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Israel’s Military: Force and Dollar Multiplier for the US Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on August 12th, 2025

http://bit.ly/45bujf4

The Israeli Battle-Tested-Laboratory received – with much gratitude! – the initial F-15 (Boeing) and F-16 (Lockheed-Martin) in 1976 and 1980 respectively.  Since that time, for 45-50 years, the Israeli Battle-Tested Laboratory and Showroom of the US defense and aerospace industries and Armed Forces has significantly improved these fighter jets – and the US air force’s battle tactics – through the uniquely intense operational use of the aircraft (due to the uniquely violent Middle East). 

*The Israeli improvements (mostly shared with the US manufacturers and Armed Forces) have yielded ground-breaking mega billions of dollars worth of research and development (saving 10-20 years), enhancing US competitiveness in the global market, increasing US exports and expanding the US employment base. The Israeli improvements have enhanced the capabilities of the F-15 and F-16, as well as several hundred of other US military systems, which have been supplied to the Israeli Battle-Tested-Laboratory.

*For example, the F-15I Ra’am, a variant of the F-15E adopted to Israeli specifications, functions as a compact but long-range strategic bomber with enhanced ground-attack roles. Also, Israel’s F-16s have undergone hundreds of Israeli-designed upgrades including improvements to the cockpit (75% Israel-upgraded), fire control (50% Israel-upgraded), wings and fuel tanks, effectively modernizing and extending their operational lives.

*State-of-the-art Israeli game-changing technologies have bolstered the range, payload capacity, and overall performance of the aircraft. Israel has introduced an innovative engine overhaul, which has extended the life of the aircraft. These enhancements have bolstered the US economy and defense capabilities, while advancing the Israeli Air Force’s strategic superiority in the Middle East; thus, enhancing Israel’s posture of deterrence, minimizing Middle East instability, securing pro-US Arab regimes, and reducing wars and terrorism, which is a critical US interest.

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Shutting down the economy won’t help the hostages Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 12th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/shutting-down-the-economy-wont-help-the-hostages/

In a press conference on Sunday morning, the October Council—consisting of hostages’ families, bereaved relatives of Oct. 7 victims and mothers of reservists—took turns at the microphone to call for a countrywide strike the following week.

The men and women who read statements aloud conveyed a uniform message to the powers-that-be in Jerusalem: End the war and bring home all the hostages. Their plea for a deal to return the captives held by Hamas for the past 22 months isn’t new.

On the contrary, accusing the government of pursuing its goals in Gaza at the expense of the hostages has become a protest-movement mantra that every Israeli knows by heart.

That’s a delicate way of describing the chants and placards claiming that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu has the blood of the fallen—and that of those “certain” to be killed by their kidnappers—on his hands. It’s a narrative backed by the mainstream Israeli media and embraced by Hamas.

Former political/military officials whose hatred for Bibi outweighs any vestige of patriotism they once possessed go even further. They’re perpetuating the lie, spread by the Jewish state’s most virulent enemies, that Israel is guilty of war crimes.

Again, nothing novel about the noxious noise that’s music to Hamas’s ears. Ditto for the call to paralyze the economy—the very threat two years ago that caused Netanyahu to reverse his decision to fire then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and proceed with judicial reforms. Hence the revival of the general-strike idea.

But the current attempt to pressure the premier into meeting unreasonable demands came on the heels of the announcement that Israel would be taking over Gaza City. The Cabinet approved the plan after a 10-hour session, during which ministers debated among themselves and with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir about how to proceed in the face of a failed “negotiation” process with Hamas.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“No, the Atomic Bomb Wasn’t the Only Way to End the War in the Pacific.” Diana West

Posted By on August 12th, 2025

http://“No, the Atomic Bomb Wasn’t the Only Way to End the War in the Pacific.”

Below is an essay I first published in 2015 called “No, the Atomic Bomb Wasn’t the Only Way to End the War in the Pacific.” Nothing has changed except the date. 

As we approach the 70th anniversary (2015) of the atomic age, inaugurated in a radioactive blast at Hiroshima, know that the information below, which will prove shocking to some, has previously been collected, developed, verified in both newspapers and research tomes. It has been reported by time-tested journalists and noted historians. It has been confirmed and declared by top military figures and world famous political leaders. It is information that belongs to the American people, but it is information that is virtually lost to us, “disappeared” from what is well-described as our “court history,” written not to shed light on events but to burnish the ideologies that be. Yes, more American betrayal.

Today’s subject, then, is not only the two atomic bombs that the US dropped first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, but also the fairy tales we tell each other about them.

To be honest, I used to believe and tell these fairy tales, too. I used to believe that the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan was a display of heroic presidential strength — a gruelingly difficult but also moral and strategically empowering decision that ended the war in the Pacific against Imperial Japan as quickly as possible, and, most important, saved one million American men from becoming casualties in a dreaded military invasion of the Japanese main island.

If the choice is between dropping the A-bomb or losing one million Americans, there is no choice. That is, drop the Bomb and save American lives — and countless Japanese lives which would also have been lost in any such major military onslaught. But what if there were other ways, other means, to get the Japanese to sign that surrender?

Our customary focus on the up-down decision by Truman — see, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens’ “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t merely horrific, war-ending events. They were life-savers” — has had the effect of blinding us to the timeline preceding Hiroshima that is marked by Japanese peace bids (in itself a shocking concept), and, post-Hiroshima, surprisingly strong and high-level military objections to the notion that the Bomb ended the war in the first place.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Jaranwala Case: A Comprehensive Analysis of Religious Violence in Pakistan Will there ever be justice for the victims of Jaranwala? by Faraz Pervaiz Roshan

Posted By on August 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-jaranwala-case-a-comprehensive-analysis-of-religious-violence-in-pakistan/

The Jaranwala incident of August 16, 2023, stands as one of the most devastating attacks against Pakistan’s Christian minority in recent history. This tragic event, which unfolded in Jaranwala, Faisalabad district, Punjab, resulted from false blasphemy allegations that spiraled into widespread communal violence. The incident destroyed at least 26 churches and over 400 Christian homes, displacing approximately 10,000 people from their communities and affecting 20,000 individuals overall.

Understanding this case requires examining multiple interconnected factors: the dangerous use of Draconian blasphemy laws, the role of inflammatory rhetoric in inciting violence, systemic failures in law enforcement response, and the complex challenges facing minority rights advocacy in Pakistan. This analysis reveals how a personal dispute between individuals escalated into community-wide destruction through a combination of false accusations, religious extremism, and institutional inadequacies.

Historical Context and Background

To comprehend the severity of the Jaranwala attacks, we must first understand Pakistan’s complex relationship with its religious minorities. Pakistan’s Christian community, comprising approximately 2.3% of the country’s population, has long faced systemic discrimination and periodic violence. The country’s blasphemy laws, particularly sections 295-A, 295-B, and 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, have become powerful tools that can be weaponized against Christians and vulnerable individuals.

These laws have created an environment where mere accusations can trigger mob violence before any judicial investigation occurs. The psychological impact of these laws extends far beyond their legal framework, creating a climate of fear where minorities must constantly guard their words and actions to avoid potential accusations.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Just How Bad Is The BLS At Its Job? Our Findings Will Shock You

Posted By on August 12th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/12/just-how-bad-is-the-bls-at-its-job-the-answer-will-shock-you/

Yesterday, President Donald Trump nominated a high-profile critic of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EJ Antoni, to be its new commissioner, promising on Truth Social that under his leadership “the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”

If confirmed, Antoni, currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, has his work cut out for him.

Last week, we pointed out glaring mistakes the Bureau of Labor Statistics had made in recent years and asked whether its foul-ups were driven by politics or ineptitude.

The issue came to a head after President Donald Trump fired the head of the BLS in the wake of its massive revisions to the two previous months jobs reports, in which it admitted to overcounting the number of jobs created by more than 250,000. Trump responded by saying the numbers were rigged.

The press, naturally, rushed to defend the bureaucrats, saying that revisions are normal and there’s nothing to get worked up about. The BLS routinely revises its initial monthly jobs estimate – based on a survey of 100,000 employers – over the next two months as more data come in. No biggie.

Is that true? We decided to find out and reviewed the BLS’s monthly jobs data going back to 2009. What we found was deeply troubling.

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Whistleblower Ties Clinton Campaign to Fake Russia Hack A whistleblower reveals deeper Clinton campaign ties to the Alfa Bank hoax and Obama-era suppression of evidence, exposing manipulation in the Trump-Russia narrative. By Paul Sperry

Posted By on August 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/11/whistleblower-ties-clinton-campaign-to-fake-russia-hack/

A whistleblower report declassified last week suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign efforts to manufacture evidence tying Donald Trump to alleged Russian hacking in 2016 were deeper than previously known – as were Obama administration efforts to conceal them.

According to the report, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who investigated alleged Russian attempts to breach state voting systems during the 2016 election suspected the breaches may have been “related to activities” of the computer contractors involved in the Alfa Bank hoax, who were accused of manipulating Internet traffic data.

In that well-publicized case, a Clinton campaign lawyer worked with federal computer contractors and the FBI to create suspicions that Russia was communicating with Donald Trump through a secret server shared by Alfa Bank of Russia and Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The anonymous whistleblower – who served as the deputy national intelligence officer for cyber issues in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2015 to 2020 – told Special Counsel John Durham he stumbled onto “enigmatic” data while leading the investigation of alleged Russian cyber activity for the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He said that his discovery took place in December 2016 when President Obama ordered the ICA.

After examining state-reported breaches of election networks, the whistleblower said, “It seemed only brief interaction was occurring – in some cases, no unauthorized access, or even attempted access, was detected on ‘victim’ systems.” Though the suspicious activity initially was attributed to Russian actors, further analysis raised doubts.

But when he brought his findings to his boss, ODNI’s national intelligence officer for cyber issues, he was ordered to stop investigating and not include his findings in the final ICA draft.

“After being directed to conduct analysis of Russian-attributed cyber activity for the ICA, I had been abruptly directed to abandon further investigation,” the whistleblower analyst said.

He added that his boss, whose name was blacked out in the whistleblower statement, “directed me to abandon analysis of these events, stating reports of Russia-attributed cyber activity were ‘something else.’”

While the names of the whistleblower and his boss are blacked out in the report, a RealClearInvestigations search of federal records shows Vinh Nguyen was the national intelligence officer for cyber issues at the time. The whistleblower would have been Nguyen’s deputy.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Disinformation and the Dropping of the Atomic Bombs In 1945, Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs was grim—but it ended a war that could have cost millions more lives on both sides and unleashed even greater horrors. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/11/disinformation-and-the-dropping-of-the-atomic-bombs/

Disinformation and the Dropping of the Atomic Bombs

Legitimate disagreement about the wisdom of dropping two bombs on Japan to end World War II in 1945 persists even 80 years later, as reflected in discussions this past week.

But recently, there has often been no real effort even to present the facts, much less to consider the lose-lose choices involved in using such destructive weapons. In an age of revisionist history—when Churchill is deemed a “terrorist,” Germany did not really mean to starve millions of Jews and Ukrainians in summer and fall 1941, the British forced Hitler to continue the war, and World War II was not worth the cost—so too are Hiroshima and Nagasaki judged as either war crimes or colossal and unnecessary follies.

For today’s generation, it seems so easy to declare one’s 21st-century moral superiority over our ancestors. So we damn them as war criminals, given that they supposedly dropped the bombs without legitimate cause or reason.

What follows are some of the most common critiques of President Truman’s decision to use two nuclear weapons against wartime Japan, with an explanation of why his decision to use the bombs proved, at the time and in hindsight, the correct one.

1) Why did the Americans not drop a trial bomb in Tokyo Bay to warn the Japanese to surrender or face the real thing?

That choice was considered at length. The liberal-minded Robert Oppenheimer had headed a commission to determine the most effective way to use the two bombs to end the war as quickly as possible.

A third nuclear weapon may or may not have been available within a few weeks after the bombing, but there were no others beyond those three at hand for at least a few months. So in early August, only two bombs, the uranium-fission bomb “Little Boy” and its plutonium counterpart “Fat Man,” were deliverable. The limited number of bombs affected the decision to use two on real targets.

Note that a third atomic bomb would not be exploded (in a test) for about a year after the war. Moreover, the uranium bomb used on Hiroshima had never been tested; the plutonium one had, but in the New Mexico desert on a tower and not loaded on and dropped from a plane.

As a result, no one knew for certain whether an air-dropped bomb would even work, the optimal detonation height, or the extent of the destruction it would cause. On the eve of the first test of the plutonium bomb on July 16 in the New Mexico desert, even scientists could not agree whether the plutonium blast would set the sky afire or might be not much more powerful than a large conventional bomb.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Starvation’ in Gaza Who’s to blame? by Cal Thomas

Posted By on August 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/starvation-in-gaza/

In the Middle East, war is conducted not only with bullets and missiles, but also with pictures. The latest are pictures of allegedly starving children in Gaza distributed by Hamas and its enablers with the intention of blaming Israel for delaying, even denying entry of food trucks into the strip.

Such pictures are gobbled up and distributed to the world without question by media that are always critical of Israel and hardly critical at all of forces that seek to destroy the Jewish state.

Perhaps no nation in history has cared about preserving human life more than modern Israel. It even treats its wounded enemies in Israeli hospitals. It releases hundreds of convicted terrorists in exchange for a handful of captured Israeli soldiers. It distributes leaflets and makes phone calls urging civilians to evacuate areas inhabited by Hamas terrorists before those areas are attacked. What other nation does that?

The New York Post reports “Col. Abdullah Halabi, from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, told reporters last week that around 1,000 truckloads of aid remain undelivered ‘due to a lack of cooperation from the international community and international organizations.’” Predictably, others are blaming Israel, which plays into Hamas’ hands.

The problem for Israel is that it has defeated Hamas, but Hamas won’t surrender. The terrorist organization is the main impediment to getting food to those who need it, but the seeds of today’s disaster began in 2005 when Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip by dismantling all 21 of its remaining settlements. It didn’t take a prophet to predict the vacuum would soon be filled by terrorists eager to use Gaza as a base for attacking Israel.

What followed was this:

– Gazans stupidly elected Hamas as their government. They are now reaping what they sowed.

HISTORY, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

When America Stopped Winning Wars The legacy of Korea. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on August 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/when-america-stopped-winning-wars/

The last war the United States actually won was World War II. We’ve fought plenty of wars since then, but they were both not officially wars, that is, they were not officially declared, and we didn’t win them. We didn’t lose them, either. In Vietnam, we abandoned a war that the opposition ended up winning because we gave up. Elsewhere, we have fought for years with no clear goal and no idea even of what winning the war would entail (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The fighting of these inconclusive wars began in 1950, with our incursion into Korea.

As Rating America’s Presidents explains, on August 10, 1945, with the Japanese on the verge of surrender, the U.S. divided Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel, into Soviet and American occupation zones. No one expected this arrangement to continue indefinitely, but the U.S. was entirely unprepared when, on June 25, 1950, the Communists of North Korea invaded the South. The United Nations condemned the invasion and sent troops to Korea to counter the invaders.

Most of the troops were American; General Douglas MacArthur, a World War II hero, commanded them. President Truman, however, did not ask Congress for a declaration of war; this was the first of a huge number of “police actions” that the U.S. military would pursue.

MacArthur achieved great early success, but then the Communist Chinese invaded in November 1950 and threw the UN forces back. MacArthur wanted to attack Chinese bases, which Truman would not allow, as he did not want to escalate the conflict. MacArthur began acting unilaterally until Truman summarily fired him. This was a tremendously unpopular move at the time, as the American people understood MacArthur as trying to win the war and liberate the Communist North, with Truman stymieing him.

Reality was more complicated: the Chinese forces were significantly stronger than the U.S. had anticipated, and Truman worried that getting involved in a direct conflict with them could provoke World War III. This undeclared war went on inconclusively until after Truman was out of the White House.

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Zohran Mamdani SAYS He’s Not Antisemitic, But… His long record says otherwise. Robert Spencer

Posted By on August 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/zohran-mamdani-says-hes-not-antisemitic-but/

Zohran Mamdani, the man most likely to be New York City’s next mayor, has said: “Antisemitism is not simply something that we should talk about. It’s something that we have to tackle. We have to make clear there’s no room for it in this city, in this country, in this world.”

That doesn’t sound so bad, but there is so much else on Mamdani’s record that calls it into question. He said in 2021 that the Palestinian jihad against Israel made him a socialist: “I sincerely believe in this political project. I sincerely believe in socialism. For me, it was Palestine that brought me into this movement.”

He maintained, on the other hand, that this did not mean that he was in favor of violence against Israelis or Jews in general. When a pro-Palestinian gunman murdered two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington on May 21, 2025, Mamdani wrote the next day: “We owe it to one another to confront hate with the urgency and solidarity it demands, and to ensure our Jewish neighbors can live safely and free of fear. May the memories of both victims be a blessing.”

Once again, it sounded good, but Mamdani has also accepted money from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group with ties to Hamas. Along with money from Soros-linked far-left groups, Mamdani’s New Yorkers for Lower Costs PAC also collected $100,000 from the Unity & Justice Fund, a creation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In 2007, the Justice Department named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) Hamas funding case. When CAIR and other Muslim organizations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), appealed this designation, Judge Jorge Solis ruled on July 1, 2009 that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.”