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DON'T MISS THIS!
Republican Jewish Coalition
CEO Matt Brooks
Remarks at the 2024 RNC Convention
in Milwaukee, WITonight at 6:30 EDT/5:30 CDT
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| by Niall Ferguson via The Free Press |
Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBS as Niall Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company, and a trustee of the New York Historical Society, the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, and the newly founded University of Austin. His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published last year by Penguin and was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize.
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Greetings!
Some life lessons stick with you. And many apply to our political environment today, like this one from back in 1984 when I attended Airborne School at Ft. Benning.
It was in that first week that Sergeant Black Hat, that is what Airborne instructors are called, took a short bit of time from smoking us with pushups to impart some wisdom. He simply said, “Men, if you set the bar low, you will always jump low. When you set the bar high, you will jump high. Set your standards high; that is what an Airborne Paratrooper does.” This is a lifelong lesson and one that we should all embrace, sadly, that is not the case, and we are witnessing that at the highest level in our Republic.
Our politicians in Washington have been setting lower and lower bars to claim "success." I invite you to read more in my Town Hall OPED this week.
Three more things...
If you will be in the Statesboro, GA area, I will be hosting a meet and greet event on July 24. You can find more information here.
The following day, on July 25, I am honored to join Former Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll and Councilman Terrance Freeman for the Faith, Freedom, and Family Forum in Jacksonville, FL, at 6 PM at the Epping Forest Yacht Club. You can get more information and reserve your seats here.
Also, this coming September in Charlotte, NC, is our Committee to Support and Defend Country Stars and Stripes concert. I will be hosting, and we're excited to bring three big-name country artists to a small and private venue. You can learn more here.
Steadfast and loyal.
Allen West
Executive Director
American Constitutional Rights Union
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America Was an Inch From Catastrophe, and I Was There
Dave McCormick
Wall Street Journal
Sunday, July 14, 2024
One inch. That’s how close America came to losing Donald Trump to an assassin’s bullet Saturday evening—and that inch may be a metaphor for how close we are to an internal breakdown in the greatest country the world has ever known.
The bullet that came within an inch of Mr. Trump’s skull, grazing his ear, whizzed over my own head, too. I was just offstage and moments away from joining him at the podium to talk about my campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.
I am a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Gulf War; I’m familiar with the sound of gunfire. But it wasn’t apparent in the first millisecond that the staccato crack that interrupted our Butler County rally was gunfire. Why? Because I was surrounded by thousands of fellow Americans in a celebratory, patriotic, unifying mood. It was unthinkable.
Then I saw Mr. Trump duck and grab his ear. Someone in the bleachers behind me was knocked down, and it became clear we were under fire. In the military, I learned that you can’t predict how someone will respond under fire until it happens. Mr. Trump rose brilliantly to the occasion. In what will be an iconic image for the ages, he raised his fist in defiance, reassuring his countrymen, and showed true grace amid a lethal attack. He demonstrated the strength and resolve that the leader of the free world simply must have.
In the wake of the shooting, law–enforcement groups and Congress will dive into important questions about how this assassination attempt happened. How did the shooter get so close? Were Secret Service protections adequate to the threat level? Did anyone help the would–be assassin?
But these questions merely scratch the surface. What we really need to ask ourselves is how we can keep our free society from becoming a banana republic where political differences are resolved with ballistics.
Mr. Trump’s critics need to acknowledge that he isn’t Hitler or the devil. He’s a legitimate political candidate, and the contest for the presidency should be fought over ideas and leadership traits, not through calumny that can incite violence.
That Mr. Trump is about to be nominated after winning a contested GOP primary makes his candidacy the essence of democracy. The assassin was the real threat to democracy. Mr. Trump is democracy in action.
Too many critics didn’t accept Mr. Trump’s first election victory in 2016 as legitimate. And since it hasn’t been enough for them to disagree with Mr. Trump, they’ve painted him—and by extension his fellow Republicans—as a national threat that must be eliminated. The radical leftist who shot Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) on a baseball field in 2017 likely took this rhetoric to heart. The same may be true for the gunman who tried to assassinate Mr. Trump.
This recklessness extended beyond rhetoric to action from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party. In April, nine House Democrats, including the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation that would have stripped Mr. Trump of all Secret Service protection.
In Trump v. U.S. this month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that a president could theoretically order the assassination of a political rival and be immune from criminal prosecution. “In every use of official power,” Ms. Sotomayor wrote, “the President is now a king above the law.”
Extreme rhetoric has also gained currency on the political right. It’s time to stop the unending ratchet of political polemic by extremists on either side who believe their opponents’ extinction is the only option. This is a political sickness, and it’s spreading. It isn’t manifest only in one party, and it can’t be fixed by one party alone.
We need to put the engine of our republic in a constructive gear. We have consequential differences; we should debate them robustly. The left and right have vastly different visions, and both fear the consequences of losing. So let’s have that conflict—but let’s commit to keep it inside the context of elections, civil debate and policymaking.
As my wife, Dina, and I tell our six daughters (who until Saturday never imagined they’d have to worry about my safety), our nation’s founders faced an equally fragile future. Benjamin Franklin was once asked what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had produced. Franklin’s reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.” His words should ring in our ears today. We may have only an inch to spare.
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The Ragtag Houthis Continue Their Aggression
By Sherwin Pomerantz
As the IDF continues its critical operations in Gaza, Yemen's Houthi terror group has launched attacks on Israel, escalating the conflict further. Earlier Monday, the Houthis claimed responsibility for two military operations: one in the Gulf of Aden and one targeting Eilat at the southern tip of Israel. According to the group's military spokesperson, the group targeted an Israeli ship in the Gulf of Aden with ballistic missiles and drones, and attacked military targets in Eilat with drones. These aggressive actions were reportedly in response to the Israeli airstrike on Khan Yunis on Saturday.
On July 13, 2024, the Al-Jazeera website published an interview with Aziz Rashed, a brigadier-general in the Defense Ministry of Ansar Allah, as the Houthi movement is officially known. Rashed begins with the Houthis' cooperation with the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias in Iraq and their joint attacks on Israel, "coordinated in a joint operations room.
He assesses that the U.S. "will not intervene directly in any war in this region, because Iran, Iraq and Lebanon are a terrifying force." He says the Houthis are dictating the boundaries of the battlefield, which stretches from the Red Sea through Bab Al-Mandeb, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Rashed threatens that "in exactly one year, Yemen will have missiles that can reach Europe or the Atlantic Ocean, so America's nuclear targets will be within the range of the Yemeni missiles."
China is going to host officials from Fatah and Hamas next week for discussions on what will happen in Gaza once the Israel-Hamas war has concluded, the New York Times reported on Monday. A meeting held in Beijing in April attempted to bridge the gap between the two groups, which the New York Times claims is seen by many as a key component of rebuilding Gaza, but the meeting was unfruitful. At the end of June, Fatah's spokesman in Europe and a member of its Revolutionary Council Dr. Jamal Nazzal appeared on the Fatah-affiliated network Awda TV where he slammed Hamas for sacrificing Palestinian lives without the consent of civilians.
“We consider them to be martyrs, but they did not sacrifice themselves — they were sacrificed,” Nazzal said. “The people who applaud this – especially from abroad – did not try to live in Gaza.” Nazzal further charged that Hamas had sabotaged attempts to establish a Palestinian state, citing the 1995 Oslo II Accord.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, 22,000 people have immigrated to Israel, according to figures from the Jewish Agency and Israel’s Aliya and Integration Ministry. Of these, nearly 1,800 are from North America and 800 from France.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, there has been an increase of over 500% in interest in immigration from France alone, with nearly 6,500 people opening case files compared to just over 1,000 in the same period the previous year, according to the figures.
A massive wave of French Jewish immigration is expected in the wake of the July 7 French election, which saw the far-left antisemitic France Unbowed party and its New Popular Front alliance garner the most seats in a hung parliament.
Two thousand North Americans are expected to immigrate to Israel this summer, while there have been more than 10,000 requests to open aliyah files in North America, a 76% increase from the same period a year earlier.
Some 20 rockets were launched from Lebanon at Israel late Monday, with the majority of them intercepted, the military said. Incoming rocket sirens sounded at 11:30 p.m. in the northern communities of Kiryat Shmona, Margaliot, and Manara. Nine minutes later, alerts blared again in Kiryat Shmona as well as Metula and several other towns. The IDF said there were no reports of injuries.
Some of the rockets landed in the largely evacuated city of Kiryat Shmona, including one that hit a shopping mall. Hezbollah took responsibility for the barrage, saying it was in response to an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah weapons depot in Bint Jbeil that killed an operative and two Lebanese civilians.
For a lighter moment you are invited to watch Israeli journalists on live television trying to make a hotel reservation in Dubai for Hamas leader Sinwar:
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Try and duck humor. Even bad duck humor. Not easy.
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Three little ducks go into a Bar......
"Say, what's your name?" the bartender asked the first duck.
"Huey," was the reply.
"How's your day been, Huey?"
"Great.. Lovely day. Had a ball. Been in and out of puddles all day. What else could a duck want?" said Huey
"Oh. That's nice," said the bartender. He turned to the second duck, "Hi, and what's your name?"
"Dewey," came the answer from duck number two.
"So how's your day been, Dewey! ?" he asked..
"Great. Lovely day. I've had a ball too. Been in and out of puddles all day myself. What else could a duck want?"
The bartender turned to the third duck and said, "So, you must be Louie?"
"No," she said, batting her eyelashes.
"My name is Puddles."
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Fate of those who forge/reject history:
More impractical nonsense which never dies because it is always at the total expense of one nation.
A Two State Solution — But on Both Sides of the River Jordan Victor Sharpe
Ruth King
https://drrichswier.com/2024/07/10/a-two-state-solution-but-on-both-sides-of-the-river-jordan/
The phrase “Two State Solution” has been embraced by politicians and journalists alike, repeated endlessly, and touted as the panacea for a “just and equitable” solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has assumed the repetitious role of a muezzin’s call to Islamic prayer. But it is based on erroneous geography and history, on a mixture of wishful thinking, naiveté and a brilliant Arab propaganda campaign of disinformation and falsehood. To understand why, it is necessary to learn a small but vital chapter of Middle Eastern history.
Shortly after the conclusion of the First World War and the total defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled most of the Middle East from 1517 to 1917, Britain was made trustee by the League of Nations for the whole of the geographical and non-state territory known as Mandatory Palestine. Incorporated within the Mandate was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which specifically referred to the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the moral validity of reconstituting within it the Jewish National Home.
The British Mandatory power, however, arbitrarily tore away 80% of the Palestine Mandate which lay east of the River Jordan in 1921 giving it to the Hashemites, a Bedouin tribe with links to Mecca. Only the land west of the River Jordan remained from the original Mandate territory promised to the Jewish people as a National Home.
Jewish residency was immediately forbidden in all the lands east of the River Jordan, which in time became known as Trans-Jordan and then as the Kingdom of Jordan.
The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 proposed two states, Jewish and Arab, which were roughly equal in size. But these two states were to occupy only the remaining western geographic area of Mandatory Palestine – from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan – barely 40 miles wide and a mere 20% of what now remained of original Mandatory Palestine.
This plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership with deep reservations, but as a pragmatic solution to the plight of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel’s rebirth.
The miniscule size of the state was also reluctantly accepted in order to facilitate the absorption of the surviving Jewish remnant languishing in European refugee camps following the Holocaust.
The State of Israel, thus reconstituted in part of its ancient and biblical homeland in May 1948, was immediately invaded by seven Arab armies in order to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.
The Jordanian Arab Legion, led by British mercenary officers, occupied the eastern half of Jerusalem along with Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), driving the Jews out of their towns and villages. In the south, the Egyptians occupied the Gaza Strip, similarly driving the Jews from their homes.
The Jewish state astonished the world by surviving the Arab aggression. The Arab states, however, totally rejected the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East and an uneasy armistice remained in force routinely broken by acts of Arab terror.
In June 1967, the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians, launched a new aggression against Israel with the avowed intention of annihilating it. Israel again defeated her Arab enemies in six amazing days and in so doing liberated the eastern half of Jerusalem, along with Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank), from the Jordanians. At the same time, Gaza was freed from Egyptian occupation.
Despite subsequent and repeated offers by Israeli governments to give away territory in return for a true and lasting peace with the Arab belligerents, the Arab world continued to support terror and refused to accept a Jewish state within the Middle East.
In April 2009, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s supposed peace partner, rejected any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state; a sure indication of the falsity of any Arab claim to live in full and lasting peace with Israel.
True, a peace exists today between Israel and Jordan and between Israel and Egypt, but it is a frigid, cold, and precarious peace with neither Jordan nor Egypt truly interested in full and mutually beneficial relations. Thus ends the history lesson.
The creation of a Palestinian Arab state within the mere 40 miles separating the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is a recipe for war and for the piecemeal destruction of the Jewish state. Such a hostile Arab state will more than likely soon fall under the control of the Islamist Hamas movement, itself a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks a worldwide Islamic Caliphate. Gaza, and what is has become, is living proof.
Israel will again be reduced as it was before 1967 to a nation a mere nine miles wide at its most populous region. When President Bush was still Governor of Texas he flew over Israel’s then tiny width and remarked, “…why, in my state we have driveways longer than that.”
To repeat: The present-day Kingdom of Jordan occupies four-fifths of geographical Palestine. This territory consists of the land east of the River Jordan, extending north to Syria, east to Iraq and south to Saudi-Arabia.
Compared to Israel, it dwarfs the Jewish state, yet it originated in an act of unprincipled perfidiousness by the British government of the day and remains an Arab state that has from its inception forbidden Jewish habitation within its borders, even though it includes territory promised in Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and by the League of Nations as a Jewish National Home.
Jordan’s population is currently made up of 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians with the remainder being Hashemite Bedouins. As it is on land originally forming four fifths of Mandatory Palestine, and as the population is three fourths Palestinian Arab, it follows that the “just and equitable” solution to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state should be within the present day Kingdom of Jordan and, therefore, east of the River Jordan.
The Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and who choose to remain in Judea and Samaria should be required to end all terrorism against Israel – hardly an onerous demand – and by finally living in peace could flourish within an Israel whose territory would now formally extend west from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. That would still only be a distance of barely 40 miles at its widest. The United States in comparison is some 3,000 miles wide.
Israel would now formally possess most of her biblical and ancestral Jewish lands – with the exception of the biblical Jewish territory east of the Jordan River, the ancestral lands of the biblical Jewish tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben which are in present day north-western Jordan.
If there is a desire within the international community to truly arrive at a “just and equitable” solution, then this would be it. Of course, if this was a perfect world, it would satisfy historical, geographical, religious and ethnic considerations. But, alas, it is anything but a perfect world and the fanatical desire among Arab and Muslim nations to wipe out all vestiges of a sovereign Jewish state is, perhaps, insurmountable.
Nevertheless, it can do no harm to raise it in the corridors of power and promote and articulate it forcefully as a truly “just and equitable” solution. Indeed, the clarion call should always be Jordan is Palestine.
When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrives for his fateful address to Congress later this year it is unlikely he will be well received by the Democrats and certainly not by the malignant and hate filled Islamist squad. Alas, the accepted belief now exercising the minds of Biden, his problematic advisors and those who have succumbed to the churning mills of the Arab propaganda machine, is that there exist a people called Palestinians with a distinct history who lived in an independent Arab state called Palestine.
It is a lie, perhaps one of the greatest scams in history, swallowed by the ignoramuses in direct proportion to the number of times it has been repeated. It is a fraudulent history of a fraudulent people in a fraudulent land.
Indeed, there has never in all of recorded history existed an independent, sovereign Arab nation called Palestine.
Here are the words of a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, speaking in 1937 before the Peel Commission, which was considering partition of the Palestine Mandate, west of the River Jordan:
“…There is no such country as Palestine! …That is a term the Zionists invented! …There is no Palestine in the Bible.”
Professor Philip Hitti, the Arab-American history professor at Princeton, said in unambiguous words before the 1946 Anglo-American Committee:
“…There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.”
President Obama made it crystal clear that he was not prepared to let such inconvenient truths deter him from his strange obsession in forcing through the creation of a terror supporting Palestinian Arab state during his term of office.
He intended to shower the Arab and Muslim world with favors. No favor could be more eagerly snatched at than that of the Israeli democracy abandoned by an American President to the tender mercies of the ever-circling mullahs, imams, dictators, and oligarchs.
And as Obama prepared to leave on his strange mission to Egypt soon after becoming President and give a speech to the Muslim world, he no doubt ignored the fact that the Al Azhar University in Cairo was spewing forth a constant stream of Islamic hatred towards non-Muslims; those they call “infidels.” Doubly strange – or was it – that President Barak Hussein Obama should have chosen Egypt whose government-controlled media routinely dripped with anti-Israel propaganda.
For Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, his latest visit to Washington DC may, to paraphrase Dickens, be in the best of times and the worst of times. He may yet again display that he is still a leader who stands up to the Left and to a Democrat President.
After all, the stakes are harrowingly high – the very existence of modern Israel. But it is worth doing the right thing, or as Mark Twain put it:
“… always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
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