FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump, Vance Shut Down Zelensky in Jaw-Dropping White House Confrontation And the Left is apoplectic about it. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on March 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-vance-berate-zelensky-in-jaw-dropping-white-house-confrontation/

In an astounding public exchange between world leaders in the White House, President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance gave Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky a dressing-down that demonstrated American resolve to end business-as-usual for the Ukraine money pit and bring the war with Russia to an end.

Things got off to an awkward start from the very moment Zelensky arrived dressed in his usual  performative, combat-ready green sweatshirt, cargo pants and boots, as if he might have to rush back to the front lines against Russia at any moment. As the Ukrainian leader exited his motorcade, Trump shook his hand and wise-cracked to the press, “He’s all dressed up today.”

Once inside the White House room packed with reporters and cameras, there were 40 minutes of reasonable, calm discussion before Zelensky made what former US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called a “terrible, unforced error” by demanding security assurances before agreeing to a minerals deal with the U.S. He also argued that previous American Presidents including Trump 1.0 did nothing to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against his country, and therefore the kind of diplomacy with Putin that Vance was urging was pointless.

This prompted an immediate and sharp rebuke from Vance, who upbraided him for “litigating” the war in front of the cameras: “Do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?”

The conversation went off a cliff from there, as Zelensky went on to employ the blackmail tactic of claiming that the U.S. has the privilege of “nice oceans” between us and Russia, but that if we don’t help him defeat Putin now, Americans will “feel it in the future.”

Trump then sternly interjected, “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel, because you’re in no position to dictate that.”

An increasingly angry Zelensky tried to talk over Trump, who continued, “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with World War Three. And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country – this country – that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A vile equivalence Jews who support the Palestinian death cult pose the greatest danger to the Jewish people Melanie Phillips

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Noa Argamani, the Israeli hostage who was rescued from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last June, addressed the UN Security Council this week. She spoke about being abducted into a “world of torture and humiliation,” where she tried to comfort two small girls who had been dragged with her into the darkness of the Hamas tunnels and where she saw her fellow hostage, Itai Svirsky, brutally murdered.

Her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was dragged into the Gaza Strip with her, remains in captivity. Of the 63 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.

Argamani’s raw testimony was a necessary corrective to the unconscionable indifference in the halls of the United Nations to Israeli suffering, and its shocking embrace of Israel’s genocidal attackers.

Shortly afterward, however, someone else addressed the Security Council. This was Daniel Levy, the British former Israeli peace negotiator and now president of the US/Middle East Project think tank.

Referring to Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the murdered Israeli infant hostages who were buried in Israel in heartbreaking scenes the following day, he said:

A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.

What a breathtakingly vile comment. Hamas terrorists murdered nine month-old Kfir and four year-old Ariel with their bare hands and mutilated their bodies to conceal the crime. How could anyone equate this monstrous depravity with the fate of children in Gaza killed unintentionally in a war to defend Israel against genocide — killed, moreover, because Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields and cannon fodder?

Moreover, the 18,000 figure is merely a claim by Hamas that notoriously makes no distinction between dead civilians and combatants, has reclassified numerous adult fatalities as children and includes as “children” teenagers who serve as Hamas gunmen.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria: Muslims Kidnapping, Possibly Torturing, Christians by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21438/syria-kidnapping-torturing-christians

After forces from the al-Qaeda affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) terrorist group conquered Damascus and overthrew Syria’s Assad regime in December 2024, they urged the residents of the Valley of the Christians to surrender any weapons they kept for self-defense, telling them that civilians would not be harmed. Since the jihadists’ takeover of Syria, however, around 500,000 Christians in the country have been faced with increased persecution and abductions

On February 16, more Christians… were abducted from another village in the area. Their kidnappers, according to sources on the ground, are torturing them.

“HTS’s successive renamings and ‘rebrandings’ appear to echo al-Qaeda’s own strategy in Syria of establishing branches and presenting them as locally-grown organizations arising in response to Syrians’ needs…” — US Commission on International Religious Freedom, November 2022.

Al-Sharaa recently started dressing in a suit and tie, and is now presenting himself to the West as a “moderate.” He has spoken of plans to form an inclusive transitional government representing diverse communities that will build institutions and run the country until it can hold free and fair elections. In schoolbooks, however, his government has been replacing the word “law” with “sharia,” and has been using Islamic teaching to recruit the country’s new army.

“Under HTS-control in Idlib, Christian clergy are not allowed to walk outside in any clothing that makes them recognisable as priests or pastors. Crosses have been removed from church buildings.” — Open Doors, December 2024.

“Islam does not tolerate other cultures.” — “Christina,” a Greek Christian in Syria, to Gatestone, January 2025.

“The new Syria should not be established without parties that represent the minority groups in the country, such as Christians, Kurds, Druze, and Alawites. The official recognition and acceptance of the jihadists by Western governments is like placing swords on the necks of Christians in particular and everyone who disagrees with them in general.” – “Christina,” a Greek Christian in Syria, to Gatestone, January 2025.

Sadly, the persecution of Christians in Syria’s “Valley of the Christians” (Wadi al-Nasara), overwhelmingly inhabited by Greeks originally from Antioch, has been escalating. Antioch is a city in today’s Turkey (now known as Antakya), near the country’s border with Syria. It is among the Turkish cities from which, in the last century, Greeks were forcibly expelled.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

American Psychological Association Slammed for ‘Virulent’ Jew Hate Thousands of mental health professionals have signed a complaint accusing the world’s largest psychological organization of growing antisemitism.Sally Satel

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/american-psychological-association-antisemitism-complaint

More than 3,500 mental health professionals have sent a letter to the leaders of the world’s largest psychological association, rebuking them for allowing “virulent antisemitism” to fester in their ranks.

The letter, sent last night, calls upon the president and the board of the American Psychological Association (APA) to “address the serious and systemic problem of antisemitism/anti-Jewish hate.” The APA, which was established in 1892, has 173,000 members.

The 3,556 signers, who submitted the letter to APA president Debra Kawahara and the 15 additional members of the board of directors, claim that “Jewish APA members have been harassed, marginalized, and silenced on APA community forums even for attempting to challenge antisemitic rhetoric or correct misinformation.”

The signers, who comprise thousands of APA members and other psychological professionals, write that they “have documented extensive evidence of antisemitic discourse and concerning behavior across APA divisions.”

Their examples include:

APA-hosted listservs that “contain antisemitic discourse, often masked as anti-Zionism, including statements like ‘Kudos to Hamas’ and calls for ‘Intifada, Intifada,’ which are synonymous with calls for violence and murder against Jewish and Israeli civilians.”

Numerous calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel—“an initiative to demonize, delegitimize, and isolate the state of Israel including Israeli academics.”

APA conferences where speakers “notorious for antisemitic rhetoric” have been invited and made official statements that rationalize “violence against Jews and Israelis; antisemitic tropes; Holocaust distortion; minimization of Jewish victimization, fear, and grief; and pathologizing of Jewish people’s connection to their indigenous homeland.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Eric Kaufmann Time for Populism to Grow Up It’s an important check on undemocratic liberalism, but its practitioners must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship and toward a vision of national unity.

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/liberal-democracy-trump-populism-conservatives

The Trump administration is hitting its allies with tariffs, pulling out of international agreements, withdrawing U.S. support for Ukraine, pardoning January 6 rioters who attacked police, and going after the Department of Justice. At the precise moment when liberal elites are lamenting their overreach on wokeness and mass immigration, these actions risk discrediting national conservatism across the western world.

Populism, which Trump has embodied, is an important check on what Yascha Mounk has termed undemocratic liberalism. However, national populists must move beyond “tear it all down” partisanship to construct a new, mainstream vision of national unity. The negative impulses of populism need to be reined in: we need a rational populism. Liberal institutions must learn from the populist moment, and populists need a vision for the institutions.

As progressivism has triumphed in the culture, its irrational and illiberal strands have come to the fore. This has pushed classical-liberal rationalists to the right, and convinced traditional conservatives to back free speech and Enlightenment truth.

The Right was not always amenable to the idea of evidence-based policy. James Burnham’s conservatism of the early 1960s, for example, still opposed Enlightenment reason and free speech, preferring tradition to planning and accumulated habit to consistent principle. That has changed, with free speech and science’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos now associated with the right. The new marriage is symbolized by Silicon-Valley tech elites throwing their lot in with national-populist conservatives like J. D. Vance.

Liberals have also been stunned into self-reflection by Trump’s convincing comeback. Whatever they think of Trump or the European populist Right, the lesson is clear: institutions must change if they are to regain the trust they have clearly lost.

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

The Forever Holocaust In a hard-hitting new book, Robert Spencer recounts the bleak history of antisemitism. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-forever-holocaust/

I’ve read more than my share of books about antisemitism. I even reviewed one of them here at FrontPage twelve years ago. Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives was a collection of nineteen essays edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, a professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University. “Most of the essays,” I wrote, “illuminate the current situation for Jews in a specific corner of the world.”

Much of the book was impressive. But several of the contributors defended Muslims from the charge that their religion preaches antisemitism, or argued, lamely, that Muslim antisemitism has nothing to do with Islam, or professed, absurdly, that Muslim antisemitism dates back only as far as the early twentieth century, when Islamic leaders became enamored of Hitler. There’s something perverse about experts on antisemitism who consider it part of their professional obligation to whitewash Islam.

On my bookshelves I find other works on the subject. The subtitle of Jødehat (Jew-Hatred) by Trond Berg Eriksen, Håkon Harket, and Einhart Lorenz translates into English as The History of Antisemitism from Ancient Times to the Present, but only the first twenty or so pages cover the ancient world. (The book, originally written in Norwegian, has also been published in other languages.) And Clemens Heni’s Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon focuses mostly on twentieth-century Germany.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Do 36 Percent of Americans Have a Positive View of Socialism? Socialism promises many things and claims to prioritize people over profits. But what people actually get is different. John Stossel

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://reason.com/2025/02/26/why-do-many-americans-have-a-positive-view-of-socialism/

Socialism is popular!

A Pew study reports that more than a third of American adults view it positively.

How is this possible?

Little has brought more misery—first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Nicaragua, now Venezuela.

One reason young people support socialism is because their social media feeds show videos made by popular but economically illiterate people.

TikTok star Madeline Pendleton has 1.6 million subscribers. My new video shows her telling them: “Socialism is working better than capitalism 93 percent of the time!”

Where does she get 93 percent?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What’s behind the vicious attacks on Elon Musk? He’s doing big things, but he’s also a way to attack a popular president Charles Lipson

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/behind-vicious-attacks-elon-musk/

Why are Democrats mounting such a ferocious assault on Elon Musk? Why are mainstream media outlets so eager to go along?

The simplest answers are the best. Musk is the most prominent member of the new administration aside from the president himself. He is Donald Trump’s point man for exposing malfeasance in federal bureaucracies, determining where the money is going and cutting the engorged payroll.

The more Musk and Trump succeed, the worse for Democrats. They created those agencies; their supporters staff them; and those supporters funnel lots of public money to specially favored institutions and projects. When Musk attacks this partisan nexus, he is attacking a major source of Democratic power and influence.

That is what’s really at stake here, beyond cutting the budget. The pickings are easy, and they’re popular. The latest poll shows 60 percent think DoGE is helping and 76 percent support eliminating fraud and waste. (Who, for heaven’s sake, are the 24 percent who don’t support eliminating fraud and waste?)

Why does the mainstream media oppose these popular efforts, marching in lockstep with the Democrats? Because they are Democrats. That’s why 60 Minutes deceptively edited their interview of candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear coherent and intelligent. She was neither, a point she continues to prove whenever she speaks. That’s why CBS refused to release the transcript before the election. Hey, what are friends for?

Of course, attacking Musk has its own attractions. He is the richest man in America and the best-known, aside from the president. Pillaring Musk for his wealth allows Democrats to pose as populists, hoping to regain voters they lost to Trump’s MAGA coalition.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Tapped Out Tapper Steven Hayward

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/02/tapped-out-tapper.php

“I predict one common theme from this and all the other forthcoming books about the 2020 election and the run-up to it: they will all absolve the media of any blame. Who covered it up? I thought exposing cover-ups is what the media is all about ever since Watergate. Biden’s “deception,” as it is termed here, would never have succeeded without a compliant media.Would this be the same Jake Tapper who scorned any mention of Biden’s obvious decrepitude, claiming that Biden’s stumbles were because of his “stutter”?

So CNN’s Jake Tapper and co-author Alex Thompson of Axios and CNN have announced May 20 as the publication date for their book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

My hunch is that they are still writing the book, but want to pre-empt the field of journalists feverishly cranking out similar “inside stories” of Biden’s disaster right now.

Let’s have a look at the pre-publication description:

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Should Federal Workers Be Treated Differently Than Private-Sector Employees?

Posted By on February 28th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/28/should-federal-workers-be-treated-differently-than-private-sector-employees/

In consuming the news, one could easily conclude that, as we said earlier in the week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. The wails and screeching breakdowns over the injustice of federal workers losing their jobs are ear-piercing. They are, we’re told, under attack.

After all, these are no everyday workers toiling for large corporations and small businesses – they’re federal employees who apparently are so indispensable to life as we know it that if they are no longer employed at taxpayers’ expense, America and maybe even western civilization will collapse.

Why else would there be so much fuss, so many tantrums, over a few of them losing their jobs?

We noted earlier that even if 100,000 federal workers lose their jobs, that’s a tiny 4% haircut off of nearly 2.3 million federal workforce. Yet we hear about an angry mob – our term – “getting fired up for the fight,” the birth of “fresh grassroots energy (that) came after a wave of layoffs hit government workers in recent weeks” and grousing about the administration’s “extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions.“

“It really is a witch hunt that is happening regarding our federal workers,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said.

Federal workers have sued to keep their jobs, there have been obligatory protests, and in a letter to department and agency heads, more than 100 Democrats showed their desperation to save the bureaucracy that works for them and not the American people. They bellyached about “Elon Musk’s public threat to dismiss any employees who” don’t respond to his email asking them to explain what they do at “work”; called his “threat” “reckless, cruel, unlawful, and unenforceable”; and demanded “immediate action.”