America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
JOE BIDEN - FOLKS, BILLARY CLINTON DEMS ARE THE PARTY OF WALL STREET, BANKSTERS FOR BAILOUTS, BILLIONAIRES FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND THE NEVER ENDING WAR MACHINE - DON'T FORGET THE PARTY'S BRIBES SUCKERS - THAT'S US!
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.
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.
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.
President
Barack Obama, standing with Vice President Joe Biden, gives a press
conference about the Iran Nuclear Deal, on July 14, 2015, in Washington,
DC. (Andrew Harnik – Pool/Getty Images)
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).
Hamas
militants celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence
east of Khan Younis Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hassan Eslaiah)
Rockets are launched by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip towards Israel, on Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
A
man passes the scene where a rocket fired from Gaza strip hit a
building on October 7, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Amir Levy/Getty
Images)
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.
Iran’s
President Ebrahim Raisi speaks during a rally outside the former U.S.
embassy in the capital Tehran on November 4, 2022, to celebrate the 43th
anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis against Americans. (ATTA
KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
Hummers
from the U.S. Army left behind at Bagram air base in Kabul,
Afghanistan, are seen on September 1, 2021. (AFP via Getty Images)
Armed
Taliban security personnel ride a military vehicle as they parade near
the U.S. embassy in Kabul on August 15, 2023, during the second
anniversary celebrations of their takeover. (WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty
Images)
Men
watch as an armed Taliban security personnel rides a vehicle convoy as
during a parade near the U.S. embassy in Kabul on August 15, 2023, as
Taliban celebrates the second anniversary of their takeover. (WAKIL
KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
Taliban
security personnel display seized weapons in Mazar-i-Sharif on July 13,
2023. (Atif Aryan / AFP) (Photo by ATIF ARYAN/AFP via Getty Images)
An
Afghan shopkeeper sells used U.S. military headphones and vests at
Mujahideen Bazar in Kabul, Afghanistan, on October 12, 2022. (WAKIL
KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)
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.
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 Iand II).
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.”
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.”
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.
Tamar,
Yonatan, and their children — Shachar (6), Arbel (6), and Omer (4) —
were brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nir Oz. (@EladStr
Twitter/X)
Sixteen-year-old
Ruth Peretz and father Erick at the site of the Supernova music
festival before they were murdered on October 7 by hordes of Hamas
terrorists, who killed hundreds more at the event. (Supplied)
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.
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 Force
More
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 @SunSimonKentor 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.”
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.
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 Affairswrote:
[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.
Politicoreports 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.
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.
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