COMMENTARY / OPINION
“Europe is FALLING APART Right Before Our Eyes…” [22:40] Victor Davis Hanson
Apr 19, 2025 – In this video, Victor Davis Hanson takes a hard look at the unraveling of Europe’s political and cultural foundations. He explores how decades of unchecked immigration, bureaucratic overreach, and progressive ideology have led to social fragmentation, economic stagnation, and rising insecurity across the continent.
Hanson argues that Europe’s elites, in their pursuit of globalism and moral relativism, have abandoned the very values that once made the West strong—reason, national identity, and civic responsibility. Instead, they have embraced a postmodern vision that undermines sovereignty and silences dissent.
From Paris to Berlin, Hanson reveals how the European project is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. He contends that Europe’s collapse is not just a regional issue, but a cautionary tale for the United States and the rest of the free world. This is a powerful and sobering analysis that challenges mainstream narratives and asks tough questions about the future of Western civilization.
TRUMP SAYS NO to Israel Strike on Iran — What Happens Now? [55:00] Josh Hasten and Alex Traiman
April 20, 2025 JLMinute
2,979 views • Premiered 2 hours ago • JLMinute
A bombshell New York Times report reveals that President Donald Trump rejected a proposed joint U.S.-Israel military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, opting instead for last-ditch negotiations. Join JNS CEO and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Alex Traiman and JNS Middle East Correspondent Josh Hasten as they debate whether Trump’s strategy is a sign of weakness or a smart play to corner Tehran diplomatically before the gloves come off.
Also covered in this episode:
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to critics and leaked war plans
- Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s latest hostage deal and the growing frustration among hostage families
- Protests at Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer’s home and what they reveal about the domestic political divide
- The financial collapse of Hamas and why it’s critical to Israel’s long-term strategy
- France vs. Israel: Macron floats recognizing a Palestinian state—Netanyahu fires back
- Exclusive behind-the-scenes insights into the first public appearance of Ambassador Mike Huckabee, including a note from President Trump placed in the Western Wall
- Updates on IDF activity in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen, and the geopolitical chessboard involving Iran, the Houthis and Hezbollah
- Resignation of Shin Bet head Ronen Bar and what it signals about Netanyahu’s battle with Israel’s deep state
One great way to improve Homeland Security: Get rid of the TSA By Post Editorial Board
April 19, 2025 – Here’s an issue for the new Trump appointees to the Homeland Security Advisory Council: deep-sixing the Transportation Security Administration’s airport-screening work.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently ended collective bargaining with the union representing TSA agents after DHS found that more TSA employees are busy doing “full-time union work” than actually screening passengers on any given day, while 60% of “poor performers” don’t get fired.
But as any beleaguered traveler can contest, TSA’s issues go far beyond that: Virtually the whole security/screening apparatus is a pointless circus.
Having understaffed teams of low-wage workers screen millions of air passengers a day brings painfully long lines, contradictory and arbitrary “rules” (Are we taking off shoes today? Laptops out of the bags? It depends!) and countless invasive searches that turn up nothing but pocket lint.
Take off your belt, empty your water bottles, throw out your aerosols, step aside for a random hand-swab — it’s all security theater, and all for nothing.
Yes, TSA still catches thousands of guns each year, some even in carry-on — but it evidently misses even more.
In 2017 covert tests, DHS sent ringers through airport security lines with fake weapons: TSA agents reportedly failed to catch 80% of the fakes — an improvement on two years before, when 95% of weapons slipped through.
It’s been this way in testing since the agency’s founding.
How is this more than a make-work program?
Perhaps nothing reveals the scam more than the fact that for $78 you can buy your way out of the worst of the experience by signing up for PreCheck — or cough up $179 a year and skip to the front of the line with a private company like Clear.
Everyone else gets to sweat about missing their flight.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has been calling for Congress to abolish the TSA for years; his colleagues should listen.
At the least, privatize the screening work: That’s already the case at 20 US airports, including San Francisco and Orlando.
Set up to provide a sense of security amid the post-9/11 panic, TSA is still clunking along with little rhyme and less reason because that’s how government agencies roll.
America needs something less intrusive and less onerous — more efficient, competent and pleasant.
Michael Goodwin: Left-leaning AP is out of step with the rest of the US By Michael Goodwin
The AP lost its spot among a tight press pool that covers the White House.
April 19, 2025 – As a lifelong journalist, I should be on the side of The Associated Press in its ongoing legal fight with the Trump White House.
And I would be if the AP were the neutral, fact-driven wire service it used to be.
Unfortunately, it has become just another outlet peddling leftist opinion disguised as straight news.
And as its fight with the White House demonstrates, it also reeks of a sense of elite entitlement.
The case involves the AP’s claims that its freedom of speech was violated when it was booted from its long-standing spot in the press pool, an elite, small group of legacy news outlets that get near-daily access to the president.
The AP was one of three wire services in the group, along with Reuters and Bloomberg.
Others getting special access include television and cable companies, photographers, radio reporters and rotating members from print outlets.
Refused to adjust
Because there was just one spot reserved for print reporters, most got only a monthly chance to question the president in small-space events, such as the Oval Office and Air Force One.
The AP got the boot from the group after it refused to change its influential stylebook and continued to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” after President Trump officially changed the name to the “Gulf of America.”
I agreed with the federal judge who ruled the demotion unfairly punished the AP, but have come to admire even more the way the White House has used the case to carry out a much-needed move to democratize access to the president.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who at 27 is the youngest person to hold her job, took office wanting to open the door to new media outlets, including edgy podcasts, political influencers and specialized wire services.
That the new access would involve adding some conservative voices and diluting the near-monopoly of leftist, legacy media was inevitable.
A first step involved a clever response to the court order, which said the AP “cannot be treated worse than its peer wire services.”
So instead of putting the AP back into its guaranteed spot, the White House removed all three wire services and included them in a group of 31 other organizations, while adding a second print spot for the small-space events.
The new rotation means that instead of a guaranteed daily spot, each of the wires will get into the small events about once a month.
Naturally, Reuters and Bloomberg are also howling about their diminished access, and the AP went back to court, claiming the White House move violated the judge’s order.
The judge, Trevor N. McFadden of the federal District Court in DC, disagreed.
He said Friday that he needed more time to study the issue but that the White House seemed to be acting in “good faith,” presumably because the new policy follows his order about the AP and its peers.
Indeed, as the White House put it, “No other news organization in the United States receives the level of guaranteed access previously bestowed upon the AP. The AP may have grown accustomed to its favored status, but the Constitution does not require that such status endure in perpetuity.”
Beyond exposing the AP’s sense of entitlement, the case opens the door to the administration’s plan to break up the stranglehold legacy media have on privileged access to the White House as well as to other federal agencies, such as the departments of State and Defense.
Gatekeeper mentality
Their gatekeeper mentality has become an acute problem in Trump’s two terms because so many of the legacy outlets are openly hostile to him and the Republican Party.
There are next to zero “straight” reports, with nearly every story every day distorted by personal animus toward the president and conservative ideas.
The approach is the opposite of how those same organizations covered the Biden presidency.
Their lockstep behavior in those years featured soft-ball, friendly coverage even as the public turned thumbs down on inflation and open borders, adding to the evidence that big media is out of step with most Americans.
The resulting decline in public trust in the media is warranted, with nearly all of those organizations ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
And despite supposedly being guardians of free speech, none opposed the censorship schemes orchestrated by the White House to protect the first family from reports in The Post and elsewhere of corruption.
Moreover, none of the legacy outlets showed any curiosity about Joe Biden’s obvious mental and physical decline.
Indeed, some like The New York Times, repeated the White House lie that claims of the president’s decline involved altered videos and right-wing talking points.
It was only after Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June, and the panic that Trump would win the election, that the media noticed his condition and declared, in unison, that he had to drop out of the race.
As soon as he did, they all jumped on the Kamala Harris bandwagon and unanimously declared her campaign full of “joy.”
So they can spare us now their claims that they are essential to good government and public knowledge. Too often, they have shielded corruption and misled the public.
This control of like-minded outlets creates a near-monopoly of coverage, one that involves the White House Correspondents Association.
It is a private group that has for decades set up the pool for small-space events and also assigns the 49 seats in the separate briefing room, all of which are held by legacy media.
Upset media apple cart
They, along with the Times and others, are furious that Leavitt has upset their apple cart by scrambling the pool and opening the briefing room to newcomers.
Often as many as 20 people with new credentials can be seen standing along the sides of the room, with some getting a chance to ask a question.
And now reports say she is considering going even further by changing the assigned seats.
Oh, no, the Sky is Falling, screams the correspondents’ association.
Acting like a thuggish union losing its grip on power, it is warning Leavitt against making changes to the seating chart.
In a statement, it said the White House “should abandon this wrong-headed effort and show the American people they’re not afraid to explain their policies and field questions from an independent media free from government control.”
Therein lies the conceit — that only media hostile to Trump are “independent.”
This is the attitude the AP took with grossly inflated claims that its demotion “centers on the government blocking AP’s access to cover events,” as if the agency had been banned from the White House.
Fact check: False!
In truth, Trump is the most accessible president in modern times, and probably takes more questions in a month than Biden took in four years.
To even suggest otherwise is fake news, which unfortunately describes what the AP and its fellow travelers are peddling these days.
“The Warsaw Ghetto in the American Jewish Press”* By Alex Grobman, PhD
April 19, 2025 – On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an act of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland undertaken to oppose the Nazis’ final effort to transport the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews in the ghetto to extermination camps, began.
The effort to build bunkers and smuggle weapons and explosives into the ghetto had begun after the summer of 1942, when the German Nazis deported more than a quarter of a million Jews to be murdered in Treblinka.
On April 19, 1943, the ghetto refused to surrender to the Nazi police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop.
First Report
The first news of the ghetto uprising was published three days later, on April 22, on the front pages of The New York Times and the Yiddish daily Forward.
The Times transmitted a dispatch from the Associated Press in Stockholm, Sweden, which reported that, one night earlier, April 21, the secret Polish radio had appealed from Poland for help, after which “suddenly, the station went dead.”
The AP report continued, “The broadcast, as heard here, said, ‘The last 35,000 Jews at Warsaw had been condemned to execution. Warsaw is again echoing to musketry volleys. The people are murdered. Women and children defend themselves with their naked arms! Save us….’”
Appeals
On April 22, the Forward reported that the Nazis were slaughtering the last Jews in Warsaw, explaining that, on January 21, an appeal was sent by these Jews that was not received by the Jewish Labor Committee in New York until April 21.
According to the Forward, six requests were made, only a few of which could be revealed to the public. One was that 10,000 of the remaining children in the ghetto be exchanged for German prisoners of war. The Jews of the ghetto also demanded material help, including food.
The appeal ended with the warning: “Brothers, the remaining Jews in Poland believe that in these most frightening days of our history, you didn’t help us. Answer now, at least in these last days of our lives; this is our last appeal to you.”
“In the Name of All That Is Sacred”
On April 23, the Times’ story was headlined, “Warsaw’s Ghetto Fights Deportation—Tanks Reported Used in Battle to Oust 35,000 Jews.”
The article reported that the American representation of the General Jewish Workers’ Union (the Bund) had sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt imploring him “in the name of all that is sacred, to do your utmost to speed up the rescue of the doomed victims of the Nazi beasts.”
The Bund’s demands were included in their statement to the Anglo-American Conference on Refugees, which was held in Hamilton, Bermuda, from April 19 to April 30, 1943, ostensibly to examine the problem of Jewish refugees and to suggest solutions.
Bermuda Conference
One of the first articles to discuss the failure of the Bermuda Conference in light of the Ghetto Uprising appeared in the Forward on April 24, in which the paper noted that an entire week had passed, leaving the Jews in England and the US still waiting for a sign that something would be done.
The only sound was the hopeless cry for help emanating from the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, a voice that would never be heard again. While most of the press neglected the Warsaw Ghetto and only sporadically condemned the Bermuda Conference’s lack of progress, the delegates in Hamilton continued to declare their inability to solve the refugee crisis.
At a Passover Seder, held on April 25, 1943, under the auspices of the National Labor Committee for Palestine, some delegates to the Bermuda Conference declared that the only solution to the tragedy was immigration. The speakers did not mention the Warsaw Ghetto or the need to accelerate the rescue of the Jews.
Mourning and Pleading
On April 27, The New York Times reported that a tentative arrangement, a compromise, was being considered “on a plan to relocate European refugees temporarily in French North Africa, the Cyrenaica portion of Libya, and the Diredawa region of Ethiopia.”
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported that the chairman of the American delegation to the Bermuda Conference, Harris Willis Dodds, a conservative Republican who served as president of Princeton University, assured the press that the rescue proposals had been thoroughly examined. However, he refused to comment on whether any had been acted upon favorably.
These news reports prompted many Jews to initiate six weeks of mourning and pleading for aid to the victims of Nazi terror. The Synagogue Council of America, then the umbrella organization representing the three major Jewish religious movements, demanded that, at the very least, efforts had to be expended to save the children.
“Cruel Mockery”
The final communiqué from the Bermuda Conference, released on April 29, dispelled any hope for immediate rescue. Given wide press coverage, the report made clear that the only agreement reached was that the war against Germany had to be won. US immigration quotas were not raised, nor was the British prohibition on Jewish refugees seeking refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine lifted.
On April 30, The New York Times headlined its piece on the end of the conference with the suggestion that “Hopeful Hint Ends Bermuda Sessions.” The article reported that the delegates had rejected recommendations that they said were incapable of being accomplished under war conditions and would most likely delay the war effort.
On May 3, the JTA reported that then-Assistant Secretary of State A.A. Berl, Jr., re-emphasized that there would be no changes to official US government policy. He warned Germany and her satellite states that they would be held responsible for crimes against the Jewish people, but he admitted there would be no immediate relief for those still trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Nothing can be done to save these helpless unfortunates except through the invasion of Europe, the defeat of the German army, and the breaking of the German power. There was no other way,” he said.
On May 4, the American Zionist Committee for a Jewish Army ran an advertisement in The New York Times condemning the efforts in Bermuda as a mockery of past promises to the Jewish people and of Jewish suffering under Nazi-German occupation: “To 5,000,000 Jews in the Nazi Death-Trap, Bermuda was a Cruel Mockery.”
Jewish Powerlessness
Throughout the Bermuda Conference, many American Jews were disturbed by the absence of any concrete plans for rescue and distressed at their own inability to present their case in a forceful manner that might have resulted in a different outcome.
Many believe such feelings are not without merit. According to Ghetto Speaks, the monthly magazine of the General Workers Union of Poland, for an entire year before his suicide on May 11, 1943, Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish-Jewish socialist politician, Bundist trade union activist, and member of the London-based National Council of the Polish Government in exile, had received “appeal upon appeal, cry upon cry, from the tortured Jews of Poland.”
In May 1942, the Bund issued a report informing readers that the German Nazis had “embarked on the physical extermination of the Jewish population on Polish soil.” The Bund stressed that “it is estimated that the Germans have already killed 700,000 Polish Jews.”
Protests and Meetings
On July 21, 1942, the American Jewish Congress, in cooperation with the American Jewish Labor Committee and B’nai B’rith, held a demonstration in Madison Square Garden, attended by a crowd of 22,000, to denounce the atrocities committed by the Nazis. In messages sent to the demonstrators by FDR and then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill, neither mentioned the possibility of rescuing European Jewry.
According to historian Yehuda Bauer, the most American Jews were demanding was to threaten Germany with retaliatory air raids.
The 1942 edition of the American Jewish Yearbook found that while there had been a paucity of productive results for their attempts to save the Jews of Europe, there was no lack of effort by American Jews in registering their disapproval of Nazi horrors. There had been worldwide demonstrations of sympathy, including a “Voice of Washington” rally. There had been work stoppages, mass meetings, protests, a day of fasting, memorial services, and periods of silence in memory of the dead.
On December 8, 1942, a prominent delegation met with FDR at the White House to appeal for action to stop the Nazi massacres.
On March 1, 1943, barely six weeks before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 300,000 demonstrators filled Madison Square Garden in a “Stop Hitler Now” protest. At least 75,000 others tried to enter the Garden and, along with more than 10,000 others remaining in the streets, heard the speeches over loudspeakers.
Nevertheless, historians consider the resolution adopted at the demonstration too moderate to prompt any government action.
No Illusions
Shortly before he committed suicide, Zygielbojm received a message from the Warsaw Ghetto delivered by a Gentile leader of the Polish underground, Jaczynski, who had been told by ghetto leaders, “Jewish leaders abroad won’t be interested. At 11 in the morning, you will begin telling them about the anguish of the Jews in Poland, but by 1pm, they will ask you to halt the narrative so they can have lunch. This is a difference that can’t be bridged. They will go on lunching at the regular hours at their favorite restaurant. So they cannot understand what is happening in Poland.”
The Jews of Warsaw urged the Jews of London to go to the American Embassy and the British Foreign Office and remain until the government was changed. If imprisoned, they should fast until death.
The Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto had no illusion that any of this would happen. In fact, they knew from the beginning that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was doomed and their survival unlikely. Marek Edelman, the only surviving commander of the ghetto’s Jewish Combat Organization, said the motivation for the fighting was “to pick the time and place of our deaths.”
Cry “to Jolt the Indifference”
In desperation, on May 11, Zygielbojm, who had just learned that his wife, Manya, and 16-year-old son, Tuvia, had been killed in the ghetto, took his life with an overdose of sodium amytal in “an energetic cry of protest against the indifference of the world which witnesses the extermination of the Jewish people.”
In a long suicide note, he said that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of Polish Jews, “the whole of humanity” was indirectly culpable. He accused the Western allies of “looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions of tortured children, women, and men,” and no one doing enough.”
“I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw Ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave. By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people,” he wrote.
He asked Polish-in-exile officials, including President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski, to “embark immediately on diplomatic action…in order to save the living remnant of the Polish Jews from destruction.”
His suicide provoked a significant reaction in the press to what was happening in Poland, but it was too late. By May 16, 1943, the Germans had succeeded in quelling the Ghetto Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto was liquidated and destroyed; its Jewish residents were either murdered or captured and sent to Majdanek or Treblinka.
A Final Note
The Bermuda Conference was not the first attempt to find a solution to the refugees frantically in search of a haven. From July 6-15, 1938, the US organized the Évian Conference from July 6-15, 1938, at Évian-les-Bains, France.
At a news conference following the failure of the delegates to solve the problem of stateless refugee Jews, historian Martin Gilbert quotes a journalist from a Swiss newspaper who asked Golda Myerson (Meir), the Jewish observer from Palestine, for her assessment. “There is one ideal I have in mind,” she answered, “one thing I want to see before I die—that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”
*Portions originally published in The Wiener Library Bulletin Volume XXIX, New Series Numbers 37/38
Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
