The main cause of terrorism is ideology. That’s hard for Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience.
Stephen M. Flatow
(July 19, 2021 / JNS)
Is poverty the root cause of Palestinian Arab terrorism?
That’s what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to think. At a press conference during his recent visit to the Middle East, Blinken argued that the forthcoming U.S. aid package to Gaza will defeat the terrorists.
“Reconstruction and relief for the people of Gaza” will “undermine Hamas,” he claimed. “I say that because Hamas thrives, unfortunately, on despair, misery, desperation, on a lack of opportunity.” If the United States provides “genuine prospect for opportunity, progress and material improvement in people’s lives,” then “Hamas’s foothold in Gaza will slip. We know that, and I think Hamas knows that.”
We know that? How, exactly? Usually, the way we know things is from past experience. We know something happened in the past, so we conclude that if we duplicate those conditions, that thing will happen again. If the billions of dollars in aid that the United States sent to the Palestinian Arabs in the past had led to a decrease in terrorism and the undermining of Hamas then, yes, it would be reasonable to conclude that we should do more of that. But in reality, the exact opposite happened.
With the signing of the Oslo Accords, America began sending $500 million annually to the Palestinian Arabs, including to Gaza, then ruled by the Palestinian Authority. That’s a total of $10 billion-plus from 1994 to 2006.
If anything would have “undermined” Hamas, that largesse should have done it. Yet somehow, all the “opportunity, progress and material improvement” that money brought didn’t convince the people of Gaza to reject terrorism. On the contrary, in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, the voters democratically gave Hamas a majority of the seats.
In June 2007, Hamas became the ruling regime in Gaza. Every few years since then, Hamas has attacked Israel, the Israelis have bombed Gaza, and the United States and the international community have rushed in with hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid.” Yet that aid has never undermined Hamas. Fourteen years later, Hamas is still in power.
Certainly, it’s true that in the United States, poverty contributes to crime. The mistake that Blinken is making is to assume that the Mideast is similar to the American Midwest and that terrorism is just another form of crime. Neither of those assumptions is valid.
The main cause of terrorism is ideology, not poverty. That’s hard for some Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience. Most Americans are not ideological. American culture doesn’t accept political violence. The American government does not promote the use of violence. The religions that most Americans embrace do not espouse violence.
Contrast that with the Middle East, where Muslim fundamentalism actively encourages violence, and governing regimes such as the Palestinian Authority actively promote terrorism and glorify terrorists as heroes and martyrs. The Palestinian Arab public is inculcated daily through the regime-controlled media, with pro-violence messages. Children in P.A. schools absorb those messages daily in their classrooms. Summer camps in Gaza teach children to crawl under barbed wire with weapons, albeit fake ones, in their hands.
The stereotype that Palestinian terrorists are all single, unemployed young men who are lashing out because of their poverty is nonsense. Studies of suicide bombers, for example, have found that many were well-educated, employed, and family men and even women.
Remember the 415 Hamas terrorists whom then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in 1992, in response to a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that “many” of the deported terrorists were “businessmen, academics, lawyers [and] doctors.”
Likewise, the co-founder and longtime leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was a practicing pediatrician. By day, he treated Palestinian children; by night, he organized the murder of Israeli children. Rantisi, of course, is just one example of a successful, educated Palestinian Arab professional who chose to become a mass murderer.
There are countless others.
This applies to other Mideast terrorist groups as well. In 2016, the World Bank undertook a study of 4,000 foreigners who joined ISIS. Here were the report’s key findings:
“These individuals are far from being uneducated or illiterate … 69 percent of recruits report at least a secondary education … a large fraction have gone on to study at university. Only 15 percent left school before high school and less than 2 percent are illiterate.”
“Foreign recruits from the Middle East, North Africa and South and East Asia are significantly more educated than what is typical in their region.”
“The vast majority … of [ISIS] recruits from Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East … declared having an occupation before joining the organization.”
The authors of the study wrote that, as a result, their conclusion “is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a driver of radicalization into violent extremism.”
Blinken is wrong. The Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza will not undermine Hamas. It won’t promote moderation. It won’t increase the chances for peace. It will just be throwing good money after bad.
Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”
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We allow illegals to flood our nation and incarcerate those citizens who protest the way their freedoms have been taken away. They are locked up and the key apparently thrown away:
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Ross Rants:
Joe Manchin just proved he can be bought. They gave his wife a $160,000 year make believe job, and now he says he will “not stand in the way’ of the $3.5 trillion socialist program of the far left if it can be paid for -whatever that means.. He clearly does not care anything about his constituents or bipartisanship. He took a bribe. Simple as that. I wonder how Murdoch feels now having just given Manchin a big campaign contribution. The country is potentially in big trouble as this is massive entitlement spending that will only cost far more, and never go away. It will create more inflation, blow up the Fed balance sheet further, and hurt the dollar. Most of all it will hurt the middle and lower classes when inflation does not go down, and when jobs start to shrink. They need $4 TRILLION of new taxes and the middle class is the only place to get the money to pay for this, it will be a VAT, or a “carbon tax” eventually. Rates will go up, and there is no way to pay for the debt service that will be required, so defense will get cut as even more welfare-no work programs are added next year. We now have what they call child care of $3000 per kid which is really guaranteed minimum income in a costume, and they will try to make that permanent. Next up will be forcing through higher corporate tax and higher cap gains, and you can kiss goodbye to all your stock market gains. This is a potential disaster. W VA should do a recall on Manchin. He clearly lied about bipartisanship.
The good news is there appears to be a growing pushback. Schumer wants to shove through the procedure vote on the infrastructure bill this week, except there are major missing parts to the bill, so he will not be able to get that done. He is trying to push a version of Obamacare-you will know what it says after you pass it. The big $3.5 trillion has the same issues. No way to pay for it, and many missing pieces to the bill. There seem to be enough Dem senators who realize we can’t have another $3.5T +the infrastructure $600 billion of new money, and not have inflation and record breaking new taxes. Try running for reelection on that. It is unclear where this goes and when.
Biden just said one of the stupidest things ever, claiming that spending another $4 trillion will cut inflation. He has no idea what he is talking about, and just reads off a teleprompter. Extensive research has shown that while infrastructure spending is needed, it does not impact GDP nor productivity much if at all. Massive fiscal spending does clearly contribute to inflation.
Now the Dems are proposing a carbon tariff just like the EU wants. Great stuff. We can have a trade war over who can impose this “carbon tax” on who, and by how much.
Junk bonds now yield 3.9% on average. Last year, in March, rates were 9%. That is really amazing as it does not properly reflect the risk premium. They are rated junk for a reason, and should sell at prices that reflect the risk that they could eventually default. It appearstthere is a market belief he economy is very strong, and these companies survived the pandemic, so the risk of default is very low now. The chase to get yield is overwhelming good credit analysis. It is further evidence that the bond market is very disrupted by the Fed, and prices of bonds do not reflect credit quality.
Earnings season is just getting underway, and it is likely that it will be as expected, with most companies materially beating consensus, which I have previously noted is always too low in over 80% of companies. The game remains for companies to suggest x when they know it will be x+ so they can look like they beat consensus. The good news is earnings are doing very well. Many companies cut costs during the past 18 months by no travel and less staff, and the introduction of much more tech solutions to accomplish tasks. Some of this cost savings will be permanent as tech replaced some workers. It also reflects the economy being much stronger than many had expected. The real test will come in Q1, 2022, when we will know how badly the Dems have screwed up the economy with taxes and spending, and massive new regulation, and now bad inflation. There is a high likelihood that travel budgets will remain lower as Zoom and other tech solutions permanently replace a material amount of travel. We just do not know how much that will be until sometime in 2022. Everyone has realized there are a lot of meetings that can be just as effective on Zoom. Sales calls and deal negotiations is another matter. One big area in question is if courts will stick with Zoom for routine matters where only lawyers present motions.
Everyone is pointing to the dramatic drop in lumber prices to suggest inflation is transitory. First, lumber prices remain slightly above where they were in 2019 in general. Second, lumber industry experts say the decline is temporary, and prices will rise again as demand continues very high with the booming housing development market. We will see, but don’t rely on these comments about lumber price declines as meaning inflation will fade anytime soon. One day next year supply chains will catch up in most things, but as the world economy revives into next year, demand will again rise very fast, and prices may not slow nearly as much as the Fed predicts. I believe higher prices will be stickier than forecast. A lot depends on how much Congress creates serious economic problems, which could translate into a 2022 slowdown in the economy generally. In the next two Congress will tell us if Schumer can ram through the reconciliation package of $3.5 trillion, higher corporate taxes and if costly regulation is as bad as I expect it to be..
The FTC is just getting started interfering in the free market. It will get very ugly as we get into next year, and they begin to bring cases, and to issue massive new regs. This will be very bad for the economy. Ending non-competes is also an invite to theft of trade secrets and customer lists. Some non-competes are already unenforceable, but there are many places where they are essential.
In a recent survey fully 33% of recipients said the extra $300 is what is keeping them from seeking work. We don’t know how many more just did not admit it. In states that ended the $300 the decrease in unemployment has been 19% vs 6.7% in states still with the $300. So what are the Dems doing- giving everyone $3000 per kid. For a worker making $28,000 per year taxable, $6000 non-taxable is a lot of money. Add Medicaid, food stamps and free this and that, and motivation to work becomes less. There are no work requirements under Biden. They will ty to turn the $3000 into a permanent program along with other give aways. You get a reducing portion of the $3000 even if the family income is as high as $400,000. It only starts to reduce after $150,000.
There are 294 million cars on the road in the US today with an average life of 11.6 years. Only 2% are EV. Add on trucks, RV’s, farm equipment, etc. Does anyone really believe we are going to replace all these with EV’s and dispose of 294 million cars, and all those other vehicles and equipment in the next 9-15 years. Gas powered cars are here for a long time. 294 million EV’s, and all the other vehicles would consume massive amounts of electricity, for which the power grid does not have the capacity now, and there are not going to be enough windmills and solar panels. And none of this includes the movement to end natural gas for homes and restaurants. Oil is not going away for decades.
The invite by Biden to the UN to examine race and human rights in the US is one of the most insane and divisive things ever contemplated by an American administration. It is a an invite to a very anti-American organization to slam the US and feed the Russian, Iranian and Chinese propaganda machines. It will also feed the BLM and press false narrative. I cannot imagine what got the White House to ever think this was a good idea.
Winslow Homer is the greatest water color artist ever. His paintings do not achieve anywhere near the prices Hunter’s amateur water colors are supposedly getting. A very successful artist friend has told me water colors, which Hunter uses, are very hard to use, and it not only takes real talent, but also training. This is likely the most blatant and worst corruption ever, and the White House says sales will be anonymous. They are using art because it is not possible to prove the piece is way over priced since it is worth whatever a buyer thinks it is worth, especially when used to buy influence.
Now we have the squad and BLM backing the oppression in Cuba. In case anyone was still unclear about BLM, it should ow be evident they are Marxist, and anti-American. Big corporations that rushed to contribute to BLM now should be ashamed, but they won’t stop cozying up so they can say they are not racist. Pathetic. They have no principles anymore. This situation will insure the Republicans get the Latino vote in huge numbers in coming elections. Biden needs to have NSA set up offshore or satellite internet access for the Cuban people which I believe can be done.
I have no idea what the black national anthem is, but are we then supposed to have the Asian, the Latino, the Israeli and whatever anthems played at NFL games. This is America, and we have one national anthem, and by playing whatever they say is the black anthem just adds divisiveness. It adds to the already very divisive CRT teaching, and all the other racial bias and white hate that is now being taught in schools. Only 25% of blacks are vaccinated because there is a community belief that the vaccine is some sort of white conspiracy, or whatever. That is a direct outcome of the narrative from the left and Biden, and then they try to claim blacks are not getting access to the vaccine, which is false.
The White House just killed the social media companies legal position, and gave Trump, or someone else who sues the social media companies, a potential real case. When the government is directly deciding what is to be censored, and colludes with what happens on Facebook, that crossed the line legally. That is a direct attack on the first amendment by the government, and that is exactly what the constitution forbids. What is to stop the White House from saying what DeSantis says about Covid, or other things is misinformation, and keeping it off social media. They lied about the Wuhan lab, and they put out misinformation about hydroxychloroquine, and masks, and the vaccines last year, (Harris said she would not take the vaccine because Trump was involved) but that was deemed OK, but Trump and others are not OK. Combine this with the $3.5 trillion left wing bill and HR1, and we have a complete destruction of the country. McConnell has to find a way to stop all this
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Bye, Bye
| Democrats No More | by Victor Davis Hanson via American GreatnessNow with money, institutions in their hip pocket, and cool popular culture, the Left will not just damn American institutions, but infect and transform them into revolutionary agencies. In the old days, Democrats had predictable agendas, supposedly focused on individual rights, the “little guy,” and distrust of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. The Left, often on spec, blasted the wealthy, whether the “lucre” was self-made or inherited. The old-money rich were lampooned as idle drones. If the rich were self-made, they were deemed sell-outs. A good example was ’70s pop icon Jackson Brown’s “The Pretender,” whose lyrics railed about “happy idiots” who “struggled for the legal tender.” Democrats talked nonstop about the “working man.” They damned high gas and electricity prices that hurt “consumers.” Almost every liberal cause was couched in terms of “The First Amendment”—whether it was the right of shouting obscenities, viewing pornography, or bringing controversial speakers to campus. The Supreme Court was sacred. Thanks to the holy, liberally packed court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, enlightened, progressive justices supposedly restrained the harebrained ballot initiatives of hick right-wing populists. Once upon a time, leftist congressional officials investigated the CIA and FBI nonstop. Progressive political cartoonists cruelly caricatured the Pentagon’s top brass as obese, buffoonish looking clerks with monstrous jowls. Even their uniforms were mocked as festooned with ostentatious gold braids, shiny medals, and ridiculous peaked hats, smothered in gold and silver insignia. The “revolving door” was a particular leftist obsession. Democrats blasted generals who retired into defense contractor boards and got rich. For the Left, elite professional sports were the opiates of the middle classes. Wannabe jocks supposedly wasted hours in front of the TV watching grown men toss around little balls. Unions were sacred. So United Farm Worker kingpins like Cesar Chavez headed to the border to physically assault any would-be illegal alien “scabs.” Politicians like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bill and Hillary Clinton railed against illegal immigrant “cheap labor” that “drove down” American wages. That was then; this is now. Liberals soon became rich progressives who transmogrified into really rich hardcore leftists. Suddenly not just millionaires, but multibillionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, and a host of other celebrities and CEOs were cool and hip. Deified Silicon Valley monopolists ensured the leftist candidates were usually better funded than were conservatives. “Dirty money” disappeared from leftist invective. The Fortune 400 became mostly a list of billionaires who did not make their money in the old way of manufacturing, assembly, construction, farming, transportation, or oil and gas production. The Left got drunk on the idea that they now had their hands on the money and influence in America. So they systematically began targeting institutions. And they leveraged them not from the noisy street with empty protests, but from within. Suddenly the once revered Supreme Court, with a majority of conservative justices, became an “obstacle” to “democracy,” and had to be packed or restructured. The First Amendment was redefined as a bothersome speed bump that slowed “progress.” It needlessly protected noisy conservatives and their backward values. In contrast, the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon were suddenly OK—if staffed with the right people. Their clandestine power, their chain-of-command exemption from messy legislative give-and-take, and their reliance on surveillance, were now pluses once in the correct hands. These institutions now became allies, not enemies, and so their powers were augmented and unchecked. Sports were cool, given they offered a huge platform for social justice players to damn the very system that had enriched them. The higher gas and electricity prices, the better to shock the clueless bourgeoisie that their club cab trucks and home air conditioners were anti-green and on the way out. The union shop was written off as a has-been enclave of old white dinosaurs, an ossified, shrinking base of the Democratic Party. Its new hard-Left successor party wanted a bigger, better Democratic demographic—if illegal, indigent, and non-diverse immigrants, all the better. The media glitterati were no longer to be mocked as empty suits and pompadour fools, but useful Ministry of Truth foot-soldiers in the revolution. So what happened to turn the party of Harry Truman, JFK, and even Bill Clinton into a woke neo-Maoist movement? Globalization created a new $8 billion consumer market for American media, universities, law firms, insurance groups, investment houses, sports and entertainment, and the Internet, social media, and online gadgetry. In contrast, work with arms and hands was passé, the supposed stuff of meth heads, deplorables and clingers—and so better outsourced and offshored. Traditional Democrats were seen increasingly as namby-pamby naïfs, who rotated power with establishment Republicans. Now with money, institutions in their hip pocket, and cool popular culture, the Left would not just damn American institutions, but infect them: alter their DNA, and reengineer them into revolutionary agencies. So here we are with a near one-party system of a weaponized fused media, popular culture, and the administrative state—confident that all Americans will soon agree to love Big Sibling.
About Victor Davis Hanson Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump |
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Speaks for itself:
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I just took a Northwester Mutual Life computer calculator test and based on my answers it predicted I will live to be 97. That means 9 more years.
It is a simple test, I did it on my computer.
Americans ought to insist Biden take it: Personally I gave him 78 days in office and he proved me wrong.
Biden Is Days Away From Resigning, See Why…
July 23, 2021
Former White House doctor Ronny Jackson, who worked under both Presidents Trump and Obama, told Fox News this Thursday night that he thinks that President Biden will be forced into resignation or will come up against the 25th Amendment over topics related to his mental health.
Jackson, who is now representing Texas’ 13th Congressional District, informed Fox News that he was reporting for a while that “something is happening here.”
“And I have been saying that it will only get worse, and guess what? We are watching that occur right in front of us,” Jackson said. “And I am to the point where I went from telling people we should be worried about what might happen to now saying, hey, what is going on right now?”
“Where are the academics in medicine that were asking for President Trump to get a cognitive test? Where are these folks?” Jackson said. “There is something very seriously happening with this man. And you know, I believe that he is either going to resign, they will convince him to resign in the near future for medical problems, or they will use the 25th Amendment to remove this man right now. There is some serious stuff happening.”
Jackson said that people within Biden’s cabinet are possibly looking at Biden and thinking about if he is able to go forward with his responsibilities as President. Jackson said that “this is a national security matter at this point … it truly is.”
Jackson later published a video clip from this news segment to Twitter, saying: “Something is SERIOUSLY wrong with Joe Biden – and it will only get WORSE! It is past embarrassment. He is lost. He is confused. He can barely deliver a coherent sentence. He MUST undergo a cognitive exam and reveal the results!”
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