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Last of wedding photos

Bride Jessica

Some of Henry's father in law's family

Henry, Jessica and Rabbi Under Chuppah

Amy's Husband, Steve, with Daniel's Son, Max

First Dance

Grandson, Son, Kevin, with Our Family Grandchildren

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When South Africa and the UN Hate,

Take Comfort in G-d's Protection

Anti-Semitism is so incomprehensible that many of us Orthodox Jewish theologians believe anti-Semitism is G-d’s way of “mowing the lawn”- while making sure we survive. Op-ed.

By DOV FISCHER

Our history: We accepted and received G-d's Torah at Mount Sinai in the presence of millions, and we have honored our promise for 3,300 years. We still observe His Day of Rest on the seventh day. We still do not eat the animals, sinews, and fats He declared forbidden to us. We still maintain family purity and the mikveh laws. We still observe the Holy Festivals He declared in the Book of Numbers (Bamidbar/B’midbar) chapters 28-29.

And despite incomprehensible and indescribable antisemitism through two millennia of Exile, we still maintain the world’s best sense of humor and — except for those who have made a Cult of the Holocaust, spending tens of millions building Holocaust Museums and producing Holocaust movies instead of building yeshivot and producing authentic Jewish education — we refuse to see ourselves as “Victims.”

The Left wallows in Victimology. We are Winners. Proof? We are still here. Jews returned to the Jewish homeland after two thousand years. We revived our language after two millennia of its corruption and dilution, because of innocent ignorance, with German and Polish. And, on the day Israel has the right leaders, it can and will wipe out all proximate foes — and anyone else who gets in the way — in 24 hours.

On the other side, ladies and gentlemen, the People’s Republic of South Africa. South Africa, a failed state with extraordinarily high murder rates. Their history: Cannibals. When they attack Israel, the question is not “What’s eating them now?” Rather, it is: “Who’s eating them now?”

To be born a Jew is to be born with a target on your back. You go to the same movies others do. Enjoy similar foods, although — if you play by the rules — you restrict yourself to kosher ingredients and kosher-certified eating establishments. You root for the same sports teams others do. You like the same books.

But you still know you have a target on your back. Each and every Jew knows this from childhood. Watch “The Fabelman's,” where even Spielberg drops his guard to let you know he knows, too. Israel is his life insurance policy, too. The America that loved “E.T.,” “Jurassic Park,” “Star Wars,” “Indy,” “Jaws,” and “Close Encounters” could throw him out unceremoniously just as Germany threw out Billy Wilder and his cohort of great screenwriters, actors, composers, and Einstein's.

It makes no sense. Germany could have used Einstein during World War II. E = mc2 was not a secret recipe for cholent. But they handed him to America as stupidly as Sharon handed Gaza to Hamas and as Ehud Barak (Israel's Judas Maccabee, without the "Maccabee" part) handed South Lebanon to Hezbollah.

If left alone, Jews would be like everyone else — normal. Our voting patterns would be the same. Our everything would be the same. But mindless persecution has made us different — and caused a certain chunk of us, like the makers of Chunky Monkey, to be not normal, even manifestly sick with self-loathing. Ben and Jerry left their ethnically Jewish New York for Vermont, to live as colonizers on indigent Indian land. So did Bernie Sanders from Brooklyn, to live not only on indigenous Indian land but also indolently on indulgent women’s money. So some Jews become distorted with self-loathing, like a George Soros who grew up as a ward to a Nazi, like a cartoon Robin to an Eich Man, keeping account books for him of property confiscated from Jews, to try proving to non-Jews that “We are just like you, no different at all. See? We even associate with the worst Jew haters and oppose Israel — just like you. So please don’t kill us. We’ll do the books.”

And, yet: News Flash: When a person takes the lead in demonizing people of his own ethnicity for no rational reason, and mires himself in the same pigsty where the Rashid Tlaibs, Ilhan Omars, and Ocasios wallow, that is not normal. Normal people simply do not do that. Irish-Americans don’t turn on Ireland. Mexican-Americans don’t boycott Mexico. Italian-Americans don’t attack Italy. Black Americans, like civil rights heroes Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, do not lead battles for the women of Congo who face a national epidemic of rape. Arab-Americans do not oppose Hamas rape or “Palestine Authority” terrorism. Rashida Tlaib won't even vote to condemn Arab rape.

It so much “makes no sense” that it makes perfect sense. Two thousand years of blood libels, Crusades to Palestine that got out of hand and turned into bloodbaths along the Rhine and the Seine, false accusations of poisoning the wells of Europe, mass burnings of Talmuds and others of our holy books and manuscripts, false allegations of causing the Black Death, autos-da-fé and burnings at the stake, mass expulsions from countries, forcible conversions to majority religions, being confined in ghettoes, pogroms, Holocausts, “Gentleman’s Agreements,” and such finally do leave some people psychologically distorted. They become deeply sick. This is not about hurling invective; it is diagnosis.

Indeed, antisemitism is so incomprehensible that many of us Orthodox Jewish theologians believe that antisemitism is G-d’s way of “mowing the lawn” when He sees Jews assimilating too much, too many abandoning their Judaic ties, being too much like “the Nations” to the degree that they no longer make the Sabbath Day special, one of delight, and abandon kosher dietary practices. So, along comes Jew-hatred to keep us in check. Maybe that is why we still are around, and will be forever. When too many try to run away, He simply closes all other doors. As the Shoah taught, in contradistinction to the universal aphorism: You can hide, but you can't run. The rabbis of the Talmud say that the evil Haman inspired more Jews to return to G-d and Judaism than did great teachings.

We don’t look for it. We don’t want it. But it comes. The little Jew-hating snot, Greta Thunberg, knows nothing about climate. Antisemitism is in her forecast, now and forever. As with all storms, it moves from country to country. Where is she from? Sweden? It’s been there forever. It would be nice to have climate change there.

Often, it comes from outta nowhere, just when we never felt safer. Our Golden Age in Spain came in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, when some of our greatest scholars arose: poets and thinkers like Rambam (Maimonides), Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, Avraham Ibn Ezra, and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. And then G-d sent Ferdinand and Isabella to convert us forcibly and to burn at stake any Jews who presented as converts but secretly retained their Judaic faith and practiced Judaic rituals privately. Other countries invited us in, and we contributed mightily to their successes, ever grateful for the opportunity. “And then there arose a new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph,” and it was back to the beginning, kicked out and searching for a new land that would take in the survivors.

We never were secure. We first entered Russia, moderately welcomed. Then they turned. We were at the center of the Weimar Republic, never felt safer in Germany. And soon they were painting swastikas on stores and on college dorm rooms, breaking glass windows, burning books and temples, and banning us from the universities. And so it went. Never to find a haven.

England expelled us in 1290 and did not let us back until 1648. When King Henry VIII searched for a rabbi to interpret the Torah books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to provide Biblical justification for the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he couldn’t find a single darned rabbi in all of England — because all the Jews had been thrown out 250 years earlier. France threw us out a few years later. We got slaughtered in Germany throughout the 11th through 13th Centuries. Spain threw us out in 1492, Portugal in 1497 when King Manuel married Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s daughter. Italy confined us in those ghettoes, truly “the world’s largest open-air prisons”; that’s why that word, ending in singular in “o,” sounds Italian. Because it is.

(Segué In my freshman year of college, my dormmate turned out to be an anti-Semite — even before he got to know me. I had no idea until one day a guy from down the hall told me to watch out for him, that he hates Jews. I asked how he knew. He told me: “Last night, he had a few too many beers and caught me alone while I was watching a movie in the common TV room at the end of the hall. He started ranting how he hates Jews and hates that he was placed on a dorm floor where all the other 118 students are Jews. That he and I are the only “Christians” on this ‘whole damn Jew floor.’ I asked him how he knew I was not a Jew, too. He answered: ‘I feel safe with you because you are Italian.’ I asked how he knew. He said “Because your last name ends in an ‘o.’ ”

And that is how I learned that my dormmate was a Jew-hater. Because he had opened up, after a few beers, to Harry Shapiro.

And now Black-Majority South Africa has decided to take the lead as the next great world Jew-hating power. Mighty Black-Majority South Africa. Cultural center of the universe. Think of any great composer from there. Black-Majority South Africa: source of great philosophers and scholars. Think of one. The locus to which all eyes turn at Nobel Prize season. Think of all their laureates. All that comes to my mind are their cannibals. Not cannon balls, mind you. Cannibals. (Christiaan Barnard? White. Degree from University of Minnesota. In today’s South Africa, he would be a bimmy. DEI.)

And now Black-Majority South Africa is ready to advance civilization. With eyes on the Jews, they are taking out their forks and knives. They don’t need dishes.

What in the world did the Jews ever do to warrant the dirt bags running Black-Majority South Africa joining with Hamas and Arab Muslim terror? If anything, Jews were leaders in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa when that opposition was perilous to lead. The most outspoken anti-apartheid parliamentarian in the country was a Jewish woman, Helen Suzman. The Jews were mostly quite conservative but deeply anti-apartheid. Apartheid is plain wrong. So South African Jews opposed it. And eventually apartheid fell.

And what did the Jews get in return for a decency that Nelson Mandela recognized, acknowledged, and deeply appreciated? The Jews got a loused-up polity that cannot run its own country, a Black-Majority South Africa where 7,000 of their own people in “peacetime” get murdered every three months — that comes to 28,000 murders a year, the highest numbers they have recorded.

Yet, those Jew haters file a “legal” case in a corrupt United Nations court, accusing Israel of war crimes. Got that? Hamas murderers break into Israel and, in one day, murder 1,200 Jews, slaughter hundreds at an all-night rave dance party for peaceniks who believe Arab Muslims are their friends, then proceed to left-wing Marxist socialist kibbutzim (kibbutzes), populated by leftist Israelis who chose to live near Gaza in order to be peace emissaries to the Arab Muslims in whose good intentions they foolishly believed, and slaughter them.

In the name of Allah, they stabbed and cut throats, cut fetuses out of the bellies of living mothers and then stabbed the babies and mothers multiple times to horrible death, cut off limbs of living people before murdering them, raped dead women, raped living women alongside dead women, cut off heads, slaughtered babies, in some cases slaughtering so many babies and cutting off so many of their heads in the same nursery room that the religious burial society needed weeks to match the decapitated heads with the right baby torsi for dignified burials consonant with Jewish law; and in the name of Allah, they took other babies and put them in ovens while they still were alive and burned them to death.

In 2006, Israel gave those Arabs — there is no such thing as “Palestinians” — a land of their own, Gaza, along a beautiful Mediterranean coastline that is no different from the beaches and coasts of Tel Aviv. They could have built a Shangri-la. They were sent $4.5 billion from 2014-2020. They could have built villas, built a national utilities infrastructure. Instead, in 18 years they never built their own electric grid or water system or world class hospital; they chose to rely on Israel for it.

Instead, they took that by-now close to $8 billion from American taxpayers like you, and from Europeans and Qataris, and they built an underground hell-hole of 400 miles of tunnels that are like the New York City subway system, covering every kilometer of Gaza underground. They built them to store rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, ammunition, rockets and missiles to shoot into Israel, hand grenades, IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), and to hide themselves. They built them under hospitals, UNRWA schools, mosques, residential apartment buildings, even five-star hotels.

Israel had to fight five wars they launched, and this is the sixth in those 18 years. So it has got to stop, whatever it takes. If Hamas insists on hiding behind human shields, Israel has to do what America did in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. There is no choice — or From the River to the Sea, Israel Will Cease to Be.

America — as weak as it has become under politically correct governance — still would never stand for what Israelis endure daily. If every single hour of every single day for the past 18 years, Biden and Blinken had to race into bomb shelters — several times daily — to take cover from rockets being fired from Mexico and Canada, that would be a red line even Obama would have to cross.

To hell with Black-Majority South Africa.

This, from the non-partisan Wikipedia on South Africa:

[C]rime, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about 40% of the total population being unemployed as of 2021, while some 60% of the population lived under the poverty line and a quarter under $2.15 a day. . . .

By 2020, numerous warnings have been issued that South Africa is heading towards failed state status with unsustainable government spending, high unemployment, high crime rates, corruption, failing government owned enterprises and collapsing infrastructure. . . Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt said the country is in deep trouble, "South Africans have been getting poorer for a decade". He said he is very concerned because "32 million people get an income from the state. The state cannot afford this anymore."

Neal Froneman, CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater, said that crime is out of control, with 'mafia-style shakedowns' for procurement contracts becoming the norm. Professor Eddy Maloka, from the Institute of Risk Management, " Government has collapsed in areas across the country. We are seeing inner-cities collapse and degenerate."

This, from the Arab Muslim Qatari outlet, Al Jazeera:

Quarterly figures showed that the murder rate rose 14 percent between July and September, compared with the same timeframe in 2021, when 6,163 people were killed.

Almost 1,000 women were among those murdered during the period in 2022. More than 13,000 women were also victims of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and 1,277 women were victims of attempted murder.

“The rate at which women are abused, violated and some killed in South Africa remains worrying and unacceptable,” Police Minister Bheki Cele told a news conference.

The figures also showed that kidnappings doubled to more than 4,000 compared with the same time last year; and rapes, in a country notorious for sex attacks against women and children, were up 11 percent, with 10,000 cases opened across the country.

Car jackings rose 24 percent to more than 6,000.

And between April and September, more than 550 children were killed.

Those dirt bags have a Gaza Strip right under their own noses, in “peacetime,” on their watch, and yet they bring war crimes charges against Israel? And all the other anti-Israel tropes:

1. Millions of Arab Muslims are immigrants all over Europe, though not indigenous there. Are they colonizers? So why are Jewish immigrants to the Land of their Fathers called “colonizers” when they are indigenous, predating the Muslims by more than a millennium?

2. Arab Muslim countries expelled 900,000 Jews in the 1940s and 1950s. Where else did they think those million Jewish immigrants would end up, if not in Israel? There was a population exchange, as with every major war. End of story.

3. The Soviet Marxists persecuted Jews from 1917. Of course the Jews wanted out. Once they got out, where did they expect them to emigrate, Saudi Arabia? Yemen? Syria? They already had been expelled from there. Of course they immigrated to Israel.

4. How can Israel be accused of ethnic cleansing and other Nazi terms of annihilation if actual census data instead evidence that the population of Gaza has increased by 25 percent under Israeli oversight in under ten years? “Since the publication in 2012 of the UNCT’s report on ‘Gaza 2020’1, Gaza’s population has increased by 400,000, reaching 2 million people by the end of 2016. Gaza’s population is projected to further increase to 2.2 million by 2020 and to 3.1 million by 20302 - just 12 years away.”

And so, we Jews never know where it will come from. When I was in college at Columbia in the 1970s, I marched against the Soviet Union and communism, and got arrested many times. I also knew that Red China and all Communists were evil and that my parents’ generation had encountered it from Nazi Germany to Vichy France. I knew where we stood with the Arab Muslim countries. But I never imagined I would see South Africa as a new world center of Jew hatred. And yet, I always knew — and know — it will come from somewhere, often a slime-hole of murders, women abuse, kidnappings, sex attacks and rapes, child killings, and car jackings.

Like Black-Majority South Africa.

Today, South Africa. Yesterday, the Turkey that once was the one remaining Muslim country with which we were allied closely. The day before, Iran that was an incredible ally under the Shah.

Tomorrow? It will come from somewhere else that will be so surprising that, for me as a student of Jewish history, it will not be surprising at all. For the late Jimmy Buffet, who loved to party, it was always 5:00 somewhere. For Jews, it always is midnight somewhere.

To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org

Rav Fischer’s recent high-energy no-holds-barred encore interview with the Jewish Republican Alliance appears here at bit.ly/3U0Gbv9. In it, he discusses Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, the sicknesses on America’s college campuses, opines on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Charlie Kirk, Tucker, Candace, the ADL, and the 2024 election.

His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the Rise of Modern Israel can be found here at bit.ly/474Wnyg. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and video’d interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.

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In Trump lawfare, Anything Goes.

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

Remember when the Lawyer Left Legions lined up from Broadway to Guantanamo Bay to volunteer their services to imprisoned al-Qaeda terrorists? Ensuring a five-star due-process menu for mass-murderers whose objective was to return to the jihad, we were told, was the best way to promote “our values” globally. (With the globe on fire 20 years later, it’s probably best not to ask how that went.)

In more recent times, progressives have stayed domestic, railing about the “carceral state,” going to bat for violent criminals of color, and maintaining that the justice system is inherently racist. Wait a sec, you think: Isn’t that system run by the Lawyer Left and its top law-school graduates? Now, now, this is no time for such impertinence — not when we still have police departments to investigate!

Ever wondered how lawyers can have no apparent qualms about defending monstrous clients? How they can sleep at night after zealously defending terrorists, murderers, organized-crime buttons, rapists, and every other kind of sociopath? I’ve known and litigated against my share of such lawyers, grown fond of quite a few, and, as for the others, realized their role is vital even if it’s not for me. An old defense-lawyer friend, a talented guy who knew how to charm a jury, told me he was often asked how in good conscience he could put his impressive skill set in the service of such clients. He’d reach into his pocket, pull out one of those booklet copies of the Constitution, and proclaim, “That’s my client.”

I once prosecuted leaders of a street-gang cocaine business. At the very start, before we’d gotten five minutes in, the judge explained to the jury that a criminal trial, which we were about to begin, is “a search for the truth.” “Objection!” came a shrill voice from the defense table. Thereupon the judge, the other lawyers, and I were subjected to a sidebar civics lesson: a defense attorney’s impassioned lecture on how, far from a search for the truth, a criminal trial is the crucible in which we test the government’s adherence to the Bill of Rights. It affords the accused the presumption of innocence, she thundered, giving him every bounce of the ball, compelling the prosecutor to meet the daunting burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So dedicated are we to these propositions, we proudly acquit even those we suspect may be guilty, since we’d prefer that over the possibility of railroading a potentially innocent man. Finally, pointing at moi, she admonished the judge that our courtroom trial was not “a search for the truth”; it was the Constitution in action, a sacred undertaking in which his sworn duty was to hold my feet to the fire.

A tad melodramatic? Sure . . . but to this day, I confess to a grudging admiration for it. It put some spring in the judge’s step, which made my job harder. But see, my job was supposed to be hard. Striking the right balance between aggressiveness and fairness, grasping that the presumption of innocence is serious business, something conscientious government lawyers must overcome with evidence, not by gaming the system — that’s the gig. That way, when a clever defense lawyer brandishes a pocket Constitution that he claims is his client, the prosecutor can justly reply, “Yeah, mine too.”

During the Pleistocene Epoch, when I was a young government lawyer, I was given to understand that these were eternal truths. Time-traveling to 2024, I’m left to ask: What would the media-Democratic complex be saying if Republican prosecutors had indicted a Democratic presidential candidate in four different jurisdictions, and were rushing to get him tried and (they hoped) convicted prior to Election Day?

Imagine the howls if the prosecutors were arguing that the four courts should schedule trials without any concern about whether the physical, psychological, and financial burdens of the multiple cases — in different districts hundreds of miles away from one another — would undermine the defendant’s ability to prepare for any one trial, let alone all of them.

Yet something very similar is happening right now in the real world, except that the prosecutors are Democrats and the defendant is former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee to run against the incumbent Democratic president.

In Trump lawfare, anything goes.

A good example: Last week, I discussed an important proceeding in Florida. Judge Aileen Cannon was considering a new trial date for the Mar-a-Lago documents trial — one more realistic than the current May 20 date. Everyone knows May 20 is unrealistic with the case mired in litigation under CIPA (the Classified Information Procedures Act, the complexity of which invariably makes a slog of any matter it applies to). Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith thus proposed July 8 as an alternative.

As Politico reports, Judge Cannon seemed to view Smith’s proposal as implausible given the breadth of discovery (mainly, mounds of classified discovery) to which the defense may still be entitled; the sheer number of pretrial motions and hearings that remain to be submitted, conducted, and ruled on; and the fact that the Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution is not the only case on the South Florida federal court’s docket.

The huge problem, about which prosecutors seem astonishingly apathetic, is that Trump is facing not just one criminal trial, but four of them.

Normally, this would be a first-order concern for a prosecutor. The government’s lawyer is responsible for ensuring that the defendant gets a fair trial. Though that may sound hokey, it is demanded by due process, which prosecutors are dutybound to uphold. But we don’t just rely on the honor of the government lawyers in this regard; self-interest factors in: Nothing is more likely to get a conviction reversed than denial of the defendant’s fair-trial rights. Prosecutors are supposed to ensure that the trial-court record can withstand the searching review of appellate courts. There is nothing normal about prosecutors in a hot panic to get a conviction by a certain date — specifically, Election Day.

If Trump had nothing else going on but the Florida case, a July 8 trial date would be challenging. There’s too much pretrial preparation that needs to be done. Most significant, in terms of the constitutional right to a fair trial, is the discovery that needs to be reviewed — a task complicated by the mandate that classified discovery may only be perused by government-approved defense lawyers in government-approved secure locations.

Of course, Trump has lots going on besides the Florida case. I’m not just referring to the little matter of the presumptive Republican nominee’s national presidential campaign. Among the array of criminal prosecutions pending against him, Trump faces a trial in Manhattan on March 25, about two weeks from now.

Any good litigator will tell you that, once you’re within two weeks of a significant trial, preparation leaves you with scant time for pressing matters in your own life, to say nothing of other cases with remote trial dates. The case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg may be absurd and abusive, but it is inarguably significant — Trump faces 34 felony counts that, statutorily speaking, amount to a century-plus of potential incarceration. According to the latest estimates, the trial will last for up to six weeks, with the court sitting for four days a week, taking Wednesdays off.

At the hearing, Smith’s underlings suggested to Cannon that this Manhattan trial was no excuse to delay the CIPA proceedings in Florida. After all, the prosecutors theorized, those proceedings could be scheduled for Wednesdays.

What?

During a criminal trial, non-trial weekdays and weekends are not downtime for the lawyers and defendants. To the contrary, that is the time they use to get ready for what’s ahead in the trial — scrutiny of the discovery, preparing to cross-examine government witnesses, research and writing of any relevant motions, preparing for the defense case and the defendant’s potential testimony, and so on. They are long days, not off days.

Moreover, even if there were time to shelve all that necessary work, in the middle of a complicated trial, so the lawyers and defendant could turn to preparation for another trial that is months away, there is the stubborn geographical fact of Manhattan’s being situated over 1,200 miles away from South Florida. There is no way everyone could get down to Florida for a full day’s work on Wednesdays, then be back in the New York courtroom ready to go on Thursday morning.

Remarkably, the attitude of Smith’s prosecutors was that this bind is Trump’s fault. It wasn’t that Smith knowingly timed his indictment in a way that made the bind inevitable. It wasn’t that Smith — who could have brought a straightforward obstruction case — elected to bring dozens of Espionage Act charges that have frozen the proceedings in the CIPA tundra. No, no: The blame here lay with the defendant, prosecutors rationalized, because Trump elected to have the same lawyers represent him in both Florida and Manhattan. The implication was that if Trump would just pony up more millions for more legal teams in response to the Democrats’ strategy of indicting him in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, then one Trump team could handle proceedings down south from March through May, while Trump is on trial up north.

This is breathtaking on two counts.

As the prosecutors well know, absent a conflict of interest, a defendant is entitled to qualified counsel of his choice. What Smith is saying, however, is that this right, rooted in the Constitution, should be nullified because the Biden Justice Department wants Trump tried and convicted before Election Day — notwithstanding unambiguous Justice Department guidelines that forbid prosecutors from basing law-enforcement decisions on electoral considerations.

But it’s worse than that. Cannon quite properly schooled the prosecutors on the more fundamental point of constitutional law: Even if Trump had separate sets of lawyers who could work full time on two different cases (to say nothing of four), a defendant has a constitutional right to be present at all important proceedings in a criminal case. There is no way Trump could be present for classified proceedings that are critical in his Florida case if he is in Manhattan attending his criminal trial. Yet Smith would negate Trump’s constitutional right to be present and meaningfully participate in his defense in the Mar-a-Lago case — again, in service of President Biden’s campaign imperative that Trump be convicted on federal charges before Election Day.

To repeat, Smith intentionally created this bind. Bragg indicted Trump first, last spring, after which Judge Juan Merchan set the March 25, 2024, trial date. Only after that did Smith indict Trump on the Mar-a-Lago charges (now including two other defendants and 42 felony counts). The denial of Trump’s fair-trial rights is not a bug, it’s a feature.

It’s worse than that, actually — much worse. Bragg unsealed his Trump indictment on April 4, 2023. Smith thus waited until the putative Republican 2024 presidential candidate was locked into a March 2024 trial before pulling the trigger on his Mar-a-Lago indictment on July 8, 2023. He then pressured Judge Cannon to set a preposterously early trial date in a CIPA case — which is how we got the scheduled May 20, 2024, trial. Only after he had Trump locked in for a Florida trial likely to be of two-to-three months’ duration starting this spring did Smith finally indict Trump in the 2020 election-interference case (the so-called January 6 case) in Washington, D.C.

By the time the January 6 charges were unveiled on August 1, 2023, the Biden Justice Department had been investigating the Capitol riot for over 30 months. The evidence against Trump, such as it is, had been notorious for years. There had been an impeachment trial, hundreds of related criminal prosecutions, and extensive congressional investigations. Nevertheless, Smith waited until late summer 2023 to indict, knowing this would enable him to push for a trial smack in the middle of the 2024 campaign — in Trump-hostile Washington, to boot. And once Smith indicted the January 6 case, Bragg — an elected progressive Democrat — signaled that he would defer to the feds. Hence, Smith persuaded Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee with a history of making derogatory statements about Trump, to set a trial date of March 4, 2024.

That date has now been dashed by Trump’s immunity appeal. Smith first pleaded with the Supreme Court to hear that appeal on an emergency basis by cutting the D.C. Circuit out, and then pleaded with the Supreme Court not to hear it at all once he got a favorable D.C. Circuit ruling — gamesmanship driven by the prosecutor’s futile desperation to preserve a March 4 trial. But let’s be clear: Smith’s original scheme was to have the Republican nominee continuously on trial — in court rather than out campaigning — for six consecutive months: from March through late May in Washington, and then from late May into August in Florida . . . after which, if all went as designed, it would be time to sentence Trump for Washington convictions and potentially have him in custody as he awaited sentence on Florida convictions, all as the November election loomed.

Now, with the immunity appeal disrupting the schedule, Smith has revised the plan so that Trump would be tethered to courtrooms for nine months. That is, Bragg would try Trump from late March into May, then Smith would try him in Florida from July into September, and then — with Smith having decided that DOJ’s rule about avoiding law-enforcement actions within two months of an election is inapplicable to Trump — Smith would try Trump in the January 6 case from mid-September right through the November election.

Let’s put aside that Smith’s objective is to keep the Republican nominee off the campaign trail, where Trump could contrast his energy with Biden’s senescence. The due-process question is: When exactly is Trump supposed to prepare for these trials — convictions in any one of which, at his age (77), could effectively result in a life sentence?

As far as the Biden Justice Department’s special counsel is concerned, that’s Trump’s problem. We’re not talking here about the case of a foreign terrorist, an urban street gang, or a migrant — the defendants who inspire in the Lawyer Left a Bill of Rights fervor that would make James Madison blush. We’re talking about Trump, so don’t be bothering the prosecutors with such trifles. They’ve got an election to prepare for!

If this were being done to a Democrat, or even to a common criminal, the righteous indignation of Democrats and journalists would be blaring and incessant. Jack Smith has decided, however, that with Trump in the dock, he can check out of the due-process business. What remains to be seen is whether the courts, too, are indifferent to the fair-trial rights they exist to uphold.

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The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. When it comes to Hamas numbers they are to be treated as propaganda traps.

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How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers

The evidence is in their own poorly fabricated figures

From Rabbi Menachem Schmidt

The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.

The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on Gaza MoH figures.

This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts render the numbers suspicious.

Similarly, we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.

This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real

The correlation between the daily men and daily women death count is absurdly strong and negative (p-value < .0001).

Consider some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact, the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.

There are three days where the male casualty count is close to 0. These three days correspond to the three highest daily women’s casualty count.

Taken together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed.

There are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of casualties reported.

Taken together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.

Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamas’ own misfired rockets, accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.

The truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1 to 1. By historical standards of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy that protects itself with civilians.

The data used in the article can be found here, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.

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Sooner or later, Israel must take out Iran. This is the cancer that must be excised. This will leave Hezbollah and Hamas naked, allow the Saudis to link with the Benjamin Accords, restore a semblance of peace and stability to the Middle East and leave the Palestinians in a more defensive/vulnerable position.

As for he genesis of the Palestinian problem, destruction of Gaza and their sad starvation. They brought it on themselves through their support and alliance with Hamas. Once day they need to look in the mirror and see their own POGO!

Big task for a tiny country like Israel but, until Biden is gone, Israel has no alternative if it chooses to survive.

Finally, it might even secure BIBI's position and Israel will need strong leadership if he can pull this off as he eventually must.

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Amit Segal in WSJ: 'Biden’s Middle East is a fantasy world'

The Israeli political analyst explains how the American administration sees both the Israelis and Palestinians in a light that is disconnected from reality.

In an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, Israeli political analyst Amit Segal criticizes the Biden Administration's outlook on the situation which he says is disconnected from reality.

"When Joe Biden and officials in his administration talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, they describe two peoples that don’t exist in reality," Segal opens.

Segal notes that the US leadership believes that the majority of Palestinians strive for peace and reject the Hamas terror organization.

In contrast, the reality is quite different. "According to a November survey by Arab World for Research and Development, affiliated with Ramallah-based Birzeit University, 59% of Palestinians 'extremely support' the Oct. 7 massacre, and another 16% 'somewhat support' it," Segal points out.

According to Segal, the picture of the Israeli public painted by the US administration is far from reality as well: "Vice President Kamala Harris this week uttered a statement about Israel of the kind typically reserved for dictatorships: 'It’s important for us to distinguish or at least not conflate the Israeli government with the Israeli people.'"

He notes that while there is a significant contrast between Israel’s leadership and its citizens— it is the opposite of what is portrayed by the US government, being that the Israeli public is far more right-wing than the policies of its government.

"While Mr. Netanyahu has previously voiced support for a Palestinian state, a February survey conducted by Midgam for Channel 12 News found that 63% of the Israeli public strongly opposes such a state under any circumstances. While the cabinet implicitly agreed that a renewed Palestinian Authority would control Gaza, 73% of those who expressed an opinion in the survey opposed it," Segal explains.

Alluding to suggestions by Biden's supporters that the President circumvent the Prime Minister and address the Israeli people from the Knesset, Segal concludes: "Maybe Mr. Netanyahu should go over Mr. Biden’s head and speak to the U.S. people directly. According to a recent Harvard Caps-Harris poll, the American public supports Israel much more than the president does. And I’d like to remind my fellow Israelis that it’s important for us to distinguish, or at least not conflate, the American government with the American people."

And:

MK Danon: 'Time to go into Rafah, move the population and finish the job with Hamas'

'We will go all the way until Hamas is eradicated. Many terrorists found a safe place in Rafah, we have no other option,' MK Danny Danon tells Arutz Sheva.

On the local political arena, after MK Gideon Sa’ar announced his decision to leave MK Benny Gantz's National Unity party and join the Right, Danon said, “I don't know the political implication of his statement, but one thing I can tell you. We need to change what's happening on the ground in Gaza and I hope that this change will actually lead the cabinet to take more aggressive decisions in order to move forward and finish the job in Gaza.”

“We started very strong but now we are pausing, I think it is about time to go into Rafah, move the population to different areas, and to finish the job with Hamas. I think that [Prime Minister] Netanyahu also realizes that we will have to do that. The question is when. I think now that, unfortunately, we don't have a deal regarding the hostages yet, we have to move forward. So we have to implement the plans for evacuating the population from Rafah to other areas and mobilize the military. Many Hamas terrorists found a safe place in Rafah. We have to fight them and win.”

On international pressure, US pressure, world pressure, and Biden's statement to Israel warning, ‘Don't,’ Danon said, “We appreciate the support of the US, the UN, the ammunition, but at the same time we have to win this war, and with all due respect to the US election calendar, we have a different calendar and we have to win the war. We cannot stop now, without finishing the fight against Hamas, so we have to tell our allies in Washington, respectfully, we beg to disagree. We cannot stop now. We will go all the way until Hamas is eradicated. Maybe it's not convenient for your elections, but for us, we have no other options. For us, it's life and death.”

MK Danon admitted that he is not surprised to see the pressures, the messages coming from Washington day after day, and added that, “I think we will see more. I know elections in the US and in Israel. I know it will be a hot issue and every once in a while there will be more pressure coming at us. We have to push back and focus on what's important for us. We cannot allow Hamas to stay in power. I don't know who will be in the White House in November 2024, but I can tell you one thing, that after the election in the US, Hamas will not be in Gaza.”

On the worlds’ silence about the sexual crimes on October 7th, which is still continuing today with the hostages, and regarding the United Nations' publication of the results of the investigation, MK Danon said he believes that, “This is a very important report. For the first time the UN has finally said what we knew for months, that we have experienced atrocities that no one can imagine. The numbers of sexual misconduct, raping and it’s ongoing, ongoing atrocities as we speak. We still have hostages, females, young girls, in the hands of Hamas and I think it is about time that the world will wake up. I hear so many dignitaries speaking about the humanitarian suffering in Gaza, I don't hear them talking about the humanitarian suffering of our hostages in the hands of Hamas. So I expect the UN to do more and to make this report public.”

On the other hand, the head of the UN has made many excuses for what happened on October 7th. MK Danon said, “Secretary Guterres made shameful statements and unfortunately decided then to ignore the facts on the ground, and I hope that he will change the way he conducts business at the UN. He is supposed to be neutral, but even now when you hear about the sexual issues, he had to make the equation of Palestinian women, which I'm not familiar with any allegation, but how can you put that together? How can you make that equation? That's shameful.”

And:

The problem in Gaza is Hamas, not how to provide aid

Biden’s floating port scheme is a potential trap for both the United

States and Israel, as well as an opportunity for terrorists to exploit

sympathy for Palestinians.

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN (JNS)

After months of pressure from left-wing critics and liberal media outlets that seem to only highlight the suffering of Palestinians since Hamas started a war on Oct. 7, President Joe Biden felt he had to respond with something big. What he needed was a gesture that would be a tangible demonstration of his sympathy for Gaza civilians, as well as a scheme that would allegedly provide aid to them without helping the terrorists. What he came up with was a plan to build a floating port for the Strip from which food and other supplies would flow to alleviate the shortages that have produced a steady stream of appalling images and heart-rending stories about conditions there.

The main question to be asked about the port is not whether it will be enough to facilitate the aid needed in Gaza. Nor is it the problem posed by Biden’s pledge that not a single American boot will be on the ground in Gaza, which he is highly unlikely to be able to keep. Similarly, the as yet unanswered questions about how the food, fuel or other supplies brought in by the American contraption will actually reach needy Palestinians without being stolen by Hamas are also secondary concerns.

That’s because, despite the international community’s obsessive focus on shortages in the Strip, the real problem there isn’t about aid or its distribution or the conditions faced by Palestinians. The issue in Gaza is Hamas itself.

As long as the terrorist group is still armed and in charge of any part of the coastal enclave—and still able to use parts of the tunnel system it built with international aid intended to help ordinary Palestinians—all talk about humanitarian concerns there is essentially a diversion.

Why the Palestinians suffer

The only reason residents in Gaza continue to suffer is precisely because the international community, the media and the U.S. government have been persuaded to treat the impact on Palestinians of the war that began on Oct. 7 war as more important than its cause or the only way it will truly end: by Hamas’s complete defeat.

War, as it has always been, is hell. Innocent people always suffer when governments and/or terrorist groups that operate as governments—like Hamas, which ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name since 2007—start them. And the only way the pain can be ended is by ending the war.

It’s true that many of the same people clamoring for more aid for Gaza—and decrying Israel’s alleged cruelty in prosecuting the war against Hamas in such a manner as to make that assistance more difficult to obtain—do have ideas about ending the fighting. They support Hamas’s demands for an immediate and permanent ceasefire that will more or less return to the status quo on Oct. 6, when the Islamists ran the Strip with an iron fist.

Israel’s refusal to go along with that absurd situation is treated by its critics as proof of its malevolent intentions. But any ceasefire that would put an end to the fighting would essentially reward Hamas for carrying out the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust in its assaults on Jewish communities in southern Israel. And it would make the repeat of that spree of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping a virtual certainty; Hamas has said as much.

The war aim of the Jewish state—supported at least in principle by the United States until Biden issued a “red line” warning demanding that the Israel Defense Forces from entering Hamas’s last enclaves in Rafah—is the complete defeat of Hamas.

And it is a reminder that all the suffering in Gaza and the casualties on both sides, no matter how many there actually have been, is the fault of Hamas and Hamas alone. It started the war with cross-border attacks and unspeakable atrocities. And by not releasing the men, women and children it took as hostages and dragged back into Gaza—carrying on with the war despite the hopelessness of its military situation and continuing to hide behind civilians, even if most of them probably support Hamas—it must accept the responsibility for the inevitable consequences.

Hamas still thinks it can win

But the problem isn’t just their intransigence. It’s the fact that they are counting on the images of Palestinian anguish, which they caused, bailing them out. They see the focus of the international community and the United States on the aid question, rather than on demanding that Hamas end its futile resistance as the key to victory. This goes beyond the unfair criticism of Israel’s military tactics, which far from being genocidal are actually more humane than that of any army in modern history. By acting as if the priority of the moment is to push aid into Gaza, regardless of the fact that most of it is being stolen by Hamas and kept for the use of its cadres, they are prolonging the war and increasing rather than alleviating the pain of Palestinians.

And the same will be true of the port scheme.

The idea for the port is complicated and will require a massive effort from both the U.S. Army and Navy. The conceit of the concept is that U.S. forces will build the floating platform offshore, as well as a causeway that will connect it to the land over which trucks will transport the humanitarian aid. Once ashore, the vehicles will be inspected by unspecified personnel and then allowed to make their way to Palestinians. Reportedly, Israelis will inspect the items heading to Gaza in Cyprus to ensure that nothing will directly help Hamas’s war effort. But there is no plan that can guarantee that any food, fuel or anything else needed by Palestinians won’t eventually be taken by Hamas’s forces inside the Strip. Which is to say that even after all the elaborate logistical planning of this engineering marvel, the supplies it brings to the region may not help anyone but those who have always gained from the world’s generosity: the terrorists themselves.

Creating new problems

Even if that were not an obvious flaw in this proposal, the mere act of involving American personnel in Gaza operations opens up the possibility of attacks on them, whether they remain offshore or, as is most likely, Biden’s pledge is not kept. Will an administration that left Afghanistan in a disgraceful rout that involved the deaths of Americans and the betrayal of our allies, as well as the handing over of immense stores of military material and infrastructure to the Taliban, be willing to stand its ground in the face of Hamas attacks? Or will it run away as it did elsewhere, further diminishing U.S. prestige and influence?

And what is the future of the floating port? Will it become the start of a permanent facility that will provide Gaza with an outlet to the sea that will facilitate not just the flow of humanitarian aid but an easier way for Palestinians to import weapons and materials needed to rebuild their military infrastructure?

The history of the last two decades in Gaza should have made the international community far more cautious about easing the isolation of Gaza.

While the creation of a port could contribute to solving a short-term crisis of food distribution, it could also exacerbate a long-term problem by essentially breaking any future blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt that was aimed at making it harder for the terrorists to regroup. It’s true that the blockade failed to stop Hamas from arming itself to the teeth and building the equivalent of the New York subway system underneath Gaza. It uses its tunnels for a command-and-control structure where it stores rockets, arms and other supplies. The underground system also shelters terrorists and is being used to imprison Israeli hostages. And it did it by diverting the billions that Europeans and Americans sent to Gaza intended to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians before the start of the current war.

A Trojan HorseUnless Hamas is eradicated and Israel is in complete charge of all of Gaza, there would be no way to stop the port from solving Hamas’s future supply problems. There’s nothing in the port plan—other than trusting in Biden’s judgment or that of a successor if he is not re-elected—that would prevent it from making Gaza more of a threat to the region than it was on Oct. 6. Rather than being merely a conduit for aid, the port must be viewed as a Trojan Horse that looks like a humanitarian gesture but is certain to provide the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 atrocities with the ability to go on killing and exploiting the Palestinian population.

The administration has succumbed to pressure generated by images in the media and reports of Palestinian starvation that are as likely to be manipulated by a biased press as those of the bogus casualty figures put out by the Hamas Health Ministry. Biden is worried about defections from his intersectional left-wing base that sympathizes with Hamas. Yet the president should have said no to involving American forces and resources in a scheme that could boomerang on him and prolong the war he says he wants to end.

The only way to do that is the same as it has been since Oct. 7: helping Israel to complete the defeat of Hamas and the end of its control of any part of Gaza. Once that happens, the problem of feeding and caring for Palestinians becomes simpler. It takes a degree of foresight and moral courage not to succumb to pressure from those who refuse to see the connection between Hamas’s continued existence and the troubling images of Palestinians in need. But instead of speeding up the demise of the terrorist forces, the port plan, coupled with the pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire before the terrorists are finished, will only mean more privation for Palestinians as well as more blood spilled by Hamas.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow

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Hur probably made the correct decision. Biden is simply a corrupt person OR a lost cause or BOTH.

He should be thrown out of office.

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Joe Biden Under Oath to Robert Hur: Say, Have You Heard the One About the Boy Who Lost His Penis?

By DUANE PATTERSON

By now, you've probably read, seen, or heard the reports about how bad Joe Biden's mental acuity is. It's so bad, according to the 258-page transcript of a two-day interview between the President and Special Counsel Robert Hur and his team of prosecutors, that even though their conclusion was that Biden committed multiple violations of law in the handling of classified documents, the likelihood was that a jury would see the declined state of Joe Biden's cognitive ability and not return a guilty verdict. In short, he's too far gone to understand what is going on around him, and trying to punish him for something he doesn't understand probably wouldn't work with a jury. In layman's terms, Hur and his team concluded Biden's out there where the buses don't run anymore

Let me state for the record that I am not a lawyer. I never attended a single class in an accredited law school. I've never been the subject of an investigation by prosecutors in which I've been deposed. That said, there is one thing I, and most Americans, intrinsically know. When you're asked a question, if your answer is longer than, "Yes," "No," "I don't recall," or a one sentence direct answer, you're not doing the deposition right. Joe Biden is a lawyer. He had five lawyers sitting in on the interview with him - three from the Office of White House Counsel, and two personal attorneys. Brevity is not the path Biden chose to take.

Andrew Kerr and Joseph Simonson over at the Free Beacon have the best reporting thus far not of the House Oversight hearing yesterday with Special Counsel Hur, but of the actual transcript released Tuesday of the two-day interview Biden gave at the White House on October 8-9, 2023. In fact, Biden himself, in a hastily-arranged, angry press briefing on February 8th, the day the Hur report was released to the public, offered up this as a response to the Hur conclusion about his mental fitness to stand trial.

He was too busy dealing with the international crisis of the Hamas massacre in Southern Israel a day before his interview with Hur. That's why, Biden claims, he wasn't as sharp and focused as he normally is. First, being distracted to the point of not appearing mentally sharp while an international crisis is unfolding is not exactly the best line on a presidential resume when campaigning for another term. But from the actual transcript of the first day of interviews, we read this exchange.

There was one line of text from the transcript on the first day remarking on the President taking a call from Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One line. Here, we read half a page of back and forth between Biden, his attorneys, and the Hur team to navigate the truly important stuff - the staff barbecue that was happening later that night. So much for the excuse that Biden was distracted by the 10/7 attacks.

Biden was asked whether he transferred classified docs from his vice presidential residence to his Delaware residence. Somehow, Joe the lawyer felt the need to add this for context.

"You left everything in place," Biden told Hur in reference to the special counsel’s search of his Delaware lake house. "I just hope you didn’t find any risqué pictures of my wife in a bathing suit. Which you probably did. She’s beautiful."

I think I can honestly say I never hope to find risqué pictures of Dr. Jill Biden, either.

Then, this whopper, again reported in the Free Beacon.

During this tangent, Biden revealed a remarkable feat: He hit a target hundreds of yards away with a bow and arrow during a visit to Mongolia in August 2011.

"I’m not a bad archer," Biden said, after referring to Mongolian archers as "gorillas." "But … I hit the goddamn target."

A video uploaded by the Obama administration of the occasion shows Biden shooting a bow into an empty field. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

In case you want to see the video, this was put on the WhiteHouse.gov website during then-V.P. Biden's trip to Mongolia.

To be fair, he actually was in Mongolia. I was skeptical, but he was there, along with the Sumo wrestlers. Thankfully, the archers shown were not dark-skinned, or the gorillas line might be a little more problematic than it is. As for hitting the blankety-blank target, look at the video again. There were not 20 hay bales with a target on it hundreds of yards away as Biden claimed in vivid detail during the Hur interview. I've seen the Marvel movies. I watched Hawkeye. Joe Biden is no Hawkeye. He shot an arrow into an open field. If his target was landing an arrow somewhere within 5 acres of dead grass, Biden scored a bullseye.

Now, we get to the kicker. Out of the 1968 Syracuse University School of Law graduating class of 85 students, Joe Biden finished 76th. Why so low, you ask? One, he's not terribly bright, as virtually anyone in politics will tell you. But more important, in his first year Torts class, he plagiarized a Law Review article for a paper he had to write and failed the course as a result. That plagiarism, along with three other times during his first presidential run in 1988 he appropriated material not his own, including the most famous incident of academic theft being from Neil Kinnock, caused his campaign to implode. The avalanche of gaffes and lies proved to be too much to overcome.

Yet in his interview with Hur's team, Biden took a question from Hur, who doggedly continued all day to rein the conversation back to how classified documents ended up at seven different locations in Biden's private life. Instead, Biden went down this rabbit hole while reminiscing about his failed Tort class at Syracuse.

Later, as Hur attempted to steer the conversation back to how classified documents made their way from Biden’s West Wing office to his personal residences, Biden again veered into an unrelated story about how he "didn’t take law school very seriously," but had a knack for unpacking tort cases on the fly.

"We had a really difficult professor," Biden recalled. "He called on me to—you know how they do in law school, discuss a case, you know, in your first torts class. And I had never read the case, and I stood up and I spoke for 10 minutes. The whole class stood up, started clapping."

Biden then detailed a bizarre episode during one of his first jobs out of law school involving a 23-year-old construction worker with a seared penis and a missing testicle, and how the case ultimately led him to enter politics.

"This poor kid is down a hundred-foot vessel, chimney, scraping the hydrogen bubbles off of the inside," Biden told Hur. "And he was wearing the wrong pants, wrong jeans, and he—a spark caught fire and got caught in the containment vessel and he lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old."

Floyd the Barber told stories out loud to nobody in particular outside his shop on a bench in Mayberry. It was funny when televised on the Andy Griffith Show. It's not funny when the guy with the nuclear launch codes is doing it. Again, this is the guy who's being interviewed about potential felonies he's committed, and he riffs about a young man's burned off genitalia for context?

The President talked a lot about cars, both his Vroomy Corvette (yes, he actually made the sound effect of his car during a deposition on classified documents), and how fast these newfangled electric vehicles can go.

"Damn, they’re quick," Biden said. "You step your foot on the accelerator all the way down until it gets to about 6, 7 grand. Then all of a sudden it will say ‘launch.’ All you do is take your foot off the brake."

That's not how EV motors work. You don't rev them. There's not a neutral in the traditional sense of the word. If the motor is turning, the wheels are turning. If the wheels aren't turning, the motor isn't just sitting there idling. With some cars, there are ways to manipulate what's actually happening by simulating the equivalent of dropping it into gear or popping the clutch, but there is no flooring it up to 6,000 RPM. That's not how any of this works. If noise is coming out by pressing on the pedal with the brake on, the Vroom is a sound effect playing out of the car's speaker system. It's not coming from under the hood.

If you have any doubts why Hur came to the conclusion he did, all you have to do it read the transcript of the Biden interview. As bad as I can tell you it is, once you read it for yourself, you'll draw the conclusion the President is not fit for office today, tomorrow, or ever again in the future.

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Biden and Netanyahu at Odds Over Gaza (RightWing.org)

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is creating a pressure cooker that could explode at any moment with their aggressive attitude towards Taiwan (ROC/Republic of China) and the other Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries, and President Joe Biden and the rest of the Left seem ambivalent at best.

When it comes to the war raging in Eastern Europe after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his military into Ukraine, the Liberals have already sent tens of billions of dollars worth of military equipment and aid to the defenders, and are looking to authorize almost $100 billion more.

When one looks to Israel, one of America’s staunchest allies, which was the victim of an unprovoked attack by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proxy terrorist group Hamas that saw unarmed civilians slaughtered, the Leftists — particularly the Progressive arm are…

Singing a Different Tune

After procrastinating long enough, Biden’s 2024 State of the Union (SOTU) address was given on March 7, making it the latest date that a president has ever delivered one. Afterward, he was speaking to Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), relating an anecdote from a recent conversation with Israeli Prime Minister (PM) Benjamin Netanyahu in what ended up being another in his long line of “gaffe machine” moments.

Biden claimed to have said to the PM, “I told him, ‘Bibi [a usually friendly nickname for Netanyahu] you and I are going to have a come to Jesus [moment],'” regarding the ongoing war in Gaza. He cautioned Bennett not to repeat the comment, but unfortunately for the POTUS, the aid who came over to warn him he was on a live mic didn’t get there until the world heard it anyway. One could argue this was two gaffes in one since he had just told the leader of the Jewish nation that he needed to meet — metaphorically at least — the Christian Messiah.

Not long after that bungled moment, Biden provided an exclusive interview to MSNBC and seemed to lay the blame for the high number of civilian deaths in Gaza squarely at the feet of Netanyahu, saying that “he must [repeated three times for emphasis] pay more attention to the innocent lives lost” as a result of Israel’s effort at eradicating Hamas. He then played the sympathy card by stating his hope that they can find a way to get a cease-fire in place so that the Palestinians can observe Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, which began on March 12. It didn’t happen.

The POTUS also opined that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was again the fault of Netanyahu, saying that the fighting is doing more to hurt Israel than to help them in the eyes of the world and deemed it “a big mistake.” In response, the Prime Minister’s office issued a press release which said if the president meant that, he was prosecuting this war to advance a personal agenda or against the will of the people of Israel, he needs to rethink that.

Netanyahu informed Biden that he has the support of the “overwhelming majority” of his citizens in the effort to finally unseat the terrorist group that raises generation after generation steeped in the ideology of religious intolerance. He also says the government and its people are in agreement that they “should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state.”

Perhaps it is not surprising on the narrative the American president is pushing considering the anti-Semitic hate being spewed on college campuses across the country and from the halls of Congress by “The Squad” and other Progressive and Liberal politicians. While all this is going on, there are those pointing to the hypocrisy of blaming Israel for the civilian deaths since it is Hamas that is choosing to use innocent Palestinians as human shields.

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Bernie Sanders will burn in hell.

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ZIONIST ORGANIZATION OF AMERICA

ZOA Condemns 8 Jew-Hating Senators (Bernie Sanders & 7 Democrats)’ Libelous, Disgraceful, Pro-Hamas Letter to End Military Assistance to Israel and Biden’s Threats to Do So

American politicians help Hamas’ terrorist army and make peace impossible when they libel the Jewish State of Israel and promote cutting off lifesaving military assistance to Israel at this time. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what eight hostile Senators led by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) just did in a March 11th letter to President Biden. The other Jew-hating/Hamas supporting signers are: Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.); Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.); Peter Welch (D-VT); Tina Smith (D-Minn.); Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.)

The 8 Senators’ letter cites VP Kamala Harris’ statement (out-of-context) about children dying of malnutrition in Gaza; and then falsely blames Israel for this, and fails to mention that Wharton statisticians have shown that Hamas casualty numbers are largely false and highly exaggerated and that the real cause of any casualties is Hamas. The eight radical anti-Israel Senators’ letter falsely accuses Israel of “interference with humanitarian operations” and falsely asserts that “Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian access . . . are one of the primary causes of this humanitarian catastrophe.” The letter then demands an immediate cutoff of military assistance to Israel.

Shamefully, Biden is also reportedly considering cutting off military assistance to Israel if Israel takes the necessary step of destroying Hamas’ stronghold in Rafah, due to the prospect of “dead Palestinians.”

In fact, Israel continues to allow in massive amounts of humanitarian aid and continues to minimize civilian casualties. And if you won’t fight a war due to Hamas supporting civilians dying, Hamas wins and remains in power to massacre more Israelis and Americans.

Remember:

• Israel was the party that initiated the idea of bringing in humanitarian aid by sea with checks in Cyprus, back during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s conversations with President Biden on October 22 and 31 and January 19. (Despicably, Pres. Biden stated in his SOTU address that he would finally start bringing in aid by sea because “we’re not waiting for Israelis” – when in fact it was the Israelis who were waiting for Biden!)

• Three Israeli divisions (Israel’s International Cooperation Division of the Strategic Planning and Cooperation Directorate (J5), Coordination and Liaison Administration to Gaza (CLA) of the COGAT Unit, and the 98th Division and the Israeli Air Force) worked in cooperation with five nations to air drop 160 packages of food and medical equipment for the residents of southern Gaza and the Jordanian field hospital in Khan Yunis (including fuel supplies for the hospital).

• Israel facilitates several hundred tons of humanitarian supplies every day – even though Hamas possesses many essential supplies which it could itself provide to the civilian population. Israel is also providing water to Gaza from its own supplies.

• Israel facilitated the establishment of field hospitals in southern Gaza, floating hospitals in the sea and is working with third parties to establish additional field hospitals. Israel has facilitated the movement of people out of Gaza to receive medical treatment, has facilitated the entry of medical supplies and equipment into Gaza, and itself provided medical supplies to patients and staff in the Shifa hospital during IDF operations to uncover and disable Hamas military infrastructure inside the hospital complex.

And:

Rabbis Reject Sen. Schumer's Interference with Israeli Leadership

Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis in American public policy, today rebuked Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) for his "counterproductive interference" in Israel's democratic government, in a floor speech blasting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

CJV President Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld made the following statement:

The leader who has 'lost his way' here is Sen. Schumer himself, who is using Netanyahu as a bogeyman for hatred directed against Jews for having the temerity to defend Jewish lives. Every Israeli, and every committed Jew, recognizes the malignant hatred of those calling Israel 'genocidal' as it eliminates a genocidal terror organization, or calling for a 'ceasefire' to permit the terrorists to regroup, rearm, and again murder the innocent.

Leader McConnell is right to call Sen. Schumer's statement hypocritical, but it goes further: Mr. Schumer can best remind us that his name comes from Shomer, Hebrew for guardian, by calling out members of his own party trafficking in classically antisemitic tropes, like Reps. Omar and Tlaib. He should apologize for his counterproductive interference in Israel's democratic governance and self-defense.

Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV) represents over 2,500 traditional, Orthodox rabbis as the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America. A 501(c)3 non-profit, CJV promotes religious liberty, human rights, and classical Jewish ideas in American public policy

Finally:

If Gaza is to have a brighter future after the war between Israel and Hamas is over, one of the key ingredients for this renewed society must be education reform, focused on democracy, de-radicalization, and normalization between Israelis and Palestinians.

If not, the stage will be set for future years of war and terrorism.

Read More ➝

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Middle East and Other Musings

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Last Of Photos. Is There A God? Anything Goes? Fake Numbers? Time To Go After Iran!

Amit Segal in WSJ: 'Biden’s Middle East is a fantasy world'

The Israeli political analyst explains how the American administration sees both the Israelis and Palestinians in a light that is disconnected from reality.

MK Danon: 'Time to go into Rafah, move the population and finish the job with Hamas'

'We will go all the way until Hamas is eradicated. Many terrorists found a safe place in Rafah, we have no other option,' MK Danny Danon tells Arutz Sheva.

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