Camp Fun.WH Hatchet Job Again. Jenin. Kim, Heninger and Katie.

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There are a few in this world who enjoy defying death

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My enthusiastic grand daughter: after a month in camp.

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Camp was so fun! We got to do all sorts of fun stuff like soccer, horseback riding, hiking, cabin time and more. We were split into group’s in our ada/grade. It was so rainy there and our overnight got canceled. I have made so many new friends at camp this year! My bunk mates name was Zoe and she was so much fun. I got the biggest cabin in the whole camp! I had 17 girls including me in my cabin. And that’s not a lot till you add my 5 counselors! My favorite counselors were Sidney and Meli. Sidney had black and red hair and was really good at art. Meli was Argentinian and was super fun to be around. For my chog/extra activity I did acting. I have so many new acting friends such as Naomi, Mia, Ben, Noah, Noa k, Ari, Sammi, Joye, Zoe (not my bunkmate) and more! I met a girl at Alexs bat mitzva named Harper, then a couple months later she turned out to be at camp. I am so excited for the cruise and cant wait to see you!

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The White House continues to change the "cocaine" story. As of 7/7 the number is now 3.  Once again the WH is either incapable of telling the truth  and for sure Biden continue to disavow responsibility.

The WH cites The Hatch Act as restricting them from informing "We The People."  Again, Biden is simply engaged in another "hatchet" job.

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The Limited Potential of the Operation in Jenin

What can we expect from the Israel Defense Forces’ current operation in Jenin?

According to the IDF, the goal of the operation is to disable the massive terror infrastructure that Palestinian groups have built in the Jenin refugee camp.

Over the past year-and-a-half, due to the policies of the previous government and to IDF support for those policies, the area has become a mini-Gaza. In September 2021, in conjunction with then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Central Command head Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs ordered a five-month moratorium on IDF operations in Jenin, in the interest of “strengthening the Palestinian Authority.”

The current operation then is geared towards repairing the damage caused by the policies of the previous government and Central Command. As IDF Spokesman R. Adm. Daniel Hagari explained Monday morning in a spate of television and radio interviews, the purpose of the operation is not to seize control over Jenin or parts of the city. It is not directed against the P.A. It is meant simply to regain the tactical advantage and degrade the capabilities of the terror groups operating in the refugee camp.

As a limited, tactical engagement, the operation has limited, but important, potential. Over the past several weeks, the Palestinians have shot four rudimentary rockets at Israeli communities from Jenin. Although military experts insist these were mere pop guns, the missile industry in Gaza began the same way in 2000. Today, missiles from Gaza have ranges that cover most of the country. The operation in Jenin can destroy all the rocket workshops and kill or arrest all of the terrorist operatives engaged in the development of the rocket program.

The operation in Jenin can also disrupt and degrade the Palestinian terror capacity by killing and capturing the terror commanders and foot soldiers who together have been carrying out shooting, stoning, roadside bomb and pipe bomb attacks against Israelis throughout the region. These attacks have made life a crap shoot for tens of thousands of Israeli citizens who live and work in the communities in northern Samaria and the Binyamin region.

In the hours before the operation in Jenin began, Palestinian terrorists carried out four shooting attacks against Israeli vehicles, communities and IDF personnel in the area around the city. To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, every day Palestinians from Jenin and the wider area carry out hundreds of stoning attacks against Israeli vehicles on the roads. And according to the Shin Bet, in May alone, Palestinians attacked Israeli vehicles with Molotov cocktails 139 times. They carried out 51 pipe bomb attacks and 11 shooting attacks.

While some of the terror infrastructure behind these attacks is located in Nablus, and in villages like Huwara and Umm Tzafa, because of the free rein terror groups enjoy in Jenin, the bulk of the operational infrastructure is located in Jenin.

Strategic problem

The fact that the current operation is a tactical engagement doesn’t mean that the problem isn’t strategic. It is. But unfortunately, the IDF doesn’t share the Netanyahu government’s understanding of the strategic realities on the ground. And as a result, a wider operation is unlikely.

This disparity was exposed Sunday by an in-depth study of Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs and his ideological assessment of the region published by Hakol Hayehudi news service. The report included an interview with a top officer in Central Command. In a remarkable exchange, journalist Elchanan Groner asked the unnamed top officer whether the Palestinian Authority is Israel’s enemy.

“Absolutely not. The Palestinians are not an enemy and the P.A. is not an enemy and really doesn’t encourage terrorism,” the top officer said.

The statement by the top officer was jaw-dropping. As Palestinian Media Watch reported last week, Fatah, the PLO faction led by P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas, bragged in its official media organs last week that U.S.-trained P.A. security personnel carry out two-thirds of all terrorist attacks against Israel.

The P.A. devotes 7% of its U.S.-funded budget to paying salaries to terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails and pensions to the families of dead terrorists. These salaries rise with the severity of the crimes. The base salary is NIS 1,400 a month for rock throwers. Terrorists receive extra money if they murder Jews and the more Jews they murder, the more money they make. On average, the salary of terrorists is three times the average income in P.A.-ruled areas. Yet, the top Central Command officer insisted that the P.A. opposes terrorism.

In his words, “The P.A. views it as a failure when a member of their security forces shoots Israelis. They handle it and put him in jail. I absolutely do not define them as an enemy.”

He added, “It’s possible that a day will come where they embark on another path, and then we’ll define them as an enemy. Abu Mazen [aka Abbas] doesn’t love us, but he opposes terrorism. He is terrible to us in the international arena. But he opposes terrorism.”

Although he admitted that the P.A. pays salaries to terrorists, and that the policy is “a problematic story that is liable to encourage terrorism,” he insisted that it is “very complicated.”

Central Command

Rather than focus on the P.A.’s role in the violence, in recent weeks, top Central Command officers have been focusing their ire on the Jews in the region. The day before the current operation in Jenin, Channel 11 reported that the IDF, Shin Bet and police are forming a joint unit to quell “settler violence.”

The move followed a series of actions against Israeli Jews in the region capped off last week with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s order to place four Israeli Jews under administrative detention for six months despite the absence of evidence of wrongdoing by them. A magistrate’s court judge, citing the absence of incriminating evidence, ordered the four released from jail last week.

The current IDF onslaught against Israeli residents of the region came after last Saturday, when hundreds of area residents entered Umm Tzafa and set fire to Palestinian homes. The media, the Biden administration and the IDF all zoned in on the incident, using it to buttress the narrative that “settler violence” is the propellant driving Palestinian terrorism. That is, the presence of Jews in northern Samaria and the Binyamin region is the “root cause” of Palestinian terrorism.

Last Friday, Maariv journalist Kalman Liebskind exposed the full picture, which is quite different from the narrative that has taken hold. Last Monday, terrorists from the Palestinian village of Urif in the Binyamin region massacred four Jews dining in a restaurant in the neighboring Jewish village of Eli. In the days following the massacre, Palestinians from the neighboring village of Umm Tzafa carried out continuous assaults on Jewish vehicles traveling on Route 465.

Rather than enter Umm Tzafa and round up the hundreds of villagers attacking the Israeli motorists with rocks and boulders, the IDF shut down Route 465 to Israeli traffic for several hours on Thursday and again on Friday morning.

On Saturday, a cowherd from the region was attacked by hundreds of Palestinians from Umm Tzafa. When the IDF failed to deploy forces to protect him from the hundreds of Palestinians attacking him and his cows with fireworks and rocks, he called the residents in the surrounding villages, who broke the Sabbath restrictions to save him. Rather than thank the Jewish villagers, the IDF joined Peace Now and other leftist and anarchist groups in castigating them as violent

thugs for brandishing their weapons to protect the cowherd.

Later that evening, still raging from the attempted murder of their friend just days after four of their friends were murdered at Eli, dozens of area residents entered Umm Tzafa and carried out their arson attacks. While deserving of condemnation and criminal, the arson rampage looks a lot different when seen in the context of events, including the IDF’s inaction.

This is the heart of the problem. While the immediate cause of the expansion of the terrorist infrastructure in Jenin was Fuchs’s stand-down order in September 2021, the deeper reason Jenin has become a mini-Gaza is rooted in Israel’s disastrous 2005 withdrawal from northern Samaria. At the time, believing that the P.A. would behave responsibly and quell the terror groups operating in the region, the Sharon government ordered the destruction of four Israeli communities and the withdrawal of the IDF from its brigade headquarters in the area.

In the event, depending on whom you talk to, the P.A. either lost control over the region and Iranian-backed terror groups took over, or, according to Fatah, the P.A. has led the Iranian-backed terror groups in their transformation of the region into a second Gaza Strip.

Recognizing that the 2005 withdrawal, rather than “settler violence,” forms the root of the present crisis, in March the coalition repealed the 2005 Disengagement Law in relation to northern Samaria. The move was the first step towards enabling the repopulation of the destroyed communities, beginning with Homesh, where the government approved the operation of a yeshiva.

Presumably, the move also presages the return of the Menashe Territorial Brigade (also known as the Jenin Brigade) to its original position.

Since Israel has not applied its law to Judea and Samaria, for the Knesset’s action to go into effect, Gen. Fuchs must sign an administrative order. To date, Fuchs has refused to sign the order. By so acting, Fuchs actively subverts and prevents the government from implementing its strategic vision for northern Samaria.

Empty suit

To be sure, Netanyahu said this week that he opposes any effort to dismantle the P.A. But it is not at all clear that the decision is Israel’s to make. As Arab affairs commentator Baruch Yedid reported on Monday morning, a recent poll showed that 50% of Palestinians believe it is their national interest to dismantle the P.A. Sixty-three percent want Abbas to resign. Seventy-one percent support the terror groups operating in northern Samaria.

Beyond that, the term “Palestinian Authority” is an empty suit. The question is who fills it and what he does. The Netanyahu government does not view the P.A. as presently constituted as a positive force or one interested in fighting terrorism. And given its personnel’s leading role in terrorism, the government’s view is grounded in reality.

From the top officer’s statements to Hakol Hayehudi, and from statements by Fuchs and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, it is apparent that the IDF’s strategic vision for the region is far different. It is more aligned with the Biden administration’s policies than with the Netanyahu government’s policies. Like the administration, the IDF’s top leadership views the Jewish communities in the region as obstacles to security and the P.A. as the preferred partner for fighting Palestinian terrorism.

What this means is that the limited, tactical operation in Jenin the IDF is currently undertaking is the best that we can expect to receive in Judea and Samaria for now. So long as Fuchs remains the commanding officer, and so long as the IDF General Staff refuses to accept strategic realities unaligned with its leadership’s ideological convictions, there is unlikely to be any positive strategic shift in the reality on the ground.

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Hunter Biden’s Smear Strategy

The president’s son launches an attack against the IRS whistleblowers.

By Kimberley A. Strassel

Hunter Biden has adopted a legal strategy of threats and character assassination. It was on display in his legal team’s recent letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith. The 10-page screed was a broad condemnation of the committee’s decision to release the interviews of two Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers who worked the Hunter investigation and claim irregularities in the process that produced Hunter’s recent plea deal. Hunter lawyer Abbe Lowell complained the release violated the “spirit” of “tax laws” that protect “private” taxpayer information. That letter should have come from Donald Trump’s lawyers to House Democrats, who in December set a precedent by voting to release Mr. Trump’s returns.

The real targets of Mr. Lowell’s polemic were the whistleblowers themselves, and the letter is filled with inaccuracy and innuendo. Just one example: Mr. Lowell insinuates the whistleblowers might have lied, since he claims the committee “purposely” didn’t issue them the standard warning about falsehoods. This is flatly refuted by the transcripts, which show both men were told upfront that “false testimony” would subject them to “criminal prosecution.”

The letter deploys the standard impugning of motives—suggesting the IRS men are “biased” and “aggrieved” agents turned “self-styled” whistleblowers. It also slings suggestions of illegal behavior. It intimates whistleblower Gary Shapley might have broken a law prohibiting the disclosure of grand-jury material—even though the transcript shows Mr. Shapley explaining that he couldn’t talk about or provide to the committee covered material.

The letter also suggests the whistleblowers might have illegally leaked information about the investigation to the press. It provides one example: An Oct. 6, 2022, Washington Post story said prosecutors thought they had “sufficient evidence” to charge Hunter with tax and gun crimes. Yet the anonymous whistleblower says in his testimony (under penalty of perjury) that he didn’t leak. Mr. Shapley’s lawyers noted it was their client who referred that leak to two inspectors general. If that isn’t enough, Mr. Shapley filed an affidavit to the committee declaring he isn’t the leaker and releasing the Post from any obligation to maintain his confidentiality if he is.

These smears are in keeping with what the media reported in February was an “aggressive” new Hunter plan to attack critics. That included a flurry of letters—also from Mr. Lowell—to state and federal prosecutors and the IRS demanding investigations of those involved in disseminating the contents of Hunter’s laptop. Yet the attack on the whistleblowers is in a different category, and more reprehensible. The entire point of whistleblower statutes is to protect those who report government malfeasance from retribution.

It’s bad enough the Hunter team made the letter public, putting a target on the backs of both men. The past letters also raise the possibility that Hunter’s team has similarly sent these accusations of whistleblower criminality to the Justice Department with a demand for action. It would be truly outrageous if the president’s son is urging his father’s Justice Department to harass government workers who blew the whistle on potential political favoritism in his plea deal.

Few mere mortals would get away with such behavior, but it’s good to be a Biden. And don’t think confidence in the name isn’t a central tenet of Hunter’s legal strategy. One of Hunter’s lawyers told prosecutors that charging Hunter would be “career suicide,” according to Mr. Shapley’s testimony. And anyway, who is going to call it out? The press cheered the smear, with Axios gloating: “Hunter Biden’s lawyer roasts IRS whistleblowers.” The New York Times, days earlier, buried its confirmation of one of Mr. Shapley’s key claims: that a Joe Biden-appointed California prosecutor had refused to bring charges against Hunter.

Then there’s the Washington Post, which in its own story on the Lowell letter quoted a line claiming Mr. Shapley engaged in “leaks.” It somehow failed to tell its readers that the one concrete leak Mr. Lowell cites appeared in its own newspaper—which means the Post knows the actual source, and therefore presumably knows that it isn’t Mr. Shapley and that the letter’s accusations are untrue. Especially as the same reporter worked on both stories. Instead, the paper aids the Hunter narrative. As someone once said, democracy dies in darkness.

Hunter’s problem is that the evidence the two whistleblowers provided is detailed, consistent and potentially damning. So his team is going to the old James Carville playbook against Bill Clinton’s accusers and impugning the source. And betting the Biden name lets them get away with it.

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Trashing The White House

By Katie Pavlich

Just a few short years ago, the White House, known as The People's House, was revered as a place of prestige, dignity, importance and class. It didn't take long for President Joe Biden to tarnish that reputation, revealing a lot about his morals and "leadership style." 

To start, his degenerate, federally indicted son Hunter Biden has been practically living at the White House for months in an effort to reportedly avoid paying child support or being served with yet another lawsuit from the mother of Navy Joan Biden. Navy Joan is the four-year-old child who Hunter denied existed for years as his daughter. Once a court-ordered paternity test came back positive, Hunter shamelessly tried to bar Navy Joan from using his last name. You would think with all of the shady foreign money Hunter raked in on behalf of the Biden family that he could pay for his children and have his own place, rather than living with his dad at the age of 53. 

But Hunter isn't the only one failing to live up to his family obligations. Navy Joan is also ignored by First Lady Jill Biden when she hangs six stockings for the grandchildren every year – there are seven. President Joe Biden, who claims he is an upstanding family man, is a deadbeat granddad who only acknowledges six grandchildren in press interviews. He has directed his communications staff to do the same. 

On the political front, last month, President Biden gave the green light to his staff to host the largest pride event in White House history. They invited leftist, attention-seeking TikTok influencers to attend ceremonies on the South Lawn. One of the men invited was Rose Montoya. Montoya took down the top part of his dress, exposed his breast implants and engaged in public fondling of himself while children were present. Montoya then posted the footage of his behavior on the internet... 

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Scapegoating the Supreme Court

Democrats said decades ago they alone would run policies for black Americans. Now comes the blame game.

By Daniel Henninger

It has become conventional wisdom that ideological polarization impairs the ability of the political system to function or succeed. In Congress, that is demonstrably true. But what if polarization is justified?

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, popularly summarized as “ending affirmative action,” is the latest study in polarization’s mortal combat.

What Did We Learn From the Latest Supreme Court Term?

Democrats en masse are on the attack against the Roberts court. The delegitimization campaign, such as the personal assaults against Justice Samuel Alito’s integrity, will expand, as will demands that President Biden support a bill introduced by Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren to expand the court to 13 seats.

The U.S.’s polarization over race has indeed become deeply destructive. Its cause lies not in systemic racism but more in political decisions made 60 years ago.

The political division arguably began shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose passage—as a matter of undisputed historical record—was made possible with strong support from Republican senators.

What came next was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, the “war on poverty.” In effect, liberal Democrats back then said to Republicans and conservatives: Step aside. The running of these programs to help black Americans is something we, Northern Democrats, are going to control. You Republicans don’t have a role in this.

No doubt the Democrats’ takeover of antipoverty programs and their large financial transfers was done in part to keep black voters inside the party’s coalition. Still, it’s hard to overstate the monopoly control that career Democrats asserted over public policies affecting the lives of black Americans. The rest of the country was reduced to bystanders. From time to time, a Republican such as Rep. Jack Kemp, Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, would try to cross the racial bridge with less centralized policy proposals. He was rebuffed.

What is there to show for this social-welfare monopoly? Put plainly: The Democrats’ stewardship of urban black America—its education, housing and family well-being—has been a policy and moral failure.

No one will gainsay that the original Great Society was well-intentioned. But a political and psychological characteristic of the liberal administrative state—that is, the appointees and academics who ran these programs—is they never changed course no matter the evidence before their eyes. And past some point, the catastrophe for black family cohesion and education was so embarrassing that by internal Democratic consensus, it became virtually a nonsubject.

During this 60 years, the one notable midcourse correction was Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, whose telling title was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. That reform has since been repudiated by Democratic progressives, who have revived the original Great Society idea of direct transfer payments, aka Bidenomics.

Most disturbing is the liberal failure in education. The race-based admissions policies of Harvard, North Carolina, Princeton and other “elite” schools are the result of so many black Americans being underprepared by their public schools. I recall a visit to the Journal editorial page years ago by the head of one of the college accrediting agencies, who unapologetically argued to us that remedial college courses in English and math were not only necessary for incoming black freshmen but should be a requirement for a college’s accreditation.

These university presidents should be on the ramparts for public-school reform. Instead, they pulled down the shades and retreated to the salve of their admissions policies.

Time was that a strong public education was a crown jewel in New York City. But in another Faustian bargain to keep their political coalition intact, the Democrats let the teachers unions degrade into an industrial union that first and last is about . . . da money.

This travesty of sweeping urban K-12 under the rug was never sustainable. The past 40 years or so have seen a wave of upwardly mobile Asian immigrants to the U.S. from South Korea, China, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard was inevitable.

This commentary is painting Democrats with an unfairly broad brush. Liberal reformers recognized the failures in schooling and family cohesion among inner-city black populations, and some became supporters of public charter schools or school-choice voucher programs. They, too, were pushed aside as the party’s social-policy agenda was taken over by the Democratic left, which has come up with a deflection for six decades of failure: Create scapegoats, such as “white supremacy.” Or the Supreme Court.

Census Bureau data show that increasing numbers of blacks are moving out of these cities, some to nearby suburbs or to states in the South. They often cite better schools and fear of crime. Bloomberg reports that in the past two years, some 2.2 million people have moved to Florida and the Southeast.

Outmigration in search of better opportunity is bleeding the Democrats. In 2022, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and for the first time California each lost one congressional seat. Florida and North Carolina each gained one. Texas gained two.

The Supreme Court doesn’t deserve to be attacked for its Harvard decision. It should be thanked for forcing the subject of this 60-year policy failure into the open.

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