Biden Stop Begging. Beginning The New Year With Whopper Memo.
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These are personal observations and comments about several matters on my mind.
1) Biden began by giving Israel unequivocal support. As political pressures mounted, he has begun to relent as I always believed he would.
A two state solution, with an enemy sworn to your destruction, is utter nonsense.
Furthermore, after Hamas is destroyed it would be foolhardy for Israel to allow other nations to protect them and worst of all an anti-Semitic U.N. feckless force. Would America want Mexico to defend it, Canada, Guatemala?
Israel has no desire to return to Gaza but neither has it a security choice and/or option but to do so, at least initially.
It is time for America to quit kissing the ass of terrorists. Obama made a habit of bowing to dictators and it is time for America to stop begging.
Ending the Hamas war is a simple matter. Hamas begins by returning hostages and quits firing rockets. Since that will not happen, nor will Biden man-up, Israel must continue to decimate Hamas. If that results in Palestinian and hostage casualties that is simply the consequence of war.
No military does what Israel does voluntarily to warn, supply, aid and protect innocents.
Mohammad Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the PA, said Sunday that “Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic.” The problem is that this is true. That’s why no one in his right mind in Israel thinks of creating a Palestinian state today. Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution; it wants the final solution.
Israelis are focused on defeating Hamas, a goal the U.S. shares. Mr. Biden was right to say Tuesday that “nobody on God’s green Earth can justify what Hamas did. They’re a brutal, ugly, inhumane people, and they have to be eliminated.” He was also right to stand up for Israel at the United Nations, where the international herd demands a cease-fire.
Israel fights on because it has no other choice if it wants to survive as a state. But many nations see these U.N. votes as consequence-free gestures for peace or solidarity. That a cease-fire now would mean a Hamas victory and the death of Israeli deterrence, bringing on the next massacre and the next war, doesn’t concern them.
Israelis know Mr. Biden is under pressure from the Democratic Party left to stop Israel’s Gaza operation, and they are making sacrifices to satisfy him. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted that the Israeli campaign “we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south,” and Israel has complied. It is now telegraphing its attacks to the enemy so civilians can flee, and it is using a smaller force with less reliance on air power and artillery.
As a result, Israel is taking more casualties. Ten soldiers were killed Tuesday. That follows five Monday and seven Sunday for a total of 445, including Oct. 7.
The rising fatality rate is noticed in Israel, if nowhere else. In a video making the rounds, an infantry officer protests in Hebrew: “How can it be that an area isn’t cleared from the air before allowing our soldiers to enter?” Israel did that earlier in the war, he says, but now “our fire power is being restrained because our leaders may have started prioritizing the enemy’s lives over the lives of our soldiers.” A petition by soldiers’ mothers makes a similar point.
Israel gets little credit for its sacrifices. Mr. Biden even criticized it Tuesday for “indiscriminate bombing,” a slander so belied by the evidence that the White House tried to walk it back. Civilian casualties in Gaza are tragic, but they are mainly a result of Hamas’s way of embedding in what should be safe civilian spaces. The U.S. military also couldn’t avoid civilian casualties against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, or other post-9/11 engagements. The U.S. doesn’t bomb indiscriminately either.
Facilitating the transfer of fuel and aid to Gaza also hasn’t stopped U.S. criticism. On Oct. 18 Mr. Biden said, “If Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people, and it will end.” Really? Hamas theft, some of it caught on video, is so blatant and pervasive that Gazans denounce it publicly. Still, Israel keeps aid flowing, and the U.S. has pressured it to open another crossing to let in even more.
Israel has no good choices here, but America does. The President can focus on supporting a U.S. ally in vanquishing a genocidal enemy.
If the west wants to solve the Middle East conflict, it must take a long look in the mirror. By MELANIE PHILLIPS
The simmering tensions between Israel and the Biden administration over the plan for post-war Gaza have now come to the boil.
The US is doubling down on its insistence that Gaza must be run by a revamped Palestinian Authority. The Americans are still obsessed with a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
This week, US President Joe Biden told a White House Chanukah reception that there had to be a Palestinian state in the future and that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to make an effort to strengthen, change and “move” the PA.
Netanyahu riposted that Israel would permit neither Hamas nor the PA to rule Gaza. Israel, he said, would not repeat the “mistake of Oslo,” a reference to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation under which control of Gaza and parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria were handed over to the newly-created PA.
The previous day, Netanyahu had caused outrage by stating that the Oslo Accords caused as many deaths as the October 7 Hamas massacre, “though over a longer period”.
His enemies immediately claimed that the comparison was invidious, that he was seeking to shrug off any blame for Israel’s vulnerability to the Hamas pogrom and that he was already campaigning to win the general election that many assume will follow the war.
Whether or not such criticisms are well-founded, they are irrelevant to the key point at issue. Giving the PA control of Gaza and establishing a Palestine state would expose much more of Israel to atrocities similar to those that took place on October 7— and worse.
The idea that the P. would suddenly turn into a reliable guarantor of peaceful co-existence with the Jewish state is for the birds. Currently, Israel is locked in a desperate struggle in Judea and Samaria to contain a huge spike in terrorism by Hamas and other armed groups, which have vastly expanded in scope and weaponry under PA administration.
In fierce firefights in these territories, the IDF has arrested hundreds of terrorists, killed others, seized weapons and destroyed weapons labs, terrorist command centres and terrorist tunnel shafts. Just like in Gaza.
Officials in the PA’s ruling party, Fatah, have gloated over the slaughter of October 7 and pledged there will be more.
The Biden administration says the PA must change. But how is that remotely feasible given that it has indoctrinated its people with Nazi-style antisemitism, teaching them to regard Jewish people as the devil incarnate and that the highest goal is to murder them and steal their land in order to turn the whole of Israel into a “state of Palestine”?
This week, polling results published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research revealed that no fewer than 82 per cent of Judea and Samaria residents and 72 per cent of Gazans approve of the October 7 pogrom.
If there were an election in the disputed territories, Hamas would win hands down. Support for Hamas in these territories has more than tripled compared to three months ago. In Gaza, such support has also increased. The overwhelming majority in both areas want to see Israel destroyed.
If the Palestinian Arabs are to govern themselves, they must go through the equivalent of the de-Nazification that was carried out in Germany after World War II. That clearly cannot be done by the rejectionist, Jew-hating and despotic PA.
In Britain, whose government is marching in lockstep with the US, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has stated that the PA is the best vehicle for governing post-war Gaza and that the British Support Team, a military unit that has been training the PA’s security forces for many years, should play a vital role with its “capacity” enhanced.
This is similarly deluded. In 2018, the British Foreign Office awarded itself an official score of “A+”, claiming the PA’s training had “exceeded expectations” for developing “accountable and responsive security and justice services” and that, as a result, “citizens have been empowered … to hold authorities to account”.
Yet as David Rose observed in The Jewish Chronicle, in 2021 14 members of those same PA security forces raided the home of Nizar Banat, the leading anti-corruption, pro-democracy campaigner in Judea and Samaria, kidnapped him and savagely beat him to death.
Moreover, the Palestinians have been repeatedly offered a state of their own and turned it down, resorting instead to violence against Israel every time.
The west’s obsession with a two-state “solution” is therefore a type of madness. The core reason for this is the west’s refusal to recognise that the most important factor in this never-ending conflict is the behavior of the west itself.
This started in the 1930s, when Britain tore up its treaty obligation under the 1922 Mandate for Palestine to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, and instead offered the Arabs a state within that land. This was the original “two-state solution”. It was based on a repudiation of international law and a reward to the Arabs for their murderous aggression.
Ever since then, Britain, America and the Europeans have continued to incentivise and reward the Palestinian Arabs for their exterminatory agenda by bestowing upon them global status, funding and support.
Western leaders have never acknowledged the bogus nature of Palestinian identity that writes the Jews out of their own history. Nor have they acknowledged the PA’s gross Jew-hatred; nor the way the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, funded by the west, weaponised equally bogus Palestinian refugee status to turn the world against Israel.
As for the Oslo Accords, midwifed by the Clinton administration, they unleashed three decades of terrorism causing thousands of Israelis to be murdered and injured. Former PLO leader Yasser Arafat bragged that he had signed the accords as a ruse to bring back terrorism to Israel from Tunis, where he had been exiled, and that the “two-state solution” was a “first stage” in Israel’s destruction.
Whether through their dependence on the Arab world, anti-Jewish prejudice or the liberal fantasy that all conflict can be ended through compromise, western governments told themselves that the Arab war against Israel was no more than a fight over land boundaries. Since it was actually a genocidal cause, successive Israeli governments — other than at Oslo — have balked at concessions that would have signed the death warrant of the Jewish state.
Netanyahu’s overriding concern has always been to prevent a Palestinian state because of the mortal threat it would pose to Israel. That’s why he tolerated the rule of Hamas in Gaza: to divide the Palestinians, and thus forestall the establishment of another terrorist entity.
The October 7 pogrom exposed this as a catastrophic error of judgment for which he should deservedly pay a high political price.
But people must look beyond their loathing of Netanyahu to where Israel’s interests lie. Is it in its interests for the PA to run Gaza? No. Is it in its interests for Israel to run Gaza? No. Is a “two-state solution” in Israel’s interests? No.
So who should run Gaza?
That question cannot be answered in a way that protects Israel’s interests unless the whole paradigm shifts, and the western world stops supporting the Palestinians’ agenda of extermination and starts treating them as the pariahs they should be. At a stroke, their cause would collapse.
That won’t happen unless the world finally decides to accept — as it did in 1922, but then chose to forget — that the Jews are the only people, as a people, who are legally and morally entitled to inhabit Israel, their own ancestral homeland.
The Impossible Deal: Establishing a Peaceful Palestinian Arab State That Accepts the Jewish State - Article From 2017 Still Applicable in 2023
By Morton A. Klein
(AUGUST 25, 2017 / BREITBART) The Israelis whose lives are at stake and the authentic U.S. pro-Israel community have long understood that a Palestinian Arab state would be a Hamas-Fatah-ISIS-Iranian regime terrorist state that endangers Israel’s heartland.
Such a state would be a launching pad for non-stop attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. Indeed, the Maagar-Mochot poll in January found that Israelis overwhelmingly (by a 10 to 1 margin) support Israeli sovereignty in Judea/Samaria and oppose a Palestinian Arab state. (Judea/Samaria is the accurate name for the area Jordan renamed the “West Bank.”)
Similarly, a Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs poll in March found that Israelis are overwhelmingly (by a 12 to 1 margin) concerned that if Israel gave up security control of Judea/Samaria, that the Palestinian Arabs will build attack tunnels. And the implications go far beyond Israel. A Palestinian Arab terror state is likely to push Jordan and the entire Middle East into complete chaos. (Also remember, there was never an Arab sovereign State in Judea and Samaria. Even the name “Palestine” is a Roman name, not an Arab name. Arabs can’t even pronounce the letter “P.” When the Romans captured Judea and Samaria and murdered or drove the Jews out of their ancient homeland they renamed it Palestine after the enemy of the Jews, the Philistines.)
Thus, earlier this year, we were thrilled that President Trump refused to parrot the irrational, dangerous mantra that a Palestinian state is the only option for peace (the so-called two State solution, a misnomer since Israel is already a State). We were glad to see President Trump wisely speak instead about real peace and creative solutions; and demand that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must stop teaching “tremendous hate” to their children in PA schools; stop naming Arab schools, streets, sports teams, and tournaments after Jew-killers; recognize Israel as the Jewish State; stop paying Palestinian Arab terrorists to murder Jews; and revoke the PA law authorizing the PA’s horrendous $350 million per year of “pay to slay” payments.
However, we are concerned now. In May, the PA leadership rejected President Trump’s praise-worthy demands that the PA must end its “pay to slay” payments. Instead, the PA vowed that these payments will continue. Any effort to negotiate anything else with the PA should have ended there. It is unconscionable to negotiate with Arab Nazis who pay people to murder Jews. And yet, Trump administration negotiators are reportedly now attempting to negotiate a “peace deal.”
Such negotiations are also futile. Irreconcilable, diametrically opposed differences between Israel and the PA have long made it clear that the creation of a peaceful Palestinian-Arab state is impossible.
Friend, it’s Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and I’m speaking out against the New York State Supreme Court Justice presiding over President Trump’s case. His bizarre behavior has proven he’s giddy to have Trump in his courtroom, and the scales will be tipped in the prosecution’s favor to find Trump guilty.
This trial is nothing short of weaponized lawfare. President Trump is being targeted as the leading Republican presidential nominee. Due process and equal justice under the law have been thrown out the window.
We have to stop this insanity! The Democrats will do whatever it takes to trash, tarnish, and smear President Trump, but without a House Republican Majority, there’s only so much we can do to combat the attacks.
There’s a saying… “When people show you who they are, believe them.” Democrats have shown us who they are and what they’ll do to win a presidential election.
We shouldn’t just believe that they’ll persecute the Republican frontrunner in a presidential election – we should know that this is just the first step in their warpath for control of every single seat in Congress and on the Supreme Court bench.
This type of behavior won’t stop in the race for the White House. These prosecutorial tactics will bleed into the race for the Senate, House, and every level of local government you can imagine.
President Trump may be the first, but he won’t be the last.Mark my words.
We can’t let a left-wing judge preside over a trial against our former President of the United States and the Republican frontrunner for 2024, especially when he’s proven he can’t put his personal politics aside to judge fairly. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2) israel will never win the propaganda war against it nor Jews throughout the world because there is always a need, among radicals forces in the world, who are predominantly liberal and progressive, to have a scapegoat.
That said, there also is no justification for not trying.
Recently, I learned CNN accused Israel of using armed bombs indiscriminately Turns out, CNN included unarmed bombs in their calculations dropped by the IAF to warn Palestinians they were about to destroy their facilities where Hamas was operating from, launching rockets etc.
Furthermore, if you believe Hamas' casualty statistics or anything they say you are either prejudiced, stupid or both. +++ 3) I understand the urgency of getting Hamas' hostages released. However, when involved with blood thirsty animals, urgings by civilized simply play into the hands of terrorists. Terrorists have no regard for human life. They take and hold hostages for leverage and results show how effective they have been. One IDF soldier swapped for 1000 Israeli Arab prisoners.
From a humorous standpoint the equation of 1 IDF soldier to 1000 Arab prisoners suggests how disproportionately worthless Arabs and further validating evidence is the unwillingness of Arab nations to absorb Palestinians etc.
This webinar was generously sponsored by Donna Gary in loving memory of Beverly Gary
On October 7th, Israel experienced the most barbaric display of sadistic savagery since the days of the Holocaust, resulting in the death of at least 1200 people and the hostage-taking of 240 innocent civilians. Yet, by October 8th Students for Justice in Palestine were in full gear, in support of the Hamas terrorist attacks. Who is behind Students for Justice in Palestine? How have they been so effective in convincing our students about the justness of such brutality? How can this be fixed, so that our society does not become complacent to such acts of terrorism and savagery?
Here to answer these questions is Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh.
About the Speakers:
Daniel Diker is the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a public diplomacy and research institute in Jerusalem, Israel. Dan was born in New York. He earned a BA cum laude from Harvard University and pursued his MBA at the Harvard Graduate School of Business before receiving an MA in government, counter-terrorism and homeland security studies, summa cum laude, from Reichman University in Israel. His dissertation on the Palestinian National Movement and the West was under the supervision of Professor Christian Kaunert, Department of Security Studies at the University of South Wales, Cardiff, UK.
Abu Toameh has written for JNS, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, and for the New York–based Gatestone Institute, where he is a senior distinguished fellow. He has been a producer and consultant for NBC News since 1989. His articles have also appeared in numerous newspapers around the world.
It’s simple, really. Why do so many college and university students hate Israel? Because they know nothing about it, and have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed.
In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.”
This wholly unstartling bit of information was gleaned from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley. Ron Hassner, who has the unenviable position of being Berkeley’s Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, conducted the survey, which began by presenting students with 18 issues and asking them to rate how interested they were in them.
These issues, according to Hassner, included “US-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5).” The survey went on from there to ask the respondents a “series of open-ended questions ‘on history, geography, and current affairs.’”F
Forty-three percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.”
That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous leftist rubbish about the massive, outrageous, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. In all likelihood, they haven’t even heard of either one.
Why is that likely? Because they know virtually nothing regarding the conflict about which they claim to care very deeply: “Eighty-four percent of those in the most passionate cohort could not name the decade when Israel captured the West Bank, while 75 percent could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map.” Moreover, a full twenty-five percent of these programmed and propagandized student “placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.” Nor did just a few of them drive the Palestinians into the sea that they chant about wanting to fill with Israelis: “The class average for this blunder was 14%.”
The survey data also showed that “students who expressed the most interest in the Palestinian issue were less informed than more moderate peers, who ‘are more likely to admit gaps in their knowledge and, as a result, are less likely to hold erroneous beliefs.’” Thus “like the rest of the class, only 25% of passionate students placed the Palestinian Territories, correctly, south of Lebanon. But students with more moderate levels of enthusiasm provided the correct answer 28% of the time.”
The anger of the students toward Israel correlated with their ignorance of it: “the most passionate students were also the least likely to leave questions unanswered and ‘the most likely to offer a wild guess,’ marking them as the most overconfident respondents.” This pattern continually recurred “in all answers related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Hassner stated: “Only 16% of students who ‘care deeply’ about the Palestinian issue provided the correct decade for the Six Day War and only 17% were able to guess that the population of Israel was somewhere between 8 and 12 million people. The others offered guesses ranging from as low as 100,000 persons to as high as 150 million persons.”
Hassner himself professed not to know why ignorance and passion about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict correlated so strikingly: “While acknowledging that his survey could not answer why students were driven to profess strong opinions on issues they were not particularly knowledgeable about, Hassner posited that ‘it does indicate, strongly, that education and moderation go hand in hand.’” He added: “The questions that students answered most accurately involved Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, all countries for which they expressed moderate but not extreme interest. If misinformation is both a cause and a consequence of political passion, then good teaching is the antidote.”
Yes. The students who are most passionate about hating Israel know the least about the conflict because they are suffering from a social contagion, not acting upon a reasoned conclusion. Those who actually study the issue, if they do so thoroughly and honestly, will come out supporting Israel. Our nation’s colleges and universities are doing their level best to prevent that outcome.
The Left’s Long March Through the Institutions has been a resounding success. Most of our nation’s colleges and universities, including — indeed, especially — those who enjoy an outsize influence on American politics and culture, have long ago ceased to be centers of higher learning and have become centers of far-Left indoctrination. Marxist sloganeering and agitprop masquerades as genuine intellectual inquiry, and so it’s no wonder that once American youth graduate from their once-renowned institutions, they happily take jobs in government or social media that involve stripping free speech and self-defense rights from Americans. They have been trained to be cogs in the machine. Their hatred of Israel is just one aspect of that indoctrination.
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3) I am amused by radical Democrats who defend Biden by suggesting there is no evidence of guilt when Biden's surrogates have been doing everything they can to stonewall Republican efforts to discover and document evidence so their case will be convincing and factual.
Democrats have besmirched anything the whistle blowers have said. They have defended Hunter's unwillingness to obey Congress' subpoena etc. In essence, Democrats have shown they have no regard for the law and the various procedures attached to legal procedures.
Yet, when it comes to their constant harassment of Trump, on trumped up charges and weaponizing of the law, they demand strict adherence to dotting every i and crossing every t.
4) Finally, when university administrators and their respective boards support anti-Semitism on the basis they have sworn to protect free speech it is evident if the campus protests involved blacks etc. the administrators would hop to.
Once again the embracing of double standards has crept into America's cultural judgment process. There is no black and white except in racial matters. Morality lies on the cutting floor.
Ignoring law breaking has reached new levels and ultimately signals the total collapse of America is within view.
Antisemitism is one example of a much deeper rot on campus.
By The Editorial Board
The furor over antisemitism on campus is a rare and welcome example of accountability at American universities. But it won’t amount to much if the only result is the resignation of a couple of university presidents.
The great benefit of last week’s performance by three elite-school presidents before Congress is that it tore the mask off the intellectual and political corruption of much of the American academy. The world was appalled by the equivocation of the academic leaders when asked if advocating genocide against Jews violated their codes of conduct. But the episode merely revealed the value system that has become endemic at too many prestigious schools.
The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania hid behind concerns about free speech. But as everyone paying attention knows, these schools don’t protect speech they disagree with. They punish it.
Harvard President Claudine Gay has presided over the ouster of professors for speech that violated progressive orthodoxy. As Elise Stefanik wrote on these pages on Friday, Harvard’s Title IX training says using the wrong pronouns qualifies as abuse. Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
But because Jews in Israel are seen in the progressive canon as white oppressors and colonizers, it’s not a clear campus violation to call for murdering Jews because it depends on the context.
The three presidents have apologized for or moderated their comments before Congress, but that was only after the political consequences became clear. Believe what they said the first time. That is what their institutions now stand for.
The resignations of Penn president Elizabeth Magill and board of trustees chairman Scott Bok are best understood as attempts to placate angry donors. That’s fine as far as it goes. But if the accountability ends there, nothing much will change.
The schools may attempt to mollify the fury by adding Jews to the classes deemed oppressed. That may make antisemitism less tolerated on campus. But it won’t change the deeper rot of anti-American, anti-Western instruction that dominates so many campuses. And it won’t root out the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies that use race, gender and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.
The answers must lie with boards of trustees willing to appoint presidents who will stand up to the DEI censors and require intellectual diversity among the faculty. Donors will also have to follow through on boycotting schools until they do. Too many trustees and donors are happy to settle for getting their names on buildings and their children admitted.
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Allysia knocks the ball into the stands.
Radical Democrats continue to weaponize politics as they hide behind their neurotic ways.
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Trump as Dictator Is a Classic Case of Projection
Biden and his supporters try to excuse and deflect attention from their own authoritarian actions.
By Allysia Finley
If you haven’t heard, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are planning a coup. “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable,” Robert Kagan, an editor at large at the Washington Post, writes in a recent 6,000-word essay that compares America’s fractious democracy with Weimar Germany.
Budding opinion writers are instructed not to draw inapt comparisons to Hitler, yet Mr. Trump’s opponents are casting aside such conventions in much the same way they’re jettisoning political and legal ones. Only by convincing themselves that Mr. Trump threatens the existence of the republic can they justify their own weaponization of government to stop him. “When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him—pots, pans, candlesticks—in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up,” Mr. Kagan writes.
Cynicism is one way to explain the left’s hysteria. Another is that the portrayal of Mr. Trump as a would-be dictator is a textbook case of psychological projection, the process by which people avoid confronting their own unwanted thoughts, feelings or behaviors by subconsciously ascribing them to others. Psychologists refer to this as a defense mechanism.
President Biden and his supporters project their own authoritarian impulses onto Mr. Trump because they don’t want to come to terms with their own illiberalism. The examples in the Biden presidency are rife.
With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Biden tried to cancel half a trillion dollars in student debt, ban evictions and mandate Covid vaccines—each of which the Supreme Court blocked because Congress never gave the president the authority to do so. Even after losing at the high court, his administration has used other regulatory means to write off about $770 billion in student debt.
Mr. Biden has abused his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act to wall off nearly 1.5 million acres of land from fossil-fuel development. He’s reconstructed the Clean Air Act to shut down coal and gas power plants and ban gasoline-powered cars. And he has ignored Congress’s command to lease federal land for oil and gas drilling and dallied on holding auctions even after being ordered by a federal court to do so.
His administration has failed to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, paroling millions of migrants into the U.S. rather than detaining them at the border or holding them in Mexico while they await hearings. The immigration-court backlog has doubled to two million since 2019 amid a surge of migrants exploiting lax law enforcement.
The top brass has threatened social-media companies with retribution, including antitrust lawsuits, if they don’t censor speech that progressives dislike. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September ruled that Biden officials had violated the First Amendment by colluding with tech platfoms to squelch politically disfavored speech about Covid and elections.
A phalanx of regulators—the Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board and Justice Department—has targeted Elon Musk’s companies for sundry regulatory infractions after the tech entrepreneur criticized Democrats’ leftward lurch and recommended Americans vote for Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
Meantime, a Justice Department special counsel has filed trumped-up charges against Mr. Trump for allegedly defrauding the U.S. Progressive prosecutors in Georgia and New York have piled on. New York Attorney General Letitia James even campaigned for office in 2018 on a pledge to nail the sitting president.
Abuse executive power. Ignore the law. Run roughshod over individual liberties. Retaliate against political opponents. Mr. Biden and his allies have done exactly what they warn Mr. Trump will do if he returns to the White House. Unlike Mr. Biden, however, Mr. Trump would have to contend with a hostile media and federal bureaucracy that would be throwing pots, pans and candlesticks at him at every step.
The left’s depictions of Mr. Trump as a tyrant are likely to fall on deaf ears with GOP voters who have heard leftists say the same for years, and not only about Mr. Trump.
“Bush the despot” headlined a piece by former Bill Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal in 2005. “In a single coup, he planned to take over all the institutions of government. By crushing the traditions of the Senate he would pack the courts, especially the Supreme Court, with lock-step ideologues,” Mr. Blumenthal wrote. Isn’t that what leftists have been exhorting President Biden to do?
Some conservatives engage in projection too. Consider Vivek Ramaswamy’s questioning of Nikki Haley’s authenticity during last week’s debate even as he pandered to Trump voters. Mr. Trump derides his former allies as disloyal even though he turned on them because he couldn’t abide their dissent or criticism.
What Mr. Trump and his opponents have most in common is their determination to blame others for their own failings.
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Israel has taken the self-imposed handcuffs off.
Would it not be nice if America did the same? It will never happen as long as Biden remains in The Oval Office.
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Israel’s Message in Gaza to Iran and Hezbollah
Jerusalem, no longer afraid of taking the offensive, shows it is willing to go to the mat if pushed too far.
By
Yonah Jeremy Bob
Gaza City
Northern Gaza has been flattened. It isn’t just another combat zone. The area will need years of rebuilding before Palestinian civilians can live there.
I saw the fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas during a recent trip with Israel Defense Forces to Gaza City, including the vast network of tunnels around Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the terror group’s unofficial capitals. I moved around the area aboard one of the IDF’s Namer armored personnel carriers.
What happened in Gaza, and particularly at Al-Shifa, will reshape the Middle East, including for Hezbollah and Iran, over the next decade and possibly beyond. While the Mossad blocked Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for more than 20 years, questions persisted about whether Israel would actually launch a major strike against Tehran if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to break out a nuclear weapon. My visit to Gaza answered that question.
But first, what has emerged from the war and the IDF’s taking over Al-Shifa Hospital and Hamas’s underground tunnels there? What paradigms have been shattered?
For the past 16 years, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, Al-Shifa was untouchable. After the 50-day Gaza conflict in mid-2014, many Israeli defense officials said if they could take out the tunnels under Al-Shifa, they could end Hamas or cripple its leadership hiding there. At the same time, the IDF warned that Hamas was storing weapons and running command-and-control operations from Gaza hospitals. Al-Shifa, the pinnacle of those activities, is no longer untouchable. No part of Gaza is.
Hamas’s officials lost their precious underground network at Al-Shifa. They had sent forces and messages through the tunnels and sneaked commanders throughout Gaza City, with Israel’s mighty air force and technological sensors unable to track any of it.
Israel showed Hamas that after the Oct. 7 massacre, it has the power and the will to rout the terror group from even sensitive civilian locations. For years Israel feared using its military advantage against weaker adversaries. Why? Because of the damage rockets could do to the Jewish state’s home front, the cost in Israeli soldier casualties and worries about global legitimacy. With tools such as the Iron Dome missile defense system, Jerusalem avoided playing offense. Now Israel has proved—at least to anyone who sees Hamas’s stockpiles of guns, grenades, drones and other materiel found at Al-Shifa—that it was right all along about the terror group’s abuse of civilian locations.
The U.S. government took Israel’s side when it took over the hospital—something Jerusalem wouldn’t take for granted. This will have implications for any effort by the International Criminal Court to go after the IDF for alleged war crimes.
What Israeli forces didn’t do at Al-Shifa was defeat Hamas completely. Rather, the IDF appears to have let Hamas, including about 200 fighters, escape to southern Gaza. This may have been either to avoid a bloodbath inside the hospital or preserve the possibility of what turned out to be a weeklong cease-fire in which dozens of Israeli hostages were returned. Since the Dec. 4 invasion of Khan Younis, the IDF has been confronting Hamas in a more definitive fashion, with most of the terror group’s fighters and leaders fleeing south.
Israel expects an insurgency in Gaza even after it defeats Hamas. According to the United Nations, 60% of housing in northern Gaza has been destroyed. The extent of the destruction means civilians won’t be able to return quickly. An insurgency could last longer than the six to nine months that defense officials have predicted. The staggering cost to rebuild will make it harder to manage the region after the war and the insurgency, no matter whom Israel puts in charge.
The flattening of northern Gaza also sends a message to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Tehran and to Iranian proxies in Syria: Mess with us and expect the same. Israelis are now more inclined to believe their country will use force against Hezbollah and Iran if necessary. The Lebanese terror group is far more dangerous than Hamas, given its special forces, mortars and precision rockets. Jerusalem has lived in fear of Hezbollah for well over a decade. What I saw in Gaza City is probably in part why Hezbollah has fired “only” 1,000 times on Israel since Oct. 7 and “only” in the north. The group now believes Israel’s threats of what it would do if Hezbollah crosses certain lines. So does Tehran.
That won’t end the violence against Israel in the Middle East, but it will shift the balance of power. Israel has shown it is willing to go to the mat when pushed too far.
Mr. Bob is senior military analyst for the Jerusalem Post and a co-author of “Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination—and Secret Diplomacy—to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East.”
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Prosecutor Smith probably overplayed his hand.
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Major Shakeup in Jack Smith’s Case Against Trump, Kamala Breaks with Biden
Corrupt prosecutor Jack Smith and the Deep State’s unrelenting attempts to prevent democracy from happening in 2024 ran into a brick wall this week. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from three innocent January 6 defendants in a case that will have direct bearing on Jack Smith’s fake “insurrection” case in Washington, DC. Since the Supreme Court is likely to overturn the Biden regime’s creative interpretation of a financial crimes law, that case is now officially in limbo—which is exactly what Jack Smith and the Deep State wanted to avoid!
The law that federal prosecutors have twisted far beyond its actual intent is 18 U.S. Code § 1512(c)(2). That’s part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that was passed in 2002 in response to the Enron boondoggle. It’s a law that basically imposes stiffer penalties on the CEO of a corporation if he starts shredding documents when he gets caught doing something wrong. What that has to do with waging an insurrection to try to overthrow the federal government is a mystery for the ages.
Federal prosecutors basically pulled this novel interpretation of 18 U.S. Code § 1512(c)(2) out of their butts to make it apply to January 6ers. More than 300 J6 defendants have been prosecuted under the Enron law, because prosecutors claim they “corruptly” “interrupted an official proceeding.”
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act uses those terms completely differently. In the actual law, the “official proceeding” is an investigation by the SEC or the IRS. Corruptly interrupting it means shredding documents or otherwise destroying evidence related to that investigation. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with interrupting a meeting of Congress. It’s like filing rape charges against someone after they’re arrested for jaywalking. They’re completely different statutes that have nothing to do with each other.
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Ousted NY Times editor James Bennet rips paper’s ‘bias,’ claims he was asked to add ‘trigger warnings’ to op-eds by conservatives
By Alexandra Steigrad
James Bennet – the former New York Times editorial page editor pushed out after running a column by a top Republican senator – said he was urged to attach “trigger warnings” to op-eds written by conservatives before he was dumped by the Gray Lady.
Bennet accused the so-called “paper of record” of having an “illiberal bias” in a blistering 17,000 word cover story for the Economist titled “When the New York Times lost its way,” which was published Thursday.
In the scathing article, Bennet delved into the events that led to his exit following three years of reflection. He said the incident typified the Times’ “dangerous problem” that pervades its newsroom.
“The Times’s problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favor one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether,” wrote Bennet, currently a columnist and senior editor for The Economist.
He recalled that during his four-year tenure as Times editorial page editor — from May 2016 until June 2020 — many top editors displayed signs of their left-leaning bias.
“The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious,” Bennet wrote. “Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatize certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias.”
“James Bennet and I have always agreed on the importance of independent journalism, the challenges it faces in today’s more polarized world, and the mission of The Times to pursue independence even when the path of less resistance might be to give into partisan passions.
“But I could not disagree more strongly with the false narrative he has constructed about The Times,” A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, told The Post in a statement.
Sulzberger described Bennet as a “valued partner,” but “where I parted ways with him is on how to deliver on these values. Principles alone are not enough. Execution matters. Leadership matters.”
The op-ed by Cotton that led to Bennet’s ouster argued that President Donald Trump should call out the US military to crack down on protests following the death of George Floyd. Many of the protests had devolved into violence against police and looting.
Sutzberger quickly went from supporting Bennet to pushing him to resign amid backlash over the publication of the Cotton op-ed. Getty Images
Times staffers griped that by publishing the op-ed, the outlet appeared to be endorsing Cotton’s views, with some making the point that the screed endangered black colleagues.
Bennet said that he and then Times editor in chief Dean Baquet believed that Times readers should hear Cotton’s views, which were shared by many Americans — and that Sulzberger even “understood” why the piece was published.
Bennet said Baquet was frustrated and surprised by the backlash, asking aloud one day: “Are we truly so precious?”
Cotton’s editorial called for a crackdown on protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020
But as anger bubbled up, both Baquet and Sulzberger began to change their tune — and Bennett soon realized that bias in the editorial ranks was eroding the paper’s professed objectivity.
In one meeting with Baquet, the top editor talked about how, as a black man, he was “vulnerable in ways a white man was not when he left his apartment wearing a hoodie and a mask, to ward off COVID.”
Bennet countered that while as a white man he had privilege, as a reporter he had been put in vulnerable positions in conflict zones. He added that he would like to have an open dialogue about his approach to the Cotton situation, but noted that nobody wanted to discuss it further.
Later, Sulzberger pressured Bennet into posting an “Editor’s Note” describing what was wrong with the Cotton op-ed, and to his surprise, when it was published, it went “far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all.”
The next day, Bennet received the fateful call from Sulzberger to resign.
In his piece for The Economist, Bennet said The Times is guilty of ‘illiberal bias,’ and lamented that the paper has a ‘dangerous problem.’ AP
“On Saturday morning, Sulzberger called me at home and, with an icy anger that still puzzles and saddens me, demanded my resignation,” Bennet wrote. “I got mad, too, and said he’d have to fire me. I thought better of that later. I called him back and agreed to resign, flattering myself that I was being noble.”
Bennet pointed out that Times writers feel danger from “vocabulary” as compared to the old days when reporters were pounding the pavement, Bennet said.
“They may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files, but their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently,” he wrote.
Dean Baquet, who was the editor in chief of The Times when Bennet was there, agreed that Cotton’s op-ed endangered staff after supporting its publication at first.
He went on to add that the Times has spent too much time navel-gazing about “why so many Americans have lost trust in it” without facing up to “one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.”
“I think many Timesstaffhave little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world ‘without fear or favor,'” he wrote. “And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.”
Bennet’s extensive takedown also took issue with the paper’s Trump coverage, noting that the Times was “slow to break it to its reader that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that COVID came from a Chinese lab.”
Bennet said The Times is too caught up in responding to the whims of social media, adding that the paper is closed off to publishing conservative viewpoints. NurPhoto via Getty Images
He also said the line between opinion and news journalism was more blurry than at rivals like “The Wall Street Journal,” which features conservative voices in its opinion pages, but not let those pieces inform the news report.
“The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise,” Bennet concluded. “It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.”
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