Rep. Rashida Tlaib Shares Fundraisers With Hamas
"A Hamas activist who served eight months in prison"
Rep. Rashida Tlaib is doubling down on the lies and the smears. Her support for terrorists has never been ambiguous. And the terrorists love her back.
A Canary Mission report documents some of the intersections between Tlaib and Hamas.
Canary Mission can confirm that Rashida Tlaib has extensive fundraising ties to Hamas supporters. She employed no less than three Hamas-linked activists to fundraise for her 2018 election campaign, one of whom spent 8 months in prison for his alleged connections to Hamas.
That includes Salah Sarsour who “was reportedly a Hamas activist who served eight months in prison in 1995 for his connections to the terror group, including giving Hamas members money.”
As well as Rafeeq Jaber, a co-founder of CAIR, who hosted a Tlaib fundraiser and “directed two Hamas front groups in the U.S. to ‘promote [the Holy Land Foundation] in every way we can’ and to distribute Hamas propaganda materials, including an August 2001 editorial that advocated martyrdom operations and the killing of Jewish people.”
But we’re also talking about some of the infrastructure that runs through CAIR and most of the Islamist front groups that prominently operate in America.
And finances a chunk of the Left.
American Muslims for Palestine is being sued for terror financing, specifically for funneling money to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The case might also bring bad political fallout for a number of politicians who are associated with American Muslims for Palestine, including:
Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Ilhan Omar (D-MN)
Andre Carson (D-IN)
Betty McCollum (D-MN)
Donald Payne Jr. (D-NJ)
Debbie Dingell (D-MI)
Judy Chu (D-CA)
Ayanna Pressley (D-MA)
It’s a network and its scope goes well beyond this. Tlaib is just the most obvious of the bunch.
Reader Interactions
Universities Celebrate the Mass Murder of Jews
American academia has descended into barbarism.
Since Hamas initiated a brutal and barbaric terrorist attack against Israel and the Jewish people on October 7th, many Americans—Jewish and not—have mourned alongside the world’s only Jewish state and have understood the necessity of a swift and decisive military counterattack. But in the green quads and ivory towers of American academia, a very different reaction has been brewing. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses. Student organizations like the Hamas-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine have infiltrated our universities and turned them training grounds for the next generation of jihadists. In the wake of Hamas’s barbarism, its slaughter and mutilation of innocent Jews, its campaign of rape and torture and beheading, we can now bear witness to the effects that two decades of Jew-hating pro-terror propaganda have wrought in our institutions of higher learning.
At Harvard, arguably America’s most prestigious university, over 30 student organizations signed onto a statement declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Not to be outdone by Harvard, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Brown University released its own statement (co-signed by the Graduate Labor Organization and Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, as well as 25 additional organizations) stating that: “We, the undersigned, hold the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all suffering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.”
At Cornell University, SJP held a rally to “Stop Israel’s Annihilation of Gaza.” History Professor Russell Rickford who spoke at the rally declared Hamas’s barbaric attack which included the rape of women, the beheading of babies, and the deaths of entire families as “exhilarating.”
Yale University Professor Zareena Grewal tweeted in support of Hamas, calling October 7th an “extraordinary day.” She went on to justify the barbaric violence unleashed on Israeli civilians, writing “Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” Yalies4Palestine also released a statement blaming Israel which stated, “We hold the Israeli Zionist regime responsible for the unfolding violence and denounce the Israeli occupation, apartheid system, and its military rule” and declaring that “The events of October 7th are the inevitable outcome of a decades-long apartheid and suffocating blockade that continues to escalate.” The statement concluded by celebrating Hamas’s barbarism, adding that, “Yalies4Palestine stands in full support of the Palestinian people’s right to resist colonization and return to their land” and “Breaking out of a prison requires force.”
Meanwhile, twenty campus groups at Columbia University signed a statement condoning and justifying Hamas’s atrocities against Jews, describing the wholesale slaughter of infants and children and the rape of women as “resistance,” and blaming Israel and America for the violence, writing, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the United States government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid and settler-colonization.” Also at Columbia, a Jewish Israeli student was beaten with a stick in front of Butler Library by another student who screamed “F**k you, F**k all of you prick crackers” causing the Jewish student to suffer a bruised hand and broken finger.
At the University of Pennsylvania, dozens of flyers depicting the names and faces of the Hamas kidnapping victims were torn down within an hour of being put up around campus. The student group, Penn Against the Occupation, held a “Collective Walk Out for Palestine” during which a Jewish student was assaulted while putting on tefillin and a speaker claimed there were no “innocent civilians” in Israel because “all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and they will be targeted until the time in which one-state, a plura-national, secular and socialist state is formed on Palestine and you can either live there in peace or you can go back to Moscow, and Brooklyn and and f**king Berlin where you came from.” Participants in the event chanted genocidal slogans including “Intifada, Intifada,” “Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied,” and “Free Palestine.”
And that’s just the Ivy League. The reaction to Hamas’s attacks across the rest of academia was no more constrained.
At Stanford University, the instructor of a required undergraduate class on “Civil, Liberal and Global Education” instructed Jewish students to raise their hands. She then told the Jewish students to gather their belongings and go stand in a corner, saying, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” The instructor then asked the students, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “six million” the instructor minimized the mass slaughter of Jews, saying, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million, Israel is a colonizer.”
At UC-Berkeley, a statement organized by Bears for Palestine that signed by twenty-five on-and-off campus organizations brazenly declared their support for Hamas’s brutal terrorist maiming and slaughter of Jews. “We invariably reject Israel’s framing as a victim” said the statement which also argued that “[O]ur people’s freedom will not be attainable without revolution” and “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.” The statement included the genocidal sentiments, “From the River to the Sea, we will continue to support resistance until we are able to return home to a unified Palestine” and “Glory to Palestine, glory to the resistance, and glory to our martyrs.”
Jewish Voice for Peace at Georgetown University chimed in with a statement supporting Palestinian “resistance” (otherwise known as mass slaughter of innocents) and asserting that “The violence we see today is a direct result of the brutal decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.”
At the University of Michigan, a statement demonizing Israel and blaming the Jewish state for Hamas’s barbaric violence was signed by over 800 faculty members, staff, and graduate students. “We write as human beings in grief and anguish over the loss of life — both Palestinian and Israeli — that is the result of the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestine and the structural apartheid Palestinians residing both within Israel and the Occupied Territories endure on a daily basis,” declared the statement. Meanwhile, Michigan Professor Erik Gordon has been accused of tearing down posters depicting Israelis kidnapped by Hamas.
SJP at Tufts University released a statement celebrating Hamas’s vicious terrorism, calling it an “historic attack on the colonizers,” and applauding the paragliders who brought mass terror to innocent civilians, stating that “Footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land.”
SUPER UW, a pro-Palestinian group at the University of Washington, held an anti-Israel protest on campus which featured genocidal chants including “Palestine is our demand, no peace on stolen land,” “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” During the event, one SUPER UW supporter yelled “F**k Israel, no problem, f**k you, f**k you, you guys are all f**king gay bro” at pro-Israel students while another protestor defended Hamas’s barbaric terror campaign, stating, “What Hamas is doing is fighting for their people, fighting for their country back, that’s what Hamas is doing [but] what America is saying is Israel is a victim, but for what, for Hamas defending their people.”
SJP chapters and pro-Palestinian groups at several New York schools including the City University of New York, City College of New York, Brooklyn College, and John Jay College, released a “Joint Statement” that demonized Israel and claimed that Hamas’s barbarism against Israel was justified. The statement referred to Hamas’s reign of rape and terror as “a wave of resistance [that] swept across occupied Palestine” which created “a sense of empowerment,” and scolded the CUNY administration for condemning Hamas, arguing that “To call the resistance of those who were oppressed for over 75 years ‘abhorrent’ is blasphemous” and “it continues to be a reminder that colonization is inherently violent and this was brought by the Israeli apartheid state.”
This is just a small sampling of the reactions across America’s colleges and universities. Instead of condemning outright barbarism and the mass slaughter of Jews, large numbers of students and faculty across the nation are celebrating the bloodshed and heralding the coming revolution. These true believers view the world through the prism of Marxist ideology in which the Jews and Israel are oppressors who must be overthrown by any means necessary—up to and including the mass slaughter and mutilation of innocents.
As Daniel Greenfield wrote recently, “The radicalization of universities has made them into safe spaces for the worst possible extremists. Conservative faculty and all opposing voices have been banished from campuses. Pro-Israel and conservative students have learned to hide their views to avoid becoming targets. And curriculum changes have turned places of learning into Marxist indoctrination centers.”
The world at large is finally witnessing the degradation and perversion of academia that we have warned about for decades. We cannot let this moment pass without utilizing the momentum it has wrought. We must push Congress and state legislators to immediately defund any university which gives aid and comfort to America’s enemies and openly seeks to foment terrorist violence. If the last few weeks have shown us anything, it is that the radical Left has zero pretense of adhering to a moral code. We must act now, before it is too late.
Jewish students studying in Cooper Union library barricaded and threatened by Hamas activists
What kind of barbarism in academia is this?
According to the New York Post:
A handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.
A Jewish senior at the East Village institution recounted the terrifying moment she watched the demonstrators slam anti-Zionist posters against the window and shout “anti-Semitic rhetoric” just a few feet away.
“When they started banging on the door, my heart started pounding. I was crying. I think if the doors weren’t locked — I don’t know what would have happened,” the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.
“I don’t want to speculate what would’ve happened. It just makes me too nervous. I was absolutely terrified in that moment.”
So you're a Jewish kid. Maybe you are Orthodox and wear a yarmulke. You get into a good school. You study hard in a library, sometimes with your friends, because you know that schooling is important and you want to graduate. You aren't out partying. You are doing the right thing.
And suddenly, a gang of goons from somewhere out on the streets, wielding Palestinian flags, takes a pivot from their plan to get to the president's office, after seeing you, and then barricades you in and pounds on the doors, threatening you and flashing anti-Semitic signs through the library windows and bellowing about something happening several thousand miles away, blaming you for all of it, all because you are Jewish.
Obviously, this isn't about Zionism, or the Israel government, or anything the Palestinian apologists claim. This is straight, naked Jew-hate.
Worse still, it's not thugs on the street doing thuggish anti-Semitic acts, it's the university establishment condoning it from other thugs. The story says the protestors busted through the security guards who tried to block them. The kids called the cops. The cops got there but stood by twiddling their thumbs because the university told them not to get involved and they actully honored that, despite what they were seeing going on.
The establishment actively collaborated with the terrorizers who targeted Jews, and though the protestors were unable to break in, the way they would have liked to, that was only because someone got the door shut and locked in time.
This is an outrage. Those kids were studying hard and paying good money to go to this university yet the university allowed a bunch of interlopers, who might not have even been students, to invade the campus and terrorize these students and get away with it. The creeps weren't even arrested for their stunt.
The Post says the response was so weak the kids had to be led out by a back door -- not the front door, which is what they were entitled to do, but the back door, and the university's president, wokester Laura Sparks, did likewise.
That's one heck of a weak response, borne of bias towards not offending so-called Palestinians and their activists, but in reality, naked anti-Semites.
What's more, this university has a history of this. When wokester New York University professor Shellyne Rodriguez was fired by that establishment for threatening a New York Post reporter with a machete and chasing him down the street for asking her about one of her unhinged abortion rants, Cooper Union stepped right up to hire the freak, in a classic fail-upward. They want people like this employed by the school and teaching kids.
No wonder the Jewish kids can no longer feel safe.
It's obviously a problem of leadership over there, and the leadership needs to be removed. Donors must close their checkbooks, and the federal and state governments need to revoke their accreditation and government grants. The kids, at a minimum, should be able to sue their keisters off for breach of contract. Because if none of this happens, they'll do it again -- and worse.
In an atmosphere like this, what chance does any decent kid who wants to study hard and do his schoolwork have with anti-Semites of the rawest sort being coddled?
Image: Twitter screen shot
The Hamas wing at the House: Rep. Ilhan Omar can't bring herself to vote for a widely supported House resolution supporting Israel
If Rep. Ilhan Omar ever wanted to disabuse anyone of the idea that she's a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, she could have voted with the vast majority of Congress for the anti-Hamas resolution that just passed 412-10 in the House yesterday.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Rep. Ilhan Omar broke from her Minnesota colleagues and most other members of the U.S. House on Wednesday by voting against a resolution in support of Israel in the wake of attacks by Hamas.
Omar, the Democrat who represents Minneapolis and several of its suburbs, was one of just 10 House members to oppose the measure, and the only one from Minnesota. The resolution, which is largely symbolic and garnered 412 votes in favor, reaffirmed Israel's right to self-defense, condemned "Hamas' brutal war against Israel" and proclaimed the U.S. ready to assist Israel in the conflict.
But she didn't.
She was one of ten holdouts, all wokester leftists, who refused to condemn the terrorist outfit for its October 7 attack in Israel that killed 1,400 people, and injured thousands more, not even agreeing with Israel's right to self-defense.
It was a no brainer. Even most Democrats voted for it. But Omar took the Hamas side, claiming it was all about her love for the Palestinian children. For that, she had a problem with Israel defending itself from more attacks from these very guilty dirtbags.
Omar said the resolution "rightly acknowledges and mourns the lives taken by Hamas," but said she voted against it because it "fails to acknowledge and mourn" the Palestinians killed by Israel in retaliation.
"Our position should be consistent in defending innocent lives," Omar said in a statement. "We must use diplomacy to secure the release of hostages, end the violence by negotiating a ceasefire, restore water, food and fuel to Gaza, and work toward lasting peace."
She's all in for useless negotiations with these killers, as if diplomacy could be effective in turning these mangy predators dripping with the blood of 1,400 people and obviously loaded with cash and Iran sponsorship into pussycats. And as if Israel has not already tried this -- again and again and again after some violent attack or another.
Which looks pretty skeevy. Anyone decent could sign on to this resolution condemning Hamas and affirming Israel's right to defend itself after that monstrous attack, the worst since the Holocaust.
But she couldn't bring herself to do it. Which is weird stuff, a loud radio signal to the world's terrorist outfits and their enablers that her shingle is still out for them, she's still as anti-Semitic as they are.
After all, she has been caught making anti-Semitic statements ("all about the Benjamins") against Jews, and even got a watered-down resolution against such statements in Congress, triggered by news of her tweets, but loudly denied she had an anti-Semitic bone in her body.
She's such a liar, no different from Hamas. If she's no anti-Semite, well then neither is Hamas, because her argument is the same as that of Hamas.
If she can't draw the line at mass murder of the most heinous sort, maybe the new Speaker of the House can bring up that resolution on anti-Semitism again, and pass a non-watered down version of it this time, explicitly condemning Omar and her anti-Semitic remarks. She hasn't changed any since that resolution. She hasn't mellowed. She hasn't grown cautious and circumspect. She just keeps right on repeating the talking points of her pals in the terrorist world. Congress should sanction her immediately.
Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of screen shot from shareable Rep. Ilhan Omar Facebook Live video.
WE CAN LET THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DESTROY AMERICA AS FAST AS THEY DESTROYED THE BORDER AND FLOODED US WITH TENS OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS, OR WE CAN PUT THEM OUT!
“Of course, one of the main reasons the nation is now “divided, resentful and angry” is because race-baiting, Islamist, class warrior Barack Hussein Obama was president for eight long years." MATTHEW VADUM
How Obama’s Muslim Childhood Became a Taboo Topic
https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-obamas-muslim-childhood-became-a-taboo-
Reflections on when a gigantic biographical inconvenience was successfully hidden and denied.
June 23, 2023 by Daniel Pipes
The Left’s Planned Destruction of the Judeo-Christian World
What is now occurring in Israel is no act of happenstance or the result of failed policy. It is the execution of a premeditated plan of destruction that Obama began, and Biden is trying to finish. The American left has long desired to eliminate Judeo-Christian followers. Their reasoning is simple: you cannot conquer, subjugate, and enslave a population that refuses to accept the rule of an earthly authority.
With Barack Obama leading the American left and pulling the strings on the Biden marionette, the plan is in motion. They seek to destroy Israel, followed by erasing Christians, whether through genocide (as in parts of Africa) or criminalizing Christianity.
In 2014, Israel initiated “Operation Protective Edge” to destroy “endless” miles of terror tunnels Hamas used to gain access into Israel and murder civilians. The Obama Administration assailed the Netanyahu government for using “disproportionate force” to protect their citizens from death at the hands of terrorists.
That same year, in a Tel Aviv speech, Philip Gordon, special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama and the White House coordinator for the Middle East, made clear Barack Obama’s position. As reported on July 8 in Times of Israel:
Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank is wrong and leads to regional instability and dehumanization of Palestinians, a top American government official said Tuesday in Tel Aviv, hinting that the current Israeli government is not committed to peace.
Gordon appealed to Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make the needed compromises to reach a permanent peace agreement. Jerusalem “‘should not take for granted the opportunity to negotiate’ such a treaty with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has proven to be a reliable partner,” Gordon said. Abbas’s administration has called for the extermination of all Jews as an Islamic imperative.
Image: Barack Obama. YouTube screen grab.
Whether Gaza or the West Bank, Obama placed greater concern on the quality of life of Palestinians who subscribe to terrorism than industrious Jews working to build a better life for themselves.
In a July 27, 2014, phone conversation with Prime Minister Netanyahu, Obama insisted on a Gaza cease-fire:
An immediate and unconditional ceasefire ending Israel’s assault on Hamas is a “clear strategic imperative” to Israel, U.S. President Barack Obama told Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Sunday.
[snip]
Obama told Netanyahu he wants a ceasefire “that both allows Palestinians in Gaza to lead normal lives and addresses Gaza’s long-term development and economic needs, while strengthening the Palestinian Authority,” the White House said, in a readout of the call to reporters.
In terms of disproportionate force, what gives Barack Obama the right to say what a Jew’s life is worth? (The Biden administration is repeating the same line.) To those who have followed Middle East events, it is clear that the last thing to concern Obama was a Jew’s life. His position always focused on protecting the Palestinian right to kill Jews, while minimizing the consequences. Looking at today’s horrors in Israel and Obama’s lethargic response, how can any reasonable person believe otherwise?
In 2015, Obama promoted and signed the Iranian Nuclear Accord over bipartisan objection from the Senate on both constitutional and principled grounds. Obama ignored that. Obama’s agreement was structured to allow Iran to develop nuclear power readily convertible to a nuclear weapon. It also deleted existing sanctions, giving Iran the financial resources to pursue its oft-stated goal using nuclear weapons against the Jewish State. Additionally, the money allowed Iran to sponsor Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Majid Rafizadeh, an economist and business consultant who teaches at Harvard University, offered his analysis of the deal:
The international community would truly do itself a great service to recognize that the nuclear deal was nothing more than a pro-mullah agreement which provided Iran’s ruling clerics with billions of dollars to pursue their anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Iranian people and pro-terror activities, while simultaneously providing cover for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions.
When President Trump withdrew from the Iran deal, he reimposed sanctions and essentially cut off funding for terrorism. An important point lost on many today is that when we were mass-producing energy under President Trump, we drove down the price of oil in the marketplace. This further deprived Iran (and Russia) of resources to use against the United States and other Judeo-Christian nations.
As a parting shot at Israel, in 2016, Barack Obama refused to block an anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations condemning settlement construction. Perhaps the strongest evidence of Obama’s desire to destroy the Jewish State comes from his allowing the resolution to pass. The proof is simple. The resolution holds that the Temple Mount and Western Wall, Jerusalem’s holiest sites going back over 2,500 years, are occupied territory. The so-called Palestinian people are a construct fabricated in the 1960s. Only the worst of the Jew-haters could endorse this resolution.
Currently, much is being made of $6 billion that the Biden administration has moved to make available to Iran, but that amount is small compared to what his administration has already done. Writing in August 2023, former White House official Richard Goldberg explained:
“At least $16 billion has now been made available to Iran without any congressional input — and more might be on the way. Another $6.7 billion is reportedly moving to Iran via the International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights… and reportedly… another $3 billion of regime assets frozen in Tokyo, India and China…”
In addition, Biden continues to issue waivers for oil exports without Congressional oversight, resulting in Iran deriving many billions of dollars in revenue.
Under President Trump Iranian oil exports were 10 percent of what they are today, representing reductions of tens of billions of dollars to Iran. It was deterrence without death and destruction.
Today, the Biden Administration has reversed the Trump measures and renewed the flow of money to Iran and Hamas. Without this funding, both Iran and Hamas would be unable to move against Israel. In addition, based on a Wall Street Journal report, aside from funding, Iran provided the organizational structure and guidance for the attack on Israel.
Simply put, without Iranian sponsorship, Israeli babies would not have been beheaded or burned alive. Israel’s move to exterminate Hamas should have taken place in 2014. It is obvious that Barack Obama blocked this action. So again, what other conclusion can be drawn other than his goal was to destroy Israel, a goal that Biden continues to pursue?
Moreover, both Obama and Biden know that, when the Jews are gone, Christians are next. Hamas has explicitly stated that, after Israel, it will eliminate Christianity (and, presumably, Christians). This will not be confined to Israel. It will happen here. Thousands of Middle Eastern men of military age are coming over our southern border, with numbers of them on the terror watchlist. They are waiting for the Ayatollah to press the button. The American leftist leader Barack Obama is the author of the existing tragedy and what is to come.
What is currently transpiring in the Middle East is not due to some error in judgment. It was planned. The violence, death, and destruction were premeditated. If not headed off now, the American left will empower the Muslim community to accomplish their goal and bring their horror show here.
UNTIL JOE CAME ALONG, BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WAS THE GREATEST THREAT TO AMERICA!
They’re Infiltrating The US Border - Customs & Border Patrol Intelligence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfvBGYsR3JE&ab_channel=ThePoplarReport
Obama’s Mindset Still Drives U.S. Mideast Policy
Israeli settlements are legal - despite Obama's 2016 denial.
Votes have consequences. President Obama directed the U.S. to abstain on a vote by the UN Security Council in December 2016 – just before leaving office – called Resolution 2334, which condemned Israel for its settlements In occupied territories. In previous votes on this matter, the U.S. vetoed said condemnation.
This abstention in effect branded Israel as a violator of international law at the expense of the Arab population living within its borders since the Israeli victories of 1967 and 1973 (the Yom Kippur war). The enemies of Israel have never tired of stating that Israeli Jewish settlements in occupied territories, especially in the south of Judea and Samaria, were expanding too rapidly in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Judea and Samaria were the original names of the land areas of present-day Israel – names that were abolished by the Romans in 70 AD. The Romans re-named the land area Palestine. That is why the residents of that area, prior to the recognition by the United Nations of Israeli statehood, were called Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
Many uninformed persons today do not realize that the United Nations also authorized the creation of a state for the Palestinian Arabs at the same time the State of Israel was authorized, but the Palestinian Arabs, coached by the neighboring Arab countries, turned down the offer. Instead, the Arabs in the region, intent on destroying the new Jewish state and annihilating all the “Palestinian Jews” (now properly called Israelis), called upon all Arab residents of the newly formed state of Israel to flee so they could wipe out all of Israel. After the intended “wipe out,” those who fled could return to the homes and property they had left – as well as take over all the property of the Jews.
It was an all-or-nothing plan, and they ended up with nothing. The fledgling state of Israel that was completely outmatched in terms of equipment nevertheless won the war in 1948, and the Arabs who had fled from Israel now found themselves living in camps and unable to occupy the homes they had left in Israel (“Eretz Yisrael”). Some observers, like this writer, believe that not only was that victory a David vs. Goliath-type of event, but that it was the fulfillment of the prophecy found in Ezekiel Chapter 37 – wherein the prophet is taken to the Valley of Dry Bones and the bones are resurrected by the power of Almighty God, thus ushering in the soon-to-be return of Christ.
Some commentators, in particular Shalom Lipner, saw Obama’s abstention on the vote condemning Israel as more of a personal confrontation between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Further, like so many elitist commentators, he expressed his understanding in opaque, highly educated language. He wrote:
Lacking critical texture, the resolution paints the entire parcel in question with the same truth, effectively equating the most isolated of Israeli settlements – which Israel would surely dismantle in the even of a bona fide peace agreement….
He is thereby disagreeing with the resolution but sees it as a finesse to favor Obama’s perspective over that of Netanyahu. Yet the florid language obscures the reality that Israel was betrayed.
However, although Obama was president, there was considerable backlash against his decision to abstain. Obama found himself opposed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Sen. Mitch McConnell, Sen. Cory Gardner, President-elect Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, and even Democrat Senator Charles Schumer. Obama’s decision was not only pro-Islamic, it also represented a twisted interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which was supposed to be the reason for the abstention.
The Fourth Geneva Convention has an entire section about the legal treatment of occupied territories going from Article 47 to Article 78. These articles cover such topics as children, repatriation, and hygiene in occupied territories. Section 47 is the one section that may seem to apply to the Israeli occupation per se. It states,
Protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present Convention by any change introduced, as the result of the occupation of a territory….
Reviewing the articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention, this writer concludes that the meaning inferred by Obama was that the increase of settlements by Israelis in lands acquired in earlier wars with Arab states deprive local Arabs in those territories “of the benefits…by any change introduced as a result of the occupation….”
To me, this is an extreme and hostile view of the Israeli settlements in lands taken during wars. Arabs in those lands are in no way oppressed by the presence of Jewish Israelis in expanded numbers in neighboring acreage. Thus, Israel is right in conceiving of this interpretation of Section 47 of the Convention as illegitimate, and it is clear that Obama sacrificed truth for the sake of the Islamic false claims. The Arabs simply did not want to live near increasing numbers of Jews. No international law was breached.
By failing to veto the false claim of the terrorist world that surrounds Israel, Obama opened the door to a fundamentally false understanding of the Israeli settlements in lands taken during the horrible wars that beset that wonderful country. This was an encouragement to Hamas and to all those bitter murderers who deny the right of Israel to exist as a country. The Arab bias is driven by an irrational sense of Islamic hegemony as being valid in any lands they had conquered at one time.
Whatever President Obama may or may not have thought, Israel is not in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Horrible murders of the residents of Jewish settlements and towns in no way validate the Obama agreement. It is a bloodthirsty and primitive reaction that must be smashed.
Hamas and the Politics of Hell
A profound irony of Israel’s latest grim suffering is that the knife- and gun-wielding Palestinian (Hamas-sponsored) terrorists and their leftist cheerleaders in the American academy reveal a deplorable collusion between what ordinarily would be antagonists.
The collaborative condemnation by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for” the October 7 slaughter suggests a bewildering collusion between far right and far left: fundamentalist Islamists supported by woke, neo-Marxist radicals.
A rebarbative synthesis
It is as if, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War that pitted Israel against Egypt and Syria, Hegel’s dialectic (actually Johann Fichte’s) overcame the diverging ethos of antagonists. Thesis: Islamofascism; Antithesis: neo-Marxism (submission to Allah versus a godless war on exploitation). The rebarbative synthesis: death to Jews.
It appears there is a metastatic malignancy perfusing elite universities all across the country, as the emerging generation of America’s foreboding political future (young Democratic Socialists of America) celebrated in Times Square amid reports of the beheading of toddlers and the rape and murder of young women in their parents’ homes. Can it really be that Ivy League and other prominent universities are graduating Nazi youth? Are there in fact neo-Nazis reimagining the Barack Obama/Joe Biden wing of the Democrat party?
Matriculating radicals
A perspicuous rationale is needed to explain the pitiless way the woke Harvard student radicals blamed the victim for the latest Hamas intifada. Why, sane people want to understand, do Ivy League students hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding barbarity?
We are struck by the irony of Harvard admissions officers recruiting applicants who “have demonstrated concern for others ... can be graceful ... under pressure ... [and] open to learning new ideas. [I]t [is] important for you to treat others with kindness and demonstrate that you care for others in addition to caring for yourself.”
Left-leaning moral concerns
As the research of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind illuminates, the left’s two (almost exclusive) moral concerns — for care/harm and fairness/cheating — which, Haidt explains, “means equality to the left but proportionality to the right” (emphasis added), almost guarantees that Harvard’s students will empathize with their partisan professors’ perspective on the Middle East.
Taught by impressive and persuasive progressive professors to see the Palestinian issue through Haidt’s care/harm, fairness/cheating lens of lamb versus lion, rabbit versus wolf, or (ironically) David versus Goliath, the weaponized professorial casuistry often tracks the calumnies recited by Amnesty International: that Israel is a Zionist, apartheid bully state that (with the backing of American money and weapons) has swaggered between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea for seventy-five years.
What young person of idealistic bent doesn’t root for an underdog? Unfortunately, this saga is about two very different underdogs that appear to be fighting over the same bone.
Given that openness is considered a particularly progressive personality trait, one would expect a commitment to the diversity of ideas in academe. Instead, The Harvard Crimson 2022 survey of faculty found that “more than 80 percent of Harvard faculty respondents characterized their political leanings as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal.’” Sixteen percent labeled themselves “moderate,” while “only 1 percent of respondents stated they are ‘conservative.’”
Progressive student psychology
Jonathan Haidt explains the students’ likely primary moral concerns for care/harm, fairness/cheating. But what explains their wildly inhumane demonization of the innocent victims of utter savagery?
The answer is a matter of psychology, about human tendencies that have been understood and written into the characters of plays and novels long before Freud gave them a nomenclature, before human behavior became a clinical profession or an academic discipline.
The Harvard student groups that published their deplorable statement blaming the Israeli victims responded in a way that is consistent with their prejudices and philosophical assumptions about humanity. They believe, in the abstract, that all human beings are basically good...except, perhaps, recently realized (post–George Floyd) exceptions such as white (especially conservative) Americans and Israelis.
There is an unquestioning belief by these young, care/harm, fairness/cheating idealists that Hamas terrorists — what they have been conditioned to believe are only dispossessed freedom fighters — are just as righteous as the Harvard students consider themselves to be. The students project their own relative decency onto the objects of their political concern. And their feelings, even if not articulated, are very real.
Preposterous translation
When the radical young Ivy-Leaguers hear about or see video of the savagery of innocents by the barbarism of Hamas terrorists, their reaction is determined by a translation.
Not only are they predisposed to see the Palestinians as surrounded by merciless gorgons, but they interpret the pitiless terrorism of Hamas as a desperate, understandable response to decades of intolerable abuse by Israeli masters. The students think: What unspeakable degradation these poor Hamas freedom fighters and their loved ones must continually suffer to be willing to risk their lives and the contempt of the world to express their agony in such sadistic acting out!
Absurd and unreasonable as they obviously are, the Harvard student radicals reimagined the Israeli victims as vile oppressors and the Hamas barbarians as recipients of torture beyond toleration.
In short, the students who support Hamas are identifying with Hamas “freedom fighters,” enabling the Ivy-Leaguers not only to explain away, but even to celebrate their sadistic actions.
Educational dereliction
The students’ care/harm and fairness/cheating moral outrage is purely in defense of the Palestinians, but their assumption that Palestinians are good and Israelis are bad is due largely to the imbalance of their Harvard education. This monolithic distortion in the political posture of American university faculty is to blame for so many of our increasingly violent political divisions.
What is a poor (actually often wealthy) Harvard student to make of life’s political dilemmas, especially when he is not taught to think critically, not taught to grapple with contrasting points of view, and often encouraged to ignore views that do not fit his leftist narrative? Sometimes they just close their eyes, plug their ears, and yell.
So many young Ivy-Leaguers are unaware that the perfect is the enemy of the good, informed primarily by partisan dogma, unable to reason from cause to effect, incapable of paying it forward, and willing to see Hamas only as the champions of downtrodden Palestinian refugees. So what do the radically woke Hamas-loving students really want?
In their ignorant, soft-souled, underdog-loving, decency-projecting hearts, they demand heaven on earth — the politics of hell.
Hamas-loving Harvard student radicals illuminate a criminal neglect: the failure of the American educational complex to represent history with reasonable balance. This dereliction of U.S. higher education, especially since WWII, is particularly evident in its failure to inform students how in the recent century, men with utopian and totalitarian impulses (dreamers with power) slaughtered scores of millions of human beings that the woke generation is hardly aware of.
As Whitaker Chambers wrote in 1961, “[i]t is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within.”
Douglas Hackleman has a Master’s degree in psychology from Pepperdine University.
Image: scottgunn via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.
The Inevitable Fracturing of the Democrat Party
The Democrat Party is not a homogenous entity, but an amalgamation of various left-wing factions now overwhelmingly dominated by its smallest and most radical element, the avowed anti-Semitic and racist American Marxists. However, the largest group and underpinning of the Party are the credulous, patronizing, and narcissistic liberals who, in their naiveté, willfully allied themselves with any group virulently opposed to conservatives and Republicans. While living in their cocoons among the likeminded, they chose to ignore the Marxist’s inexorable infiltration of the Democrat Party as well as their declared intention to transform America into a socialist “paradise” which will devour these same liberal elites.
With so many on the Left celebrating the premediated slaughter of women, children, and the elderly in Israel, many of these gullible fools have been shocked at the vast number of young people that have been indoctrinated and the depth of anti-Semitism that has its home in the Democrat Party.
Apparently, far too many so-called educated elites fail to understand that their American Marxist allies are virulently anti-Semitic and racist. They fully accept Karl Marx’s unequivocal belief that Jews are part and parcel of the oppressor class that must be eradicated. Marx further amplified this position in an essay published in 1844 titled, On the Jewish Question, when he wrote: “Money is the jealous God of Israel, in face of which no other God may exist.” He argued that in the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from the Jews. In other words, Jews can only become free when, as Jews, they no longer exist.
Further amplifying his overt racism, in a letter Marx wrote to his co-author and friend Friedrich Engels in 1879, Marx described one guest at a resort he was visiting as a “Jewish ni**er.” A vile racist epithet often used by Marx in his writings and conversations as documented by Diane B. Paul in an essay published in The Journal of the History of Ideas (1981).
The current American mélange of Marxist-inspired activists and narcissists are little different than Karl Marx in their racist and anti-Semitic outlook.
In the United States, the current iteration of Marxists began their ascendancy into the nation’s mainstream when they insinuated themselves into the popular Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Today, these radicals are the dominant force in the nation’s culture, education, and governing class as well as being in de facto control of the nation’s largest political party.
After eight years of Barack Obama, the liberal elites or ruling class viewed their ultimate objective of assuming near-permanent political power as being within reach. However, their erstwhile allies, the American Marxists, viewed the eight years of Barack Obama as the opening salvo in their ultimate objective of permanently transforming America.
The transformation the Marxist radicals seek will subsume their liberal allies, as there is no room in the structure they are building for the elites and their wealth, as well as their unfettered and hedonistic lifestyles. While some have awakened to this reality, the vast swath of self-described progressives and liberals have been blissfully oblivious. Thus, the Marxist radicals currently have power far beyond their numbers.
Their power has further been abetted by the current president and presumptive Democrat nominee in 2024, Joe Biden, who has been overtly and willingly blackmailed by the Marxists, into acquiescing and pursuing virtually all their policy positions.
However, Biden is becoming increasingly unelectable due to scandals, his age, senescence, and failed policies. The American Marxist faction of the Democrat Party is faced with the reality that Biden will have to be replaced during the 2024 campaign season.
However, those who might be considered for the nomination and ordinarily viewed as more moderate or liberal are roundly criticized if they stray too far from Marxist dogma and thus stand virtually no chance of winning the nomination unless approved by the party’s Marxist overlords who are convinced they can nominate virtually anyone as they believe the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, is so unpopular among the general electorate that he cannot win in November of 2024.
However, trepidation is now creeping into the higher reaches of the liberal establishment wing of the Democratic Party as they look across a barren landscape of potential nominees promoting, by necessity, Marxist ideology. However, they are essentially powerless, having gradually ceded their dominance of the Party to their radical allies over the past three decades. Allies who now dominate academia turning out armies of mind-numbed activists. Their number in turning out to support Hamas and the slaughter of Jews has been an eye-opening bucket of cold water for not only the Democrat Party establishment but all Americans.
Thus, it is too late for the Party to turn back toward any semblance of moderation. If the Democrats were to win the presidency in 2024 and control both house of Congress, the Marxist wing would be more determined than ever to implement their Marxist/socialist agenda.
Ultimately, while the nation would unduly suffer under Democrat/Marxist control and in all probability move beyond the point of no return, the tension between the two factions in the Democrat Party will eventuate in the implosion of the party allowing the American Marxists full and permanent control of the Party as well as near-perpetual control of the levers of government. Additionally, they will, in all likelihood, marginalize the Republican Party by use of executive orders and legislation to nationalize all elections while third parties will effectively cease to exist.
In an ironic turn of events, either a Trump or DeSantis presidential victory in 2024 and Republican control of both Houses of Congress is the single event that would not only save the nation but be the opportunity for the Democratic Party to recover a sense of moderation, assuming that the liberals or so-called moderates have the intestinal fortitude to use that outcome to divorce themselves from their long-term incestuous bed partner, the American Marxists.
The question then becomes, would the liberal elites be too squeamish to confront their Marxist allies for control of the Party, as it is highly likely there would be excessive political bloodshed resulting in the ultimate creation of a third party to replace the Democrat Party.
The 2024 election is not only critical to the future of the nation and the future of both parties but in particular the Democrat Party as the cracks in the façade are beginning to widen.
Image: William Warby
Alex Marlow: Joe Biden Bears Responsibility for Hamas’s Terror Attack on Israelis
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Joe Biden’s abject incompetence at foreign policy is legendary.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” former President Barack Obama reportedly warned a fellow Democrat during the 2020 primary. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2014 that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Biden’s record somehow has only gotten worse since he became president.
His Afghanistan withdrawal strategy lead to chaos, horror, and death – including for children and American servicemen. His Ukraine/Russia policy undoubtedly played a major role in Putin’s decision to invade. China has routinely humiliated the U.S. on the world stage. Biden is more responsible than any single person for the humanitarian crisis at the U.S./Mexico border. His efforts to keep America’s Southern border opens confirms that, stunningly, national security is simply not a priority for the U.S. President.
So, yeah, he’s wrong on every major foreign policy decision.
He staffed his foreign policy machine with grifters, dissemblers, and ideologues. Those who didn’t spend the Trump years hawking their services to the highest bidder were perched at think tanks, where they were no less at the mercy of foreign interests. Just last week, the Pentagon announced a probe into a Biden appointee over her cozy relationship with Iranian officials while promoting the nuclear deal as a scholarly “expert.”
Once in power, these phony “experts” have rarely even hinted at progress toward Middle East peace of any kind.
In fact, the region has been markedly more chaotic than the relative calm of the Trump years.
Despite Biden’s campaign promise for a return to “normal” foreign policy, this weekend’s blood bath carried out against Israelis by Iran-backed Hamas terrorists may well be his biggest foreign policy failure. For starters, Biden’s team appears to have been blindsided by the attacks. This should shock no one, since these same people have spent most of his term wrangling with allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel while trying to appease Iran (which wants us all dead).
In fact, in response to Hamas attacking Israel, the United States’ Office for Palestinian Affairs called for Israelis to “refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.” (They have since deleted the offending tweet.)
There is a word for granting moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims: evil.
Upon taking office, Biden chilled the U.S.-Saudi alliance. President Joe will rarely, if ever, defy his left-wing base, and his base had become obsessed with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis. This made it impossible for Biden to engage with the Saudis at a level necessary to forge a stronger peace in the region. Additionally, as my colleague Joel Pollak has noted, Biden paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia and “reopened negotiations with Iran toward a new nuclear deal over Saudi (and Israeli) objections.” Russia would be a key partner if a new Iran deal takes shape. The same people who told us that Vladimir Putin is the world’s greatest threat are perfectly fine pushing for a deal that elevates him on the world stage while empowering Iran. This is incoherent and irresponsible.
Since Biden has been president, the U.N. nuclear watchdog found that Iran has enriched uranium to near weapons-grade.
That doesn’t seem to bother Joe Biden, who recently released $6 billion in frozen funds to Iran as part of deal that included a prisoner swap. Iran funds and arms Hamas. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi declared “victory” after the latest terror attack in Israel. While the $6 billion hasn’t arrived yet, and it is supposed to be used specifically for peaceful purposes, money is fungible and padding Iran’s bank account obviously frees them up to fund more terror. Only liars and demagogues would pretend this is not how money works. What’s more, people (and countries) spend when they have the expectation of money coming in; they don’t necessarily wait for the check to arrive. That’s basic economics.
In fact, the Iranian President has said he’ll do whatever he wants with the money.
He is laughing at us. Literally.
But wait, there is more: Biden inexplicably revoked the terrorist designation of the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist group. He also pulled U.S. support for Yemen’s government against the Houthi rebels — in a country that sits across a narrow strait from a key U.S. naval base in Africa. All of this strengthens Iran.
Meanwhile, Biden has been icy to Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu, despite Bibi’s efforts to engage productively with President Joe. Biden and his team refused to meet with Israel’s duly elected government. They also restored funding to Palestine over internal objections that the aid could be diverted to Hamas.
U.S. weapons abandoned in Afghanistan — another catastrophe Joe Biden failed to see coming — are also believed to now be in the hands of Hamas.
As I document in my new book, Breaking Biden (the definitive book on Joe Biden’s record with a strong emphasis on his disastrous foreign policy), the Pentagon reported that the U.S. left $7.12 billion worth of military equipment in Afghanistan upon our departure. This includes aircraft, air-to-ground weaponry, other military vehicles, munitions, and communications equipment.
Here is some of what has reportedly fallen in the Taliban’s lap:
- 208 aircraft, including UH-60 Black Hawks and M-17 helicopters, between 2003 and 2016
- 61,000 military vehicles of all types, including more than 2,000 armored vehicles and Mine-Resistant, Ambush- Protected (MRAP) vehicles
- 258,000 rifles, including M-16s and AK-47s
- 56,000 machine guns
- 31,000 rocket-propelled and handheld grenade launchers
- 18,000 “gravity” bombs
- 16,000 aviation rockets
- 1,845 D-30 mortar systems with more than a million mortar rounds
- 224 D-130 howitzer artillery guns 30 million rounds of ammunition 17,400 night-vision devices
- 95 small drones
- body armor
- biometric security equipment
There were likely other beneficiaries of this bounty besides the Taliban. As I note in the book, sophisticated weaponry and convoys of military vehicles could easily have fallen into the hands of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or other hostile actors in the region. Two months after the evacuation, in October 2021, U.S. supplies were already for sale by Afghani gun dealers.
It looks like we now know who got some of them: exactly the people we all feared.
As the disasters in the Middle East have mounted, the typically stubborn Biden has occasionally reversed course, meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent weeks. We were finally back on track for an historic deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the framework for which was established under the Trump administration.
But this is all far too little, far too late. After Hamas’s terrorist attack, it would be a miracle if such a deal gets done now.
If it were in a vacuum, all the brutality would already be unthinkable. The systematic slaughter and murder of women. The preying on innocents. The stacking of bodies in the street. All of this is horrifying even for a region of the world known for constant war.
Yet it’s not in a vacuum. There is context. And the context is that the United States government under Joe Biden has signaled a weakening of our relationship with our allies in Israel, it has elected to fund the funders to terrorism, and it has repeatedly entertained a nuclear deal with the hideous Iranian regime that hopes to eviscerate both us and Israel.
We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Alex Marlow is the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart News and a New York Times bestselling author. His new book, Breaking Biden: Exposing the Hidden Forces and Secret Money Machine Behind Joe Biden, His Family, and His Administration, is available now. You can follow Alex on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @AlexMarlow.
OBVIOUSLY WHEN IT COMES TO TERRORISM IN CHICAGO ONE NEEDS TO LOOK AT THE BLACK ON BLACK WEEKEND SHOOTINGS!
Terrorism’s Local Supporters Take Over Downtown Chicago
Getting around downtown Chicago is a challenge at the best of times. Weekdays feature a constant flow of carefully and swiftly moving traffic; weekends all the more so.
But it is a city of 2.5 million people, in a tri-state metro area of 9 million. Back in the days when Chicago was known as “The City that Works” – a generation ago, at least – the city fathers took great care to minimize any event that threatened to jeopardize that title.
We had parades occasionally; we had demonstrations all the time. The Constitution guarantees American citizens’ right to such things.
So the city always allowed them – it had to – but made sure they were kept under control, usually on the front courtyard of the Daley Center or some similar easily-confined location.
The goal of the demonstrators was never to disrupt traffic, in those days. As fellow Chicagoans, demonstrators knew that their own neighbors, parents, or siblings had to get to work. So demonstrators would hold picket signs and recite pithy slogans, and the police would make sure fights don’t break out.
The regular population of downtown – the businessmen and the shoppers, the tourists and suburbanites in town for lunch or a show – could get on with their day unimpeded, but they would receive the message of the demonstrators while walking or driving past. See? The city still works, and the demonstrators reach an audience. Win-Win.
Not anymore.
On the afternoon of Saturday, October 21, A.D. 2023, Gentle Reader, this writer had to venture into the city to see a friend’s world premiere performance in an iconic downtown venue. With the Kennedy under construction and the usual traffic of a Saturday, it was sure to be an unpleasant drive, but nobody knew how unpleasant it was going to get.
There was already a big event scheduled for Saturday– the Halloween Parade, attracting some 50,000 spectators. Back in the days when the infamous Machine still functioned, they would not have granted a permit for a competing event two blocks away on a Saturday afternoon.
But at about 3:00 p.m., thousands of pro-Hamas protesters – both pedestrians and vehicles - converged on Chicago’s downtown, centering around the intersection of Ida B. Wells Drive (named for a famous black Republican journalist of the 19th century) and Michigan Avenue (named for our own Great Lake), mere blocks to the east).
There was no room for this massive, unsanctioned demonstration, so it tied up traffic for hours, as thousands of people carrying full-size flags of the imagined nation of Palestine that the supporters of the terrorist groups Hamas and Fatah hope someday to establish in place of Israel.
I don’t know when people started bringing full-size flags to demonstrations; I certainly don’t recall them in the days when I used to watch (or counterprotest) such things, many years ago. Conservative demonstrations might have two or three full-size American flags to lead a parade and give the crowd a direction to face for the Pledge. Leftist demonstrations would have dozens of picket signs. But it’s not like the demonstrations of the 1970s and 80s had hundreds of Soviet or ChiCom flags flying around. Even those enemy nations’ own paid agitators (and yes, during the Cold War, there were plenty) knew better than to make their allegiance so blatantly obvious.
But in recent years, it has become common enough for people to drive around Chicago with a full size Mexican flag – or flags of other immigrants’ homelands - sticking out of the sunroof of a car, driving down our city streets, or even sticking out of a side window, presumably held in place by the passengers.
So at this pro-terrorist demonstration, there were indeed hundreds of people with these huge flags cluttering the streets and sidewalks of downtown Chicago on a Saturday afternoon. Visibility is never all that great downtown, with the crush of humanity on the sidewalks, and the SUVs and buses and trucks everywhere else. Add in all this random fabric flapping in the breeze, and traffic slowed to a crawl, as even our most confident Chicago drivers had to hesitate at every intersection, taking each turn more slowly than usual, from fear of hitting a car or pedestrian because of such obscured sightlines.
The short demonstration tied up the city for hours, because both before and after the actual speeches or chants, all the participants – with their cars and leaflets and flags and signs – were added to the already dense numbers of people downtown.
One is reminded of an anecdote from the late, great P.J. O’Rourke’s classic work, “Parliament of Whores.”
Not long after Andy (Ferguson) and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration. “How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”
“We have jobs,” said Andy.
-- Parliament of Whores, copyright 1991 P.J. O’Rourke
O’Rourke was making a different point than I am here, since this was a Saturday, making it far easier for even people with jobs to attend a rally. But it is worth noting that a related aspect still applies. This pro-terrorist rally disrupted the commerce of the city of Chicago, the downtown commerce in fact, which – outside of the airports and our various stadiums on game days – is really the commerce that Chicago counts on to survive.
Why wasn’t this protest broken up immediately, as soon as it was clear that it was going to disrupt traffic?
When you add an hour in traffic to the tens of thousands of individuals, couples, and families in downtown Chicago on a Saturday, what you’ve done is shortened their day in town by an hour. You’ve caused them to miss the first hour of a performance they had paid to attend (or that they were to be paid to perform in). You’ve caused them to miss the dinner or drinks or dessert or appetizer that they were planning on enjoying at one of the restaurants or bars on their day’s agenda. Or you’ve caused them to skip one or two or three of the shops they were planning on visiting during their day downtown, likely costing each of those businesses a sale.
Every hour of unnecessary additional traffic in Chicago costs the Chicago business community – that means their proprietors and clerks, cashiers and musicians, bartenders and waitresses – hundreds of thousands of dollars at least, but more likely, millions of dollars.
That’s the real result of this traffic-snarling demonstration. That’s what its organizers costs us, and therefore, what our city leadership cost us by failing to properly enforce the permitting requirements and location limitations traditional for Chicago. This wasn’t a sudden change with Chicago’s rabble-rousing new mayor; Chicago has been careening on a downward track for years. They long ago forgot the importance of smooth traffic flow to the business of the city; they never did really understand how dependent their constituents are on a smoothly operating downtown business and entertainment district.
(Perhaps this tells us something about the supporters of Gaza as well. For generations now, especially for the past sixteen years of self-rule, the leaders and residents of the Gaza Strip itself have concentrated on protests and violence instead of on jobs and commerce. Had their own focus been on seeking honest prosperity instead of blood, we might have found peace by now.)
Perhaps the police were afraid that if they utilized the normal tactics of crowd control and actually tried to enforce the law, violence would erupt. This shouldn’t be a fear, but considering the crowd in question, it can’t be discounted.
This was, after all, a crowd of tens of thousands of Hamas supporters, just two weeks after Hamas committed one of the most horrific pogroms in history (yes, for all intents and purposes, most of the Hamas attacks on October 7 met or exceeded the definition of the worst of history’s pogroms).
Many spectators assumed that after the word came out of the unspeakable horrors of October 7 - the terrorists shooting up a music festival, the tortures and rapes at a kibbutz, the desecration of the bodies of their victims – Hamas would be sure to lose its vocal supporters. Surely nobody would admit to siding with such demonic villains in this day and age. This attack beats most of the barbarity of ancient times.
But no. It is now clear that Hamas supporters know no shame. Still they charged into downtown Chicago, as they have filled demonstrations in other cities as well for the past week, furiously calling for an end to American support of our friend and ally Israel. They have the audacity to call Israel the monsters. To claim that Israel practices apartheid, of all things. Even chanting their ghastly song of genocide against the Jews, calling for clearing the country “from the river to the sea.”
We remember our history books. We know about the Third Reich. We know exactly what “from the river to the sea” means.
Still the supporters of independent nationhood for the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria are willing to show their faces in public, even after all that their heroes have done to thousands of innocent victims in Israel in the past two weeks.
And we remember – for we can never forget – that under U.S. Law, those who support terrorists are terrorists themselves. Know your enemy.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II).
Image: Screen shot from NBC News Now video, via YouTube
Video: Turning Point USA Employee Attacked by Pro-Palestinian Mob
A staffer at the conservative student group Turning Point USA was attacked by a pro-Hamas mob near a pro-Israel rally in Skokie, Illinois, on Sunday, the organization said. The attack in the heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago, which included the staffer being hit with a flag pole, was caught on video.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk explained that his employee, Peter Christos, “was violently attacked while he and another TPUSA staffer were trying to escort an elderly Jewish couple away from a pro-Israel rally.”
Watch Below:
“On the way to their cars, they encountered pro-Hamas supporters who assaulted them, punched them repeatedly, and hit them with a flag pole before cops could pull them away to safety,” Kirk continued.
“All of these thugs need to be arrested and charged with hate crimes,” the TPUSA founder added.
The attack occurred in Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago that is home to more than a dozen synagogues.
Additional video footage posted to social media shows moments before the attack, when Christos was thrown to the ground.
Watch Below:
“Peter Christos and his colleague were simply trying to do a good deed; they saw an elderly Jewish couple that was turned away from an over-capacity pro-Israel event and wanted to help keep them safe from a gathering pro-Palestine crowd outside the event,” TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet told Breitbart News.
“They’re not even Jewish, but Christians who stand with Israel,” the TPUSA spokesperson continued. “It’s absolutely unacceptable that America has violent mobs terrorizing Jews, their Christian friends, and pro-Israel gatherings.”
“That should not happen in this country, and the fact that it is, should be a wakeup call to our leaders about the type of people we allow to live here,” Kolvet added. “This is a hate crime and we intend on doing everything we can to ensure these criminals are prosecuted.”
In a separate incident, a gunshot was fired into the air at a pro-Palestinian protest by a man claiming self defense.
Protestors have been acting out ever since the terrorist attack in Israel by Hamas on October 7, which left more than 1,300 Israelis dead, and also resulted in rape, beheadings, bodies being set on fire, and kidnappings perpetrated by the Palestinian terror group.
As Breitbart News reported, the reaction from pro-Palestine students across the U.S. has also opened the eyes of many who now find themselves shocked to see how widespread antisemitism is on college campuses.
The massacre of Jews in Israel has galvanized students across the U.S. into putting on pro-Palestine, anti-Israel demonstrations on their college campuses, with one student at Ohio State University even referring to the slaughtering of Jews by Hamas as “a resistance movement.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
‘Glory to Our Martyrs:’ George Washington U. Students Project Pro-Terror Messages on Campus Building
Students at George Washington University projected pro-terror, anti-Israel messages onto a school library in the wake of the Palestinian terror group Hamas murdering more than 1,300 Jews in Israel.
The messages displayed on the campus building in Washington, DC, read, “Glory to our martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist genocide now,’ and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” according to a social media post by the X/Twitter account @StopAntisemitism.
The @StopAntisemitism account is now calling on George Washington University President Ellen M. Granberg “to immediately expel those involved.”
The students’ pro-terror messaging comes after the mass murder of Jews in Israel by Hamas, which also resulted in rape, beheadings, bodies being set on fire, and kidnappings of Israelis.
A second post by the same account shows four people allegedly responsible for the projection arguing with police.
George Washington University students are not the only students to have reacted this way to the mass murder of Jews on October 7.
More than 30 student groups at Harvard reacted to the terrorist attack by issuing a joint statement in which they declared, in part, “We hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
As Breitbart News reported, the students wrote:
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” a joint statement by dozens of Harvard student groups read.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement continue. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.”
The reaction from pro-Palestine students across the U.S. has also opened the eyes of many who are now shocked to see how widespread antisemitism is on college campuses.
As Breitbart News reported, the massacre of Jews in Israel has galvanized students across the U.S. into putting on pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrations on their college campuses, with one student at Ohio State University even referring to the slaughtering of Jews by Hamas as “a resistance movement.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
Hamas Terrorists Found with Instructions to Decapitate Jews and Remove Hearts, Livers
Hamas terrorists were urged to decapitate and remove the hearts and livers of their Jewish victims during their raid on Israel, as detailed in a handwritten note found at the scene of the horrific attack.
The note contains words of encouragement from Hamas commanders declaring the religious importance of massacring Jews wherever they are found.
It further draws lessons from historical Muslim leaders who massacred men, sold women and children into slavery and decimated cities across the Judeo Christian world.
Israel’s Government Press Office set out the contents of the note in a statement, saying:
Note found on Hamas terrorist: “Know that this enemy of yours is a disease that has no cure, other than beheading and extracting the hearts and livers!”
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and carried out a massacre in communities in southern Israel. A handwritten note was found on one of the terrorists which was given to him before the invasion.
The words from Hamas commanders consist of an order to kill Jews and encouragement to decapitate their victims and tear out their hearts and livers.
Please find attached a copy of the note in the original Arabic.
As Breitbart News reported, over 1,000 Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel on the morning of October 7, infiltrating Israeli towns near the Gaza border and IDF bases.
LISTEN: Hamas Terrorist Calls Parents, Brags About Killing 10 Jews
Israel Defense ForceMore than 1,400 Israelis have been killed since the first attack began, with some 220 people also kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas terrorists and their allies in the Gaza Strip.
Forensic evidence of the victims’ bodies and video footage captured by terrorists have shown that Israeli women and children were raped and beheaded while others were dismembered.
The war between Israel and Hamas, which began with the Oct. 7 attack, is now in its third week.
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: Follow @SunSimonKent or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
‘Glory to Our Martyrs:’ George Washington U. Students Project Pro-Terror Messages on Campus Building
Students at George Washington University projected pro-terror, anti-Israel messages onto a school library in the wake of the Palestinian terror group Hamas murdering more than 1,300 Jews in Israel.
The messages displayed on the campus building in Washington, DC, read, “Glory to our martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist genocide now,’ and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” according to a social media post by the X/Twitter account @StopAntisemitism.
The @StopAntisemitism account is now calling on George Washington University President Ellen M. Granberg “to immediately expel those involved.”
The students’ pro-terror messaging comes after the mass murder of Jews in Israel by Hamas, which also resulted in rape, beheadings, bodies being set on fire, and kidnappings of Israelis.
A second post by the same account shows four people allegedly responsible for the projection arguing with police.
George Washington University students are not the only students to have reacted this way to the mass murder of Jews on October 7.
More than 30 student groups at Harvard reacted to the terrorist attack by issuing a joint statement in which they declared, in part, “We hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
As Breitbart News reported, the students wrote:
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” a joint statement by dozens of Harvard student groups read.
“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement continue. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.”
The reaction from pro-Palestine students across the U.S. has also opened the eyes of many who are now shocked to see how widespread antisemitism is on college campuses.
As Breitbart News reported, the massacre of Jews in Israel has galvanized students across the U.S. into putting on pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrations on their college campuses, with one student at Ohio State University even referring to the slaughtering of Jews by Hamas as “a resistance movement.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
Obama Criticizes Israel over Gaza: ‘Don’t Harden Palestinian Attitudes for Generations’
Former President Barack Obama originally said Israel should “dismantle” Hamas, but has now criticized Israel for the way it is “dismantling” the Palestinian terror organization.
In a statement Monday, Obama wrote:
As I stated in an earlier post, Israel has a right to defend its citizens against such wanton violence, and I fully support President Biden’s call for the United States to support our long-time ally in going after Hamas, dismantling its military capabilities, and facilitating the safe return of hundreds of hostages to their families.
But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters.
…
Still, the world is watching closely as events in the region unfold, and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire. Already, thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the bombing of Gaza, many of them children. Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes. The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.
A siege of Gaza would be lawful under international law, as an expert recently noted. Moreover, as Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, has noted, Gaza only obtains 7% of its water from Israel in any case.
Obama ignored Israel’s long record as one of the best, if not the best, countries in the world in upholding human rights and international humanitarian law in war against a ruthless, terrorist enemy.
As Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has said: ““No other country with comparable internal and external threats has as good a human rights record as Israel.”
Obama’s own approach to terrorism came under criticism when he was president for being ineffective. Foreign Affairs wrote:
[W]hereas [George W.] Bush’s approach was sometimes marred by an overly aggressive posture, Obama has sometimes erred too far in the other direction, seeming prone to idealism and wishful thinking. This has hampered his administration’s efforts to combat the terrorist threat: despite Obama’s laudable attempts to calibrate Washington’s response, the American people find themselves living in a world plagued with more terrorism than before Obama took office, not less.
Obama allowed the rise of ISIS, the so-called “Islamic State,” after a hasty retreat from Iraq and after mocking the group as the “JV team” in explaining why his adminstration was not being more assertive in standing up to radical Islamic terror — a phase he almost never used.
Politico reports that Democrats are starting to worry about a backlash among Arab-American voters in swing states like Michigan, who are upset that most elected Democrats — with very prominent exceptions — have supported Israel against Hamas.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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