COMMENTARY / OPINION
Thunberg Interrupted at Protest: What’s Does Climate Change Have to Do with Gaza?
November 13, 2023 – A man confronted Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg at a climate protest in Amsterdam after she attempted to connect the climate movement with the Palestinians.
The unidentified man made his way to the stage and grabbed Thunberg’s mic as she was addressing the crowd of tens of thousands in the Dutch capital on Sunday. Thunberg was speaking after she brought a Palestinian woman named Sara Rachdan and an Afghan woman named Sahar Shirzad to the stage when the incident occurred.
The Palestinian and Afghan women spoke and then Thunberg resumed her speech, saying that “as a climate justice movement, we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and for justice. Otherwise, there can be no climate justice without international solidarity.”
That is when the man came to the stage, grabbed the mic and said, “I have come here for a climate demonstration, not a political view,” before being escorted off the stage.
Thunberg, who was wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh worn by Hamas terrorists, then led the crowd in a chant of “No climate justice on occupied land.”
A group of 100 environmental activists in Israel last month signed an open letter slamming Thunberg for social media posts expressing “solidarity with Palestine and Gaza.”
One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta… Eddie Peters, Facebook post May 2020
One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
“Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing – being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.
Ten Rules on how to fight a war, for Israelis only Jack Engelhard
Remember: There are no innocent Gazans and only Israel is put to the test for collateral damage. Op-ed.
Nov 12, 2023, 4:35 PM (GMT+2) – Only the Israelis, it surely seems, are expected to conduct war in accord with the gentlemanly Marquis of Queensbury Rules.
So,
Rule Number One…as the Israelis confront The Belly of the Beast, they must do no harm to the “innocent civilians.”
Rule Number Two to Rule Number One…are you forgetting something?
Some 85 percent of those “innocents” voted for Hamas. How did that crowd become a protected species like the Hawksbill Turtle?
They’ve been known, through the years, to cheer domestic terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, and to celebrate 9/11 as a holiday.
The Israelis are fighting for their lives, their homes, their children, their history, their future, their country…and hardly anyone cries for them as an endangered species.
There are no innocent Gazans. Would Abraham find 50? Say, 40…or not even 10?
Only Israel is put to the test for collateral damage…Dresden, anyone? Hiroshima?
Rule Number Three. The Israelis must stop winning and agree to an immediate ceasefire for the good of those Gazans who have been displaced by the fighting.
(Systematic pauses are now in effect, also for the hostages…Is this smart? But please, no more Shalits.)
Rule Number Four to Rule Number Three…strange that you worry only about the Arabs. Not a word about the Gaza border Israelis, thousands uprooted and displaced, Oct 7.
Not a word about them from Antony Blinken or the media. For the Jews, nobody cares. For the Arabs, everybody cares.
In fact, the Israelis along the border with Gaza… since 2007, it’s been life on the run from missiles, dynamited balloons and kites.
Fifteen seconds to get to a bomb shelter.
The leadership mostly shrugged. This too shall pass. But it didn’t, did it?
[Ed.: Israel National News (Arutz 7) web site has been down off and on over the past weeks. So, the rest of this excellent article may not be available.]
Why progressives can’t simply condemn antisemitism Matthew M. Hausman, JD
Democrats demand the suppression of speech they disagree with, but they cannot seem to unify against crass antisemitism. Op-ed.
Nov 12, 2023, 4:15 PM (GMT+2) – When Hamas attacked Israel in a genocidal pogrom targeting men, women, and children, it was not the start of a war with the traditional goals of strategic victory or conquest, but a war to annihilate the Jewish People.
Let’s tell it like it is: The Arab/Israeli conflict has never been about self-determination for Palestinian-Arabs, who have no historical footprint or ancient pedigree in the land, but about the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jews, whose ancestral connection to their homeland is, unlike Palestinian Arab claims, incontrovertible.
The root of the conflict – the true basis that nobody wants to acknowledge – is the doctrinal hatred of Jews.
Though there was an unprecedented show of support for Israel after the initial attack in which Hamas terrorists slaughtered families, raped women and girls, burned people alive and murdered children, it didn’t take long for the UN Secretary-General to contextualize Hamas’s savagery by saying it “didn’t happen in a vacuum.” Or for progressives in the US and elsewhere to accuse Israel of concocting accounts of atrocities, or to admit they occurred but justify them as natural consequences of an “occupation” that does not exist.
Soon after came calls from the global community for Israel to temper her response or agree to a ceasefire, followed by specious allegations of Israeli war crimes. True to form, the mainstream media showed its bias by publishing Hamas propaganda as news without seeking verification from Israeli sources or employing the kind of rigorous fact checking that set the standard when I was a young journalist starting out in the 1980s. The abdication of objectivity was clear when most news outlets falsely reported that Israeli rockets had blown up a Gaza hospital killing hundreds, when in fact the missile was fired by Islamic Jihad. The stories were later retracted, but not before such reporting had inflamed tensions and instigated worldwide condemnations of Israel.
And now, a month into the war and in the midst of Israel’s intense campaign to destroy Hamas, progressives have become the terror organization’s most prominent boosters by stepping up their pathological demonization of the Jewish state. Violent anti-Israel demonstrations are sweeping liberal college campuses and cities across North America and Europe, where rioters can be seen chanting Nazi-like slogans, assaulting Jews, and openly calling for genocide.
THE HAMAS ‘INSIDE JOB’ TRUTHERS DON’T UNDERSTAND ISRAEL OR WAR Daniel Greenfield
October 17, 2023 – There have been two kinds of conspiracy theories circulated by ‘truthers’ after the Hamas massacre of Israelis.
The first kind essentially denies there was an attack or nitpicks the details. Those arguments are made in obvious bad faith by people who simply hate Israel and side with the terrorists. Any evidence presented to them is dismissed as fake.
The second kind of conspiracy theory is of the “inside job” variety most often involving a “stand down” order that allowed Hamas to massacre over 1,000 people without any military intervention. Some of the people pushing this stuff are the usual suspects, alt-righters and anti-semites, some of it’s coming from anti-war leftists and libertarians who treat every war as a vast conspiracy, and some from fringe figures in Israel.
The idea that Prime Minister Netanyahu or top generals would have issued a “stand down” (apart from being horrifying) makes no sense. Before this attack, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. Now he’s been forced to join a unity government and polls show that most Israelis want him to resign. His political career may be over. In Israel. top generals transition into politics. That is a whole lot less likely to happen now.
The Yom Kippur War disaster tanked Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan despite their heroic stature. There’s no political gain to letting the enemy murder over a thousand of your people in a preventable attack.
Finally, Israel is a small country. A whole lot of people know each other and are related or friends with each other. This conspiracy theory requires you to believe that military personnel who had friends and family living in these communities decided to ignore calls for help and sit around playing cards. Not to mention ignore attacks on their own bases and allow their fellow military personnel to be murdered, tortured, and taken hostage.
But since it is out there, let’s address it.Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?
1. Israel is a mighty fortress and its security is second to none, so how could this have happened?
Democrat Cenk Uygur Loses It on Piers Morgan Show Upon Hearing Some Uncomfortable Facts from Rabbi Shmuley: “You Bigot, You Racist!” (VIDEO 1:37) By Jim Hᴏft
Nov. 11, 2023 12:40 pm – In a fiery exchange on the “Piers Morgan Uncensored” show, Democrat Presidential Candidate Cenk Uygur and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach engaged in a heated debate over Middle Eastern politics, resulting in a meltdown from Uygur.
The conversation turned intense when Rabbi Shmuley outlined a series of historical events involving the Palestinian state proposals. He asserted that the Palestinians had opportunities to establish a state in 1936, 1947, 1967, 2000, and 2008 but rejected these offers.
“The Palestinians were offered a state in 1936, and the Peel Commission rejected it. They were offered a state in 1947. The UN Partition Plan, they rejected it. They were offered a state in 1967 after Israel conquered Judea and Samaria and the West Bank, they rejected it. They were offered a state in 2000. Yasser Arafat, Ehud Barak, they rejected it. They were offered a state with Ehud Olmert 2008, they rejected it. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and they did not create a state,” said Rabbi Shmuley.
Rabbi Shmuley then challenged Uygur’s stance on the conflict, questioning his silence on various historical events.
“Where were you Cenk, when you say that you care about Palestinian children? When Hamas stole the highest rate of per capita international foreign aid, larger than the Marshall Plan, from Palestinian children.
“Did not build schools for them, did not build hospitals, took all the money to buy bombs and to build a network of tunnels which is larger than the New York subway system, where were you then?!”
“Why did you only come up now? In fact, when Bashar al-Assad killed 600,000 children, Arab children when he gassed them with mustard gas. My organization took out full-page New York Times ads to protect them. Where were you then? You don’t care about Arab children. You are a Jew hater, defined as someone who only wants to lie and say that the Jews are genocide,” said Rabbi Shmuley.
Uygur lashed out at Rabbi Shmuley and resorted to name-calling and agitation, which usually signifies a loss in their argument, calling him a “racist” and a “bigot.”
[Ed.: Talk Amongst Yourselves]
Why Are We Flooded With Outrage-Producing News Stories? Analysis by A Midwestern Doctor
November 11, 2023
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- The mass media’s business model revolves around emotionally enraging and upsetting its audience because that makes more money than informing and empowering the public
- This business model has transformed the political process from one where differing parties come together to find the compromise which most makes sense to one where everyone prioritizes beating the other side
- Our susceptibility to this business model arises from the strain modern life has placed on our nervous system. Once in this dulled state, humans have difficulty responding to anything besides strong or provocative stimuli and hence often miss many of the most important facets of life
- One of the most important things you can do for your health is to understand exactly how the mass media emotionally manipulates you and boycott all of that toxic content
[Ed.:
The Tribute to a Little-Known Soldier By Joe Nocera
A small plaque to a young veteran in a New York park tells a very American story of sacrifice.
The tribute to Emilio Barbosa in Bennett Park. (Photo by Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)
November 11, 2023 – My neighborhood in upper Manhattan surrounds a small, sweet park—Bennett Park, it’s called—that marks the highest natural point in New York City. Long ago, it was the site of Fort Washington, which the Continental Army built in the summer of 1776 only to have it captured by the British until the end of the Revolutionary War. Today, the fort’s walls are partially outlined by cobblestones, and dogs frolic around a centuries-old cannon.
In 1996 the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation added another war memorial in Bennett Park, this one dedicated to the memory of a man—a kid, really—who had grown up in the neighborhood and had been killed during World War II. His name was Emilio Barbosa. The inscription said that he was a native of Nicaragua who had lived on Pinehurst Avenue, a street that borders the west side of the park. At 17 he joined the Marines and spent the next two years manning a 20mm gun turret on the USS Nevada, fighting first at Normandy Beach and then in the Pacific theater. He died at the age of 19, when a Japanese kamikaze pilot flew into the Nevada as she bombarded Okinawa.
Barbosa’s small plaque, low to the ground and under a tree, is easy to miss. But I’ve found myself lingering over it from time to time, wondering about the man it honors—imagining, for instance, how terrifying it must have been as that Japanese plane closed in on him. My father also served in the Pacific, and decades later, when he could finally bring himself to talk about it, he said that the experience of watching a kamikaze pilot dive toward his ship had instilled in him a profound belief in God.
Maui DEW Attack – Deeper Aspects – Video #21 [9:13] Makia Freeman
August 15, 2023 – Discover the deeper aspects of the DEW attack on Lahaina, Maui – including predictive programming, hijacking of our subconscious, the DEW laser beams caught on video, foreknowledge, 15 minute city or cities, smart cities, Agenda 2023 and more.
Aloha DEW: Lahaina, Maui Hit by Directed Energy Weapons – Video #20 [9:18] Makia Freeman
August 13, 2023 – Lahaina, Maui was hit by DEW – the same as deployed on 9/11 and also in California for the so-called wildfires of Santa Rosa (2017) and Paradise (2018). See the evidence for yourself and make up your own mind.
