COMMENTARY / OPINION
Equity, Equality And Hamas By Daniel Greenfield
November 21, 2023 – How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.
America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.
The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.
“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”
What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.
Siding with Israel or Hamas has become a litmus test for the left of center. It evenly divides liberals from leftists. The dividing line is between human decency and ideology. It’s a familiar moral struggle that played out time and again throughout the twentieth century.
Leo Hohmann: With all the Talk about Russia, China and Iran, Who’s Really Responsible for Destroying the Land We Love? A Thanksgiving Manifesto by Leo Hohmann
Nov. 22, 2023 12:45 pm – Is it time for a Second American Revolution? And if so, what would it look like?
As we celebrate Thanksgiving and near the close of another year, it’s a good time to reassess and also to resolve.
It’s only through individual resolve on the part of enough Americans that we will ever get back on the right path. We must resolve to get ourselves and our families on the right path before we can worry too much about a nation that seems destined for self-destruction and marching headlong into a digital slave state.
Our rights are given to us by God but we allow men to take them away. That’s how once-free nations become dictatorships. Too much tyranny coming from the top followed up with too much compliance from below. That’s a recipe for the annihilation of a free society.
Whether we see ourselves as conservative, liberal or somewhere in between, we are exposed daily to a litany of media voices that would like us to focus our attention on China-Taiwan, Russia-Ukraine, and Israel-Gaza-Iran. This distracts attention away from our own lying, thieving, criminal politicians. We continue to indulge ourselves in the misleading narratives carefully crafted by paid propagandists in the mainstream media.
Consider the following:
- Did the Chinese take away any of our rights after 9/11? Did they write, introduce and quickly pass the USA Patriot Act, which gave the government never-before obtained access to our private lives, pat us down and lecture us on “safety,” without even having to get a proper search warrant?
- Did the Chinese create the secret FISA court by which our government can sneak around spying on us?
- Did Vladimir Putin and the Russians take away any of our rights during the recent man-made pandemic?
- Did the Iranian mullahs open our borders to allow deadly drugs, human traffickers and Islamic sleeper cells to enter the United States illegally?
- Did the Iranians pass the Refugee Act of 1980, providing a legal framework for people to enter the United States legally from nations that hate us and hate our Judeo-Christian values, thereby setting the stage for future lawmakers like Rep. Ilhan Omar to become members of city councils, state legislatures, even Congress, where they work to take away more God-given rights?
- Is it the North Koreans who are now mustering all of their resources, calling in all of their favors, in a monumental attempt to disarm Americans and negate the Second Amendment, even as criminals are being let out of jail and crime is rampant? (The latest attempt involves a proposed ban on bulk ammo sales).
- Did any of the above foreign entities allow the president of the United States to claim for himself, starting in the late 1960s and growing with each administration, unprecedented new “emergency powers” to suspend habeas corpus, detain “dangerous persons” within the United States, censor news media, and prevent international travel?
The answer to all of these questions is an emphatic, NO.
Our rights were swiped and continue to be taken away by corrupt political prostitutes in Washington and in state Capitols across this great land. If our elections are still legitimate, then we can only assume that these corrupt elected officials are reflective of our own decaying moral principles.
How To Rescue All The Hostages Quickly – And Protect The West From The Islamic Terrorism Of The Crime Family That Rules Qatar By Yigal Carmon*
November 21, 2023 – In the struggle to obtain the release of the hostages held by Hamas, there is a vitally important path to rescuing them – and it is a path that the Israeli media and the government of Israel are refraining from presenting to the public and to the families of the hostages.
This situation is so absurd that it is difficult to comprehend. Yet it is a harsh reality.
I have personally been dealing with the deafening silence about this path – the path of using massive unprecedented pressure on Qatar rather than begging and pleading for its support for the release of the hostages – in the weeks since the war broke out. During these weeks, various people, including the families who fear that embarking on such a path could harm the negotiations and the emerging limited hostage release deal, and out of fear for the fate of their loved ones, have said that they do not want it, and are not daring to suggest it lest it cause harm to the hostages.
Meanwhile, weeks have passed with no deal, not even one that frees a handful of hostages.
This article is aimed at clarifying this other path, and at persuading the families of the hostages that their fears are groundless and that the inaction about pressuring Qatar is being fed to them by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his people who have personal and political reasons for ensuring that this path is not taken. These reasons will also be clarified in this article, so that the families understand why the government is not moving in this direction – and why it must.
WAYNE ROOT: It’s Time to Start Asking- Is Satan in Charge of the Democrat Party? By Wayne Allyn Root
Nov. 21, 2023 11:00 am – In the past week, the Biden administration gave another $10 billion dollars to the world’s worst terror state, Iran. What sane person would do that? And why?
Obama gave a hundred billion to Iran a few years back. Biden (and his boss Obama) have given Iran $80 billion more since Biden as elected- including $6 billion only a couple weeks before the Hamas terror attack on Israel.
Biden (and his boss Obama) either directly paid for the Hamas attack on Israel, or emboldened Iran by foolishly giving them billions with no preconditions.
But as bad as that was…at least Biden (and his boss Obama) released all those billions of dollars BEFORE the Hamas attack on Israel.
How can anyone explain the fact that Biden (and his boss Obama) just released another $10 billion to Iran AFTER the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. No one in the world can be that dumb. Not even a brain-dead president wearing diapers. So this is more about evil, than dumb.
But wait, there is more.
Look at our open borders. Who in their right mind would leave our border with Mexico open and wave the whole world in- including violent criminals released from the world’s worst prisons, rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, human traffickers, pedophiles, migrants bringing third world disease, MS-13 gangbangers, Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, and military-age males from our worst enemy- China.
Did I mention the drugs coming into our open border- like Fentanyl? Drug overdoses kill well over 100,000 Americans a year. The way illicit drugs are pouring through our wide-open border, that number is certain to rise to 150,000 deaths annually, maybe even 200,000, or 250,000.
What is Hamas and What are its Goals? By Alex Grobman PhD.
8 Kislev 5784 – November 21, 2023 – Many people avoid discussing Muslim antisemitism, lest they be accused of being “racist” or “Islamophobic” opines political scientist Matthias Küntzel. They feel the need to deny the problem exists, find ways to excuse it, “explain it away” or mock and confront those who recognize the danger it presents to Jews and the West. In analyzing Muslim antisemitism, so goes the narrative, one must be careful not to defame the name of Islam and attribute to Islam the singular cause of Muslim antisemitism.
Hamas, “The Most Important Palestinian jihadi Organization.”
Hamas, Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah (Islamic Resistance Movement), is the Sunni Muslim Palestinian Arab movement that has ruled the Gaza Strip since gaining power from Fatah, (a major Palestinian Arab political party that began in 1965 as the Palestinian National Liberation Movement) in January 2006. The organization is the creation of the Palestinian Arab branch of the extremist Muslim Brothers’ Society (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin), or the Muslim Brotherhood, explains Middle East expert Yehudit Barsky.
Established in Ismailia, Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood reflects the revival of Islam as the primary basis of individual and collective identity in the Middle East. The importance of the Brotherhood “to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik Party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas,” explains Küntzel. They are the “most important Palestinian jihadi Organization.”
Equity, Equality and Hamas BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
NOV 20, 2023 12:30 PM – How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.
America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.
The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.
“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”
What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.
Siding with Israel or Hamas has become a litmus test for the left of center. It evenly divides liberals from leftists. The dividing line is between human decency and ideology. It’s a familiar moral struggle that played out time and again throughout the twentieth century.
Morality can only exist in a society that believes in equality. Equity is obsessed with outcomes which is another way of saying that it believes that the ends can always justify the means.
“To put it brutally,” Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent, busy covering up Communist atrocities in the Soviet Union, famously wrote, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Equity is all about the omelets. It reduces all morality to a political program. Right and wrong is determined by where everyone starts out and where they want to end up. Violence is just another means. Sometimes eggs have to be broken and millions of people have to be killed.
Brutality, rather than something to be deplored, becomes a sign of revolutionary commitment. Only those who truly believe in a new age and are determined to overthrow the existing order will be utterly ruthless, vicious and destructive in the campaign against the system. The worst barbarism is justified as a ‘reaction’ to oppression and a determination to rush out an end to it.
The Fall of America TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
NOV 20, 2023 – A riveting new documentary was just released that basically proves that what we were told happened to George Floyd on Memorial Day in 2020 was all a lie to rig the election & take over America – as I said over 3 years ago.
It’s called The Fall of Minneapolis and it was produced by Liz Collin, a former local news anchor at WCCO-TV – the local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis. She was a well-respected journalist in Minnesota and worked with icon Don Shelby. That is – until she TOLD THE TRUTH about George Floyd. Then she was shunned. Now she works for Alpha News.
The documentary is FREE and available to watch on Rumble.
You can watch it here: https://rumble.com/v3vyvzv-the-fall-of-minneapolis.html
I know that many of you are tired of hearing about George Floyd and would like to forget it all together – but unless we embrace and share the truth about what really happened that week – America will fall right along with Minneapolis.
“Wake up. Remember. Look at the truth and hang your head in shame a little that you allowed yourself to be fooled.”
Mark Levin delivers a warning for Israel and for America about Antony Blinken By Andrea Widburg
November 19, 2023 – Antony Blinken, our current Secretary of State, appears to be an unimpressive man. My most vivid memory of him is of him being excoriated by a Chinese official and sitting there and taking it. Blinken is also a genetically Jewish person who likes to talk about the fact that he is related by blood or marriage to people who survived the Holocaust. More significantly, though, Blinken is a leftist, and that is his true faith. That faith explains why, as Mark Levin writes, Blinken’s allegiance isn’t to America’s security or the survival of the world’s only Jewish state. Instead, he’s all in for Iran and its satellites, including the violent, blood-thirsty people who call themselves “Palestinians.”
Yesterday, Mark Levin posted a very long tweet in which he called out Blinken’s long-standing hostility to Israel and his continued allegiance to Obama’s plan to raise up Iran as the most powerful nation in the Middle East. Iran, of course, has been at war with America since 1979, openly announces its plans for the mass genocide of Jews inside and outside of Israel, and foments and pays for most of the world’s anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish terrorism.
Here’s the tweet, along with my somewhat simpler version of the very densely packed ideas Levin includes within it:
A Ceasefire Deal With Hamas Would Be a Mistake BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
NOV 19, 2023 10:30 AM – Terrorists and insurgents have one defensive strategy. When faced with superior force and numbers, they pull back, melt into the civilian population, and wait for a nation-state to exhaust itself and tire of hunting them.
Taking out a terrorist group requires moving fast, being agile, gaining the element of surprise and choking off exits for the terrorists.
After a fairly slow start, Israel showed it had a good handle on speed and agility in ground attacks. It bypassed Hamas kill zones and took key Hamas infrastructure. But the problem is that Hamas is not a conventional military and seizing territory and infrastructure counts for only so much unless it’s used to choke off the movement of terrorists.
And then finish them.
Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas, has been pushing for a ‘ceasefire’ deal in which some (not all) hostages will be traded for an extended ceasefire of a number of days. Hamas supporters around the world have been frenziedly chanting “ceasefire”.
The goal is the same.
Why does Hamas want a ceasefire? It needs time and space to escape the trap that Israel spent time and blood constructing.
Giving it to them would be a strategic disaster.
Everybody Loves Islam By Robert Spencer
November 19, 2023 – After Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, all the various factions of the world rushed to show how much they loved and admired not the victims of the attacks, and certainly not the state that they lived in, but instead, the belief system and ideology that inspired and motivated the attacks themselves: Islam. Left, right, and center, everybody loves Islam now, and that love is growing more intense by the day.
The left, of course, has loved Islam for many years now. Even before 9/11, Islamic groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) adopted the left’s tactic of charging that all critics of Islam, including even foes of jihad terror who were simply exposing the motives and goals of the terrorists, with “racism” and “bigotry.” Muslims, CAIR and its allies contended, were an oppressed class, victimized for being “brown,” despite the fact that there are Muslims, and Islamic jihadis, of all races. A new sin, “Islamophobia,” was invented to intimidate people into thinking it was somehow wrong to oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women.
The left embraced this wholeheartedly, leading to a lasting alliance that has given us the winsome and patriotic Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), and a society-wide fear of the personal and professional ruin that can come from being accused of “Islamophobia.” This alliance is showing some signs of strain lately over the left’s obsession with normalizing insanity, sexual deviance, and perversity, but the Oct. 7 attack showed that the bond between the left and Islam is still strong. Leftists eagerly purvey Hamas’ propaganda about how many civilian casualties have resulted from Israel’s defensive action in Gaza, and Israel is drawing increasing fire from leftist leaders including Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron.
The strains in the leftist/Islamic alliance, meanwhile, have awakened a new love for Islam on the right. Many social conservatives have noted that Muslims are among the only groups in the U.S. standing up against the delusion that a man can become a woman and vice versa, and that those who wish to do so are of perfectly sound mind. Muslims are also among the few who are resisting the left’s insistence on placing pornography in primary schools. This has led some patriots to imagine that a new alliance can be formed between pious Muslims and social conservatives; this is, in fact, not a new idea on the right, but one that no less a luminary than Dinesh D’Souza advocated as far back as 2007.
The fallacy of this kind of thinking, however, is that even if Muslims are willing to make common cause with non-Muslim social conservatives, this will not lead them to abandon the tenets of their faith that call for them to make war against and subjugate unbelievers. The shared distaste for the left’s perversions and delusions cannot be and will not become the basis for a new accord that will allow Muslims and non-Muslims to live together in peace. The Islamic imperative to “fight them until persecution is no more and religion is all for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39) will remain.
Pandemics as a Catalyst for a New World Order ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
Their goal is total world control- with unelected officials at the helm.
NOV 20, 2023 – Each nation in the world has its own culture, governance structures, traditions, property, borders and peoples. We must preserve the diversity and sovereignty of nations and cultures.
By globally synchronizing the public health response across the United Nations member states, new powers were granted to the UN and its organizations at the cost of national sovereignty. These universally applied regulations and multilateral agreements have given birth to an enlarged, globalized administrative state.
Although this power grab has been percolating for many decades, the COVID crisis acted as an accelerant to synergize international agreements that advance the UN as a world government.
The United Nations has morphed into a leviathan. Its various agreements and goals seek to centrally dictate the world’s economy, migration, “reproductive health”, monetary systems, digital IDs, environment, agriculture, wages, climate modifications, one world health, and other related globalist programs.
To be clear, these are the goals of an organization seeking a globalized command economy, not an organization focused on world peace, ending wars or human rights!
This UN aims to regulate every dimension of our personal and national lives. It is working to reduce and eliminate national sovereignty across the world, and thereby to decrease our diversity, our traditions, our religions and our national identities.
The UN has partnerships and strategic agreements with member nations, as well as other globalist organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, CEPI, GAVI, The World Trade Organization, The European Union and the World Economic Forum, known as the WEF.
For an example of how the United Nations operates:
What Hamas did to Israeli women deserves only one punishment: death Giulio Meotti
For Israeli women, there are not even the crumbs of indignation, but.I didn’t expect anything from the UN, #MeToo or woke feminists. Op-ed.
Nov 20, 2023, 7:20 AM (GMT+2) – The hypocrite feminists launch campaigns for “pink quotas”, for “inclusive writing”, for the prices of pads, for “neutral pronouns”, to overcome the “patriarchy”, to pass laws against those who whistle at a girl on the street, believe every claim on #MeToo – and they don’t say a word about it.
“A woman was raped surrounded by her dead friends. Another had her breasts cut off and the terrorists played with them. A Holocaust survivor saw her granddaughter raped and murdered. A fourteen-year-old girl was found with her legs spread and semen on her back. She had been shot in the head. Most of the women were shot multiple times in the head. Some bodies were so badly damaged that after three days blood was still dripping. They mutilated the genitals of several women.”
The Israeli police investigation into mass sexual violence by Hamas terrorists involves allegations ranging from gang rape to post-mortem mutilation. “The police are collecting evidence of sexual violence from witnesses, surveillance footage and interrogations of arrested Palestinian jihadists,” says David Katz, head of the Israel Police Lahav 443 investigative unit. The investigation will last “six to eight months”.
Police showed reporters a recorded interview with a female survivor of the Supernova rave party who witnessed the gang rape and murder of a woman. “They bent her over and I realized that they were raping her, one after another. Then they handed her to a man in uniform. She was alive. Standing up and bleeding from her bottom. They held her by her hair. A man held her shot in the head while he raped her, while she had her pants down.”
The most important women’s organizations within the United Nations failed to say anything. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) spoke amorphically about the “gender dimensions of conflict.”
Even Fania Oz-Salzberger, the daughter of Amos Oz, the famous left-wing Israeli writer, wonders “where are the feminists”.
Brigitte Gabriel says Muslim Brotherhood working to destroy US, reveals ‘secret plan’ Kevin Haggerty
November 15, 2023 – Rising antisemitism and widespread protests reportedly all part of “secret written plan” detailing Islamic extremists’ operations “to destroy the United States from within” stretching back decades.
As the founder and chairwoman of ACT for America, a grassroots movement dedicated to America’s national sovereignty, Lebanese-born Brigitte Gabriel has long warned against the threat of Islamists and jihadists to the United States and the free world. Tuesday, she connected much of the unrest seen in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel with the Muslim Brotherhood and a coordinated infiltration of every level of society to “dominate the West and establish Islamic government on earth.”
Taking to X, Gabriel posted a video referencing a document dating back to 1991 called the “Muslim Brotherhood plan for North America” as she asserted they were “working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has been working to destroy the United States from within for DECADES, this is their secret written plan exposed. pic.twitter.com/2bodbC4vcg
— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) November 15, 2023
Of Tucker, of Candace, and rhinos Jack Engelhard
On the campus where they walked with friends, they have none. Antisemitism needed only a scratch to surface. Op-ed.
Nov 19, 2023, 1:46 PM (GMT+2) – Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros” takes us to a small town where one day a rhino appears causing fear and trembling among the citizens, until gradually, one by one, they all fall under the spell of this green monster and become rhinos themselves. The allure of mindless brute force was too much to resist.
A case of life imitates art.
Because imagine what it’s like for Jewish students, post Oct 7, to find their campus turned into a different world.
Before Oct 7, these Jewish kids were just like the rest. Their Jewishness was no big deal. They attended the same classes as their non-Jewish friends, rooted for the same football team, shared secrets, exchanged homework, laughed, giggled at the same jokes, with no hint that in a snap, everything was about to change.
Their classmates, their instructors, their professors had become monsters. Not all of them, but enough of them to turn the college experience into a nightmare, contrary to the expectation that the college years would be the last stage to enjoy the sweetness of youth, a time to celebrate, savor and appreciate that particular age of innocence for a lifetime.
All that’s been shattered. On the very campus where they walked with friends…they have no friends. Or, they don’t know which are these, and which are those.
Being Jewish is a big deal, after all.
On campus…those who dare…they are met with people who scowl, sneer and shriek “river to the sea” and Allah-hu Akbar.
Many of these are here on visas from Jihad-festering hell-holes and bring with them ancient grudges. The others are homegrown American stooges.
Their antisemitism needed only a scratch to surface.
The “pro-Palestinian” crowd is having it their way.
Of all those “Palestine” flags being waved in NYC and throughout America, some might rightfully ask, whose country is this anyway?
Under the guise of Islamic Studies, that is what we’ve brought into our country, and into our universities as teachers and students. (Must read Chapter 8.)
No wonder then, that so many Jewish kids are terrified…afraid to step foot on campus, afraid to attend class.
They don’t know which professors are their friends, or merely neutral, and which of them tore down those posters of the hostages being held by Hamas.
Where are the counter rallies? The one held in DC…very nice. But it changes nothing, day to day, for Jewish students, or for Jews anywhere.
As we write, some “Palestinian Arab” office is naming Jewish individuals and businesses as targets in New York City. They are calling for “direct action,” whatever that means.
Back to campus, the Jewish kids I’ve spoken to share one feeling when it’s time for class…dread and nausea.
They are waiting for their Christian and Asian friends to stand up and be counted. They are still waiting.
Or have they too changed colors…which brings us to Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who are apparently at odds with Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, so far as I get the story from YouTube, is disappointed that fellow conservatives, namely Tucker and Candace, are not on his side for Israel and against Hamas.
I’ve wondered the same thing. All along I’ve been fans, of Candace in particular, a black woman fearless to take on and tear apart BLM.
But where is she on Israel when Israel and Jews everywhere can use a strong conservative voice of support? Where is Tucker? Seemingly indifferent.
Their conservatism has limits, and it stops with the Jews.
Part Thirteen Setting the Record Straight: Ensuring National Media Attention By Alex Grobman PhD.
6 Kislev 5784 – November 19, 2023 – Suicide bombers guarantee international media attention. [1] “The media are part of the war. CNN is more important than airplanes,” asserted Malek Wabdeh, a Hizballah cultural representative [2]
Individuals who are not directly vulnerable to terror attacks are not concerned with their own personal safety, asserts political scientist and terrorist expert Martha Crenshaw. They might express sympathy for the victims, the terrorists or for neither group, but they are in not in imminent danger, because they are far removed from the area of conflict “as well as by virtue of their identity. To them, terrorism is drama. Feelings of curiosity, distress, or vicarious satisfaction of desires for vengeance” might affect their opinions. Interest in terrorism might be similar to their interest in natural disasters or criminality. Terrorists might also assume the “characteristics of a mythical enemy.” [3]
It is “undeniable,” stresses Crenshaw, there is an “entertainment value of terrorism as real-life drama—furnishing suspense and pathos.” The use of highly charged emotional words, expressions, and symbols promote intense public responses. Critics frequently claim the media fosters terrorism by portraying the act as valiant and glamorous. Other observers condemn the media’s focus on the plight of the victims, which can precipitate anxiety and extreme concern. [4]
[Ed.:
MUST SEE INTERVIEW with Douglas Murray: Is the West Dead? Caroline Glick
11/19/2023 – Are the massive pro-Hamas rallies throughout the Western world a sign that the West is dead? What does Israel represent in the Western psyche? Why are all members of the Red-Green alliance united in annihilationist hatred for Jews? To discuss these and other pressing existential issues that have arisen since the Oct. 7 slaughter, bestselling author Douglas Murray was my guest on the Caroline Glick Show on Nov. 12.
To watch the show on Rumble click here.
What do the Palestinians Want? Caroline Glick
11/19/2023 – For more than a generation, the Israeli left and Western leaders have insisted that the Palestinians want peace. They want a state of their own. They want Israel to leave the Gaza Strip, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. And once they get these things, they will live at peace with Israel.
Successive U.S. administrations have modulated their support for Israel based on their perception of the Israeli government’s willingness to make territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Those that were seen as willing to surrender Judea, Samaria, Gaza (which Israel abandoned in 2005) and Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority were supported. Those that were perceived as unwilling to cough up land to the P.A. were ostracized, condemned and subverted.
Throughout the years, Israeli political leaders, military leaders, academics and journalists have produced voluminous reports that exposed the P.A.’s support for and involvement in terrorism. They have produced encyclopedia-length dossiers, documentary movies and intelligence reports exposing how its education system indoctrinates children from birth to embrace the cause of Israel’s annihilation and imbued the entirety of Palestinian society with a genocidal, Nazi-styled jihadist outlook that seeks the utter elimination of Judaism and Jews from the face of the planet.
Beyond a few half-hearted condemnations from U.S. State Department officials over the years—and a couple of even less committal guffaws from U.N. and E.U. officials—none of these reports, documentaries or exposés have impacted the West’s devotion to the so-called “two-state solution,” or Westerners’ tendency to blame the absence of peace on “right-wing” or “extreme right-wing” Israelis who reject territorial concessions to a society and a governing authority that aspire to wipe Israel off the map.
Over the past 30 years, Israeli leftists have at times paid lip service to the problem. But due to a combination of political interests, ideological brittleness and dependence on Western allies, the bulk of the Israeli left refused to accept the strategic implications of the absence of a Palestinian leadership—or society, for that matter—that is willing to countenance Israel’s right to exist, with or without Judea and Samaria, with or without Jerusalem.
On Oct. 7, the sadism and scope of Hamas’s slaughter shocked the whole of Israeli society to its core. Polling data indicates that there has been a sea shift of opinion among Israeli leftists regarding the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians.
Appeasement, not Victory: Israel Has Quickly Reverted to Its Bad Old Policies by Daniel Pipes, The Washington Times
November 17, 2023 – “Everything changed” in Israel on Oct. 7. Except it did not. Despite much talk of victory by the prime minister and survey research showing the public endorses a tough new approach, Israeli officialdom and its security establishment show signs of reverting to their old failed policies, even before the bodies have been buried.
Those failed policies mean primarily one thing: Wrongly assuming that enrichment — more work permits in Israel, a larger fishing zone, outside funding — gives Palestinians something to lose, taming them and making them less inclined to aggression.
Symptoms of that sad reversion include:
The security establishment approved the entry of 8,000 West Bank workers to Israel, mostly to do agricultural work. It did so in response to Israel‘s agriculture minister assuring his colleagues that the workers had been vetted and posed no danger. That thousands of workers from Gaza had spied on Israel and made themselves complicit in the Oct. 7 massacre seemed to be forgotten.
On the West Bank itself, Israel‘s commanding general there issued oxymoronic orders limiting Arab access that appeared tough but changed little. As the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council explained, “There is no entry into Israeli towns for Arab workers. They will be permitted to enter industrial areas at night only.” Do marauders and murderers carry out their crimes only in daylight?
The Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs part of the West Bank, not only offered full-throated support for the Hamas massacre but boasted of having a role in it. It also required mosques in its jurisdiction to instruct congregants that exterminating Jews constitutes an Islamic duty. Despite this, the Israeli Cabinet continues to send tax money to the Palestinian Authority. Israel‘s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, endorsed this decision, saying, “It is appropriate to transfer and transfer immediately, the funds to the Palestinian Authority so that they will be used by its forces who help prevent terrorism.” (That theme of enrichment never seems to die.)
Either Get Rid of TikTok or Just Surrender to China BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
NOV 18, 2023 3:30 PM – In its latest social experiment, Communist China decided to test an algorithm to see if it could get social media influencers and idiot kids under its control on TikTok to come out for Osama bin Laden.
Worked pretty well.
Now that the test is over, TikTok announced that the Osama trend has been shut down. But it was successful.
TikTok’s hot new social-media influencer is . . . Osama bin Laden. Yes, the terrorist who plotted 9/11 went viral this week, and not in a good way. Users have been posting videos to the Chinese-owned app, urging their followers to read bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to America,” while suggesting he was on to something. “I will never look at this country the same,” one user said.
Giving Hollywood and public school teachers control of our kids was a bad idea. Giving Chinese Communist algorithms control over our kids is a much worse idea.
“A TikTok influencer went viral this week for promoting Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”
Online personality and pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins urged her over 175,000 TikTok followers on Tuesday to read the words of the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read- It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins said the video. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”
Another TikTok user raeyreads posted the entire letter on her page which received over 640,000 views despite having only 1,300 followers.
“We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” raeyreads wrote Monday. “I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed. I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them. Change must be made.”
Israel’s strategic imperative Caroline Glick
We need to think about what the Oct. 7 attack represents within the Iranian blueprint for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Op-ed.
Nov 17, 2023, 8:33 AM (GMT+2) – Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of Statesmanship.
(JNS) As of now, it appears that owing either to U.S. insistence or the Israel Defense Forces’ operational preferences, Israel is leaning towards keeping the issue of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon on the back burner in the hopes of not having to engage Iran’s most powerful proxy force directly. The argument presented on behalf of this approach is that by defeating Hamas completely and reducing Gaza to rubble, Israel will deter Hezbollah from attacking it for the foreseeable future.
While reasonable in theory, this view appears to ignore two key aspects of the strategic equation.
1. First, we need to understand what it means that Hamas and its partners/trainers/suppliers/bosses in Iran and Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon planned this war for two years.
With two years to prepare, we should assume they gamed all possible scenarios and planned for them, including Israel’s current operation in the Gaza Strip. Israeli commentators like to insist that Hamas was doubtlessly taken by surprise by the ferocity of Israel’s response to their one-day Holocaust. But given their meticulous planning, this assertion is highly unlikely.
2. The second thing we need to consider is the nature of our enemy. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime do not care about the societies they control. They are jihadists. In their religious war, all Muslims are obligated to participate. Some are destined to be fighters and martyrs. Some are tasked with serving as human shields. Hamas doesn’t care if Gaza is reduced to rubble if its cause of reducing Israel to rubble is advanced.
This brings us to Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s war machine is embedded into Lebanon’s civilian life. Nearly every apartment in Southern Lebanon has a room where missiles are stored and launched against Israel. The same is true of schools, mosques and other civilian structures.
Netanyahu knows Oct 7 is on him, but sees blame all around By Ariel Kahana
Anybody paying attention to him, both in his open announcements to the media and in closed briefings, fully understands that he recognizes that he is responsible. When he was presented with what former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said about responsibility, his reply was, “Nothing has changed.”
11-16-2023 18:21
1. Five weeks after the outbreak of war on Simchat Torah, there is still no real pressure from the West on Israel to put the brakes on. And as far as we are concerned, the West calls the shots. In practice, the opposite is true. The US, Great Britain, and even the EU have all justified the Israeli objective of eliminating Hamas’ control of the Gaza Strip. “The terrorist organization Hamas, or any other terrorist organization for that matter, cannot rule in Gaza,” were the words uttered this week by none other than Ursula von der Leyen, the President, of the European Commission, an entity that is not really known for backing Israel’s wars.
There are indeed certain differences as to the question of when and under what circumstances it is correct to have a “humanitarian pause” in order to promote the release of the abducted Israelis. There is an expectation in the US that water, food, and medications should be allowed to enter the Gaza Strip – which Hamas then lays its hands on – much more than we would like to see enter, if it was purely up to us. The Americans are also speaking to us about allowing fuel to enter the Gaza Strip.
But there is no real pressure to stop the current military action there. The pressure exists purely in the TV studios, which are breaking records of demoralization and sowing discord among the people at wartime.
The Western states have a variety of reasons and interests to support the objective of Israel’s war. Moral identification, concern over similar outbreaks of violence in their own countries, responsibility for their own nationals who have been abducted, and the eternal fantasy that once the dust of battle has settled, a Palestinian state will finally be established. This last item will not happen, and the day will come when we will have to argue the toss on this point with those who are currently backing us. But for the moment, whatever the argument might be, and in contrast to all the previous rounds of violence and wars we have come to know, the relevant international players do not want us to stop, on the contrary, they are willing us on to continue.
This approach grants Israel long-term political breathing room, enabling the IDF to move ahead slowly and carefully, but with the full extent of its military might. There are other reasons to hurry, above all the economic costs borne by Israel’s homefront and its stamina. But, as far as the diplomatic-security aspect is concerned, this will not be a replay of the Six-Day-War, nor a Six-Week-War, but more likely a Six-Month-War.
2. At a time when the Israeli population is taken up by the war and understands that politics can wait, a small, radical and boisterous group refuses to cease shouting, “Bibi, Bibi.” There are two focal points for this. One, opposite the prime minister’s residences in Caesarea and Jerusalem, and the other one in the Channel 12 News and Channel 13 News studios. The war effort is currently at its peak. About 1200 people have been murdered. Some 200 thousand have been evacuated from their homes. Dozens of towns, villages, and rural communities have been abandoned or burned. The education system is currently working on two cylinders only. The economy is shaking, and they remain adamant, “Bibi, Bibi, assume responsibility, assume responsibility.” As though, were he to say the magic words, this would bring the dead back to life. As if there is one leader in Israel who can honestly say, “This wouldn’t have occurred during my shift.”
My personal opinion has been and still is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should say “I am responsible.” This would contribute to national unity and remove this issue from the public agenda. But he, for his own reasons, has chosen not to utter those explicit words. That remains his right, of course. Now, let’s move on.
Let’s Agree to Disagree JENNA MCCARTHY
If you think our medical system is doing a bang-up job, perhaps we aren’t watching the same movie.
NOV 16, 2023 – I love this post. Not only because it was written by one of my favorite people ever (the co-writer of my book, Jenna McCarthy), but also because it is funny, brilliant, and powerful. Because of it’s content and focus, I have decided that from now on, Jenna will be my “Anger Translator.” Not that I need one in private, but I do try my best to keep my cool in public (sometimes unsuccessfully). If you don’t get the joke, watch this brilliant sketch by the comedy duo Key and Peele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGcro2mWJms – Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
This week on this very platform, I wrote a post about the media’s deafening silence on the #DiedSuddenly phenomenon. It’s a hard case to argue, frankly, as a) there’s undeniable proof it is happening at exponentially-above-normal rates around the world, and b) you won’t hear a peep about it in the news.
As always, 99% of the comments were in support of my stance. (I’m not suggesting I’m spot-on 99% of the time, incidentally; I’m merely pointing out that my subscribers tend to be of like mind. You know, since they subscribe.) But there’s always at least one outlier; a well-intended lone wolf who seemingly swings by to defend Pharma, call me delusional for not buying into the carefully crafted hype, or both.
This week it was Linda, a retired RN, whose publicly posted comments included the following:
