Pathetic: As Hamas plays sick games with hostages 100 days in, Biden whines he’s losing patience with Israel
By Richard Goldberg
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Last night the "Trump Boomerang" hit the Maga Haters in the Democrat party and their pathetic mass media friends, who belch bile on MSNBC, on the back of their respective heads.
How could this happen? From my perspective it was totally predictable. Why? Because the more Trump was pilloried the more he benefitted because most Americans resent bullying and "piling on" and recoil when they are exposed to this type behaviour.
From the time Donald and Melania came down the escalator the likes of Hillary and her slick
lawyers did everything in their power to spy on his administration, to accuse Trump personnel of a variety of outlandish abuses. Hillary even went to extreme lengths to concoct a false dossier alleging Trump was in bed with Putin and would destroy our nation. There has never been comparable efforts to destroy one's opponent when running for the presidency.
Were it not for our two system of justice, Hillary would be in jail for her defiance of a judge's orders not to destroy evidence, for the smashing of her cell phone etc. The woman has a history of underhanded activities. Win at any cost has always been her goal and motivation.
As for the Democrat "Maga Haters," they have applauded a series of unconstitutional efforts on the part of rabid state and local district attorneys in pursuit of the former president. Were they dogs they would have been caged and put to death for seeking to deprive a candidate for a federal office of his various freedoms, by harassments and law suits in conflict with campaign scheduling. The attacks on Trump are contrived vendettas because he bested their Queen Bee, gave the deplorables a voice and was willing to threaten the efforts of Neo-Marxists who wish to destroy American culture because of their outlandish contempt of our republic.
To make matters more dangerous we have a president who accuses his opponent of everything he is actually guilty of as if he was a disciple of Goebbel. Age is not Biden's, problem but rather his mean spirited complete incompetence and I have yet to mention his chronic, pathological lying and alleged corruption. There has never been a president, in my memory, who has apparently marketed his office for so much "gelt." Neither have I ever experienced a president who has spent 40% of his time on vacation, hidden from the people and, more recently, did not even know where his Secretary of Defense was for three days.
Biden has also violated his oath of office, early on, because he has failed to protect our nation from adversaries foreign and domestic. For his open border failures he should have already been impeached nor have I mentioned his Chamberlain like foreign and domestic conduct, his pusillanimous withdrawal from Afghanistan and meaningful responses to adversarial attacks on our military.
I submit nothing I have written is factually debatable. One may disagree with the intensity of my allegations but they cannot deny their credibility. Meanwhile, I accept that facts no longer are relevant in a weaponized world of radical politics. Unlike progressives, I do not aver that if I say it it is so.
We have allowed far too many Trojan Horses to inflict serious damage to our nation. We have no one to blame but ourselves. I fear the foundation of WW 3 has been laid. The threat from Iran must be addressed. As for China, I question our ability to meet any future challenge from their expanding military
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China, at it again?
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There Could Be Only One Reason Why the Chinese Messed With the Coronavirus Again
By Matt Vespa
There’s a new COVID variant that China has been tweaking in the lab, and it’s unbelievable. It was tested on mice and had a 100 percent mortality rate. Dubbed the ‘brain virus,' Chinese scientists are paving the way for another global pandemic if this escapes their labs again. The study involved a “cousin” strain of the coronavirus, which was mutated and then administered to humanized mice; all died within eight days. The study does not say how this could impact humans, but the research has been heavily criticized as pointless, dangerous, and veering into absolute madness (via NY Post):
In a Wuhan-esque study, Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant COVID-19 strain that has a 100% kill streak in “humanized” mice.
The deadly virus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect similar genetic makeup to people, according to a study shared last week out of Beijing.
“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.
The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years before the pandemic.
Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at the University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the research as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”
“I can see nothing of vague interest that could be learned from force-infecting a weird breed of humanised mice with a random virus. Conversely, I could see how such stuff might go wrong,” the professor wrote on X.
“The preprint does not specify the biosafety level…The absence of this information raises…possibility…this research, like the research in Wuhan…that likely caused…Covid…, was performed without…biosafety…essential for research with a potential pandemic pathogen.”
Dr Gennadi Glinsky, a retired professor of medicine at Stanford, wrote: “This madness must be stopped before too late.”
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HOOVER DAILY
AMERICA’S LONGTIME SOURCES OF POWER HAVE TURNED WEAK
by Niall Ferguson via Bloomberg
The US used to be good at persuading allies to pursue its ends and deterring enemies from pursuing theirs. That advantage is being squandered in seven significant ways. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”
“What is the power that moves peoples?" asks Tolstoy in the philosophical essay at the end of War and Peace. “How did individuals” — he has in mind Napoleon — “make nations act as they wished?”
The political theorist Robert Dahl once offered a very simple answer to that question. “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” A great power can make other states or entities do what is in its national interest; and can shrug off their pressures on it to do what would suit them better.
Corporate America Should Amp Up the Volume on DEI
We sometimes tell ourselves that power in the modern world is a more sophisticated thing.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs that went to press just before the horrors of last Oct. 7, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan defined the modern “sources of American power” as a combination of “Bidenomics” (increased investment in domestic innovation and industry), revamped alliances (“a self-reinforcing latticework of cooperation”), reform of international institutions such as the World Bank and even the United Nations Security Council, and the economic and technological containment — as opposed to direct military confrontation — of hostile powers such as Russia, Iran and, above all, China. The argument was elegant — and immediately belied by events in Israel, necessitating a hasty rewrite.
The harsh reality is that the US is no longer very good at “getting B to do something that B would not otherwise do.” Who now thinks of Afghanistan, hastily abandoned to the Taliban in 2021? Ukraine, still struggling against the Russian invader, is slipping from public consciousness amid dwindling financial support from Washington.
We argue bitterly about the way Israel is waging its war against Hamas; we say much less about the impunity with which Iran’s proxies in the Middle East wreak havoc, even attacking American troops. (Friday’s US-led strikes on Houthi targets by design did minimal damage, as they were telegraphed well in advance.) The Taiwanese people voted on Saturday: What, one wonders, will be the US response if the Chinese take exception to the result and blockade the island? Should Sullivan’s essay really have been titled, “The Sources of American Weakness”?
American power sure ain’t what it used to be. During the two world wars, the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror, the US not only grew rich; it also developed a wide range of levers or tools that transformed its national wealth into power. These were the keys to America’s ascent to superpower status. Some are obvious, a few of them paradoxical. Some endure. Too many have atrophied in recent times.
By becoming the world’s largest economy in terms of gross domestic product — which it did as early as 1872, according to the British economist Angus Maddison — the US had unrivaled resources to spend on its army and navy, not to mention all the other agencies of the national security state that came later. It simply chose not to exercise power until the 1940s, when its defense spending as a share of GDP at last rose to match and then exceed that of the European great powers.
Is the US still No. 1 in terms of aggregate economic output? On a current-dollar basis, it is still clearly the world’s largest economy. China’s GDP in 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund, was probably around two-thirds of US GDP when measured in dollars. However, when it is calculated on the basis of purchasing power parity — adjusting for the fact that non-traded services and goods are significantly cheaper in, say, Changsha than in Philadelphia — China caught up with the US in 2016, and last year had an economy a fifth larger.
Losing primacy in terms of purchasing power parity is a problem, given that most of the resources to arm a state are not purchased on the world market. The Chinese navy and nuclear arsenal are much cheaper than their overpriced US counterparts. Of course, they are probably of inferior quality, too. (Recent reports of missiles filled with water rather than rocket fuel suggest that the People’s Liberation Army is far from ready for prime time.)
On the other hand, just about everything else in our still relatively globalized economy — from oil to semiconductors — is priced in dollars. And the recent strength of the dollar, combined with the lower rate of Chinese growth, means that China remains meaningfully behind the US in dollar terms.
So far so good. Unfortunately, there are many other ways in which America has undermined the sources of its power in recent years. Seven in particular stand out.
First, immigration. By being able to import the world’s talent, the US has an almost unique source of power. More than half of unicorns (privately held startups worth $1 billion or more) were founded or co-founded by immigrants. China simply cannot do this — would you want to move there? Neither would the next Elon Musk. Nor the next Patrick and John Collison (the Irish-born founders of Stripe). Nor the next Apoorva Mehta (the Indian-born founder of Instacart). I could go on.
However, a shift from legal to illegal immigration, as the US has seen in recent years — culminating in 2023 with an influx across the southern border that may have exceeded the natural increase of the native population — erodes this source of strength by reducing the quality of the “human capital” being imported.
A second problem is rule of law. What is it that makes the US so attractive to foreign labor and capital? A key part of the answer is the consistency and reliability of our legal system. Anything that undermines that edifice from the Constitution down to the efficiency of the courts, weakens the nation. Unfortunately, there are measurable ways in which this has deteriorated in recent years — it has slid to 26th in the world in the World Justice Project’s rule of law rankings, mainly because of inequities in our civil and criminal justice system — another example of what I once called The Great Degeneration.
Next comes education. In the 19th century, the US benefited from having better secondary education than the rest of the world. In the 20th century it benefited from having better higher education. But these advantages have either gone or are going. Take a look at the latest Program for International Student Assessment results if you want to see how far American teenagers now lag behind their counterparts in not just Hong Kong and Singapore, but also Estonia and Ireland, in mathematics and science. Take a look at Claudine Gay’s brief tenure as president of Harvard to see how weakened our elite universities have been by the ideology of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Fourth, there is public health. In the 20th century, Americans were better fed and lived longer than other people. This, too, is manifestly no longer the case. The US military is finding it increasingly difficult to attract able-bodied recruits, so widespread are obesity, addiction and other self-inflicted infirmities. Less than a quarter of young American adults are in good enough shape — and have a clean enough criminal record — to enlist.
Yes, you may say, but what about American innovation? It is a truth universally acknowledged that the most important source of economic power is technological leadership. In any cold or hot conflict, the state with the most efficient means of destruction, intelligence gathering, and counterintelligence is highly likely to achieve at least deterrence and, if necessary, victory. For most of the past century, US technological leadership has been assured. But a striking feature of Cold War II is that China is posing serious challenges in a number of key domains: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonic missiles, as well as information warfare (TikTok springs to mind). And unlike the US, China has the manufacturing capability to mass produce almost any new technology, from drones to hypersonic missiles.
There is a strong case to be made that, in the past, US government investment in research and development had immense spinoff benefits for the private sector, even though that spending’s core purpose was to enhance national security. However, it seems doubtful that the spirit of Vannevar Bush (who led the Office of Scientific Research and Development in World War II) animates today’s federal bureaucracy. We should be wary of measures billed as “industrial strategy” that expand the economic role of the state in defiance of the lessons of the 1970s, when the costs of state intervention clearly exceeded the benefits. Better outcomes would come from preserving the ability of state governments to compete in attracting private-sector investment, one of the enduring strengths of our federal system.
Sixth, there is fiscal profligacy. For more than 20 years, the federal government has run an unsustainable fiscal policy, with excessive spending and inefficient taxation causing deficits to become the norm, even at full employment, and the federal debt to rise rapidly above total GDP (to say nothing of the unfunded liabilities of welfare programs). This is a major vulnerability, given US reliance on foreign investors and the Federal Reserve to buy the bonds and other paper issued by the Treasury. The rise in real interest rates since 2022 has significantly increased the cost of servicing the debt, to the point that it is close to exceeding the total defense budget. The Fed’s expected lowering of rates this year won’t ease that burden if the debt keeps rising, as it is projected to by the Congressional Budget Office.
True, as the issuer of the world’s most widely used currency (not only as a reserve asset but as a means of payment in transactions), the US enjoys some kind of privilege, though it is not “exorbitant,” as was claimed by French critics in the 1960s. Probably, the American government is able to borrow on relatively better terms than if another currency were dominant in the world. But it is underappreciated how dependent this privilege is on our strategic primacy. Where would the dollar stand, and the 10-year yield, if the US lost a major war? That may explain why successive administrations have preferred economic warfare to actual warfare. But let’s not kid ourselves about the effectiveness of measures such as sanctions and export controls. If economic warfare were a sufficient means, Cuba and Iran would be democracies and Russia would have lost the war in Ukraine.
Finally, we must look at legitimacy at home and abroad. It is perhaps harder to quantify than any other attribute, but “soft power” clearly matters in two respects. First, it is beneficial if the US is perceived in a positive light by actual or potential allies. Second, it is crucial that American power should be regarded as legitimate by US citizens themselves. If the former seems to be more or less intact — America is still far more popular around the world than China — the latter seems more vulnerable to the shifting attitudes of younger Americans. This could matter quite a lot in the event of a large-scale conflict, as it is always younger people who are called on to do the fighting.
The US prides itself on being a democracy, and the phrase “leader of the free world” is still occasionally heard in an election year. In the 20th century, this was undoubtedly a source of strength, in that the American interventions in the world wars, the Korean War, and the 1991 Gulf War enjoyed broad public support. However, the electorate’s relative impatience with prolonged conflicts has, since Vietnam, acted as a constraint on American power. It would seem that US engagement overseas has a relatively short half-life unless (as in Afghanistan) the costs are relatively modest and the fighting done by a relatively small part of an all-volunteer force.
Pax americana is another term for the rules-based international order, in that the rules were devised in 1945 and afterward largely by the US, with input from the UK, the previous Anglophone hegemon. The lesson of the British world order is that the benefits of primacy need to be enough — and discernibly so — to offset the undoubted costs. As soon as this ceases to be true, the political will to deter potential challengers is undermined, leading to much more costly confrontations when the aggressor risks a showdown.
So, when we add together all sources of American weakness, where do we find ourselves?
A reasonable hypothesis is that the US today is dangerously close to the situation of the interwar British Empire, above all because its electorate and elite are no longer willing to bear the costs of deterrence. This raises the prospect of a confrontation (like those Britain experienced in 1914 and 1939) that will be much costlier than deterrence would have been, in which even a victorious outcome would leave the country greatly weakened.
The preferable outcome is to postpone such a confrontation — by means of détente not appeasement — until the pathologies of the rival superpower undermine its economic power. This was the fate of the Soviet Union. It is highly likely to be the fate of the People’s Republic of China, given its mounting demographic and fiscal deficits
The sources of American weakness discussed above are all relatively easy to address through legislative measures that would reform:
Defense procurement, which is wildly costly and inefficient and favors the established defense “primes” over innovative new players;
Immigration in the direction of a merit-based points system and a crackdown on illegal border crossing;
The tort system, which enriches trial lawyers at the expense of business.
Education, e.g., by abolishing the strings attached to federal funding of universities, such as Title IX;
The public-health bureaucracy, which abjectly failed when Covid hit in 2020;
The federal tax system, a nightmare of complexity and inefficiency; and
Medicare and Social Security, which are both on unsustainable paths.
It would also be easy to create better incentives for productive investment than Biden’s questionable industrial strategy. The lesson of history is that free enterprises will invest our savings optimally if the tax code incentivizes them appropriately, whereas state subsidies will 9 times out of 10 lead to misallocations of capital.
The usual objection is that such reforms are politically impossible under our dysfunctional two-party system. But this is obviously wrong. Partisan division has, throughout American history, been quite easy to transcend when the survival of the US itself is at stake. Measures such as 2022’s CHIPS and Science Act — though very far from a silver bullet when it comes to reviving America’s microchip industry — illustrate that bipartisan consensus is perfectly possible when reforms are seen as imperative for national security. Just say that all the above proposals are directed against the Chinese Communist Party and you’ll have the votes.
And that is why power ultimately must consist of more than just wealth and the tools that translate it into geopolitical sticks and carrots. In addition to legitimacy, there must be will. The US still has many, though not all, of the sources of the power it has enjoyed for a century. How far it retains the will to power is harder to say. I suspect we shall find out this year.
Ferguson is also the founder of Greenmantle, an advisory firm, FourWinds Research, Hunting Tower, a venture capital partnership, and the filmmaker Chimerica Media.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net
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As I have repeatedly warned:
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Islam Overtaking Europe?
by Drieu Godefridi
In New York, as in the Belgian parliament, you can meet more and more people who are convinced that the Islamization of Brussels -- and London and other capitals, they often add -- is now inevitable and only a matter of time.
The growth of the Muslim population in Brussels has been both enormous and meteoric. Over the past 50 years, the number of Muslims has grown steadily, and given the erasure of Europe's borders, thanks to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, there seems to be no end in sight.
The figures
As many countries in Europe do not designate people by race or ethnicity, figures are not easy to establish. If we want to remain scientific and factual, it is not by noting the popularity of the first name Mohamed. The last reliable study on the number of Muslims, unfortunately, was done by Prof Jan Hertogen, dates from 2015/2016, and has been adopted by the US State Department. According to that study, the percentage of Muslims in Brussels in 2015 was 24% of the population. More recent figures have been provided by the Pew Research Center, but only for Belgium as a whole, without details by city. In another, 2016 poll, 29% of Brussels residents claimed to be Muslim. Looking at the growth curve, we can estimate that the percentage of Muslims now in Brussels is likely to be slightly beyond 30%.
These figures obviously are not evidence of a Muslim majority in Brussels – or anything near it – at least for now – although birth rates still remain higher for Muslims than for "native" Belgian women.
Immigration
So far, Brussels is not predominantly Muslim. Immigration is not, like gravity, an immutable fact. Across Europe, with the exception of Wallonia, we are witnessing an awakening of the population and the rise to power of parties and personalities seeking zero immigration, or at least a moratorium on immigration.
Despite the claims of many that in Europe, immigration is inevitable, there may be nothing necessarily inevitable about it. What seems to have created the current chaos is the well-meaning but calamitously unthinking jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), combined with the disastrous "Wir schaffen das" ("We can manage this") of Germany's then Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The ECHR's extreme interpretation of "open borders" hinders the development of a workable asylum policy.
In 2012, the ECHR introduced the "Hirsi ruling," named after the legal case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy. This ruling asserts that European states are legally obligated to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, even if they are just 200 meters from the Libyan coast, and transport them to a European port, allowing these individuals to claim refugee status. When the Italian Navy intercepted illegal migrants in the Mediterranean and returned them to Libya, the ECHR not only condemned Italy for what it considered an "evident" violation of human rights but also required the Italians to pay 15,000 euros ($17,000 at the time) to each of these illegal migrants as compensation for "moral damage." This amount is equivalent to more than 10 years of income in the home countries of Mr. Hirsi Jamaa and his companions, Somalia and Eritrea, and most probably the reason they wanted to come to Europe in the first place. (In 2016, Somalia's GDP per capita was estimated at $400, and Eritrea's at $1,300.)
The Hirsi ruling became widely known, particularly in Africa, leading many to understand that if they could just reach the Mediterranean, European navies would now be obligated to transport them directly to Europe. Before the Hirsi ruling, individuals attempting to reach European shores each year faced tragic deaths at sea – sometimes in the hundreds. After Hirsi, the goal of many migrants shifted to being intercepted and rescued. Consequently, literally millions of people now make this journey, often with the assistance of non-governmental organizations, such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), whose activists wait for boats near the Libyan coast.
Immigration is not a natural disaster that befalls Europe, like a plague of locusts or a drought. The migration chaos we are experiencing in Europe is purely a human catastrophe, caused by dreamy policies and faceless judges who are accountable to no one.
The migrants already here are here, but further mass influxes of migrants, such as many countries are experiencing, can be stopped the day after tomorrow by neutralising the ECHR -- simply by opting out of it. It will be interesting to see what Dutch MP Geert Wilders brings to the Netherlands. He may have watered down his most extreme views, but still might want to end the flow of migrants to his beautiful country. In any event, leaving the ECHR is at least one option.
The European Union, by the way, and the Council of Europe -- on which the European Court of Human Rights depends -- are two distinct international organizations. The Netherlands could leave the Council of Europe, if they wished, while remaining a member of the EU.
The temptation to prejudge
The massive settlement of Muslim populations in Europe -- 57 million people by 2050, as projected by the Pew Research Center -- is being experienced dramatically by attacks on civilians, harassment of civilians, no-go-zones with inhabitants who appear not to wish to assimilate, and outspoken concern that a significant proportion of the newcomers are, or are becoming, radicalized.
This new sentiment in Europe could be seen long before the current Israel-Hamas war, with the proselytization of these new Europeans by programs from the Middle East (such as here and here). In Belgium, anti-Semitic prejudice is reportedly more widespread among Muslims. Pro-Palestinian marches since October 7 have all too often been the pretext for raw anti-Semitic slogans not seen since Nazi rallies in the 1930s and 1940s. In France, sadly, the vast majority of anti-Semitic acts and attacks have apparently been committed by Muslims.
In London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, to his great credit, condemned the "Hamas sympathisers" who joined these demonstrations and were "singing antisemitic chants and brandishing pro-Hamas signs and clothing".
We all, however, must guard against the temptation to oversimplify and prejudge – a tendency that appears widespread. Although Islam is a religion, with laws and a doctrine like other religions, one cannot, however, leave it in the same way as one might leave socialism, environmentalism or Catholicism. In Islamic law, apostasy can be punishable by death.
Additionally, many Muslims in Europe feel an intensity about Islam that we do not feel about our Judeo-Christian tradition. Often, we even seem -- dangerously -- to take it for granted and risk throwing it away. Many Muslims, conversely, appear to take for granted that wherever they are should be Islamic. To many Muslims, Islam appears to be "very important" in their life. To many in the West, religion is not necessarily "very important," but often somewhere in the periphery, except perhaps during the high holidays. Many Muslims also seem have the conviction, that the world should bend to Islam, not the other way around.
If, then, we assume Islam is an immovable and timeless concept that disregards all other factors and dominates all considerations, we are just reaffirming the mindset of Islamists. Perhaps it is important to remember that over time, nothing remains unchangeable.
To think now that Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Antwerp will inevitably become Islamic is to promise victory in advance. It is defeatist thinking, which Winston Churchill, in his six-volume series, The Second World War, describedas more threatening than all the Nazi divisions put together.
Tolerating the representatives of Islamist terrorism
One of the elements that lends credence to the idea of an "Islamist Brussels" -- or anyplace-- is the astonishing tolerance shown by the Belgian authorities towards representatives and individuals linked to Islamist terrorist organisations. For example, The London Times recently revealed:
"A British man has been accused by the German authorities of being Hamas's key liaison in Europe with numerous alleged links to the terrorist organisation... Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, names Al-Zeer as the 'person responsible for Hamas' in Germany and across Europe."
Al-Zeer has an office in Brussels that enables him to directly monitor events at the European Commission. According to a December 2023 report by 7sur7, Al-Zeer is the "real boss" of a non-profit association called EUPAC, which describes itself as the "European Palestinian Council for Political Relations".
According to Laatste Nieuws, Al-Zeer, aged 61, is from Bethlehem, and fled to Kuwait with his family at the age of six during Israel's Six Day War. In the 1990s, he settled in Britain, becoming an influential Palestinian activist, already, at the time, linked to Hamas.
According to The Times, in 2009, in an interview with Felesteen, a newspaper affiliated with Hamas, he spoke about a relative who had joined the armed wing of Hamas, the Ezzedin Al-Qassam Brigades.
In London, Al-Zeer was reportedly one of the founders of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), a pressure group set up in 1996 to defend the "right of return" of all refugees to "Palestine." In 2018, Germany's internal security agency, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, described the PRC as a Hamas front organisation and a "central propaganda organisation for Hamas in Europe", used by Hamas and its supporters in Germany and Europe for their activities. A photograph dating from 2008 shows Al-Zeer alongside Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, and another picture from 2015 shows him alongside Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
According to The Daily Mail:
"A file from the German interior ministry, first reported by magazine Der Spiegel, named Al-Zeer as the 'person responsible for Hamas' in Germany and across Europe."
EUPAC has other members close to Hamas, including the second and third members of its organisational chart — Mazen Kahel and Omar Faris — who have held senior positions in the PRC. One of them Mazen Kahel was also a co-founder of the Council for Euro-Palestinian Relations, a non-profit organisation based in Brussels, founded in 2010 and dissolved in 2016, but was on the European Union's official list of pressure groups.
EUPAC, which also appears to be dedicated to lobbying, has its official headquarters on Place Robert Schuman in Brussels, overlooking the European Commission's Berlaymont building -- a perfect symbol of the Belgian authorities' appalling laxity.
Islam and Islamism as a totalitarian ideology can be defeated. With its policy of open borders, Europe has taken the path of submission. The freedom of movement of Hamas's "key liaison" in Europe is the ultimate symptom of this submission. A moratorium on immigration might be a good place to start.
Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).
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Anti-Semitism:
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It isn’t always a matter of simple hatred. Sometimes it springs from ideology or is a product of ignorance.
Iran and the Houthis Don’t Get Biden’s Message
Two Navy SEALs are missing from a mission to seize Iran’s weapons.
Mr. Biden’s spokesmen are at pains to say the U.S. doesn’t want war with the Houthis or Iran, but it sure looks like they’re at war with the U.S. On Monday the Houthis fired an anti-ship missile at a U.S.-flagged containership, and on Tuesday they launched a missile that hit a Maltese-flagged ship. The Maltese ship was able to keep sailing, but the episode shows that neither the Houthis nor Iran have been deterred by last week’s U.S. salvos against Houthi arms caches and missile launchers.
Perhaps that’s because the U.S. warned the Houthis in advance of the strikes so the militants could evacuate. That might seem like a humanitarian gesture, but in the Middle East it tends to get interpreted as weakness. The Houthis may think Mr. Biden authorized the retaliatory strikes because he wanted to show a U.S. audience he’s getting tough, but that the President fears Houthi escalation. So of course the Houthis escalate (and the U.S. hit four more Houthi targets on Tuesday).
As does Iran. The missing SEALs were part of an operation to interdict Iranian weapons on their way to the Houthis in Yemen. One SEAL fell into the water trying to board and with suspected weapons, and a comrade went in after him. They may be dead—two more American casualties of Iran’s hostility to U.S. interests and its apparent disdain for Mr. Biden’s warnings.
The SEALs join Army pilot Garrett Illerbrunn, who has been in a coma after being badly injured in an attack by a different Iranian proxy militia in Iraq on Christmas Day. Americans who sign up for military duty know the risks, but Mr. Biden hasn’t made any public statement to our knowledge about Chief Warrant Officer 4 Illerbrunn or the Navy SEALs.
Iran and the Houthis are putting American lives at risk, even as the leaders in Tehran hide their malevolent intent behind their proxy militias. They probably assume Mr. Biden will never dare to attack Iran’s military or domestic assets in a U.S. election year. These are the consequences of failed deterrence, with American servicemen paying the price.
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