ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Recognize Palestine Now? The timing of the UK’s announcement suggests there is more to the prime minister’s decision than fear of political retribution at the ballot box.By Daniel Allington

Posted By on August 8th, 2025

https://quillette.com/2025/08/08/why-recognise-palestine-now/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Most of the world’s nations now recognise a Palestinian state. In May 2024, the ranks of those nations were swelled by Spain, Ireland, and Norway. Under Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer, respectively, the French and British governments have now signalled their commitment to joining them in September. As conditions deteriorate in Gaza, one British government minister has even said that the UK should recognise the state of Palestine “while there is a state of Palestine left to recognise.”

Palestine is usually said to comprise Gaza and parts of the West Bank, with its capital in East Jerusalem. But in the real world, the West Bank enclave is ruled by Fatah, what remains of the Gaza Strip is still nominally ruled by Hamas, and East Jerusalem is not the capital of anything. With the two mutually hostile Palestinian parties locked in a frozen conflict, there is no prospect that either will hand over control to the other. And neither Hamas nor Fatah can be considered democratically legitimate because neither has held elections in decades.

So, what does it mean to recognise a physically discontinuous, politically divided polity as a single state? And why have no conditions for recognition been placed upon Hamas—a detail that has led some British commentators to see the promise of recognition as a reward for the pogrom of 7 October 2023?

I. History

The international expectation is that a Palestinian state will be established within borders “based upon” the 1949 armistice lines that existed on 4 June 1967, the day before the Six Day War. But no Palestinian state existed before that war. Indeed, no Palestinian state existed even before Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence. 

Until 1918, “Palestine” was a province of the Ottoman Empire: an impoverished backwater, ruled from Constantinople hundreds of miles away. And like most parts of the Ottoman Empire, it was inhabited by multiple ethnic groups. Following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire—which had picked the wrong side in the First World War—the territory was temporarily administered by the British under the name of “Mandatory Palestine.”

Throughout this period of British administration, there was substantial immigration from elsewhere in the Middle East. Many of the new arrivals were Jews, a persecuted minority in the Arab world, which had learnt (like many persecuted peoples of the day) to dream of national self-determination. Some Arabs wanted to make peace with the Jews, but the dominant force in Arab politics was Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and a Jew-hating Nazi collaborator.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Texas Redistricting Breaks The Democratic Party

Posted By on August 8th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/08/texas-redistricting-breaks-the-democratic-party/

Consider what has transpired in the past few weeks and ask yourself which political party is acting like petulant children.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department found that four Texas districts drawn in 2021 are “unconstitutionally racially biased” because they violate the equal protection clause and “must be rectified immediately.”

Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the Heritage Foundation, notes that not only did those Texas districts violate the Constitution, but the boundaries they drew in 2021 were based on faulty 2020 Census data, which had missed half a million Texans, and didn’t reflect the influx of 2 million people over the past five years.

So, the state redrew districts to pass constitutional muster and reflect the reality of Texas’ population, which, because it ends up creating more Republican-favored districts, sparked an unhinged national outrage.

Democratic state legislators fled Texas so they could block a vote on the new district boundaries – a flagrant attempt to thwart the democratic process that also violates Texas law.

Democratic leaders around the country lost their collective minds, beclowning themselves and the party they lead in the process.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that “Democrats are going to respond from coast to coast and at all points in between to this effort to steal the midterm elections.” (In 2021, Jeffries called Trump a “pathological liar” a “sociopath” and a “malignant narcissist” for claiming that Democrats stole the 2020 election,)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker proudly claimed to be providing sanctuary to the runaway Texans, “’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law.”

Pritzker claims to be fighting a valiant battle against “gerrymandering” – in which district lines are drawn purposely to favor one party or another. It’s is an unfortunate reality in politics, one hated by whichever party is on the losing end.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Meet the Zyklon B heiress who is sailing to Gaza Her forebears profited from the gas used to exterminate Jewish people. Now she rages against the Jewish state. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/06/meet-the-zyklon-b-heiress-who-is-sailing-to-gaza/

Sometimes something so perfect happens you find yourself Googling furiously to make sure it’s really true. The news that one Marlene Engelhorn from Austria is joining the next flotilla to Gaza is one such story. For Ms Engelhorn is an heiress of a German industrial dynasty that profited from the production of Zyklon B, the cyanide that was used to gas and slaughter millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Her family profited from the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people and now she rages against the Jewish State – who was it who said history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes?

Ms Engelhorn inherited $27.1million from her family’s coffers. And some of that generational wealth has pretty disgusting origins. She is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the German chemicals giant, BASF. In the 1920s, BASF merged with IG Farben. Some readers may have heard of that latter chemical conglomerate – its name lives in infamy as the producer of the poisonous gas the Nazis used to try to wipe the Jews from the face of the Earth. When her grandmother died in 2022, Ms Engelhorn got millions of Euros from this dynasty with a dark history.

And now she keeps herself busy by pontificating about the Jewish State. She’s been a key figure in Europe’s anti-Israel protests and next month she’ll set sail on the latest watery virtue-signal headed to Gaza to expose Israel’s ‘genocide’. Hen Mazzig put it best: so this is a ‘white, privileged, nepo baby’ whose family wealth comes in part from Nazi Germany’s ‘mass murder of Jews’ and she is ‘also anti-Israel’? ‘I did not see that coming’, he quipped, with excellent sarcasm.

Look, I am not for one minute suggesting Ms Engelhorn inherited her ancestors’ Nazi tendencies as well as their cash. And she is far from the first privileged white lady, or even the first nepo baby, to wang on morning, noon and night about the wickedness of Israel. The ‘pro-Palestine’ movement is lousy with aristocrats and leftists from Old Money and the overeducated middle classes who believe Israel is committing genocide as fervently as they believe you can have a todger and be a lesbian. Britain is especially bad. We’re overrun with Posh Twats for Palestine. Honestly, not since the days of Unity Mitford have I heard so many cut-glass voices hold forth on the ‘Jewish problem’.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ian Kingsbury Medical Schools Still Discriminate Based on Race, Records Show The Trump administration should investigate them to stop potential violations of federal civil rights laws.

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/medical-schools-racial-discrimination

It’s been two years since the Supreme Court banned racial discrimination in college admissions. Nonetheless, at medical schools, evidence suggests that the discrimination continues.

That’s my conclusion after submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 public medical schools. I asked for several years of admissions data, including on students who matriculated in 2024, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. I sought data on race, undergraduate grades, MCAT scores, and admission status, in order to assess whether racial disparities in admission standards persisted after the decision.

Twenty-three medical schools have answered my request, including flagship institutions in states like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri, New Mexico, and Colorado. The data they provided make it clear that schools are at least skirting the Supreme Court’s decision, if not violating it outright.

Accepted black applicants had lower average MCAT scores than accepted white or Asian students at all but one school, Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Thirteen schools accepted black students with average MCAT scores lower than the score of the average rejected Asian or white applicant. That suggests black applicants receive significant preferential treatment.

In fact, at two schools—Eastern Virginia Medical School and the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health—black applicants were about ten times likelier to be accepted than were Asian and white applicants with similar grades and test scores.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why DEI Was Already Dying DEI is collapsing under its own contradictions—no longer able to define who qualifies, who deserves preference, or why identity should outweigh merit. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/07/why-dei-was-already-dying/

Donald Trump’s executive orders banning Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI)-related racial and gender preferencing have ostensibly doomed the DEI industry.

But DEI was already on its last legs. Half of all Americans no longer approve of racial, ethnic, or gender preferences.

DEI had enjoyed a surge following the death of George Floyd and the subsequent 120 days of nonstop rioting, arson, assaults, killings, and attacks on law enforcement during the summer of 2020.

In those chaotic years, DEI was seen as the answer to racial tensions.

DEI had insidiously replaced the old notion of affirmative action—a 1960s-era government remedy for historical prejudices against black Americans, from the legacy of slavery to Jim Crow segregation.

But during the Obama era, “diversity” superseded affirmative action by offering preferences to many groups well beyond black Americans.

Quite abruptly, Americans began talking in Marxist binaries.

On one side were the supposed 65–70 percent white majority “oppressors” and “victimizers”—often stereotyped as exuding “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” or even “white rage.”

They were juxtaposed to the 25–30 percent of “diverse” Americans, the so-called “oppressed” and “victimized.”

Yet almost immediately, contradictions and hypocrisies undermined DEI.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Urgent: Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization – Now by Robert Williams

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21819/muslim-brotherhood-foreign-terrorist-organization

A bill, H.R.3883 (Muslim Brotherhood Is a Terrorist Organization Act of 2025), was put forward on June 10, 2025 by US Senator Ted Cruz, “[to] require the Secretary of State to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization.” This designation is crucial for both US and international security. Even then, if the US government makes the FTO designation, this alone is not enough to slow down the aggression that the Muslim Brotherhood is still generating throughout the world.

“Qatar is at the top of funding terrorism worldwide, even more than Iran.” — Udi Levy, former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, who dealt with economic warfare against terrorist organizations, Ynet, April 18, 2024.

Currently, President Donald Trump is selling the Qataris the weapons with which they and their terrorist protegees hope to destroy the US!

In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood listed 29 organizations that it envisioned working toward a “grand jihad” to undermine Western civilization. Several of the organizations mentioned in the document still operate within the United States, working actively towards America’s demise, while new ones have been formed based on the original ones: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and its various subgroups, the Muslim Students Association, American Muslims for Palestine and Students for Justice in Palestine, all of which were formed in the 1990s.

As the US, Canada and the entire West remain vulnerable, the Muslim Brotherhood doubtless could not be happier. Qatar’s rulers probably cannot believe how easily its influence was bought — and how agreeably the West sold its soul for petrodollars.

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Designating the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in the United States is a basic first step in countering the organization’s corrosive influence. The MB has spread extremism, instability and terrorism from the Middle East to the rest of the world, not least in the US and Europe, with affiliates of the organization spread across at least 70 other countries.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

UN Admits 95% of its Gaza Aid Trucks Were “Intercepted” After 5% success rate, UN demands another $265 million or everyone will starve. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/un-admits-95-of-its-gaza-aid-trucks-were-intercepted/

Over the past few weeks, the UN, the EU, the media and Hamas banded together to demand that aid deliveries shift back from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to the United Nations.

The campaign played out with Hamas kidnapping, torturing and killing employees of the U.S. aid group, while the media spread false claims that Israel was using GHF distribution sites as ‘death traps’ for killing Gazans, and world leaders demanded that the UN be put back in charge of aid.

Back when the UN had been in charge it had faked its own famine by refusing to deliver food and letting it pile up instead. Since then the UN’s food aid has kept on piling up even while GHF, an American Christian aid group, has managed to deliver millions of meals to Gaza residents, despite being smeared by the media as “controversial” for feeding those whom the UN wouldn’t.

Whom was the UN actually delivering aid to back when it even bothered trying to deliver it?

The UNOPS ‘Mechanism for Gaza’ revealed that of the around 2,600 aid trucks entering Gaza, only 300 made it to their destination. 2,310 trucks or 88% of them were ‘intercepted’.

Much of the ‘aid’ being brought in by the UN and its allies, including the UN’s WFP, UNICEF, the International Red Cross, the International Medical Corps and the World Central Kitchen, whose founder Jose Andres, has been constantly attacking Israel in the media, was ‘intercepted’.

Cindy McCain’s UN World Food Programme (WFP), which has been front and center in the media, crying for more money and denouncing Trump and Israel, only successfully delivered 1,864 pallets of aid since May while losing 29,673 pallets or 93% of it to “interceptions”.

The UN’s WFP recently claimed that it has run out of food stocks and needs $265 million for just the next 6 months to feed Gaza. Where did its food stocks go? Certainly not to aid stations.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Unbearable Lightness of the Woke Mind “Political correctness” pales next to the stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous lies of wokeness. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 7th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unbearable-lightness-of-the-woke-mind/

Back in the days when the grown-ups ran things, there was a gag about an elderly woman who called the cops on her neighbor for standing naked in his window on the tenth floor across the street. When the officer arrived, he looked out the window and said, “I can’t see any naked man.” The old lady scoffed and said, “Of course not! You’re not using the binoculars!”

Until the peevish, thin-skinned, self-selected cultural hall monitors took over the culture, I never dreamed that such preposterous, invented affronts could be taken seriously enough to be sanctioned as “hate speech” against politically selected “victims,” and subjected to censorship, abuse, and harassment.

What we used to call “political correctness” ––a phrase from the Thirties frequently used to compliment fanatic adherents of totalitarian regimes––as damaging as it was, pales next to the sheer stupidity, toxic hyperbole, and preposterous big lies that have flourished during the Trump decade and the left’s political meltdown. Their complaints and attacks with obsessive ad Hitlerum fallacy are dog-bites-man stories, and usually are just traffic noise for normal grown-ups.

But recently, the “woke” Stasi outdid themselves with their attack on actress and model Sydney Sweeney’s advertisement for American Eagle’s new line of jeans. In one video, Sweeney changed an American Eagle billboard featuring her tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” by crossing out “genes” and replacing it with “jeans.”

Passionate intensity ensued, some haters calling the ad “a dog whistle for eugenics.” Things got worse when Sweeney commented, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color.” This obvious truth really riled up the permanently offended race-hacks, who whipped out their ideological binoculars and took off virtue signaling. They discovered that Sweeney’s comments and visuals were all about eugenics and “white supremacism,” along with a nod to Nazism’s crackpot race theories.

This juvenile tantrum reveals the “woke’s” trademark ignorance of history. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin who invented the term eugenics, applied Darwin’s theory of “fitness for survival” to the mind, morals, and character of human beings. Galton, Robert Zubrin points out, saw human nature “almost as plastic as clay under the control of the breeder’s will,” and said the “unfit” must be kept from procreating, for “if these continued,” Galton warned, “to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Righting Our Sinking Educational Ship The race hustlers and money grubbers must go, while the importance of intact families, rewarding the best teachers, closing failing schools, and phonics must be stressed. By Larry Sand

Posted By on August 6th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/06/righting-our-sinking-educational-ship/

Public education in our country is struggling, and many proposed solutions are of no help whatsoever. First, too many people in the field are fixated on race. For example, many education schools partner with the Racial Justice in Early Math teaching fellowship, whose one-year program “helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math.”

Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Washington, participated in the program in 2023–2024. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a typical response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”

On the other side of the country, New York City might elect a race-obsessed mayor in November. Currently a New York State Assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani has supported legislation to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test—the only merit-based standard used to admit students to Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, three of the top high schools in the country. These schools have graduation rates above 99% and college placement rates over 90%. Mamdani and his allies say they want to boost diversity, but replacing merit with subjectivity doesn’t fix inequality—it just lowers standards. The real problem isn’t admissions tests; it’s the K-8 schools’ failure to prepare students properly.

Mamdani has also co-authored a bill that allocates $8 million in taxpayer money to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) teacher hiring programs. These funds prioritize demographic quotas over merit. Meanwhile, New York’s teacher workforce is already diverse: a 2023 report showed that 42% of teachers identify as Black and 29% as Hispanic—figures that exceed those communities’ representation in the city’s overall population.

And then there are the money grubbers, and no one is better at this than Vermont’s socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. He has introduced legislation to address the “teacher pay crisis in America” and ensure that all public school teachers earn a “livable and competitive wage that is at least $60,000 a year and increases throughout their career.”

This is nonsense. Just Facts examined teacher pay data and found that, in the 2021–22 school year, the average school teacher in the U.S. earned $66,397 in salary and received an additional $34,090 in benefits, including health insurance, paid leave, and pensions, totaling $100,487 in overall compensation.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli MKs: Taiwan Must Be Included in International Organizations by Anna Mahjar-Barducci

Posted By on August 6th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21815/israel-taiwan-china

The MKs are calling for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in global bodies, with a particular emphasis on health, transportation, environmental protection, and human rights.

The declaration, signed at the end of July, praises Taiwan as “a vibrant democracy committed to promoting the values of freedom, equality, human rights, and the rule of law, all in a challenging geopolitical environment.” It highlights Taiwan’s “impressive contributions during times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Taiwan was a global leader in finding solutions and assisting other countries,” and arguing that its exclusion from organizations such as the World Health Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is both “unjustified and irresponsible.”

This is the first and important step to counter the “one-China” policy. To break this “one-China” policy — a policy that leaves the door open for China’s military to attack Taiwan — members of parliament from other countries, as many as possible, would do well immediately to band together and issue similar declarations. Such a move in a large number of countries at the same time could prevent a great deal of bloodshed down the road.

In a significant diplomatic gesture, 72 Israeli Members of Knesset (MKs), representing parties from both the ruling coalition and the opposition, have signed a declaration advocating for Taiwan’s inclusion in international organizations. This unprecedented cross-party initiative underscores a growing sentiment of solidarity with Taiwan, particularly in light of its steadfast support for Israel following the massacre of October 7, 2023.

The declaration, spearheaded by MK Boaz Toporovsky (Yesh Atid), chair of the Israel–Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Association, and joined by MK Ohad Tal (Religious Zionist Party), chair of the Israel–US Relations Caucus, explicitly states that “Taiwan’s systematic exclusion from international forums is unjustified.” The MKs are calling for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in global bodies, with a particular emphasis on health, transportation, environmental protection, and human rights.