Sunday, November 12, 2023

YOU WONDERED WHY UNIVERSITIES WERE HOWLING AND SCREAMING ON BEHALF OF HAMAS TERRORIST? - The Squad: Hamas' fifth column

STOP MUSLIM INFILTRATION OF OUR INSTITUTIONS STARTING WITH CONGRESS!


Three: Finally, as always, follow the money. As Network Contagion Research Institute discovered and Bari Weiss reported, campuses have been raking in billions from antisemitic Middle Eastern countries…and carefully (and illegally) hidden the money from government scrutiny:

Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.

Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East.

Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”

The specific data are staggering. I strongly urge you to visit the Free Press article for the details because arming yourself with facts is important when pushing back against toxic, genocidal misinformation.


Jewish College Students: 'Stop Whining And Grow Some'

While their Israeli counterparts are successfully defeating the murderously hated-filled Arabs and their lackeys in 99.999% apartheid Muslim Gaza, the once comfortably insulated, but bright, Jewish college students are now quivering in fear in their dorms or in their classrooms (e.g. at Yale) afraid to venture out or display their Jewish heritage because Jewish hatred is now officially (it was always there -- unofficially, of course, disguised, among other excuses, as "diversity") encouraged on college campuses.

Jewish students -- and other fearful Jews – listen to rabbi and legal scholar Dov Fischer and "Stop Whining and Grow Some!" by taking the advice of such knowledgeable eminences as an advisor to former president Barack Hussein Obama (D) and "punch back twice as hard."  And also, yes, bring that gun to a knife fight as Obama himself later endorsed.

But how?  

Let's count the ways.

Students -- don't give them your brains or your talents by attending cesspits of bigotry. Equal opportunity be damned -- Ivy League schools are notoriously known as requiring higher SAT scores from Asian and Jewish students for admittance while eagerly accepting Black and Hispanic students -- not to mention wealthy foreigners with lower SATs. https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/Yale-sat-scores-GPA

Why bother? They need you more than you need them.  

The same advice applies to professors and others of all ranks who would like to work for these institutions. They need you more than you need them, so take your talents and skills elsewhere. 

But if you've already graduated from college, don't contribute to the alumni fund of any college or university that embraces such racism. Bigotry.  Discrimination.  Money talks. 

Wall Street titans help to fuel Ivy League donor revolt

  • Billionaire Marc Rowan has been in touch with what one finance executive quipped was “half of Wall Street” about halting donations to some of the country’s most prestigious universities.
  • Angry donors are using Zoom calls and text chains to vent frustrations with how the schools have responded to the Israel-Hamas war

Another example is extremely wealthy hedge fund manager Bill Ackman:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman isn't backing down in his crusade against what he says are anti-Israel students at Harvard.

On Saturday, Ackman took to X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — to share a 3,138-word letter he sent to Harvard President Claudine Gay.

Ackman said his letter was inspired by the conversations he had with Harvard's students, faculty, and alumni over the past four weeks "about the growing number of antisemitic incidents on campus."

Then the schools will be forced to publicly acknowledge their dependence on Arab oil money to fund their increasingly discredited academics.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Qatar has become the largest foreign donor to American academia, which has not always bothered to reveal the source. A study by the Institute for Anti-Semitism Studies found a direct link between the amount of donations and the presence of pro-Palestinian groups on campuses.

According to a study published in 2022 by the National Association of Academics in the United States, a study that did not cause too much noise at the time, in the period between 2001 and 2021, precisely after the September 11 attacks, the Qataris donated a whopping $4.7 billion to universities in the United States.

And then sue the universities.  Remind them of their legal obligations:

As part of StandWithUs’ longstanding history of supporting students in the face of anti-Jewish bias and bigotry, StandWithUs wrote to thousands of universities nationwide to remind them of their legal duties to Jewish and Israeli students and to identify specific actions they should take to align themselves with the requirements of Title VI, civil rights laws, and criminal laws, as recently stated by the Department of Education.

And then, if necessary, sue

And yes, it is necessary.

Remember, don't let the opposing side set the terms; if they start it, you finish it. But, does all this advice work?  As I was writing this the news broke:

Columbia University is suspending Students for Justice (sic!) in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (sic!) (JVP) as official student groups through the end of the fall term. This decision was made after the two groups repeatedly violated University policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an unauthorized event Thursday afternoon that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation. 

Suspension means the two groups will not be eligible to hold events on campus or receive university funding.  Lifting the suspension will be contingent on the two groups demonstrating a commitment to compliance with university policies and engaging in consultations at a group leadership level with university officials.

Like all student groups, SJP and JVP are required to abide by university policies and procedures. This ensures both the safety of our community and that core university activities can be conducted without disruption. During this especially charged time on our campus, we are strongly committed to giving space to student groups to participate in debate, advocacy, and protest. This relies on community members abiding by the rules and cooperating with university administrators who have a duty to ensure the safety of everyone in our community.  

Gerald Rosberg
Senior Executive Vice President of the University and Chair, Special Committee on Campus Safety

More to come. Stay tuned. 

The Squad: Hamas' fifth column

The “Squad,” Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna, Pressley, and Cori Bush, in supporting Hamas actions are clearly a fifth column in America. They are ignorant about the facts around the war of Israel against Hamas.

War is inevitable often under complex circumstances and only prevented by extraordinary creative work and efforts of human creatures that often fail. Once war is declared and acted upon, so called “rules of war” all but disappear in the fury of rage, hate, and violence. Evil can be aroused during war. There are seldom innocents in communities at war -- not even women, children, or the elderly. Wars most often only end with surrender negotiations, not peace negotiations.

The unresolvable conflicts between Israel and Palestine began centuries ago and particularly recurred violently since the creation of the two nation states in 1948 by the benevolent efforts of the United Nations. Wars and violence have repeatedly erupted against Israel ever since. October 7th, 2023 witnessed the emergence for the first time of pure evil by Hamas terrorists.

The brutal rape and murder of women after the prior murder of their husbands; the beheading of children and babies with some burned alive; the ripping open of a pregnant woman’s abdomen and the simultaneous killing of her baby and then her murder, marked the committing of pure evil by Hamas.  The Rubicon of pure evil was forever passed and everything sacred violated. There will be no effective cease-fires, no effective peace negotiations. Only surrender by or extinction of Hamas will bring resolution. Perhaps peace may occur in the future for Palestinians whom Hamas had ruled by vote, passive complicity, or deception.

Protests, demonstrations, and violent speech or behavior against Israel in America or around the world misses the horrible truth of history in the Holy Land as of October 7, 2023.   

"The Squad" led by Rashida Tlaib in America's Congress, and the treasonous pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas illegitimate crowds of ignorant or consciously evil protestors supporting the evil done to Israel by Hamas are clearly a Fifth Column in Iran's attack on Israel and America. Clearly, any Palestinian who voted for Hamas or who in cowardly fashion did not take up arms against such an evil regime as Hamas represents, deserve to suffer the consequences of what Israel chooses to do to destroy the baby killers and murders of innocents. The leftist mainstream American media who covers for them joins the Squad’s evil Fifth Column that supports Hamas-Iranian theocrats' pure terrorist evil against Israel and ultimately America.

Image: Secretname101


The West Gelds Itself

From the halls of Ivy to the Fourth Estate, once-respected institutions are revealing themselves to be at the forefront of efforts to upend the mores and conduct which make ours a civilized society worth defending against barbarism. I’ve already detailed some of the outrageous anti-Semitic, anti-American actions which so many colleges and universities have tolerated. (Canary Mission has done an outstanding job detailing what’s been going on in academia.)

This week, some have responded, not all with the kind of appropriate vigor and clarity which these actions call for. It’s hard to disagree with Iowahawk , ”One of the major lessons we’ve all learned in the last 33 days: send your kids to a party college.”

It’s been my sad experience that no one is easier to buy than an academic, so I’m not at all surprised to learn that Qatar, a major funder of intifadaists, is also a major funder of our top American universities

Qatar, the current residence of Hamas’ former leader, has been the largest Arab donor to American universities for decades. Not only do six leading American universities have campuses in Qatar, but they also receive hundreds of millions from ruling elites. 

At least six American universities have campuses in the country of Qatar -- which is currently home to former Hamas leader and recent global “Day of Jihad” progenitor Khaled Meshaal.

These institutions are Carnegie Mellon University, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Texas A&M University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Reportedly, these universities struck a bargain with Qatari leaders to allow Qatari residents to receive American degrees without having to travel overseas. The Washington Post reported in 2015 that these institutions receive a total of more than $320 million each year in exchange.[snip] Campus Reform previously reported that Ivy League universities were among the top recipients of $8.5 billion in Arab funding over 35 years. Now, student groups at recipient colleges have come out in support of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

For example, Cornell University received over $1.5 billion in funding from Arab countries. Now, its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter has repeatedly participated in pro-Hamas student social media campaigns.

“Among other factors, I believe funding by Middle Eastern countries of American colleges and universities has generated support for Hamas, while causing a rise in antisemitism on college campuses,” said Campus Reform higher education attorney and former Brandeis University instructor Ken Tashjy.”

Tashjy also highlighted more connections between pro-Hamas student activity and donations from Arab countries.

“According to a report published in 2020 by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy, there is a direct correlation between the funding of universities by Qatar and the Gulf States and the active presence at those universities of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which maintains over 200 chapters throughout U.S. higher education,” he also stated.

And then there’s the biggest Hamas supporter in the U.S., CAIR, whose headquarters sits three blocks from the Capitol and has 35 offices around the country. Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations has been monitoring them and the government’s acquiescence in their subversive activities for years. He has a detailed history of CAIR’s activities and the FBI’s hands off policy, with only some highlights noted here:

Christopher Wray, FBI Director: He warned last month of Hamas terror on U.S. soil. What he didn’t say is that the FBI has been investigating Hamas’ biggest ally in America for the past 30 years -- without filing any charges. 

Launched in 1994 as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has, in the decades since, become an accepted member of Washington’s lobbying community. The New York Times and other influential newspapers routinely describe CAIR as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”

Although it has not repudiated its support for Hamas -- which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people -- CAIR was enlisted by the Biden administration in May to take part in a White House initiative to fight antisemitism.” In the case against the Hamas charitable front named the Holy Land foundation, “the largest terror funding case in the U.S.”, the Department of Justice included CAIR “on a list of co-conspirators underwriting Hamas terrorism -- though CAIR and its founders were never indicted in the case.”

Why? Sperry reports former agents offered “political interference” as the explanation for the lack of an indictment.

Sperry continues: “Currently, CAIR is directing efforts at the ground level across the United States with organizations known for violent extremism,” [a former FBI counterterrorism agent] added in a recent interview with RealClearInvestigations. “Again, the FBI is doing nothing to adhere to their oaths of office and protect the American people.”

If you’re wondering why so many of the Hamas supporters gleefully rip down posters of kidnapped Israelis, babies, toddlers, women, included, William Bernstein’s explanation in The Delusions of Crowds is the best explanation for this performative act of hostility to decency.

“People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world, but rather to rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions. Over the past several decades, psychologists have accumulated experimental data that dissect the human preference of rationalization over rationality. When presented with facts and data that contradict our deeply held beliefs, we generally do not reconsider and alter those beliefs appropriately. [Instead] we avoid contrary facts and data, and when we cannot avoid them, our erroneous assessments will occasionally even harden and, yet more amazingly, make us more likely to proselytize them. In short, human ‘rationality’ constitutes a fragile lid perilously balanced on the bubbling cauldron of artifice and self-delusion.”

No institutions have contributed more to ”the bubbling cauldron of artifice and self-delusion” than the Western press, and this week the Fourth estate’s hands are bloody.

The Press and the Islamists

This perfectly anodyne cartoon appeared briefly in the Washington Post before it was yanked. It had been personally selected for publication by the editor of the op-ed page. At first the paper claimed they did so because readers claimed it was Islamophobic (a ridiculous term which suggests this is actually  thing, though experience and statistics prove otherwise -- it’s a way to diminish the real and statistically valid assertion of anti-Semitism.) In fact, it was pulled because the Post’s editor Sally Buzbee, “caved to staff pressure.”

Buzbee formerly headed the AP, and denied knowing it shared offices with Hamas in Gaza.  The artist, probably the finest political cartoonist since Nast and Nasby combined, responded:

Ramirez expressed his disappointment over his cartoon's removal, calling the move "a blow against … the freedom of speech."

"When the intellectually indolent try to defend the indefensible, they always seem to resort to playing the race card," Ramirez told the Free Beacon. "They're trying to claim that this caricature is a racial exercise, when in its specificity, it is Ghazi Hamad, who is a senior Hamas official, who went on Lebanese television praising the brutal Oct. 7 attack and systematic slaughter of women, children, and men and pledged to do it over and over again until the annihilation of Israel."

"I am presenting this because I think this is a blow against democracy and the freedom of speech," Ramirez continued. "I'm a big believer that America has to have the free expression of ideas to advance thinking."

In addition to Buzbee's note addressing her newsroom's "concerns" with the cartoon, the Post published letters to the editor that maligned Ramirez's cartoon as "deeply malicious," "deeply racist," and "full of bias and prejudice." Shipley referred to those letters in his editor's note, writing that the cartoon "was seen by many readers as racist."

"The reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that," Shipley said. "This is the spirit of opinion journalism, to move imperfectly toward a constructive exchange of ideas at all possible speed, listening and learning along the way."

Jeff Bezos bought himself a turkey in the WaPo and I doubt it can ever recover its once-considered more authoritative voice, certainly not with Buzbee at the top.

But the Post is not alone in the press for having exposed itself as defenders of barbarism and animus to Western civilization. Sometimes it’s even exposing itself to well-deserved ridicule.

CNN, NYT, AP and Reuters were found to have employed Hamas fighters as stringers and photographers (”freelancers’) who joined Hamas on October 7. One of them even posted on Facebook a picture of himself riding in with the murderers as he held a hand grenade.  If you didn’t catch on to this earlier -- i.e. the Green Helmet fiasco, where among other things they paraded dead babies taken from Iraqi morgues before photographers to send to our press, Iowahawk explains it to the naïve.

Let's face it. Orgs like CNN, NYT, AP, and Reuters are straight up forbidden by Hamas from sending their own reporters into Gaza, and are reduced to hiring "freelancers" from a handpicked Hamas "press pool."

At this point it isn't an extraordinary claim that these local "reporters" are aligned with, and abetting, war criminals. The burden of proof should be on CNN, NYT, AP, and Reuter to show they *aren't*.

At least one of the named stringers has been killed by the IDF and Israel’s internal security agency announced that when it eliminates all the October 7 massacre participants, it is including “’photojournalists’ who took part in recording the assault.”

The Western press gaslighting for Hamas is so ridiculous that a Hamas actor known to online posters at X as Mr. FAFO who posed daily in different guises -- i.e., tour director, bombing victim, pressman, medical tech -- was seriously interviewed by the BBC while MSNBC ran one of Mr. FAFO's photos as if it were a real thing. Videos of Assad bombing Arabs (he killed 200,000 of them) are reframed and published as Israeli attacks. A Lebanese artists' film in which actors pretend to be beset Gazans is run as a real documentary. Domestically, attendants to a screening of Hamas atrocities at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance were taunted and physically confronted by pro-Hamas leftists. This provocation and deliberate disruption was described by ABC 7 as “clashes breaking out between two groups.” Daniel Horowitz noted, “The media failed to report that J Town Action and Solidarity, the group planning to disrupt the Museum of Tolerance screening, expressed support for terrorism against Jews. It failed to report that the pro-Hamas rallyers had been urged to ‘mask up’ and told to shut shit down’. Other calls for violence were similarly not reported on. The media failed to tell the truth. Elected officials failed to condemn Hamas supporters trying to shut down a screening of Hamas atrocities at a Holocaust Museum. They failed to condemn hate groups invading a Jewish community and attacking Jews.”

In an ironic note, the New York Times, which offered up the weakest response to the impropriety of these using Hamas stringers, a paper which continues, by the way, to employ admitted Hitler lover Soliman Hijjy, was stormed and invaded by pro-Hamas, masked creeps on Saturday for being too pro-Israel. It’s true what the Bible says “God works in mysterious ways.”


Centuries of Wahhabi Jihad

On October 7, some 3,000 Hamas fighters crossed into Israel.  There they killed roughly 350 Israeli soldiers and policemen.  They then murdered more than a thousand mostly unarmed Jewish men, women, and children.

Hamas then crowded its own women and children into buildings it used to hide its fighters and store its weapons.  This supported its “victim” narrative by keeping its civilian deaths higher than those of Israel.

God’s Terrorists, a book by British historian Charles Allen, suggests that today’s war in Israel has little to do with the “occupation” of Palestine or Arab refugees.  It is instead part of a worldwide “modern jihad” that has been going on for nearly 300 years.  Allen wrote that book in 2006.  He did it to explain why “Islamic extremists” based in distant Afghanistan murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

According to Allen, it began in the 1700s, when Muhammad al-Wahhab and other Islamic scholars in Arabia were angry and disgusted with their Muslim leaders.

The core Muslim belief is that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad was his last messenger.  All humanity must obey the eternal and unchanging laws of Allah.  Those laws, the “sharia,” are understood, applied, and enforced by an “ulama,” a close-knit group of Islamic scholars, teachers, and judges.  Most are Arabs in and around Mecca and Medina.  That is because they naturally speak the language of the Koran and other books that teach the words and deeds of Muhammad.

Al-Wahhab believed that if all Muslims submitted to sharia and got all humanity to do the same, Allah would bless the world with peace and harmony.

However, Al-Wahhab thought this was not happening because most Muslims and their leaders had gone astray.  Some believed in un-Islamic local customs and superstitions.  Many wanted the freedom, wealth, and comforts of the modern Christian world.  Others wanted peace and friendship with Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists instead of jihad.

As a result, the “Nasrani” (Nazarenes) dominated the world.  Christians had reconquered the once Muslim lands of Spain, Portugal, and Eastern Europe.  Islam was also losing land and followers in India, Africa, and the East Indies.

Al-Wahhab and his colleagues formed a new doctrine and movement to purify Islam and save the world.  They called themselves “Unitarians” or “Salafis.”  Outsiders called them “Wahhabis.”

Wahhabis wanted to restore Islam to what they thought it was when Muhammad was alive.  That included subjugating women and suppressing music, dancing, literature, and free speech.  

Wahhabis did not tolerate dissent.  They despised any Muslim who disagreed with them as much as any “kaffir” (non-believer).  Wahhabis even declared jihad against the Ottoman sultans, who were the “khalifas” or spiritual leaders of the Islamic world!

Wahhabis promised wealth, power, and submissive women to every man who joined their jihads.  They also promised eternal life in paradise to those who died fighting with them.  The Wahhabis cleverly used bribes and deception to divide, weaken, and defeat their enemies.

In 1740, Al-Wahhab forged “a remarkable partnership” with a desert tribal chief named Muhammad Ibn Saud.  Al-Wahhab’s daughter married Ibn Saud’s son.  Their combined families quickly achieved spectacular success.

They equipped their fighters with European rifles.  Then they quickly conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the whole Arabian Peninsula.  From there, they threatened Turkish control of Egypt and Iraq.

The Wahhabis also indoctrinated many pilgrims who came to Mecca from British India and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).  Those visitors began their own “modern jihad” when they returned home.

This provoked a long international “war on terror” 200 years ago.  In 1815, the Ottoman Turks invaded Arabia.  They arrested, tortured, and killed every Wahhabi they could find.  In many areas, they simply executed every male over the age of ten.  They paraded Abdullah Saud, the great-grandson of Al-Wahhab, in chains through the streets of Cairo and Istanbul.  Then they beheaded him and tore his body to pieces.

During this time, the British, Hindus, Sikhs and moderate Muslims fought the Wahhabis in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.  In 1831 and again in 1857, they killed thousands of Wahhabi fighters and most of their leaders in two particularly brutal wars.

However, the Wahhabis survived.  In British India and Pakistan, the Wahhabis used public relations and the British legal system to win sympathy and political support.  They also established a sophisticated school in Deoband, India to peacefully promote their doctrine.  More than a hundred years later, their “talibs” (students) from that school inspired and led the Taliban in Afghanistan.

For years, what was left of Wahhabis and the Saudi family in Arabia lived quietly in remote areas.  However, in 1901, they made a spectacular comeback.  That was when 21-year-old Ibn Saud took control of his family.  Ibn Saud used modern methods, later used by communists and fascists, to create a new Wahhabi “Ikhwan” or “Brotherhood.”  He persuaded young Wahhabi men to give up their nomadic lifestyle and tribal loyalties.  Ibn Saud won their loyalty and had them live in permanent military settlements he built for them.  Ibn Saud educated them and their sons in the same Wahhabi schools.  They all submitted to the strict discipline of Wahhabi sharia.  There was little crime, corruption, or favoritism.

Ibn Saud and his successors generously shared their wealth with members of their brotherhood.  At first, that wealth came from taxing or plundering other tribes.  Since the 1930s, most of that wealth came from oil.

This inspired Wahhabis to set up similar “brotherhoods” throughout the Islamic world.  A Muslim Brotherhood was set up in Egypt in 1928.  These Wahhabi brotherhoods worked closely together.  They also shared new confidence that the thousand-year era of Christian dominance was almost over.  Years later, al-Qaeda was a perfect example of how well these brotherhoods worked together.  Osama bin Laden was in the Saudi Brotherhood.  Mohammed Atef and Ayman al-Zawahiri were in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin led the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza in the 1960s.  At that time, Gaza was part of Egypt.  Yassin formed a Palestinian branch of that Brotherhood only after Israel occupied Gaza in 1967. 

Yassin also promoted a new weapon of modern jihad: babies.  Yassin had eleven children.  There were about 400,000 Arabs in Gaza when Israel first occupied the territory in 1967.  There are more than two million today.  Half of them are less than 18 years old.

In 1987, Yassin made Hamas a separate organization so that his bombings and murders would not cause “charities” of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to lose international funding.  However, the charter of Hamas is far more Islamic than Palestinian.  Its preamble praised Muslims as “the best nation” of mankind.  It also declared that Islam would “obliterate” Israel, just as Islam “obliterated” previous Crusader kingdoms.

In 2007, Charles Allen warned that “the Wahhabis cult” was winning its “modern jihad” in Europe and America as well as in Pakistan and the Middle East.  Sadly, events in Israel and the rest of the world during the past month are proving that he was right.

Image: David Stanley via Flickr (cropped), CC BY 2.0.


Is Congress Ready to Take on Pro-Hamas Nonprofits?

“Some organizations that have celebrated the unspeakable acts of terror ... currently enjoy tax-exempt status in the United States,"

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has made exposing pro-terror nonprofits abusing the tax system into a major focus. Now Congress is showing signs of a willingness to act.

Last month, Rep. Jason Smith, the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, sent a message.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (MO-08) released the following statement blasting organizations and U.S. universities for their statements, or failure to condemn statements issued by student organizations, of support for Hamas and the barbaric acts of terrorism committed against the Jewish people in Israel.

Chairman Smith said, “To say I am disgusted by statements of support for Hamas that we’ve seen in recent days is an understatement. Celebrating, excusing, or downplaying the horrific rape, torture, and murder of innocent people is the same thing as supporting violence, or even calling for it. Releasing such statements, or failing to condemn them, is unforgivable and runs counter to our values as a nation.

“Some organizations that have celebrated the unspeakable acts of terror that claimed the lives of 30 Americans and hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children currently enjoy tax-exempt status in the United States, and their statements call into question the academic or charitable missions they claim to pursue. University administrators, for example, have weaponized their institutions to attack speech and free inquiry as ‘violence,’ yet fail to condemn actual violence that threatens our way of life all while their institutions enjoy lucrative federal tax-exempt status.

The Wall Street Journal notes that, “Mr. Smith’s comments have more weight than most because he is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax policy. That includes policies governing nonprofit organizations, including colleges and universities as well as groups issuing statements and staging rallies throughout the U.S. Statements celebrating Hamas’s violence, Mr. Smith adds, “call into question the academic or charitable missions they claim to pursue”—in other words, their tax breaks.”

As we have repeatedly demonstrated, including in today’s article, supporting terrorists is inconsistent with tax-exempt status.

The illegal pro-terrorist activities of both JVP and IfNotNow, as well as many other groups in the anti-Israel network, reflects the refusal of the IRS to enforce the tax code against the Left.

The IRS had previously found that the tax code bans funding of anti-war groups or any organization whose “primary activity is the sponsoring of…protest demonstrations  in which demonstrators are urged to commit violations of local ordinances and breaches of public order.”

Such organizations don’t “qualify for exemption under section 501(c)(3) or (4) of the Code.”

That means the groups engaged in illegal pro-Hamas protests, should lose their tax exempt status.

In a previous article, I argued that Congress could end the pro-terror tax code loophole.

These are only a few of the examples of IRS approved 501(c)(3) nonprofit groups or those funded by them celebrating Hamas atrocities. This is in clear violation of the tax code which bars such activities.

IRS regulations specifically state that “exempt purposes may generally be equated with the public good, and violations of law are the antithesis of the public good”

Is supporting terrorists part of the public good? It’s not.

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Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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Tlaib Fights Censure with Lies

Her false statements are in accord with the jihadi playbook.

[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

Facing censure in the House of Representatives over her antisemitism and thinly veiled support for Hamas, the Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah) is fighting back using a strategy that Islamic spokesmen in the West have frequently favored over the years: she’s lying. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone: in the book that those spokesmen and Tlaib consider to be holy, lying to infidels is specifically allowed for when one is cornered. And if anyone is cornered right now, it’s Rashida Tlaib.

CNN reported that “The House voted Tuesday to advance a resolution to censure Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib after a Democratic effort to block the measure failed, setting up an expected vote on final passage of the resolution Wednesday.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who on Monday reintroduced into the House a resolution to censure her flamethrowing far-Left colleague, wrote on X that it was for Tlaib’s “antisemitism, spreading Pro-Hamas propaganda, and inciting an illegal occupation in the Capitol complex.” Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Georgia) also introduced a resolution to censure Tlaib.

In a statement on the censure resolutions, Tlaib insisted: “I have repeatedly denounced the horrific targeting and killing of civilians by Hamas and the Israeli government, and have mourned the Israeli and Palestinian lives lost.” It is important to note that this is not actually a denunciation of Hamas, which Tlaib has never denounced, but only of “the horrific targeting and killing of civilians” by both “Hamas and the Israeli government,” as if the two were equivalent when one deliberately targets civilians and puts them in harm’s way and the other takes extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties.

So even Tlaib’s criticism of Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7 is watered down by her absurd moral equivalence of Hamas with the Israeli government. Beyond that, however, where exactly were these instances of Tlaib repeatedly denouncing Hamas for murdering Israeli civilians? On Oct. 8, the day after Hamas murdered over 1,400 Israeli civilians in one of the bloodiest, most savage jihad massacres of modern times, Tlaib led off her statement with the same moral equivalence: “I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day.” Then she launched into a series of thinly veiled indictments of Israel: “I am determined as ever to fight for a just future where everyone can live in peace, without fear and with true freedom, equal rights, and human dignity. The path to that future must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.” About Hamas’ targeting of civilians she said absolutely nothing, and, in fact, didn’t even mention the jihad terror group at all.

That’s all. Tlaib didn’t post on X between Oct. 6 and Oct. 13. If she was busy repeatedly denouncing Hamas’ murder of Israeli civilians, it made no headlines and isn’t even on her own website.

So what is Tlaib doing claiming now that she has repeatedly denounced Hamas’ targeting of civilians? It’s simple: she is lying. And that lying is firmly within the bounds of what is acceptable behavior according to the Qur’an on which she was sworn in. The Islamic holy book says: “Let not the believers take unbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoever does that has no connection with Allah unless you are guarding yourselves against them, taking security.” (3:28)

The fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir, author of a magisterial and still influential commentary on the Qur’an, explains that the phrase “unless you are guarding yourselves against them” means that “believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers” may “show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda said, ‘We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.’ Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, ‘The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.” Abu Ad-Darda was a companion of Muhammad.

In the same vein, the twentieth-century Pakistani Islamic scholar and politician Syed Abul Ala Maududi wrote this about Qur’an 3:28: “This means that is lawful for a believer, helpless in the grip of the enemies of Islam and in imminent danger of severe wrong and persecution, to keep his faith concealed and to behave in such a way as to create the impression that he is on the same side as his enemies.”

Might Tlaib consider herself in the grip of the enemies of Islam and in imminent danger of severe wrong, and so considers it permissible for her to claim she opposes Hamas when in fact she favors it? Certainly. And her Democrat colleagues, since they have been propagandized into thinking that such a line of inquiry is “Islamophobic” on its face, and want to keep the Israel-hating hard Left happy, will fall into line behind her.

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Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur’an and The Sumter Gambit. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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Hamas Leaders to NY Times: No Interest in Helping Palestinians in Gaza, Want ‘Permanent’ War Against Israel

israel attacked
AHMAD AL-BASHA/AFP via Getty Images

Hamas leaders told the New York Times on Wednesday that they had no interest in governing Gaza and instead wanted to create a “permanent” state of war against Israel that, in their minds, would mobilize Arab support and keep the Palestinian cause alive.

The idea of governing Gaza well, or building institutions toward creating a Palestinian state, seems not to have occurred to them — nor did the Times‘ Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib, who had access to Hamas leaders, suggest that more constructive idea.

It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,” he added. “It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.”

The Times presented several Hamas complaints about Israel in euphemistic terms, as if they were accurate or legitimate. For example, it describes Jews trying to pray on the Temple Mount as “Jews openly praying at a contested site customarily reserved for Muslims,” without mentioning that it is also the holiest site in Judaism. The Times also cites “the Israeli police storming the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem,” without noting that they only did so because Hamas and other groups stockpiled weapons there.

Prior to the war, Saudi Arabia and Israel had been moving toward a deal on peace and normalization that would have been conditioned on an improvement of conditions for Palestinians, though not necessarily on the creation of a Palestinian state.

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.

Can someone explain to the rest of us why the leaders of Hamas, the world's evilest terrorist organization which has just murdered 1,400 innocent people, are actual billionaires living their best lives in Qatar?


A Marriage Made in Hell

Unified in a seething hatred of the West.

In the month since the horrific jihadist attacks on Israeli civilians, worldwide protests and antisemitic rallies, replete with Nazi-era slogans and tropes, began even before Israel launched its war against Hamas. In the U.S., these demonstrations include unprecedented coalitions of Muslims and “woke” leftists, a seemingly oxymoronic alliance, given that everything else Islam and leftism stand for are mutually exclusive.

Yet there is a deeper connection between Islam and the left, one that goes beyond tactical alliances––an inveterate hatred of the modern West and its defining goods like tolerance, political equality, unalienable individual rights, separation of church and state, and especially freedom as the birthright of every human being. And, most troubling, both Islam and the communist left endorse and have practiced brutal, indiscriminate violence in order to punish infidels and apostates.

Even before the rise of communism, its precursors, the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution, bespoke a “passionate intensity” redolent of Islam. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution described the revolution as  “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without religion, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”  Moreover, the French Revolution legitimized violence as the tool for regenerating mankind, as does Islam today.

Nor did it take long for Marxism also to be recognized as a political religion, a secular substitute for Christianity, which since the Enlightenment has been weakened among the Western cognitive and cultural elites. Historian Michael Burleigh has catalogued communism’s “cultural appropriations” of Christianity: ‘“consciousness’ (soul), ‘comrades’ (faithful), ‘capitalist’ (sinner), ‘devil’ (counterrevolutionary), ‘proletarian’ (chosen people), and ‘classless society’ (paradise),” to name a few.

Likewise, the memoirs of former communists collected in The God That Failed (1949) contain striking resemblances to Christian descriptions of the experience of conversion. French novelist André Gide said that his “conversion is like a faith,” one he would gladly become a martyr to. Arthur Koestler describes his conversion to Marxism as a reprise of St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus: “the new light seemed to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern . . . There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.”

Modern “woke” leftism performs the same functions for a generation of Americans who have repudiated religion, and have been badly educated as well. Of course, social and cultural fashions, spread by “social contagion,” account for much of their spurious moral preening and virtue-signaling, which provide badges of their superiority to “fascists,” “racists,” and “Islamophobes.” But the need for meaning and a justifying narrative is real and urgent enough to endorse publicly the Holocaust, and to celebrate the inhuman violence against Israeli children and babies.

And to ignore the incoherence and fundamental contradictions of their shouted chants and slogans, which echo the “useful idiots” of the Twenties and Thirties, those Western apologists and press-agents for the Soviet butchers. Not even Stalin’s treaty with Hitler in August 1939 could wake up thousands of Western fellow-travelers, who had lobbied against joining the war against Nazism, until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union a few years later, when suddenly they they became passionate supporters and cheerleaders for fighting side-by-side with the capitalist running-dogs.

What else other than a similar rote fealty to a black-market cult can explain today’s protestors decrying Israel’s alleged “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs who, except for Gazans misruled by Hamas, comprise some of the freest and most prosperous Arabs in the region? Or their ignoring Islam’s brutality against homosexuals and transexuals, the woke left’s secular saints and martyrs?  Or Islam’s retrograde beliefs about women’s inferiority, which these Western poseurs celebrate by sporting hijabs that signify their sex’s debased status? Or indulging vicious antisemitic lies and slurs redolent of Der Stürmer, at the same time they decry an alleged epidemic of “Islamophobia.” In fact, half of U.S. hate-crimes against ethnic and religious minorities––like those committed over the last month during the protests––are against Jews, and have increased 388% over the same period in 2022?

Next, both Islam and leftism dehumanize whole categories of human beings into enemies worthy of extermination. In Islam, “infidels”––anyone not a Muslim––must be eliminated if they refuse the “call” to convert to Islam. The aim of the faithful mandated by Allah is that the whole world must be conquered and subjected to the Koran and sharia law. The faithful must continually wage jihad to fulfill this command.

And like communism, the greatest infidel enemy of Islam is the West, the civilization that ended 1400 years of Muslim success and dominance. The U.S.––the richest, freest, and most powerful country in history––is especially hated. In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most consequential organization for modern jihadism, promulgated “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”: “The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Soviet Communism had a similar global ambition regarding the capitalists and bourgeoise, regardless of any individual guilt or innocence. In November 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the secret police, wrote, “We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.”

Finally, both beliefs legitimize ruthless violence and torture in fulfilling their mandates to bring down the West, and both endorse the amoral principle “by any means necessary,” including terrorism, a weapon of the left since the French Revolution. Karl Marx himself in 1843 threatened the Prussian government, “We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.” Indeed, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and every communist leader since have made good on that threat.

Our “woke” fellow-travelers of jihad haven’t descended to the levels of the gruesome violence of Hamas or the Soviet regime––not yet. But the acceptance and celebration of the savage violence Hamas inflicted on Israelis, and the once-forbidden public celebration of the Holocaust do not bode well for the future. Who knows what sequence of events will, as happened in Germany in the Thirties, create an environment in which such rhetoric will become reality, and the flaunting of brutal antisemitic tropes become a call to action. We may yet see today’s bougie day-trippers turn into tomorrow’s rabid storm troopers.

As for now, these demonstrations are inflicting damage by pressuring the weak and cowardly Biden administration into escalating its bullying of Israel to take a “humanitarian pause” in its campaign, an obvious  euphemism for a cease-fire that would leave the Hamas butchers time to regroup, rearm, and return to murdering Israelis––as promised by a Hamas official who has threatened endless 10/7s until Israel is no more.

That is, unless the West recovers its civilizational nerve, and once again takes its stand for freedom against its enemies.

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Bruce Thornton

Bruce S. Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.

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Islam is Not a Religion

What is Islam?  To answer that question, it’s more important to know what Islam isn’t.  Islam is not a religion.  It is an authoritarian, political ideology that forcibly imposes itself on all aspects of any society unfortunate enough to be under its yoke.  Islam demands complete subjugation by its adherents.  Under Islam, there is no democracy, there is no free speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no minority rights, and there’s no right to love whoever you desire.  Islam allows no dissent.  It is a complete and total way of life that glorifies oppression, slavery, and death.  Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, cultural, and military components.  The religious component is the veil that hides the dangers of its all-encompassing ideology.

Islam was founded in the 7th century by the Prophet Mohammed.  From its beginnings, Islam never attempted or bothered to convert “non-believers” by friendly persuasion.  Instead, Islam converted non-believers by conquest and forcible conversion, or you were slaughtered.  By the mid-8th century, Islam had conquered all the lands from the Indus River, in the east, across North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, in the west.  During that period of conquest, if subjects didn’t convert to Islam, they were put to the sword.  To this day, most of those lands are still under the control of Islam.  There are few exceptions: Spain and Portugal, which during the 15th century, managed to free themselves from the scourges of Islam, and Israel.

Modern day Islam is just as oppressive and dangerous as was 8th century Islam.  That’s because culturally, Islam still enforces the same tenets they did 1,200 years ago.  What are some of those tenets, practices, and ways of life?  Islam enforces edicts against homosexuality to the point of executing homosexuals.  As for women, of the ten worst countries for women’s rights, seven of them are Muslim.  The Quran clearly states that women are subordinate to men, and men may beat their wives (Quran 4:34).  With Islam, there’s a fine line between oppressing women and enslaving them.  Islam practices female genital mutilation, a barbaric practice (look it up and be disgusted).  Other realities for women in Islamic countries include: women must be escorted in public, largely because it’s too dangerous for them to walk alone (rape and assaults are common); women must cover their bodies from head to foot; and very few education opportunities which result in limited employment opportunities.  

Today, in the year 2023, Islam practices slavery (here, and here), the actual commodification of other human beings, and the world stands silent.  It also engages in jihad, rape, and pedophilia—yes, it’s acceptable to rape children (bacha bāzī). Also, see this clip, from CNN no less:

Today, Islam beheads its enemies (Dec 27, 2019 in Nigeria), burns people alive in cages, amputates the hands of criminals, and engages in “honor” killings of female relatives (Texas 2008).  There’s nothing honorable about a father (or a brother) who kills his daughter (or his sister) because he doesn’t agree with her actions.  Adulterers (and even some female rape victims) can be stoned to death, and polygamy is allowed.  Earlier this year, an Iranian couple was sentenced to ten years in prison for dancing in public.  To say that Islam has nothing in common with Western culture is an understatement.  Islam vehemently opposes, and wants to destroy, Western society.  Proof of every vile, barbaric, and evil practice engaged in by Muslims was rolled up into one event—Hamas’s attack last month on Israel.

For much of America’s history, we didn’t concern ourselves with the evils of Islam.  We didn’t worry about it largely because we’re an ocean apart, and Islam’s 12th century society couldn’t much affect or threaten us.  Nevertheless, America’s first foreign war was fought in the early 19th century against the Islamic states along the Barbary Coast of North Africa.  Also, throughout most of the 20th century, our focus was on the evils in Europe—Nazism and communism.  It wasn’t until the 1970’s that most Americans became aware of the dangers of Islam.  That was when the Arabs used world oil markets to achieve their political goals.  Then, in 1979, Iranians seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.  Ever since then, the Middle East and Islam have played a central role in America’s foreign policy. 

A problem with American foreign policy is that no president, from Nixon all the way through to our current crumbling commander, has properly understood Islam, the best example being Bush’s post-9/11 statement: “Islam is a religion of peace.”  That was an idiotic statement, given that 3,000 Americans had just been slaughtered in the name of Islam.  The United States’ lack of understanding wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t in the 21st century—but we are.  And a 12th century ideology of hatred and death is a huge problem given modern technologies which gives Islamists the ability to wander the globe killing, maiming, and enslaving in the name of their ideology.

You might wonder what I have against Islam, but let me ask this question: Knowing the profoundly immoral nature of tyrants and authoritarian regimes, would you be alright if Nazism or communism ruled over two billion people on the planet?  I’m guessing most people would say “NO” to both, because the evils of these ideologies have no place in a civilized society of unalienable rights.  Well, the evils of Islam are just as bad—perhaps worse—as the evils of any totalitarian form of rule ever devised by man.  Islam doesn’t want peace; it preaches struggle, constant struggle, because it is an ideology that uses religion. 

Many people might disregard the dangers of Islam, as we do have Muslims here in America, and we don’t see things like Muslim men buying children, or public beatings by administrators of Sharia “justice.” But, Muslims are a small percentage of our population at this moment. Anywhere Islam is the majority, there is oppression, conflict, and struggle.  Think of the wars and conflicts being fought on this planet; then, think of the countries that have large Muslim populations, and you’ll find those two maps overlay one another.  From Nigeria in Africa, to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, and to the jungles of the Philippines, Islamic societies are engaged in armed conflicts to suppress and oppress those populations.  And also don’t forget, a small number can be very dangerous: the 9/11 attack was carried out by only 19 Muslims.

In Islamic countries, conflicts, struggles, and oppression have been ongoing for centuries; no end in sight, and it’s important to remember that above all, Islam is an ideology as dangerous and evil as any ideology ever conceived, using religion as a scapegoat.

Image generated by AI.


remember the saudis invasion of america sept 11


Blue State Blues: 50 Years of Excuses for Palestinian Terror Are Enough

Queers for Palestine (Mark Kerrison / Getty)
Mark Kerrison / Getty

We don’t hear much about the Palestinian cause, between wars.

The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said defended Yasser Arafat — who was then still a notorious terrorist, not yet a corrupt kleptocrat — by saying that his sensational violence at least kept the Palestinian cause from disappearing entirely from the world’s consciousness, and kept the Palestinian diaspora unified, even at the moral price of backing terror.

Said wrote that 50 years ago. But it is almost exactly the same argument used by the Hamas leaders who spoke to the New York Times this week, telling the western public that without their attack on Israel — with all its horrific atrocities — that the Palestinian cause would have been forgotten, left behind in the progress of the Abraham Accords and in the excitement of a “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

It is worth asking whether the Palestinians could have done something else in those 50 years to advance their cause, beyond killing Israeli civilians. Or whether violence against Israelis is the Palestinian cause, and how it came to be that way.

After all, you never see pro-Palestinian activists doing much to help “Palestine” between wars — and this time, they started marching after the terror attack, not the Israeli response.

It is easier to destroy than to create.

Let’s rewind to the beginning.

Israel is the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, and has been for many thousands of years. Jews have lived there continuously for millennia, and even during periods of exile and dispersion, they still faced Jerusalem during prayer — as Jews still do today.

The idea of creating a Jewish state emerged in the late 19th century as a response to persecution in Europe, and Jews began moving back.

A generation or so later, in the early 20th century Arabs living in the region began to feel their own national stirrings, and the Palestinian Arabs were no different — though initially, they wanted to be part of a broader Arab empire, not a separate state.

When the British took over from the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, with a Mandate from the League of Nations, they struggled to reconcile promises to both sides.

The dilemma was difficult to solve, but dividing the land seemed the least bad option. This was acceptable to the Jewish side, which simply wanted sovereignty of any kind — especially with the growing danger to Jews in Europe.

But the Arabs — who were only known as “Palestinians” much later — clung to the idea that there could be no Jewish state at all, and not even any Jewish immigration, not even refugees from the Nazis.

The man most responsible for this intransigence was named Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The British sought to appease him by appointing him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He abused that position to foment riots against Jews, most notoriously in the Hebron massacre of 1929. The British tried to keep the Arabs onside in the Second World War by banning Jewish immigration, but al-Husseini sided with Hitler and the Nazis anyway.

There has never really been a reckoning with this history. The Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Hitler and made sure, through pressure on the British, that Jews had nowhere to escape.

After the war, the Germans were “de-Nazified” through public acknowledgment of Hitler’s crimes. But that never happened in the Arab world, which still incubated Nazi antisemitism alongside radical Islamic sentiments.

In 1947, the newly-formed United Nations tried to tackle the same problem that had vexed the British, and came up with the same answer: partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

But the Arabs decided to destroy the Jewish state rather than build their own, and declared war. They lost, and the same pattern has repeated itself for decades. The Palestinians have aways rejected statehood in favor of violence.

Up to 2000, it was possible to believe that some Palestinian grievance justified the rejection. But when then-President Bill Clinton offered Arafat nearly all of the West Bank, and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites, and possible compensation for Palestinian refugees, Arafat walked away. He then launched a cynical and destructive campaign of terror that Hamas, the Islamist rival of Arafat’s nationalists, continued.

That shattered the Israeli left, which had long supported compromises with the Palestinians, believing that peace was possible. For the last 23 years, Israelis have been looking for a workable alternative to solve the problem — from building a barrier along the West Bank, to unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, to making peace with the other Arab states in the hope that the Palestinians could eventually be persuaded to set war aside.

Yet the Palestinian leadership had other ideas — boosted by Iran, which continued to fund and arm terror groups.

In 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban, South Africa, global anti-Israel activists seized on the idea of casting Israel as the new “apartheid” state — which, like South Africa, had to be dismantled. It was an idea without merit, but the symbolism appealed to western leftists.

I happened to be at the World Conference Against Racism, which ironically saw a shocking outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Anti-Israel activists literally broke up a meeting to discuss antisemitism, which had nothing to do with Israel.

The same impulse persists in the efforts of anti-Israel activists to tear down posters of Israeli hostages: there can be no acknowledgement of Jewish victimhood, which is part of Israel’s reason for being.

But ask these activists what they have actually done to help “Palestine,” and you will find no answers. They have not invested in economic development; they have not donated to Palestinian schools. A few may have donated to Palestinian relief efforts, but none has given thought to building Palestinian institutions.

The one question that unravels them, every time, is: “What kind of Palestinian state do you want?” They don’t know.

They just want to “free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea,” which the president of Harvard admitted this week was an antisemitic slogan: it envisions the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh recently urged followers to imagine a post-Israel “Palestine.” He wants an Islamic state. The likely outcome: Gaza. a complete wreck, a constant threat to its neighbors.

The world has heard Palestinian excuses for terrorism for 50 years. The difference now is that those same excuses come from Ismail Haniyeh rather than Edward Said — both from comfortable exile.

The only portion of the Palestinian Arab population that has moved beyond this are the Israeli Arab citizens, who are deciding, in the face of Hamas terror, that they would rather be Israeli than Palestinian. Their “free Palestine” is Israel.

There is talk about what to do with a post-Hamas Gaza. The White House wants it run by the Palestinian Authority, which has never worked. My preference would be to pay Gazans to relocate to the West Bank and annex Gaza to Israel, solving the problem of Palestinian geographic contiguity.

What do the Palestinians themselves want? We don’t know. They don’t either. Again, it is easier to destroy than to create. But “no more Israel” is not an acceptable answer.

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.

Dem Sen. Coons: Hamas Is Messing up Talks to Get People out of Gaza by Trying to Get Terrorists Out

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN News Central,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) stated that one issue complicating negotiations to get Americans out of Gaza is the fact that Hamas is trying to get injured terrorists released.

Coons said he hopes there is a “several-day pause” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, get dual citizens out of Gaza, and free hostages.

Later, co-host Sara Sidner asked, “There are still U.S. citizens in Gaza who want out. There [are] a couple in particular that we are aware of, [one] is stuck there and saying that the State Department is just not doing enough to try to help them get out. What needs to be done to finally get out more Americans, get them to safety, as they wait there in the midst of this war?”

Coons answered, “One of the challenges is our partner in the region, Egypt. The bipartisan group of senators with whom I traveled to Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia pressed President El-Sisi to allow, out of Gaza, more Palestinians, in particular, Palestinian Americans. Coming to an agreement between Hamas and Egypt and Israel about who is released has been devilishly difficult. Hamas is trying to get their wounded fighters released so that they can be cared for in hospitals outside of Gaza. So far, there have been some releases, but, obviously, opposition by the Israelis to releasing Hamas fighters. So, it’s been a difficult series of negotiations.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett


Her (KAMALA HARRIS) more radical positions, such as support for the Obama administration’s Iran deal, prosecuting a journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood’s collection and sale of aborted babies’ body parts (while receiving campaign donations from them), and defending Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, may indeed sit well with a great many leftists, but her actions as Attorney General of California may not. While in that position, Harris jailed hundreds on marijuana charges and authorized anti-prostitution sting operations which, according to SF Weekly, disproportionately targeted Latino men (a crucial Democrat demographic). In addition to this -- though she later admitted it was a mistake -- she prosecuted and jailed the parents of truant teens. She even refused to release the names of Catholic priests accused of sexually molesting children, abnegating law enforcement’s most basic and humane duty -- regardless of anyone’s opinion of the Catholic Church.

Muslim Democrats ‘Horrified’ by Plan to Halt Palestinian Immigration to U.S.

Celal Gunes/Anadolu/SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
Celal Gunes/Anadolu/SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Muslim Democrats Andre Carson, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar say they are “horrified” by GOP plans that would halt Palestinian legal immigration to the United States.

This week, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and other House Republicans introduced legislation to ban the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from providing green cards, visas, refugee status, and parole to Palestinians.

Zinke’s legislation also would revoke visas for Palestinians in the United States, thus making them eligible for deportation.

“This legislation keeps America safe,” Zinke said of the legislation. “I don’t trust the Biden Administration any more than I do the Palestinian Authority to screen who is allowed to come into the United States.”

In response, Carson, Tlaib, and Omar issued a joint statement where they called Zinke’s legislation “xenophobic, punitive, and [an] unconstitutional measure.”

“As the three Muslim Members of Congress, we are horrified by Rep. Ryan Zinke’s recently introduced bill to pause all visas, refugee status, and granting of asylum for individuals holding a passport issued by the Palestinian Authority indefinitely — and to revoke others,” they said:

Let’s be clear: using the full power of the state to target and persecute a particular ethnic group or nationality is fascism and pure bigotry. This legislation—by a former cabinet official no less—directly violates the U.S. Constitution, and would illegally destroy the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian immigrants who live in and contribute to American society. Though intended to target Muslims, this bill will also hurt Palestinian Christians, who will be targeted by these provisions. History will harshly judge this xenophobic, punitive, and unconstitutional measure. [Emphasis added]

We call on the leadership of both parties to vocally and specifically condemn these comments and legislation, to make clear that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate has no place in our politics, and to name it when it happens. [Emphasis added]

Despite claims that Zinke’s legislation is “unconstitutional,” the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Hawaii that the president has extraordinarily broad discretion under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) to exclude aliens when he believes doing so is in the nation’s interests.

Since Zinke introduced the legislation, House and Senate Democrats have sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to provide Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) to Palestinians in the United States — a policy that the far-left Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is currently lobbying for.

Giving TPS and DED to Palestinians would ensure they cannot be deported from the United States.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.


Exclusive – World-Renowned Expert on Urban Combat: Hamas ‘Creating’ Civilian Deaths to Stir World Against IDF

GAZA CITY, GAZA - OCTOBER 18, 2011: Soldiers with al Qasm, Hamas military wing, lined the streets fully armed as thongs of people stood out to greet dozens of prisoners as they travel from Rafah to Gaza City after being released in exchange for Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, at Rafah …
Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage

Despite the “nightmare” of tunnel warfare, the mission being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) appears “very successful,” though Israel doesn’t have unlimited time, according to retired United States Army Major and urban warfare expert John Spencer, who deemed Hamas an “existential threat” whose strategy is to “create their own civilians’ deaths and get the world to react,” in order to prevent the IDF from eliminating their military capabilities — “and it is working.” 

He also accused those protesting Israel’s supposedly “disproportionate” response to Hamas of having “no understanding of war, the laws of war or how the world works,” and that the terror group would “slaughter” the protesters, if given the opportunity, “for not being radical Islamic followers.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, retired U.S. Army Major John Spencer, a world-renowned expert on urban combat who serves as chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, delved into the various warfare tactics at hand during the current Middle East conflict.

IDF’S STRATEGY

Spencer, a founding member the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, deemed the IDF’s activity against a plainclothes enemy embedded amongst civilians “very precise.” 

“Of course, very costly,” he said. “But it’s not unlike any other urban battle I’ve seen.”

While Gaza is a “very highly dense place,” he noted, “cities like Baghdad, Mosul, and Raqqa are more dense,” though that “doesn’t mean it’s not any harder to operate in it.”

“From the ground perspective, as somebody who teaches this to armies around the world, I think they have been very deliberate in their approach to go through the steps that would be required to accomplish the mission they have stated, whereas a lot of militaries aren’t as clear in their objectives,” he said.

Citing a Vietnam-war saying, “you have to destroy the city to save it,” Spencer said the fact is unfortunate, “but it’s the reality of urban fighting.”

The saying conveys that there is a defender inside the city, which, in order to clear out “you basically destroy the city.” 

“And there’s nothing I’m seeing now that changes that paradigm,” he added.

Deeming the IDF’s battle against Hamas “enemycentric,” in that the mission to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities is “very clear,” the retired Army officer explained that the task cannot be done [entirely] from the air, though an air campaign can be used “to attrit rocket sites, command-and-control centers, the ability to communicate, and the ability to move — even underground.” 

“As far as I can tell,” he assessed, the mission being carried out by the IDF appears “very successful.” 

“Now they’ve moved forward methodically surrounding the city; the step that we call ‘isolate’ the city,” he explained, with reports indicating that the northern part of Gaza is now completely cut off. 

“And I’m sure that means both on the surface and underground, because isolating the surface doesn’t mean you’ve isolated the underground,” he added. 

But Israel’s current conflict with the terrorist Hamas group is actually the Jewish state’s fight against an “existential threat” that’s been “allowed through U.S. encouragement” to fester, and October 7 was a result of that. 

“Hamas has in their charter the complete destruction of Israel and the slaughter of the Jewish people, and it tried that on October 7 on as many as they could,” he added.

UNDERGROUND WARFARE

Despite the difficulty in fighting Hamas, Israel is not facing “mission impossible,” Spencer asserted. 

IDF finds Hamas tunnel (IDF)

Having “traveled the world, and been in tunnels all around the world,” as well as having “studied the way militaries approach, or don’t approach, underground warfare,” he concluded that the IDF are “leaders of the world in developing technologies, tactics and trained personnel for this specific mission.” 

“They have one of the biggest underground units, the Yahalom, which is a special forces engineering unit.”

They also have modern day “tunnel rats,” dog units, and a “complete major organization that does experimentation and research to develop things,” he noted.

Spencer highlighted the challenge of underground warfare, where “nothing that any military developed for the surface of the Earth for fighting works.” 

You can’t see down underground without special night vision because there’s no ambient light, which is what most of most night vision goggles use. You can’t navigate down there because there’s no satellite transmission. You can’t communicate because there’s no satellite or line of sight radio frequency down there that will work. Many places down there you can’t breathe. Many of your munitions can’t fire down there because the concussion will blow your eardrums and give you basically a concussion, without special equipment. 

In addition, he explained, such depths can’t be reached with aerial technologies. 

“Hamas dug deeper and deeper because of the fact that bunker buster bombs can go about 100 feet underground,” he said, “and the IDF has already found some Hamas tunnels 200 feet underground, below where any bunker buster can get to [or] any munition.”

The Israeli military believes, he noted, that there are likely tunnels even “300 feet” beneath the surface. 

While the IDF “has some of the greatest equipment and little robots they can send down, drones that bounce off walls, remote control cars, and dogs,” with 300 miles of such tunnels, “you’ll quickly run out of that capability.”

“And sending somebody into a tunnel is the last resort, so you always seek a way not to go into a tunnel,” he explained. 

However, he noted, the IDF has some personnel that can, including “everything from special forces throughout Sayeret Matkal, to the special soldiers that have been trained for it.” 

Another issue is the presence of captives in such tunnels.

“We’re 99 percent sure all hostages, or a majority of them, are underground. So even some of the historical methods in which militaries used to deal with tunnels — whether it’s to explode them or neutralize them by putting tear gas in them or flooding them or something similar, you won’t initially be able to do because you have to map and navigate the tunnel to see if there are hostages down there,” he said.

Hamas tunnel (Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty)

GAZA, PALESTINE – 07/19/2023: A fighter from Izz al-Din al-Qassam stands in front of a tunnel during an exhibition of weapons, missiles and heavy equipment for the military wing of Hamas in the Maghazi camp in the central Gaza Strip, during the commemoration of the 2014 war that lasted 51 days between Gaza and Israel. (Yousef Masoud/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Calling such a scenario a “really wicked problem” and a “nightmare to fight in,” Spencer explained why previously common methods are not feasible under current conditions:

Even the basic military, what we teach every soldier in every military in the world, is to fire and move. In a tunnel there’s no fire and move. There’s just fire down the tunnel and maybe fire back at you. You can’t flank them. You can’t move around them. You can’t surprise them. So it’s really a nightmare of a place to have to go fight or have to even enter. You can’t even breathe down there without special breathing equipment, depending on the depth that it goes and the ventilation that it has.

However, he insisted, the presence of hostages underground is not an impossible problem to solve, rather it merely means that forces must move slower and the mission will take more time. 

“Israel developed the world’s first hostage rescue teams that the rest of us have now copied. So they have hostage rescue teams and many special forces units that all have underground training,” he said. “They can put a drone into a tunnel beforehand to see if there’s a hostage down there before they do something to it.” 

He expressed his belief that for the IDF to accomplish its objectives, it would need several months, “based on other examples.” 

“Although the hostages make this situation very unique — there’s no historical precedent for that at this scale — I would say it will take months.” 

“I don’t think years, just months,” he said, “but definitely not days, and unlikely weeks.” 

However, he maintained, the real question is how much time they have, and not how much time it will take. 

“No military gets unlimited time, and Israel doesn’t have unlimited time,” he said. “So that means you’re going to have to make a lot of decisions about risk, and take risks and make hard military decisions.”

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

With many concerned for civilian casualties, Spencer insisted that “all the laws of war that were created — really, strengthened — after World War Two, have gotten a lot stronger.” 

“No more carpet bombing of cities like the U.S. and every other country involved in WWII were trying… whether it’s the London Blitz or Dresden or what the U.S. did to Tokyo,” he stated. “The idea that you can bomb your enemy to your goals has really happened very few times in the history of wars and worked.”

In addition, he stated, such a strategy “definitely wouldn’t accomplish the Israeli mission of destroying military infrastructure and capability.” 

“You have to use joint power: air, land, sea, and cyber,” he explained, “but you have to get in there and clear, destroy tunnels, destroy Hamas members, and destroy Hamas rockets.”

“So from a military analyst perspective I think they’re doing pretty good,” he added.

Regarding civilian casualty numbers, Spencer noted that they are “not unlike other battles” in recent history. 

“In the Battle of Mosul, there were 10,000 civilian casualties in a city of 1.4 million civilians where ISIS kept the civilians there for a long time before they could start to evacuate,” he said. “But by sheer numbers, they evacuated 80 percent of the urban areas. And while that’s still hundreds of thousands of people, militaries are never able to empty all of the cities, it just never happened.” 

“Even in WWII in the Battle of Aachen, where we cleared the city four times, there were still hundreds of civilians in the city and lots of civilian casualties,” he added.

He also pointed to when U.S. forces “surrounded Fallujah, and spent six months — that Israel doesn’t have — to empty 90 percent of the civilians there,” yet there were still many casualties. 

“So there are a lot of similarities,” he noted.

According to Spencer, when an enemy chooses to defend from urban terrain and use human shields, the results we see are “not abnormal.”

“Really, the civilian casualties are 90 percent of the casualties of modern war, not military,” he explained, “because modern war fights are happening in cities, not fights for cities, which is really ancient, fighting for cities.”

Today, in contrast, militaries fight in cities for a variety of reasons, he noted. For example, Hamas militants “can gain a large amount of power [by fighting] in urban environments.” 

“They take away the attacker’s military superiority, just to bring the fighting close and have a slugfest,” he said. “So that means more and more warfare.” 

“But out of the last 20 years, 90 percent of the casualties of war have been civilians,” he added. 

Spencer also explained that “everybody” misunderstands the notion of proportionality.

“We should not be comparing the amount of Palestinian civilian deaths to the amount of Israeli civilians killed on October 7 — 1,400 versus supposedly 10,000 (I’m highly doubtful that’s an accurate number, but it doesn’t matter),” he said. “That’s not the way war works. That’s not even close to the definition of proportionality — it has nothing to do with it.”

“Every civilian death is, of course, a loss, but people that want the end of the conflict because of the fact that it’s not ‘proportional’ to what happened on October 7, have no understanding of war, the laws of war or how the world works,” he added. 

Reflecting on his having taught strategy at West Point for years, Spencer determined that Hamas’ strategy is to “create their own civilians’ deaths and get the world to react,” in order to prevent the IDF from eliminating their military capabilities, — “and it is working.” 

“Despite the fact that I can tell every news agency in the world that what we’re seeing in Gaza is not unlike what we’ve seen in battles against ISIS in Mosul, Raqqa, Syria, and Marawi — nobody cares,” he said. “They’re still saying, ‘no, no, stop.’” 

“That’s the Hamas strategy, to get so many civilians killed that the IDF will have to stop, and Hamas gets to live to fight another day,” he added. 

Another Hamas strategy he indicated is that of buying time. 

“Most defenders in history lose, but one of the goals can be just to buy time,” he said. “So Hamas is going to use guerrilla warfare, use complex urban terrain and snipers, ambushes, IEDs, and pop out of tunnels, just to slow the IDF down, so that they can’t achieve their goal quickly.”

“The IDF needs time — and Hamas’ strategy is to take that time away from them, by putting all these pressures, getting every Palestinian, every Muslim of the world, to force international leadership to try to encourage the IDF to stop,” he added. 

In light of the above, Israel should “absolutely” be given the time and space to achieve its goals. 

To even destroy the tunnels, you’ve gotta clear the tunnel. You’ve gotta make sure there’s no military equipment, hostages, or fighters, in them. Then they have to destroy the tunnels, and that would be historic because even some of the ways militaries have destroyed tunnels aren’t an option to fully destroy 300 miles of tunnels. One of the only options is to flood them with seawater — which would necessitate time.

And while the IDF needs to be given the time, he acknowledged, it is crucial to “not allow Hamas’ strategy of buying time to succeed.” 

DEMONSTRATIONS

On protesters who have come out in large numbers against Israel’s response, Spencer suggested “they have no clue of what war looks like,” despite possibly being well-intentioned. 

“War happens in cities, and though it may appear like the IDF is indiscriminately bombing the cities of Gaza, that’s not the case and I have seen nothing that shows that,” he said. “In fact, this looks very similar to most U.S.-backed operations.”

“It’s what happens when an enemy embeds itself in a civilian population and the civilians are in an urban area,” he added. “Every strike is a targeted military target, but this is what war looks like.”

Addressing the “double standards” of those who protest Israel’s fight against Hamas while ignoring significantly controversial events such as the recent move by Pakistan to expel 1.7 million Afghan refugees, Spencer explained that the IDF, for various reasons, is “held to a standard above and beyond any other standard that we hold any other military in the world.” 

“It’s scrutinized and held to a standard that isn’t actually within the laws of war,” he said. “It fights in that limelight, at a standard that nobody else is held to.”

However, he noted, Hamas would “slaughter” those protesters “for not being radical Islamic followers.” 

“They would slaughter them — do horrific things — just like they slaughtered the people on October 7.,” he added.

Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.

UK Strips Visa From Migrant Caught Celebrating Hamas Terrorists

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - OCTOBER 09: Thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators protest outside the Israeli Embassy on October 09, 2023 in London, United Kingdom. The group is standing in solidarity with the resistance against Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. (Photo by Leila Dougan/Gallo Images via Getty Images)
Leila Dougan/Gallo Images via Getty Images

In the first action of its kind since the murderous October 7th rampage by Hamas terrorists in Israel, the Home Office has revoked the visa of a man who expressed support for the Islamic terrorists.

According to a report from The Sun, Britain’s most circulated newspaper, a foreign national has had his right to remain in the UK revoked over celebrating Hamas, which is a banned terror organisation in the country.

The man, who remains unnamed for legal reasons, was also caught supporting Palestine Islamic Jihad, which is classified as a banned proscribed terrorist group as well.

The Hamas-supporting migrant is said to have left the UK after a case was opened against him and Home Secretary Suella Braverman subsequently scrapped his visa, thereby prohibiting him from returning.

He is reportedly the first foreigner to have had his visa revoked after the British government warned it would remove migrants who supported banned terror groups in the wake of the October 7th Hamas attacks that killed over 1,400 people in Israel.

Commenting on the decision to revoke the Hamas-sympathiser’s visa, Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick said: “There can be zero tolerance for visitors to the UK who abuse the privilege of a visa and endorse evil terrorist acts.

“To any individuals considering following suit in the coming days and weeks: be in no doubt that we will continue to revoke visas wherever required. We will not tolerate extremism on our streets.”

The disclosure came ahead of a large-scale pro-Palestine demonstration on Armistice Day on Saturday, which many in the UK have branded as deeply disrespectful for coinciding with ceremonies to honour the fallen war dead who served Britain in combat.

According to The Sun, there have been over 100 arrests at pro-Palestine protests over the past month, including for supporting proscribed terror groups such as Hamas.

report earlier this week from The Telegraph claimed that at least three of the organising groups behind Saturday’s protest had direct links to Hamas, including the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), which was reportedly founded by former Hamas commander Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, who was granted British citizenship in the early 2000s.

Commenting on the visa revocation of the Hamas sympathiser, Strange Death of Europe author Douglas Murray praised the Home Secretary’s actions but said: “Now let’s have some more”.


 

The Problem Of Totalitarians Using Our Freedoms Against Us

By Vince Coyner

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/the_problem_of_totalitarians_using_our_freedoms_against_us.html LiLike most Americans, I was shocked by the vicious inhumanity that the coward terrorist group Hamas carried out in Israel last weekend. Unfortunately, organized evil is neither unique nor surprising. The Nazis were equally evil across Europe, as were the Japanese at Nanking, Stalin with Ukraine, and Mao with his own people. Sadly, evil happens, devils exist, although, thankfully, they are rarely celebrated.

But “rarely” doesn’t mean never, and the most shocking thing last week wasn’t the evil Hamas perpetrated but, rather, the extraordinary support it has received. Not only is Hamas’s evil finding exuberant support in places like Iran and Qatar where you might expect it, but there were tens of thousands of Muslims—and their liberal comrades—in places like New York, Detroit, and Washington out en masse vocally demonstrating their support for these monsters.

And it wasn’t just on the streets, in places like Harvard and Yale and NYU, you had students and professors and organizations blaming Israel for Hamas’s inhumanity. Even as the full extent of the carnage emerged, days after the world was able to see the barbarity of what the savages carried out, the rallies in support not only didn’t diminish, but they seemed to grow. I couldn’t help but wonder what that portends for our future.

As an American, I shook my head, stunned as I watched the scenes unfold. I wondered how so many people, with smiles on their non-hidden faces, could cheer such evil and how supposedly intelligent people could put their names in support of such barbarism. My reaction to a few posts on Twitter was, “Send them to Gaza.” Not that it was going to happen, but it’s one thing to cheer the beheading of babies and raping of women from five thousand miles away, it’s another thing to do so when there’s a realistic possibility of the IDF ending you.

 

Image: Pro-Hamas march in Chicago. YouTube screen grab. (Note, please, how it’s filmed so the reporter covers the sign saying “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” which is a call for the genocide of all Jews in Israel.

Of course, that’s not going to happen, but then I wondered to myself, what is wrong with these people, and why are they allowed to do this? Before the words even formed in my head, I answered my own question: Free speech… that extraordinary thing we have that Muslim countries don’t.

All of that led my brain to a quote that is often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill: “When Muslims are in the minority they are very concerned with minority rights, when they are in the majority there are no minority rights.” The British Bulldog may not have said that, but a look at a map of nations with Sharia law suggests that it’s correct.

“But we don’t live in one of those countries, the ones with the radical Muslims,” you might say, “these people are just fringe wackos.” Not so much. A 2015 poll of Muslims in America showed the following:

More than half (51%) of U.S. Muslims polled also believe either that they should have the choice of American or shariah courts, or that they should have their own tribunals to apply shariah. Only 39% of those polled said that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.” It also found “nearly a quarter of the Muslims polled believed that, ‘It is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam by, for example, portraying the prophet Mohammed.’” and “Nearly one-fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the United States is justified in order to make shariah the law of the land in this country.

Anyone watching the thousands of protesters in Atlanta, Chicago, and Tampa could easily see that it’s likely the percentages listed above have only grown, something troublesome in a free republic.

Now, support for Sharia doesn’t necessarily equate to support for Hamas’s actions last week, but a Venn Diagram would likely demonstrate a great deal of overlap.

But then you say, “Muslims are barely 1% of the population, so they can’t be a threat.” Maybe, but think about this: trans people are far fewer in number yet, today, we find ourselves amid national fights about bathrooms, sports, and the “medical” butchering of children. Interestingly, most of the people who support the LBGTQXYZ123 agenda also support “Palestine.” The irony, of course, is that Gazans would almost certainly throw the alphabet people off the tops of buildings were they to go there. Note, too, a fascinating essay summing up Peter Hammond’s analysis of the effect Muslims have on a country as their numbers grow.

So, the question becomes, how does a pluralistic, secular state that values individual liberty deal with vile ideas that are repugnant to the basic elements of the culture, as well as with those who espouse those repugnant ideas? Is the Constitution a suicide pact that allows those who object to its foundational principles to use the document’s freedoms to take power in order to eliminate our constitutional republic?

In his autobiography, Malcolm X talks about being invited to speak at Harvard and other prestigious universities when he was still spewing much of his anti-white racist venom. He marvels that, while he was invited to speak and said things that most of the audience disagreed with, they were always courteous and usually engaged in a healthy, respectful dialogue.

Contrast that with today’s conservative speakers such as Heather MacDonald, Ann Coulter, or Ben Shapiro, who have had events canceled or found themselves drowned out and threatened by leftists who equate speech they don’t like with violence. Not surprisingly, a recent poll showed that 66% of college students find this acceptable, while another showed that 65% of Democrats supported censoring “misinformation.”

Now, maybe this vile and public championing of hate will be a tipping point where the Democrat coalition fractures as the various victim classes it has nurtured twist themselves into pretzels trying to be good team players. I doubt it, though, because Democrats in toto hate America, hate freedom and, most of all, hate Donald Trump and MAGA. They are bound together by these hatreds and will always put power above everything else.

Nonetheless, what we saw over the last week should, I hope, cause more people to take notice of those who would use our freedoms to end them for everyone else. The adage of “One man, one vote, one time” refers to the idea of someone or some group using the democratic norms of a nation to win an election and then using that victory to eviscerate freedom. Think Hitler in Germany, Chavez in Venezuela, or Erdogan in Turkey.

If we’ve learned anything since the reign of Barack Obama, it’s that America is not immune to the danger of political parties weaponizing government for their own purposes. Given that the people cheering on the butchers of Hamas are a core part of the Democrat coalition, we should not be too quick to dismiss them as fringe. If we do so, we could all live to regret it.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.

Antisemitic campuses: Follow the money

I wasn’t shocked by the outpouring of virulent antisemitism coming from America’s colleges and universities, but that’s because I’ve been paying attention for forty years to what’s been going on there. A lot of people were shocked, though, and struggled to understand how that cancer could grow. There are three reasons: leftism, professional antisemitic agitators and, as a study from the Network Contagion Research Institute revealed, at least 200 American academic institutions have taken in around $13 billion from antisemitic countries…which they then “forgot” to report, thereby violating American law.

I attended UC Berkeley in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I loathed the place and my wish, always, was that the buildings would be razed and the ground salted. I wasn’t political, so I didn’t recognize that I hated it because I was on the receiving end of leftist tripe. I just knew it was a bad place…and an antisemitic one.

Because Berkeley sparked in me an utter disdain for academia, I paid attention to news reports about other academic institutions, mostly in California. That’s why I knew that San Francisco State University, once a respectable urban institution, was a hotbed of antisemitism and other madness. The same was true for UC Irvine and UC Riverside, both of which I heard, in pre-internet days, were also antisemitic.

Image by Andrea Widburg using AI.

In other words, the rot has been in academia for a long, long time. The question, of course, is why. There are three reasons:

One: Beginning in the 1930s, but with accelerating speed in the 1960s, leftism became the dominant mindset across all but a handful of American colleges and universities. It didn’t have to be that way.

Thanks to the Enlightenment, the virulent anti-Jewish hatred that had burned across post-pagan Western Europe was dying out. People didn’t like Jews, which was their prerogative, but they weren’t trying to kill them. Eastern Europe—Tsarist country—was the last bastion of genocidal antisemitism, which lead to a Jewish immigration to America, bring with it people truly grateful to be here and anxious to contribute to their adopted land.

What revitalized anti-Jewish hatred and turned it into the genocidal antisemitism that characterized Western Europe (and, now, America) is Marxism. Karl Marx hated the Jews. He baked it into socialism by tying Jews to capitalism…never mind that most Jews were impoverished wretches, and the vast majority of the world’s capital was in the hands of non-Jews. Socialism also hates God, because God is about two things socialists hate: Something greater than government and morals. Jews, whether specific individuals are religious or not, are the people who brought God to the world.

When socialism combined with lingering cultural antisemitism and, in Germany, neo-paganism, you ended up with Hitler’s and Stalin’s murderous antisemitism. Consequently, when leftism became the dominant ideology in American academia, it brought antisemitism with it.

Two: Antisemitic campus activism was turned into a well-funded job, something Roz Rothstein, Jerry Rothstein, and Esther Renzer discovered, which led to them founding StandWithUs, one of my favorite pro-Israel organizations. When their children entered UCLA, they were met with a constant barrage of antisemitism. The parents learned that antisemitism wasn’t coming from the ordinary students, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. For real students, the days of campus activism were over. These kids were there to learn and have fun. They wanted to get good grades, not join in protests.

However, the anti-Israel crowd was different. These were professionals who came to college, not to learn or have fun, but to agitate. Their expenses were paid and, if their agitation led them to such bad grades that they were forced to drop out, no matter—there were other professionals waiting to take their place. The agitators sole goal, despite being students, was to teach antisemitic and anti-Israel ideology. The Rothsteins and Renzer founded StandWithUs to train Jewish in rebutting the lies the professional agitators were constantly spreading.

Three: Finally, as always, follow the money. As Network Contagion Research Institute discovered and Bari Weiss reported, campuses have been raking in billions from antisemitic Middle Eastern countries…and carefully (and illegally) hidden the money from government scrutiny:

Today, after months of research, the NCRI released a report (comprising four separate studies) following the money. The report finds that at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes, many of which are authoritarian.

Moreover, while correlation is not causation, they found that the number of reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding (disclosed and undisclosed) from regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East.

Overall, authors of the report write, “a massive influx of foreign, concealed donations to American institutions of higher learning, much of it from authoritarian regimes with notable support from Middle Eastern sources, reflects or supports heightened levels of intolerance towards Jews, open inquiry and free expression.”

The specific data are staggering. I strongly urge you to visit the Free Press article for the details because arming yourself with facts is important when pushing back against toxic, genocidal misinformation.

America’s academic institutions are anti-American, antisemitic, rotten-to-the-core places of garbage ideas. It’s time to pull out every single penny of federal funding and, in conservative states, pull out the state money, too. As long as we feed those institutions, we are doomed.

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