ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Arc of History Bends Toward Thoughtcrime By Seth Barron

Posted By on May 31st, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-arc-of-history-bends-toward-thoughtcrime/

Before spilled blood had dried following the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, advocates for the Palestinians had preemptively designated the anticipated Israeli response a genocide. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro chimed in on October 10 with concern for “the genocide that has begun against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” On that same day, American consumer watchdog Ralph Nader posted that Israel’s “genocidal bombing attack on Gaza’s defenseless civilian population is underway. Once again.”

Innumerable voices have warned that future generations will look back at our silence with shame and disapproval. Bernie Sanders warns that “History will never forget that we enabled this atrocity.” Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis says that “future generations” will grapple with the blood debt we are accruing today. Irish rock band Kneecap explained that they support Palestine because they “just want to make sure we’re on the right side of history.”

Appeals to history as justification for heinous political action are nothing new. At his 1953 terrorism trial, Fidel Castro famously declared, “History will absolve me,” conveniently excusing every abuse he had committed and would continue to commit when he became leader of Cuba. The Left appeals to History as a kind of god, and anything done in its name is sanctified.

Here in America we are told constantly that we had better do such-and-such in order to remain on the “right side of history.” A few days after George Floyd died, the Des Moines chapter of Black Lives Matter erected a billboard asking, “Which side of history will you be on?” Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo vowed not to repeat Derek Chauvin’s name, and averred that “history is being written now, and I’m determined to make sure we are on the right side of history.”

History will also frown at us for the weather. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is fond of this trope. In 2020 she asked the World Economic Forum at Davos, “I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went a step further, narrating an animated film called “A Message from the Future.” In the video, the AOC of the future speaks to us from a clean energy bullet train about how successfully the Green New Deal saved America. “By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future…and we found our shared purpose.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Is the Trump Administration Selling Weapons to the World’s Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism? by Robert Williams

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21657/selling-weapons-to-qatar

While it is understandable that President Donald Trump is eager to bring business deals to America, since when has Qatar been “a friendly country that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East”? The answer is: Never.

“Qatar is the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world, more than Iran.” — Dr. Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency who dealt with economic warfare against terrorist organizations, Ynet News, April 18, 2024.

There is hardly an Islamic terrorist group, in fact, that Qatar does not support. Meanwhile, it acts as both the arsonist and the firefighter.

“Qatar has been playing a deadly double game with the U.S. for many years. It supports all Islamist terrorist organizations (ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah). Worst of all, in 1996, it hid future 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in Doha, and when the FBI came to arrest him, informing only the Qatari Emir, KSM disappeared within hours.” — Yigal Carmon, MEMRI, November 15, 2023.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s “Explanatory Memorandum” explicitly states: “The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Qatar’s media empire, Al Jazeera, is the mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood. It is this Arabic-language television network that has spread the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout much of the world. Even Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which agree on virtually nothing, both banned Al Jazeera – as have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Bahrain.

When the US sells advanced weapons to Qatar, it is literally arming an organization that openly funds terrorism, spreads radical Islamic ideology and straightforwardly seeks to undermine America, Israel and the West.

The Trump administration, in seeking to make America great again, was supposed to move away from the policies of the Obama and Biden administrations, which appeased terrorist and rogue states such as Iran and Russia. But regarding Qatar, the Trump administration appears to be pursuing effectively the same extremely dangerous policies that endanger not only US allies in the Middle East such as Israel, but the United States itself.

“[US] colleges and universities have accepted $6.25 billion from Qatar since 2001. However, Qatar’s total spending likely exceeds that figure… Qatar is a major exporter of Islamist ideology, which it amplifies on the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera network. By pumping money into the American higher education system and across the United States, Qatar avoids scrutiny as it advances hostile ideologies.” — Natalie Ecanow, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, in testimony to the Texas Legislature House Committee on Homeland Security, Public Safety & Veterans’ Affairs, April 2, 2025.

A good place to start would be not to sell weapons to Qatar and not to pretend they are a friendly ally. Instead, the US should start looking for an alternate place, such as the United Arab Emirates, to relocate American forces from Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base.

The Trump administration will apparently sell Qatar a large weapons package, including eight long-range maritime surveillance drones and hundreds of missiles and bombs worth around $2 billion. A document from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, notifying Congress of the initially approved sale, stated:

“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by helping to improve the security of a friendly country that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard and the Jews Bill Ackman

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/harvard-and-the-jews/

It has saddened to me watch Harvard, a university that I love and from which I have greatly benefited, self-immolate through gross mismanagement, poor governance, and ideological capture that have occurred over the last 15 or so years, and that have been brought into clear focus beginning on October 8, 2023.

When a day after the launch of the Hamas attack on Israel, 33 Harvard student organizations held the victims “solely responsible” for the acts of the terrorists while their extraordinarily barbaric acts were still underway, I realized that something had gone profoundly wrong at my alma mater. Further investigations on campus, including interviews and meetings I held with students and faculty, led me to conclude that the issue was not simply one of anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism, but rather the anti-American ideological capture of a once-great educational institution that has grossly veered from its original mission of Veritas and academic and research excellence.

For nearly two decades, Harvard students have been taught that the world can only be understood as a battle between the oppressors and the oppressed, a dangerous anti-American neo-Marxist ideology that emerged on campus, permeated the administration and the faculty, and one which has been promulgated and implemented by Harvard’s Orwellian-named Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (OEDIB). While the OEDIB has recently been renamed the Office for Community and Campus Life and has taken down its website in an attempt to avoid scrutiny from the Trump administration, it has otherwise remained under the same leadership, personnel, and mission.

Rather than promoting the issues suggested by its nomenclature, in practice, DEI as implemented at Harvard, is a political movement that advocates and executes on behalf of certain groups deemed oppressed under the DEI methodology. Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression, where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The post-woke world This detested ideology could only ever be sustained by terror. Andrew Doyle

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/28/the-post-woke-world/
This is an excerpt from The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.

It was an extraordinary scene. Donald Trump, recently re-elected as president of the United States, found himself surrounded by women and girls in the East Room of the White House. The date was 5 February 2025, and Trump was signing an executive order entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. As the US president took to his desk and prepared his pen, he invited his all-female audience to draw closer. ‘Secret service is worried about them?’, he joked. ‘If we have to worry about them we have big problems.’ There was laughter, applause, a hubbub of palpable relief that an egregious social injustice was on the cusp of being corrected. Photographers captured the moment in a flurry of snapping shutters. Would this be the image that marked the beginning of our post-woke era, the first phase of sobering up for a once drunken world?

The significance of this event could not be dismissed as a mere publicity stunt. Here was one of the most controversial Republican presidents in history, a man who had been accused repeatedly of misogyny, nevertheless enacting the most pro-feminist directive since Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments in June 1972, a measure that prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.

The culture war of our times has often been misinterpreted as a conflict between left and right. But, as I shall argue, these designations are hangovers from the French Revolution, ill-suited to today’s complex ideological skirmishes.

The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.

We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The West’s lies about Israel are falling apart The IDF’s assassination of Mohammed Sinwar shatters the neo-medieval libels of the anti-Israel set. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/29/the-wests-lies-about-israel-are-falling-apart/

So it seems Mohammed Sinwar is dead. The de facto chief of Hamas in Gaza has been ‘eliminated’, says Israel. Yesterday, in a speech marking 600 days of war between the Jewish State and that army of anti-Semites, Benjamin Netanyahu said Sinwar was indeed killed in Israel’s airstrike on the European Hospital in Khan Younis on 13 May. If this is correct, then it is a blistering defeat not only for Hamas but also for the West’s furiously Israelophobic elites. For one of their chief libels against Israel – that it bombs hospitals for sport – may have just taken one hell of a beating.

Mohammed Sinwar was the younger brother of Yahya, who was leader of Hamas in Gaza from 2017 until his assassination by the Israel Defence Forces in October last year. Yahya masterminded the pogrom of 7 October 2023. Mohammed succeeded him following his assassination. Hamas really has been decapitated. The Sinwars are dead. Mohammed Deif, head of the al-Qassam Brigades, was slain in an airstrike in July last year. In that same month, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political boss, was taken out in a targeted strike on a guesthouse he was staying at in Tehran. This has hands down been the most successful anti-fascist operation of the 21st century so far.

The reported killing of Mohammed Sinwar could prove to be an especially important event. It would have consequences – brilliantly dire ones – both for Hamas and for the West’s army of Israel-haters. It seems he was meeting with his fellow neo-fascists in a bunker under the courtyard of the European Hospital. That’s a hospital that was set up with a grant from the European Union and run by the UN through its local Palestine agency, UNRWA. Let that sink in: a mass murderer of Jews, the leader of a movement that carried out the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the Nazis, found refuge under a facility funded by the globalist outfits that are forever wagging a finger at ‘genocidal’ Israel.

Where the murderous anti-Semite took physical cover in an institution birthed by the EU, he was given moral cover by the anti-Israel activist class. No sooner had Israel bombed the European Hospital than it was being branded a ‘war crime’. Social media were awash with rage against the ‘Zionist monsters’ and their ‘atrocities beyond imagination’. This strike ‘highlights Israeli attacks on [Gaza’s] health system’, said the New York Times. Some believe Israel is ‘aiming to destroy Gaza’s health infrastructure’, it said. Sky News went all out to ‘debunk’ Israel’s claim that it had struck a Hamas cell. In truth, it bombed a hospital where ‘kids with cancer are waiting to be evacuated’. Firing missiles at diseased children – that’s how evil the Jewish State is.

Yet now it seems that what’s really falling apart is not Israel’s insistence that Sinwar was under that hospital, but the incessant cry of ‘LYING ZIONISTS’ from influencers in the West. Within days of the strike, there were reports from Gaza that Sinwar was indeed in a tunnel there. Asharq Al-Awsat, the London-based Arab newspaper, cited ‘sources’ saying Sinwar was killed in the hospital strike and his body was removed by Hamas and ‘temporarily buried’ in another tunnel. Saudi sources said Sinwar was definitely there, along with other ‘top militants’, including Mohammad Shabana, commander of Hamas’s Rafah brigade. He was reportedly killed, too.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

They Dress Like Cops – But Enforce Sharia From London to New York, Islamic enforcers are claiming the streets. by Aynaz Anni Cyrus

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/they-dress-like-cops-but-enforce-sharia/

We all know what Sharia enforcement looks like in the Islamic world.

We saw it when Mahsa Amini was murdered on September 16, 2022 by Iran’s “morality police”—beaten to death for resisting their hijab code.

She wasn’t some rebel.

She was a 22-year-old girl with a little too much hair showing. And they killed her for it.

That brutality sparked global outrage.

And then—just like the outrage—it faded.

Western feminists removed the hashtags. Politicians moved on. But the system that killed her didn’t disappear. It just got quieter—and closer.

But Sharia didn’t.

It just changed zip codes.

Across cities like London, New York, and Wuppertal, Germany, Islamic vigilantes are now patrolling Western streets—in police-style or military-like uniforms—confronting civilians, issuing Sharia commands, and declaring entire neighborhoods “Muslim zones.”

These aren’t volunteers.

They aren’t public servants.

They’re self-appointed enforcers of Islamic law—operating freely in democratic countries.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Qatar – The Real Face of the Snake How does a tiny Gulf state wield such outsized power – and why does the West keep looking the other way? by Dave Gordon

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/qatar-the-real-face-of-the-snake/

How could it not raise eyebrows? Donald Trump is set to invest some $5.5 billion in Qatar, according to news reports, and he’s just received a $400 million jet from the Qataris.

This is the same Qatar that unabashedly hosted Hamas leaders, and funds the terror organization into the billions of dollars. It’s the same oil-rich country that is bankrolling Al Jazeera, a channel virtually synonymous with Jihadist propaganda, and that is also being sued for having alleged terror ties. To top it off, Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister has a history of pro-Hamas tweets.

Yet, if Qatar’s place in the world could be described as a Facebook relationship status, it’d be “It’s complicated.”

Complicated, indeed. After all, Qatar has announced that it is no longer playing the role of mediator between Israel and Hamas, and that it is closing the terror group’s offices within its borders. The country the size of Connecticut has also invested $50 million in pro-Trump American media Newsmax in 2019 and 2020. It gave the green light to thousands of fresh kosher meals being provided to Israelis during the 2022 World Cup in Doha, which now hosts a recently opened Jewish center.

Additionally, Qatar also houses Al Udeid, the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East with 10,000 troops, a sign of cooperation that arose after the U.S.’s Saudi military base was shut down.

“It’s a massive amount of money that they have spent on an air base, that America got for free. And what they have done through this direct foreign direct foreign investment, is they have effectively convinced American decision makers, Congress people, the White House, to look the other way,” says Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an exclusive interview with this author, Schanzer described the country of 330,000 citizens as “this weird place” that, by his calculation, has “invested $150 billion to $300 billion in the United States’ influential spheres” — which has been revealed in detail lately by The Free Press.

In 2023, The New York Daily News reported that Qatar invested advertising contracts and sponsorships for A-list media and entertainment outlets such as Foreign Policy, VOX, Sundance, and Buzzfeed. $5 million was given to the L.A. Mayor’s Fund, and $20 million for the Nixon Foundation, and the Endowed Journalism Fellowship for the Carter Center. The “Qatari influence ecosystem” expands its reach to think tanks, influencers, PR firms, lobbyists and universities, and all of this “has effectively advanced the virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel views of the Al Thanis.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Two More Executive Orders Trump Should Sign In the interest of speeding up the Trumpian reform process

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-executive-orders-work-productivity-infrastructure-covid-masks

Wait around long enough, and a Trump executive order will likely come rolling out of the White House addressing a pet peeve or what would have been a pet peeve, had one known. In the interest of speeding up the Trumpian reform process, however, herewith are two proposed EO’s, based on close analysis of the extant orders. They are not exhaustive. Readers may have other needed EO’s in mind.

EXECUTIVE ORDER ENDING ILLEGAL EMPLOYEE ANTI-HARASSMENT TRAINING AND RESTORING AMERICAN PRODUCTIVITY.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1. Purpose. A bedrock principle of my administration is to make America productive again. Yet every year, America’s hardworking employees are subjected to hours of wasteful anti-harassment and anti-bias training. The only function of this immoral training is to provide employment to the graduates of unlawful women’s and black studies programs. These divisive training sessions presume that Americans are guilty of harassment and bias simply because of their race and sex. No evidence has been presented that America’s managers and workers are denying opportunities to their fellow workers because of prejudice, microaggressions, white privilege, rape culture, heteronormativity, ableism, neurohomogeneity, or the patriarchy. Nevertheless, influential institutions of American society, including the federal government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education require stultifying anti-bias and anti-harassment training. American dynamism is put on hold as employees click hopelessly through PowerPoint slides on bystander intervention, definitions of sex discrimination, and options for filing discrimination complaints.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

India and Pakistan: ‘A Bad Nuclear War’ by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21654/india-pakistan-nuclear-war

The Trump administration, which had previously displayed a lack of interest in the conflict, then quickly intervened and brokered a ceasefire.

“[T]he possession of nuclear weapons may have incentivized risky confrontations that pass just below the ambiguous nuclear threshold.” — Aqil Shah, Foreign Affairs, May 23, 2025.

Pakistan did not have to detonate one of its nuclear warheads to shake the world. Now, an emboldened Islamabad will almost certainly hit India again.

Nukes are supposed to moderate national leaders and make them cautious. When it comes to India and Pakistan, however, the opposite now looks true.

“We stopped a nuclear conflict, I think it could have been a bad nuclear war, millions of people could have been killed, so I’m very proud of that,” President Donald Trump told reporters on May 12.

Proud he should be. Although New Delhi refuses to acknowledge Washington’s role in brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, the Trump administration was nonetheless instrumental in stopping fighting that could have escalated, as Newsweek wrote, “to the brink of all-out war.”

On April 22, gunmen murdered 26 Hindu tourists and others at Pahalgam, in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan also claims that territory.

New Delhi blames Islamabad for harboring militants who staged the attack. Pakistan denies involvement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats and Their DEI Albatrosses Democrats are trapped by the toxic DEI ideology they created—too afraid to reform, too broken to survive without it. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 30th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/29/democrats-and-their-dei-albatrosses/

A few Democrat officeholders, activists, and pundits are finally coming to their senses that their brand is toxic to a majority of the American people.

The Biden administration killed what was left of it in a number of ways.

First, it serially lied to Americans about the cognitive decline and cancerous condition of President Joe Biden, both while in and after office.

Only when caught did the complicit media fess up that the Biden inner circle serially misled the American people about Biden’s inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

Second, left-wing politicos used Biden as a waxen effigy. His job was to pose as a “moderate” cover to push through the most radical and unpopular agenda in the last half century.

Only that way could “Old Joe Biden from Scranton” and his backroom handlers ram down the throat of the American people unpopular policies that nearly wrecked the country: hyperinflation and $7 trillion in new debt, weaponization of the government, and partisan lawfare, an open border and 12 million illegal aliens, a racialist DEI commissariat, a crackpot Green New Deal, defunding the police, biological men competing in girls’ sports, and two theater-wide wars abroad.

Third, without either a functional president or viable initiatives, the new hard-left Democrats sought to brand Donald Trump as “Hitler” and half the country who supported him as “fascists.”

For nearly nine years, the Democrats launched one failed hoax after another on the American people: “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation,” and the lying so-called “51 intelligence authorities.” They proved quite willing to undermine the rule of law by manipulating the court system in efforts to destroy their bogeyman, Donald Trump.

Never had the American people seen a political party engineer 93 bogus indictments of a rival candidate and ex-president. Two dozen states tried to take Trump off their presidential ballots. And the Biden Department of Justice sicced an FBI SWAT team to barge into Trump’s home.