cable, The New York Times for print, and BlueSky for social media. You can literally go all day without being exposed to an opposing view or fact. Then suddenly this happens.

The result is often anger. It is the same response many in higher education have to “triggering” views being expressed on campus by conservative or libertarian speakers.

The fact is that the Mamdani story was obvious news—and confirmed by the candidate himself. Mamdani identified as both Asian and African American on his 2009 Columbia University application, according to the New York Times.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Have We Reached Late-Stage Climate Hysteria?

By on July 7th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/07/have-we-reached-late-stage-climate-hysteria/

A United Nation’s report issued last month calls for the criminalization of spreading “disinformation and misinformation” about global warming. Is it the desperate act of a dying crusade – or business as usual for the climate fanatics?

While our hope is the former, it’s more likely the latter.

According to Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, governments should “criminalize misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry” as well as “criminalize media and advertising firms for amplifying disinformation and misinformation by fossil fuel companies.”

This is disturbing. Who gets to decide what is “disinformation and misinformation”? We’ve already seen, thanks to COVID-19, that the meaning of those words is determined exploitatively by the ruling class and the loudest voices, not by any objective means.

Just the News quotes experts who say the call for criminalization shows a growing desperation among the climate alarmists. Given that global warming has cooled off considerably as a pressing issue for the public, this rings true.

Yet demanding that skeptics be arrested and tried is not a fresh fantasy for the alarmists. They’ve been dreaming about a 21st-century inquisition of those who hold dissenting views (the Galileos of our time?) for more than a decade:

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island urged the Justice Department “to consider filing a racketeering suit against the oil and coal industries for having promoted wrongful thinking on climate change,” author Walter Olson noted in 2015.
Twenty “scientists” wrote a letter to President Barack Obama to “strongly endorse” Whitehouse’s “call for a RICO investigation.”
In 2016, a year after  17 attorneys general pursued fraud allegations against climate change skeptics, Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee that “the FBI was looking into information regarding climate change dissent and ‘whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on,’” the Washington Times reported.
Even before that, a hack writing for Gawker claimed that “man-made climate change kills a lot of people,” that “it’s going to kill a lot more,” and insisted that “it’s time to punish the climate-change liars.”
Bill Nye, “The Science Guy,” who is actually an engineer, said “we’ll see what happens” when asked about Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2014 wish that there was a law to “punish” skeptics and “deniers.” Nye said he thought the “chilling effect” of punishment against “scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change” was “good.”

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ISRAEL, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

After Missile Strike, Weizmann Lab Publishes Breathrough Leukemia Research By Tziona Gerson

By on July 7th, 2025

https://unitedwithisrael.org/after-missile-strike-weizmann-lab-publishes-breathrough-leukemia-research/

A simple blood test procedure could screen for leukemia non-invasively, well before symptoms begin to express, revolutionizing the ability of the medical community to effectively target and treat the disease.

During the Iranian missile attacks that rocked Israel in the second half of June, few stories captured the resilience of the Israeli spirit like the one that occurred at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

On June 15, Weizmann labs took a direct hit from Iranian ballistic missiles, obliterating years, and in some cases, lifetimes worth of irreplaceable scientific research.

While luckily there were no casualties, the hit was a significant loss to an institution dedicated to expanding the scope of human knowledge.

Notably, the Cancer Research Unit was severely impacted, with entire labs destroyed.

Yet despite the mayhem, a joint project led by Professors Liran Shlush and Amos Tanay published a startling breakthrough in leukemia diagnostics, which could fundamentally change the means of diagnosis and treatment of this infamously pernicious form of cancer.

Breakthrough in the bloodstream

Leukemia, or cancer of the blood, is an aggressive cancer that originates in bone marrow and causes rapid proliferation of malformed blood cells.

These cells compromise the body’s ability to fight infection and circulate oxygen.

Current screenings for leukemia require a bone marrow biopsy, a painful procedure to extract bone marrow and test for leukemic cells.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ted Kept His Cool, While Tucker was a Sucker Twelve days, no U.S. casualties, Iran’s nuclear threat neutralized—and Tucker Carlson is still busy losing arguments to Ted Cruz. By Arthur Schaper

By on July 7th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/06/ted-kept-his-cool-while-tucker-was-a-sucker/

The war between Israel and Iran lasted twelve days.

Instead of a broad coalition of Arab states trying to push the Jewish state into the sea, one Islamic Republic (read: dictatorship) faced Israel, isolated from all other Muslim nations. Syria wouldn’t help, and Iranian proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis couldn’t since Israel wiped them out already.

Following targeted bombing campaigns, the nuclear Iran that pundits feared is no longer. The Iranian people are rising in the streets, bolder than ever before. Some even celebrated Israeli (and American) strikes on the Ayatollah’s nuclear facilities, watching the explosions from their homes.

However, one self-important commentator was fretting about the United States being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict if Trump acted against Iran:

Tucker Carlson.

His doom and gloom bordered on hysterical.

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