‘A Covenant of Blood’ Between Druze and Israel Israel’s moral battle to protect the Druze. by Christine Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-covenant-of-blood-between-druze-and-israel/

Just when you think the New York Times couldn’t sink any lower, after favorably showcasing and quoting Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, along with his “warning” that “Israeli attacks threaten ‘chaos’ in Syria,” the Times went on to serve as al-Sharaa’s mouthpiece by reporting that his attacks on the Druze were based on the paranoia of the Druze community. The Times stated that the Druze “deeply distrust Syria’s new authorities” and “thought that the government forces were coming to attack the Druze. The militias then mobilized to repel the incoming government forces.”

The Druze community in Syria is anything but naïve or jumpy. They are astute, know their enemy, and are of vital importance to Israel for strategic and historical reasons. The predominantly Druze city of Sweida is not far from the Israeli border. The Arab Weekly explains why the Druze are so critically important to Israel as allies, stating, “Beneath the moral justification lies a layer of realpolitik. Southern Syria has long been a zone of strategic anxiety for Israel”:

Unlike Muslim and Christian Arabs, Druze men are conscripted into the military. They serve in elite combat units, rise to high ranks in the IDF, and have long been held up as a model of Arab integration. Several senior military officers, intelligence officials and Knesset members are Druze.

The Middle East Institute points out that Druze political and military forces “wield a great deal of influence” in Sweida province, where they have “established checkpoints,” “enacted community policing,” and clashed with jihad terror groups whenever they “made incursions into the province.” Some of these clashes have been with Hizballah.

Newsweek points out a deep history of loyalty that binds Israel and the Druze together:

Druze in Israel have forged what is often referred to as “a covenant of blood” with the Jewish state. Jethro—the biblical prophet Moses’ father-in-law—is the most important prophet in the Druze religion and the ancestor of all Druze. Alongside the Jewish majority, the Druze in Israel are the only religious community that is required by law to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (at the request of Druze religious and communal leaders).

The Hill notes the immediate source of the Sunni government of al-Sharaa’s desire to persecute the Druze: the “Druze are Arabs but not Muslims,” even though the Druze religion is an offshoot of Islam that originated a millennium ago.

Posh Twats for Palestine How Israelophobia became the favoured hobby of the filthy rich. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/21/posh-twats-for-palestine/

I knew it. As soon as I saw that cast member of the Royal Opera House smugly unfurl his Palestine flag, I knew he’d be some privileged they / them with either blue blood or blue hair. And I was right. His name’s Daniel Perry, he’s a they / them, he was educated at a £48,000-a-year high school, and he calls himself a ‘queer dance artist’. Now all we need to discover is that he has ADHD and he really will be a walking checklist of middle-class twattishness.

Mr Perry has got the pro-Palestine set salivating with infantile glee after he whipped out his flag during the curtain call for Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Saturday evening. A stage manager tried to snatch it from him but Perry yanked it back with all the wild-eyed frenzy of a bloke determined to trend online. He got his way. He’s being gushed over by the internet’s Sun-starved army of armchair Israelophobes. ‘Hero!’, they yelp from their bedrooms, the unbelievably sad bastards.

The Telegraph has Perry’s backstory. He attended an eye-wateringly expensive school in leafy Hertfordshire. He’s nonbinary – sorry, they’re nonbinary. He’s a self-styled ‘queer’ dancer. He seems blissfully unaware that if he ever set foot in Gaza the only pirouette he’d be doing is a mid-air one as Hamas hurled him off a tall building. He recently wore a ‘Free Palestine’ t-shirt to a performance of Cabaret, the musical about the Weimar Republic that foreshadows the rise of the Nazis and the burning of the Jews.

It didn’t take any special insight on my part to guess that this flag-waving irritant would turn out to be a knob of the most insufferably bourgeois variety. Because they’re all like that. Perry belongs to that most vexing clique of preening ‘activists’ – let’s call them Posh Twats for Palestine.

They’re everywhere. Venture into London on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll soon be swarmed by affluent tits in keffiyehs talking rubbish about Israel. Our leafier campuses have been all but colonised by plummy youths screaming the new lie (‘Israel is committing genocide!’) with the same demented fervour with which they once hollered the old lie (‘Transwomen are women!’). The am-dram arseholes of Palestine Action loved to splash around their red paint while wanging on in cut-glass tones about the unholy wickedness of Israel. The government calls them terrorists but they’re something far worse: rich theatre kids.

Yael Bar Tur Activists Say the Anti-Israel Cause Is Mainstream. New York Proves It’s Not Despite the rise in hate crimes, not everyone wants to “normalize the Intifada.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-jews-israel-hamas-anti-semitic

You knew something was off when Kylie Jenner deleted her Instagram story. On October 7, 2023, as terrorists dragged hostages into Gaza and roamed the streets of Israel, the reality star posted that she “stand[s] with” the Jewish state, a familiar “thoughts and prayers” gesture, typical of celebrities after tragedies.

But faced with a backlash from her millions of followers, Jenner deleted the post. Others followed suit, removing their own expressions of solidarity. The message was clear: acknowledging Israel’s suffering had become, at best, “problematic”—and, at worst, unwelcome in polite society.

Silence has become all too familiar to American Jews. They’ve experienced it from international organizations and women’s advocates in the face of the devastating evidence of Hamas’s sex crimes; from academic institutions as Jewish students were harassed on elite university campuses; and from fellow New Yorkers amid rising anti-Semitic hate crimes, particularly in New York City.

That silence has been broken—not by Jewish defenders, but by voices that accept or even condone violence against Jews, Zionists, and the people of Israel. Arguments once unthinkable are now aired openly: that the atrocities of October 7 were justified resistance; that Israel should be abolished; that terrorists held in Israeli prisons are morally equivalent with Jewish civilians held hostage in Gaza.

These views have proliferated in part because of our academic institutions. Schools offer students a distorted, one-dimensional portrait of the Middle East. They depict the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a simplistic struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Young users on social media, where many Americans get their news, see these views reinforced in short, viral videos.

Iran: Its Foreign Ministry’s Agents of Influence in Sweden and the US by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21770/iran-agents-sweden

The “Iran Experts Initiative” (IEI)… was first proposed in 2014 by… a member of the internal think tank of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the “Institute for Political and International Studies” (IPIS).

Ali Vaez and Ariane Tabatabai… were also members of the IEI.

How can all these prominent think tanks and influential experts enter into cooperation with IPIS, which — apart from being an integral part of the Iranian regime — organized a Holocaust conference in 2006 featuring Holocaust deniers such as David Duke and the neo-Nazi German National Democratic Party (NPD)?

The purpose of the IEI for the Iranian regime has been to establish a number of reputable and knowledgeable contacts who support the idea of a “nuclear deal” — which, in the long run, means that the regime in Iran will get nuclear weapons — and to promote Iran’s perspective on this nuclear deal and its desired structure in Western Europe and North America.

[T]he Swedish Security Service considers Iran to be one of the three countries that pose the greatest threat to Sweden.

Does anyone seriously believe the mullahs’ lies that they do not want to build nuclear weapons?

If the mullahs truly wanted peace, they would dismantle their support for terrorist organizations, abandon their ambitions to build nuclear weapons, stop pouring resources into fueling conflicts in neighboring countries, and cease spreading hatred toward the Western world.

The door must be closed to these lobbyists for the Iranian regime…. The mullahs’ regime is an enemy of the West, but the mullahs’ lobbyists must be treated as enemies, too.

On January 31, Sweden’s TV4 reported that leaked documents from Iran’s Foreign Ministry linked Iran expert Rouzbeh Parsi, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, to a network initiated by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, with the aim of increasing the country’s influence in the West. Since 75% of the funding for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs comes from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard (pictured), demanded more information regarding these allegations. (Photo by Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images)

On January 31, Sweden’s TV4 reported that leaked documents from Iran’s Foreign Ministry linked Iran expert Rouzbeh Parsi, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, to a network initiated by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, with the aim of increasing the country’s influence in the West.

Why Al-Jazeera Should Be Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21773/designate-al-jazeera-terrorist-organization

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Al-Jazeera has been openly serving as the unofficial mouthpiece of Hamas and its military wing, Izaddin al-Qassam.

Even before the war, Hamas’s political and military leaders often chose Al-Jazeera to spread their propaganda and call for jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Hamas knows it can trust Al-Jazeera: the two share the same radical Islamist ideology that calls for the elimination of Israel and replacing it with an Islamist terror state.

Hamas does not need its own television station. It has Al-Jazeera, one of the most influential and wealthiest TV networks in the Arab world. This is what happens when most of the funding comes from Qatar, which has used its ties with Islamist groups, especially Muslim Brotherhood, as soft power to boost its regional and global influence.

Al-Jazeera, for its part, has been extremely protective of its friends in Hamas. The television station does not allow any criticism of Hamas or Qatar. When a Palestinian dares to criticize Hamas during a live interview, Al-Jazeera quickly cuts off the interview.

Last year, Israeli security forces disclosed intelligence information and numerous documents found in the Gaza Strip that confirm the military affiliation of six Al-Jazeera journalists with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in the coastal territory.

One does not have to be an expert in journalism or the Middle East to understand that Al-Jazeera is nothing but a terrorist organization masquerading as a media outlet.

A number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain understand the dangers of Al-Jazeera.

That is why they have shut the offices of Al-Jazeera, blocked its websites and demanded that Qatar curb the television station. Even the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas… suspended Al-Jazeera’s broadcasting in the West Bank….

Why do some Americans and Westerners still consider Al-Jazeera a credible and professional media station if so many Arabs view it as an organ of Islamist terrorists and Jihadis? … It is time to designate Al-Jazeera as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

On June 18, the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera TV network (in Arabic) broadcast another “exclusive” video of a speech by Abu Obaida, the masked spokesman of the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas.

This is the group that started the current war in the Gaza Strip, when thousands of its members invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and wounding thousands. Another 251 Israelis and foreign nationals were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 50 are still held captive. At least 20 of those hostages are believed to be alive.

It did not come as a surprise that the video of the Hamas spokesman was first broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Al-Jazeera has been openly serving as the unofficial mouthpiece of Hamas and its military wing, Izaddin al-Qassam.

Use It or Lose It by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28730/use-it-or-lose-it

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Use it or lose it is the colloquial definition of neuroplasticity, defined in more technical terms by BetterHelp online in its, February 19, 2025, article “What ‘Use It Or Lose It’ Means in Neuropsychology”:

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the central nervous system to form and reorganize neural connections in response to injury or a learning event. This trait allows the human brain to adapt and change depending on events or experiences. Human brains can adapt through learning when an individual practices a task repeatedly. However, if they do not follow through with this repetition, this adaptive ability is lost, and they lose these possible new neural pathways until they return to the practice. This phenomenon is often referred to as the central nervous system’s “use it or lose it” insurance policy.

Why is neuroplasticity so important? Because neuroplasticity is the process that establishes agency in human beings, and because neurological processes can be used constructively or exploited for destruction. In my 2024 book, Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is, Chapter 5: America Requires an Education Revolution explains the concept of agency, and how agency is required for freedom in a constitutional republic.

Reading is the essential foundational skill individual citizens use to access information and make informed decisions. Together, reading, writing, and arithmetic are the communication tools that equip children with agency. Understanding the psychological concept of agency is extremely important to our discussion. Encyclopedia.com[i] defines and discusses agency:

The concept of agency as a psychological dimension refers to the process of behaving with intentionality. Human beings exercise agency when they intentionally influence their own functioning, environments, life circumstances, and destiny. To posit that human beings have agency is to contend that they are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting rather than reactively shaped by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses.

Reading provides agency for learning because textbooks, including math and science textbooks, require the ability to read. Reading provides a sense of independence, accomplishment, and self-sufficiency. Competence is the mother of self-esteem, and learning to read is a seismic shift in a child’s perception of self. The child begins to feel his or her power.

We are coming apart How asylum, multiculturalism and contempt for the masses turned Britain into a tinder box. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/20/we-are-coming-apart/

It’s been almost a year since the Southport massacre. That sunny morning, etched forever in infamy, when Axel Rudakubana committed his barbaric, depraved murders of three young girls at a dance class in the Merseyside seaside town. It sparked the worst anti-migrant riots Britain has seen in modern times, fuelled by false claims Rudakubana was a Muslim, small-boats asylum seeker. But to anyone who had been paying attention, the seeds of that horrific unrest were sown long before that.

Before Southport, Middlesbrough, Rotherham and many more towns and cities descended into nihilistic violence last summer, with peaceful protests being overrun by racists and opportunists trying to burn down migrant hotels and pelting mosques with bottles and bricks, there were plenty of signs that something was about to snap.

In Knowsley, also in Merseyside, in February 2023, a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers was leapt on by troublemakers and turned into a riot. The protest was called after a young girl was allegedly propositioned by a migrant on the street. This detail was naturally omitted in much of the mainstream media’s coverage, even though local media had covered it and the police were investigating. The true blame, the broadcasters piously intoned, lay with ‘misinformation’.

This pattern keeps repeating itself. A violent or sexual crime allegedly committed by a migrant causes tensions to flare, while the media and politicians play dumb. We saw it again in Ballymena last month, where the attempted oral rape of a girl by two Romanian Roma boys was followed by days of rioting, first targeting the homes of the alleged rapists before spilling over into undiscerning racist rage – visited upon innocent migrants, too. Heartbreakingly, members of the area’s thriving Filipino community took to putting signs on their doors, bearing Union flags and the words ‘Filipino lives here’, in the hopes they would be spared from the carnage.

THIS DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY-

The first moon landing, part of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, occurred on July 20, 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Module “Eagle” on the moon. Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon approximately six and a half hours later, on July 21, 1969, at 02:56 UTC. 

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Pope Leo calls up and congratulates Buzz Aldrin on the 54th anniversary of the moon landing By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/07/pope_leo_calls_up_and_congratulates_buzz_aldrin_on_the_54th_anniversary_of_the_moon_landing.html

Pope Leo XIV continues to be a pope of pleasant surprises. He actually tweeted this out, as if he were a bit excited about it:

“This evening, 56 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, I spoke with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Together we shared the memory of a historic feat, a testimony to human ingenuity, and we reflected on the mystery and greatness of Creation.”

Who saw that coming?

We know the pope majored in math in college, probably because he liked it — but imagine that it extended to an admiration for space travel and celestial things from its practical side — who knew?

For the rest of it, it was a wonderful reminder of America’s greatest moment, one that has yet to be surpassed, the successful launch to the moon in less than a decade after John F. Kennedy called for it — done on slide-rule technology. They didn’t even have pocket calculators.

Lurie Children’s Hospital Leftists Increase Stress for Parents A children’s hospital stay should comfort families—not confront them with activist symbols, controversial ideologies, and moral agendas masked as care. By Laurie Higgins

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/20/lurie-childrens-hospital-leftists-increase-stress-for-parents/

My young granddaughter was just discharged from Lurie Hospital after a six-day stay preceded by two weeks of headaches and daily vomiting. Her stay included blood draws, an EKG, an MRI, and a lumbar puncture. While the medical care she received was excellent, the visit was egregiously marred by the ignorance and lack of compassion demonstrated by the “LGBTQ+” activism seen everywhere.

Most of the staff who entered her room wore the controversial political “pride” flag pins designed by Daniel Quasar, which incorporate the “trans” “pride” flag designed by Monica Helms.

Quasar is a middle-aged man who identifies as “non-binary” and uses “they/them” pronouns (eyeroll). “Monica” Helms is an elderly cross-dressing man who is faux-married to another elderly cross-dressing man.

During the week at Lurie, it was rare to see a staff member not wearing the controversial pins.

And it was not just pins.

A desk attendant stationed just outside my granddaughter’s room and who entered her room was a young Asian man wearing long ladies’ fake fingernails painted a frosty white. A bald male doctor from Infectious Diseases who visited her room wore long, dangling women’s earrings.

Imagine how theologically orthodox Christian, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish parents, already under extraordinary stress,s feel about having to explain the pins and peculiar fashion accouterments of adult staff to their young, sick children.

The hospital made available a “pride” craft in the Panda Room that said something like, “We are a family of love.” Apparently, affirming disordered feelings and risky experimental medical “treatments” is akin to love in the moral universe that Lurie has socially constructed.

If parents believe homoerotic acts are not moral acts or if they believe healthy, properly functioning bodies are good and ought not be chemically or surgically manipulated, they are hateful.

And the library section of the Panda Room had displays of picture books intended to normalize homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation. The display included ABC Pride, Kind Like Marsha: Learning from LGBTQ+ Leaders, and perhaps worst of all, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag.