Patriot Neighbors: Leftism is a Plan For National Suicide

Commentaries and insights selected from Robin's weekly newsletter Patriot Neighbors. (Cartoons may  be added by me. RK)  E-mail her at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com to get on her list, it's free.

By Robin Itzler  

"Biden's anger and vitriol and hatred for MAGA is far more worse than President Trump's individual battles with someone who crosses him. That is something that is really detrimental to this country that the President of the United States despises half of the United States. They [Biden and Democrats] try to paint them [Trump supporters] as racists. All the things that they do to their fellow Americans who simply want a safe home, a safe community for their children to have prosperity. They want the same thing, but they demean them all the time." —Charles Payne—Fox News Responding to Democrat Jessica Tarlov during post New Hampshire primary panel discussion—January 23, 2024

BIDENS MENTAL ACUITY ISSUES: Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia. Current estimates from the Centers for Disease Control are that about 5.8 million people in the United States have Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, including 5.6 million aged 65 and older and about 200,000 under age 65 with younger-onset Alzheimer’s.  People from all political parties know that Joe Biden has mental health acuity problems.

We’re not doctors, so we can’t state exactly what Biden’s medical issue is, but it’s there for all the world to see. Everyone sees it: world leaders of nations that seek to do us harm as well as Biden’s most vocal supporters. This is probably why Joey has spent about 40 percent of his presidency on vacation and rarely campaigns. Whenever he is out and about, Biden often proves that he is not mentally (or even physically) able to perform the duties of the presidency. (Guess that’s why Barack Obama is there.)

In recent months, Biden’s dementia (or whatever it is) has gotten much worse. From incoherent comments to roaming the stage after a speech because he has no idea where to go. The dementia is there for everyone to see.

Several weeks ago, Biden was speaking in North Carolina and less than two minutes into his prepared remarks, he went off the teleprompter and said that he had just talked to and had his photograph taken with North Carolina Democrat Representative Deborah Ross.

However, Rep. Ross was NOT at the event! Biden said:

"I also want to mention your Congresswoman Deborah Ross. Where's Deborah? Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That's probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn't be here, actually. That's not true. I got it mixed up. And she has — you know, she fights very hard for the people of this district, and she is up in Washington right now."

Later in the speech, Biden said “major company” instead of “country” when referring to the United States. Democrat leadership is aware of Biden’s mental acuity issues. Democrat voters know it. World leaders know it, especially our enemies.

Only three years younger, Trump can speak with/without a teleprompter for two-plus hours while Biden can’t mutter more than a few lines before people start to snicker at his ridiculous comments. Put Trump in any city in any state and he will acknowledge elected officials by name whereas Biden often refers to people by their position (that guy who does security). 

Trump is on the physical and rhetorical move over many consecutive days, while Biden often goes days without a public appearance. When he does have official business, it is usually one event held early in the day. If Biden needs to give a speech at night, such as the State of the Union, he will be pulled off all public events for many days. (Who knows what meds he is given.)

Since the MSM suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome, as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, you are going to start seeing left-leaning news sites publish articles questioning Trump’s mental acuity. 

 

NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY Comments: President Trump made history again by winning both the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Reports show that all the non-Trump presidential contenders spent $167 MILLION in Iowa and New Hampshire in their efforts to defeat Donald Trump. President Trump spent $34.1 MILLION. This money could be spent on defeating Democrats. Someone tell this to Nikki Haley.

Here’s what others said following Trump’s double-digit New Hampshire win:

House Speaker Mike Johnson—news release Johnson endorsed Trump in November 2023 “Congratulations to President Trump on his decisive victory tonight in America’s first-in-the-nation primary! Our House Republican leaders and a majority of Republican Senators support his reelection, and Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have strongly backed him at the polls. “It’s now past time for the Republican Party to unite around President Trump so we can focus on ending the disastrous Biden presidency and growing our majority in Congress.”

Ronna McDaniel, RNC Chair—Fox News:

"I'm looking at the map and the path going forward and I don't see it for Nikki Haley," McDaniel said. "I think she ran a great campaign. I think there is a message from the voters which is clear. We need to unite around our eventual nominee which is going to be Donald Trump."

Lee Zeldin, former representative & former NY gubernatorial candidate—X/TwitterZ:

“Congratulations to the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, on another big primary win, this time in New Hampshire. We have a country to save in 2024.”

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton—interview

“Congratulations to President Trump on another decisive win in New Hampshire and becoming the presumptive nominee of our party.”

Federalist CEO Sean Davis—interview

“If Nikki Haley’s primary goal is to defeat Joe Biden in November, she will drop out tonight and endorse Trump. If she continues to stay in a race she cannot win just to attack Trump, then we’ll know she’s fully owned by the left-wing Democrats who are funding her campaign.”

CA SENATE PRIMARY: Some say let it be Schiff vs Porter

California DEMOCRATS want baseball legend and political novice Steve Garvey to come in second place behind Adam Schiff in the March California primary. Garvey, the California establishment darling, leads the other three Republican candidates:

James Bradley - Eric Early - Denice Gary-Pandol

Writing in The Mercury News, Jim Newton asks, “Republican Steve Garvey Won’t Win the Senate Race So Why Even Run?” So maybe Garvey surges over the next few weeks. Maybe the state’s Republicans rally around him — though it’s hard to see why — and push him past Porter or even past Schiff. Let’s say he lands in the No. 1 or No. 2 spot for the runoff. What then?

Does anyone really think that Lee or Porter supporters would transfer their loyalties to a Republican, retired ballplayer — much less one who confronted a marital breakdown and paternity scandal …

Is the sole goal is to get Garvey into the general election and nothing more? If that’s the sole goal, vote for him in the primary. Then watch him lose to serial liar Adam Schiff in the November general election.

HOWEVER, if the goal is to help down ballot REPUBLICANS win their races and help REPUBLICANS keep control of the House, you will want the top two vote getters in the California primary to be Adam Schiff and Katie Porter. Think of all the money Democrats will spend in a Schiff vs Porter race that starts on March 6 and runs through November 5. Plus, all the mudslinging!

That’s money Democrats might have spent on down ballot races. Excerpts from Politico’s “California’s Marquee Senate Race Could be Bad News for Down Ballot Dems,” Ally Mutnick shares:

Money like that could help flip multiple House seats and power Democrats’ attempt to regain control of Congress. California alone has seven GOP House incumbents that Democrats have targeted The campaign accounts of Schiff and his closest Democratic opponent, fellow Rep. Katie Porter, could transform those contests.

Instead, Schiff and Porter are engaged in an expensive, bruising primary. The tens of millions they’ve raised have largely been spent against each other, not Republicans.

The agony of having two of the best fundraisers in the House battle each other has left some in the party hoping that a Republican nabs the second spot in the top-two primary on March 5. Polling has shown Schiff in a commanding lead with Porter and Republican Steve Garvey battling for second. Another prominent House Democrat, Rep. Barbara Lee, trails behind in fourth place. A second-place Garvey win would effectively end the fight for the seat in the deep-blue state instead of letting it drag out until November.

Link  to the article. California's Marquee Senate Race Could be Bad News for Down Ballot Dems

NIKKI HALEY: Support from Democrats On the REPUBLICAN side, why are these folks donating and/or supporting Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign? Tells you why Haley is a RINO!

• In December, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who is one of the Democrat party’s biggest donors and also visited Epstein Island, gave $250,000 to a Nikki Haley Super PAC. Hoffman is also funding E. Jean Carroll’s ridiculous lawsuit against Donald Trump!
• The Koch Brothers, who love open borders and hate Donald Trump, are financially supporting Haley’s campaign. 
• Former RINO House Speaker Paul Ryan is lobbying Congressional Republicans to support Haley.
• Former Conservative and now liberal Democrat commentator Bill Kristol has endorsed Haley. UPDATE: Following Haley’s dismal loss in New Hampshire, Hoffman said he would no longer donate to her PACs.

On the INDEPENDENT side, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced he will be on the New Hampshire ballot in November.

Other things to consider:

The news and cable networks are desperate to keep Haley in the “competition” although it is obvious that Trump will be the nominee. Why? If everyone knows by March 5 (aka Super Tuesday) that it’s a done deal of Biden vs Trump, ratings will sink. Look at the ratings from the last two presidential Super Tuesdays and you can understand why the left and right media doesn’t want the race to be decided by March 5: 2020 19 million viewers 2016 24 million viewers

And one of the reasons touted as to why Haley wants to remain in the race is because she thinks that if something happens to Trump, she will be the last candidate standing. Someone should tell Haley that all the other presidential candidates SUSPENDED their campaigns. That means they can revive them.

 BRANDING: It takes years to achieve, days to destroy

Bud Light’s hiring of MR. Dylan Mulvaney to wear pearls, put on a dress and imitate Audrey Hepburn to sell beer should become a textbook example of C-suite executives having no idea about their customer base and its product brand.

Disney also took an iconic brand and destroyed it by ignoring its decades long commitment to family values. For some insane reason, Disney C-suiters think that the company should promote alphabet+++ insanity. Unfortunately for the House of Mouse, there aren’t enough psychotic parents that want to surgically alter their children’s gender and attend theme parks where burly bearded men where dresses.

Another example could be Sports Illustrated. For 70 years the pivotal magazine has been about SPORTS … and annually published its iconic swimwear edition. Then in May 2023, the magazine partnered with trans model Kim Petras, putting Petras on the cover of their swimwear edition. Petras was one of four models in that edition with each having their own cover.

Sports Illustrated also featured overweight women in bikinis.

Due to financial issues related to licensing agreements, on January 19, The Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated, announced that most of the staff will be gone within three months. Many say that this is another example of “go woke, go broke.” 

If you want to share your thoughts with interim CEO Manoj Bhargava: Email: support@si.com - Phone: 877-747-1045 - Write: 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ARE WE NOW A SOCIALIST NATION?

Some recent events that make us wonder if the republic can be saved.

• USA—Oscar-nominated singer Andra Day is going to sing the so-called black national anthem at Super Bowl 2024. How about asking NFL Commissioner Roger Goodall if they will allow someone to sing a national anthem for your race or religion? Email: customerservice@nflshop.com Phone: 800-635-5300 Write: 345 Park Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10154
• USA—When children don’t start their own independent lives, but instead depend on mom and dad, they eventually expect government to replace their parents. According to a recent study by Intuit Credit Karma: 
• 31% of Gen Zers are living with their parents because they can’t afford to rent or buy their own place.
• 27% of Gen Zers reported that they could no longer afford rent.
• 25% said they’ll have to move back in with family to make ends meet. 
• 30% of millennials say rent is unaffordable. 
• 25% of millennials are thinking about moving back in with their parents. 
• Overall, 11% of American adults still live at home with their parents.
• USA—According to Robert Schmad of the Daily Caller News Foundation, three major charities send their money to Communist China or agencies in cahoots with the communist nation’s government (link to article below):

Three major American charities collectively poured more than $10 million into Chinese government entities, universities and groups controlled by members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 2017 and 2022, tax documents show. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation together donated about $10.2 million directly to the Chinese government and to organizations headed by top-ranking CCP members, according to tax disclosures. Chinese beneficiaries of the American philanthropies include state-run universities that collaborate with the People’s Liberation Army, as well as government ministries.

• Major American Charities Funneling Millions to Communist China by Robert

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA: The grassroots Parents Defending Education (PDE), which promotes the “restoration” of non-political schooling, has identified dozens of DSA members who have landed or sought top school board and teachers’ union positions in at least 15 states — from California to Kentucky and from New York to Texas.

According to Parents Defending Education:

• In Los Angeles, there are at least two DSA members on the board of the Unified School District including, Jackie Goldberg, the board’s president. (Oy vey!) There are at least two more DSA members seeking seats on the board in their 2025 election. 
• DSA member Coin Palmer serves as the board president of the Riverhead Central School District in Republican-leaning Suffolk County, New York. 
• DSA member Missy Zombor serves on the Milwaukee Public Schools board. On October 22, 2023, she posted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That is another way of saying annihilate Israel and all Jews. 
• DSA member and Colorado teacher Bryan Lindstrom submitted a resolution to the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest union of educators, that was tweaked from his submission: Stated that “capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources” and was “in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism … climate change … patriarchy … education inequality and income inequality.”

From the New York Post: In August, during the DSA’s 2023 convention, its governing body greenlit a resolution calling for more DSA candidates to run for school boards.

“The teacher movement is the tip of the spear of a revitalized labor movement and school board races are a clear way to build relationships with teacher unions by showing ourselves to be the strongest fighters for teachers and quality public education for all,” said the resolution, which emphasized backing “trans and queer rights, and to defending democracy” as well as countering “right-wing and neoliberal attacks on public schools.”

IS THE TIDE TURNING TO FREEDOM? With our prayers and involvement, we must have hope of saving our republic. Let’s look at some recent wins that show the tide might be turning in the direction of Conservative Judeo-Christian values. However, we need Republican LEADERSHIP, which seems to be in short supply.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA OUT OF MONEY—Guess planning all those pro-Hamas rallies, promoting the insane trans alphabet+++ and trying to kill the U.S. economy with green everything costs more money than the Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) thought it would. From the New York Post:

“We will cut $500,000 from staff-related expenses. We will first ask for volunteers from both director-level and bargaining unit staff to have their position cut and receive severance,” according to a proposal advanced by members of DSA’s National Political Committee affiliated with its Marxist Bread and Roses caucus.

“If necessary, we will then explore initiating lay-offs according to the DSA union’s contract,” the DSA officers said. The situation appears to be a case of an organization that blindly seeks utopia and professes support of the working class clashing with reality — forcing it to have to balance a budget like the rest of America and even contemplate layoffs hated by labor unions.

“DSA is in a financial crisis and staff-related costs account for 58% of our total expenditures and 72% of our projected income,” wrote DSA members Alex Pellitteri, Kristin Schall and Laura Wadlin in the cost-cutting proposal.

CHICAGO—Texas has bussed 35,000+ illegal alien invaders to the sanctuary city. Black Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to take schools and community centers from Democrat Black neighborhoods to house the illegals. Two black Democrats, Cata Truss and Gerald Harris, are suing the mayor and the city to stop the insanity. While legal black Chicago citizens live in poverty and have minimal facilities such as parks and community centers because they are always told the city has no money, Chicago has spent more than $250 MILLION on the invaders. If you want to share your thoughts with Mayor Johnson:

Email Link - Phone: 312-744-5000 - Address: 121 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, Illinois 60602

INTERNATIONAL:

ARGENTINA—The recent  special Address at WEF by Argentina President Javier Milei gave during the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, explains why he is MAGA—Make Argentina Great Again. Almost that entire address could have been given by President Trump.

Selected Thoughts For the Day:

• The IRS returned my tax return to me because I apparently answered one of their questions incorrectly. In response to: “Do you have anyone dependent on you?” I wrote 10 million illegal aliens, 1.1 million crackheads, 3.4 million unemployable scroungers, 80,000 criminals in 85+ prisons, plus most of the U.S. Congress. The IRS wrote that my answer was unacceptable. So, I responded by asking, “Who did I leave out?”
• We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.
• It was mealtime during a flight and the attendant asked me, “Would you like dinner?” I answered, “What are my choices?” She said, “Yes or no.” 
• Sneaking into a country doesn’t make you an “immigrant,” anymore than breaking into a house makes you “part of the family.”
• Liberals want to remove the Thinker statue since it offends their way of life. 
• What’s the difference between a RINO and a Democrat? Trick question! There is no difference. 

Now, I chose these thoughts for those of us who are just a little bit long in the tooth, and told we need to change our diets, and to merely view age as just a number because age is all in our heads.

• If only vegetables smelled as good as bacon. 
• If I woke up and nothing hurt, I would think I was dead.
• The older I get, the more I understand why roosters scream to start their day.
  
• At age 4, success is not peeing in your pants, and at age 85, success is not peeing in your pants. 
  

Everything You Need to Know about the Difference Between Free Enterprise and Socialism

January 31, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

I’ve written critical columns about the failure of Venezuelan socialism and I’ve written laudatory columns about the success of Chile’s free markets reforms.

Today, let’s compare and contrast what has happened to these two countries.

Here are two maps of South America showing per-capita economic output. Amazingly, Venezuela was more than twice as rich as Chile in 1980 but now Chile is more than three times as rich as Venezuela.

At this point, I normally would pontificate about the meaning of these two maps.

But there’s no need for me to write anything because the person who shared them on Twitter (X) nailed the obvious takeaway.

Game, set, and match. Economic liberty trounces statism.

The same message that you see in this chart.

P.S. If you want to learn about Milton Friedman and Chile, click here.

Migrants – Need Cash to Cross the Border? Thanks, UN

The American taxpayer on the hook once more. 

by Kelli Ballard | Jan 31, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Illegal Immigration, Opinion

The United Nations is making it easier for migrants to reach America and using US funds to do it. So says a report from Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies, which detailed just how much the world body is handing out to those crossing the southern border illegally.

Paying Migrants to Travel to America

The UN just released the 2024 update to the Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP). It calls for handing out $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American countries. Although the plan seems to be aimed at Venezuelans as benefactors, the document states that the largesse goes to “all nationalities” and “multiple other nationalities.” Some of these benefits include debit cards and even cash-stuffed envelopes, according to several outlets. As Bensman reported:

“In a nutshell, the UN and its advocacy partners are planning to spread $372 million in ‘Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA)’ and ‘Multipurpose Cash Assistance (MCA)’ to some 624,000 immigrants in-transit to the United States during 2024. That money is most often handed out, other UN documents show, as pre-paid, rechargeable debit cards, but also hard ‘cash in envelopes,’ bank transfers, and mobile transfers the U.S. border-bound travelers can use for whatever they want.”

But that’s not all. Bensman continued:

“The $372 million in planned cash giveaways to the 624,000 immigrants moving north and illegally crossing national borders ‘represents a significantly greater share of the financial requirements’ for 2024, the RMRP says, but it is still only one part of much broader UN hemisphere-wide vision that aims to spend $1.59 billion assisting about three million people in 17 countries who emigrated from their home nations.”

UN 2024 update to the Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP)

As told by the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States is the biggest contributor to the United Nations, sponsoring about 22% of its budget; in 2021, the figure was $12.5 billion. “About one-quarter of this total was assessed and the rest was voluntary,” the outlet noted. “This represents about a quarter of the roughly $50 billion the United States spends annually on foreign aid. By comparison, that contribution is about what the government allocates to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

The updated RMRP response plan has a map on page 14 that shows migrants in-transit. The red line displays the path that they presumably take, interestingly leading to El Paso, TX. Below the map is this note: “In Brazil and Mexico, this only includes Venezuelan nationals, while in the other countries, it includes refugees and migrants of all nationalities in-transit.” It also has the disclaimer, “The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the UN.”

Teaching Immigrants to Recall Traumatic Memories

Debit cards and cash envelopes aren’t the only ways migrants are funded. Bensman said at least two UN-funded nonprofits in Mexico’s southern states pay psychologists to help immigrants recover “repressed memories” that can help them get approved for Mexican asylum with an “eventual trip over to the U.S. southern border.”

Bensman explained that many of the migrants seeking asylum who claimed economic hardship were turned down since that is not a criterion for refugee status. Enrique Vida, coordinator for the Fray Matias de Córdova Human Rights Center, told Bensman: “That may cover up one of the true reasons why they are coming. They need psychological help so they can remember the situation they experienced.” Apparently, this has been working; Vida affirmed using recovered memories has produced a 90% approval rate. “That’s the most important part of the process,” Vida said of the Mexican immigration interviews. “That’s when the Mexican authorities listen to the motives of why they left their country. And those motives have to be according to international conventions.”

Tensions are ratcheting up in the southern US states, especially in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott and Joe Biden’s administration are locked in a battle for authority over the border. The fact that the UN is allocating so much money to help unsanctioned travelers is another slap in the face to those fighting for tougher border security. Even worse, the United States contributes to this fund, essentially paying illegals to come to America.

 

Read More From Kelli Ballard

3 U.S. Soldiers Died Because Biden Won’t Stand Up to Iran

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog  

Iran’s terror militias launched a wave of rocket attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and Syria under Biden. There were dozens of these attacks last year alone.

In the spring of 2023, Scott Patrick Dubis, a 52-year-old military contractor who had worked on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar, was killed by an Iranian backed attack.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin responded by promising that, “as President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing. No group will strike our troops with impunity.”

But Iran and its Jihadi proxy militias could and did go on attacking our troops with impunity.

We launched a few light airstrikes for show and the attacks went on. American personnel kept being wounded in Iranian attacks and sometimes we responded and sometimes we didn’t.

After the latest wave of attacks and responses, the Shiite regime in Baghdad demanded that the United States leave Iraq. And Biden, obediently, began negotiating the withdrawal.

Now, three US Army soldiers were killed and over 30 were wounded in an Iranian-backed drone attack on a position on the Jordanian-Syrian border. This is the worst death toll in some time.

A few months after the Shiite Islamic regime in Tehran commemorated the takeover of the U.S. embassy with chants of “Death to America”, it succeeded in inflicting more death on Americans.

Biden has issued a statement vowing that, once again, “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.” Like Austin’s previous statement after the murder of Scott Dubis, that means that no one should expect a quick meaningful response.

The message to Iran and its Islamic terrorists is that they have nothing to worry about. And Iran’s message to us is that we can never pull out far enough until we have surrendered the entire region, the rest of the world and then finally our own country to the enemy.

In the spring of 2020, Army Spc. Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts, as well as Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon, a British female medic, were killed in an attack by the Shiite Iran-backed militias. Roberts died trying to save a female comrade.

And the attacks just keep right on coming.

When Biden came into office, Iran had a pretty good lock on Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Then Biden allowed it to seize control over Yemen. During the winter break, it used its Houthi strongholds in Yemen to hijack shipping in the Red Sea. While Biden was out of office and Austin was in the hospital, it seized a channel used by a third of the world’s container ships.

Much as in Iraq and Syria, Biden responded with limited airstrikes that fell far short of ending the threat while conducting a 30 day review before possibly bringing back sanctions on the Houthis. And the Houthis have since managed to hit an oil tanker while global shipping costs have doubled and shipping war risk insurance premiums have skyrocketed many times over.

The same pattern of failure that had played out in Iraq is now playing out in the Red Sea.

After retreating in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to push the frontiers of terror all the way to the Jordanian border. Jordan is a key intersection, a Saudi client state that shares a border with Israel, whose ‘Palestinian’ population would prefer to be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s arms include Hamas and its state sponsor, Qatar, is an ally of Iran.

Iran is serious about winning and we are not. It has a plan and we do not. Every tentative response that we make telegraphs the fact that we are afraid to attack it. The Biden administration emphasizes that its strikes are measured, defensive and come with warnings.

Our terrorist enemies however have no such fears or concerns. They hit us where they can.

The Biden administration and the foreign policy apparatus lives in fear of “expanding the war” while Iran seeks to expand the war as far as it can. When one side wants to expand the war while the other fears any escalation, the outcome is a cycle of retreats and defeats.

Every time Iran attacks, we retreat, and every time we retreat, it pushes harder. Negotiations, sanctions relief and diplomacy have failed miserably. The so-called “moderates” have been pushed out in Iran and the new regime burned them along with their American puppets like Biden’s Iran envoy Robert Malley, who was outed by Iran regime outlets, as it prepares for war.

October 7 was only one of the points of Iran’s Jihadist ‘blitzkrieg’ across the region as it prepares to become the dominant power in the Middle East. And while it was devastating to Israelis, it may be less significant than the takeover of the Red Sea or its existing nuclear program, under which it now has enough enriched uranium to build several nuclear warheads, its simultaneous launch of three satellites or its ballistic missile program that can deliver nukes.

All of this foreshadows a struggle on a grand scale that will test America and the world.

Much like WWII, this crisis could have been averted through geopolitical maneuvers, maximum pressure, limited intervention and other tools that were never properly used. Instead Obama attempted to cut a nuclear deal with Iran that he knew was worthless. Biden resumed efforts to restore the deal even though Tehran by then had achieved enough of its goals that it demanded only billions in cash while offering nothing in return but contempt, threats and terror attacks.

The killings of three American soldiers is only the latest consequence of these policies.

Iran got lucky in its Tower 22 attack in Jordan, but the attacks could have also been worse. While American soldiers deployed in Iraq and Syria are used to rocket alerts and quickly run to shelter, those in Tower 22 had not gotten into that same habit. A large stream of rockets or missiles could have inflicted much worse casualties than those 3 dead or 30 wounded.

And that leaves out the possibility that we have yet to consider.

On Oct 7, Israeli soldiers braced for rocket attacks by retreating into shelters only to face a massive assault by thousands of armed Jihadis overrunning their positions under the cover of rockets. Israel wasn’t ready for that kind of attack and the real question is are we ready?

Iran will keep testing and pushing us. And if we fail to take the initiative, the attack will come.

We were not ready for the seizure of our embassy in Tehran. We were not ready for the Marine Barracks bombings in Beirut. We were not ready for 9/11. We were not ready for the fall of Kabul. We were not ready for the takeover of shipping in the Red Sea near Yemen.

What aren’t we ready for next? We only have so much time to wait around and find out.

Wars are fought on by taking the offensive or holding defensive positions. When you are always defending, then you allow the enemy to take the initiative and then you have to find out what comes next.

If we don’t take the offensive, we will have to wait to find out how bad the next attack will be.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Big Media Lesson: You Can’t Keep Throwing Money at Woke Scolds

Even the richest sugar daddies are unable to keep such a flawed brand afloat.

by Joe Schaeffer | Jan 30, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Media, Opinion

 

(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

It’s both easy and fun to point out examples of progressive contempt for much of America held by the recently laid-off “journalists” of the Los Angeles Times. But there’s a vital quote found among the extensive media self-coverage of their latest big-box financial disaster that spells out just how much trouble an industry built around an exotic woke ideology rather than sound business practice now finds itself in.

“He is willing to continue injecting substantial funds into the LA Times for some years to come, but he is only willing to fund a deficit to a certain level, which the paper has far exceeded.” These are the words attributed to a “person familiar with” the “thinking” of biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the largest daily newspaper in California, according to MarketWatch.

Patrick Soon-Shiong (Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

Soon-Shiong has an estimated net worth of $5.4 billion. The man had a lot of slack to offer a major brand whose name he undoubtedly valued even as its employees were gleefully driving it into the mud. And it still wasn’t enough.

The quote above is reminiscent of a classic remark made by wealthy NFL owner Edward Bennett Williams when he fired famously intense head coach George Allen in the 1970s: “I gave George an unlimited budget – and he exceeded it.”

Big-Box ‘Bloodbath’

“As the prospects for news publishers waned in the past decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country’s most fabled brands,” The New York Times reported January 18. (It should be noted that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim “swooped” onto the scene to provide a financial lifeline to the struggling Gray Lady in 2009.) “Soon-Shiong … purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018,” the paper notes.

But the cash infusions proved to be no miracle cure for a systemically broken bottom line.

Ann Marie Lipinski (Photo by Aaron Davidson/Getty Images for Eisenhower Fellowships)

“Wealth doesn’t insulate an owner from the serious challenges plaguing many media companies, and it turns out being a billionaire isn’t a predictor for solving those problems,” Ann Marie Lipinski, “curator” of establishment entity the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, told The NYT. “We’ve seen a lot of naïve hope attached to these owners, often from employees.”

Reality is now biting with a vengeance.

“Nearly a dozen mainstream media companies are gutting staff and scrambling to rescue their struggling businesses,” Axios reported January 26. “Media cuts were so severe last year that most industry observers weren’t expecting such intense cutbacks in 2024. But an ongoing bloodbath is decimating news outlets nationwide.”

Time laid off 30 employees in January. But it is the tumbling Los Angeles Times that is garnering the lion’s share of attention.

“In the middle of last year, The Times was on track to lose $30 million to $40 million in 2023, according to three people with knowledge of the projections,” The New York Times related. “Last year, the company cut about 74 jobs.”

On January 23, the LA Times let another 115 employees go. That amounts to over 20% of the news staff.

At some point, one might assume a bit of self-reflection would be in order. After all, if a restaurant waters down its food quality and sees nothing but empty tables as a result, it might wonder if it’s time to take stock of the dishes being served.

Does anyone expect such a capability from these self-important journalists hanging by a thread today?

Fear and Loathing in Modern Media

The big-box media at large, and the Los Angeles Times in particular, has spent years openly sacrificing the very believability of their output on the altar of an ever-rigid – and increasingly mean-spirited – politically correct progressive mania.

Inflammatory opinion pieces such as columnist Michael Hiltzik’s January 2022 screed, provocatively titled “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes – but may be necessary,” seemed designed to offend millions of Americans.

Articles presented as news items to readers were nothing more than diatribes in support of an obvious agenda. “Children apologize to their dying elders for spreading COVID-19 as LA County reels,” read the headline to a January 12, 2021, news article. What followed was a monument to hysteria that leaned heavily on public officials from the notoriously leftist Los Angeles government.

Then there was that time in March 2023 when the paper “reported” that white people driving automobiles are “polluting the air breathed by LA’s people of color.” Once again, this is flagrant cultural warfare dressed up as journalism, aiming to fuel anger and divisiveness among the city’s citizenry.

This is how one loses credibility. Yet trapped in an endless cycle of partisan emotionalism, the only contemplation to come out of the dire financial distress will be that of self-pity. “I’m still at a loss of what to say about these layoffs,” Times columnist Erika D. Smith wrote in an X post. “I’m still employed. But this is such a blow to journalism, not just in California but across the US – and at a critical juncture for what’s left of democracy too. Subscribe.”

One of the many negative responses Smith received sums it up well: “Local news is important to democracy only when journalists have integrity. Most do not.”

If multi-billionaire benefactors are not enough to buy back this lost trust, it’s not hard to guess what comes next. Expect the push for direct government funding of news organizations to explode in 2024.

 

Read More From Joe Schaeffer

UN Agency Workers Backed Hamas in Word and Deed

A broken trust that can't be rebuilt.

by Dave Patterson | Jan 30, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Military Affairs, Opinion

As more evidence is revealed, it is clear the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East supported Hamas terrorists in their attack on southern Israel kibbutzim on Oct. 7. The allegations that UNRWA has been aiding and abetting terror against Israel are compelling enough that at least 16 countries have withdrawn funding support to the tainted agency. Keep in mind the United Nations was established in 1945 to bring peace to a world that had suffered through a major global war.

What makes UNRWA’s behavior more egregious is that the UN’s International Court of Justice is counseling Israel to avoid genocide in its efforts to dismantle Hamas – as one of its own agencies provided aid, comfort, and encouragement to commit, well, genocide.

Countries Suspend Funding to UN

Liberty Nation had the privilege to obtain an exclusive interview with Jed Babbin, author and columnist for The Washington Times and The American Spectator. Additionally, Babbin served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Liberty Nation: You wrote a book not long ago about the United Nations titled Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think. We are learning more about the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) encouraging and supporting Hamas terrorists. Are you surprised?

Jed Babbin: Anyone who is surprised hasn’t been paying attention. For more than 20 years, [UNRWA] has been hiring members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All are terrorists desiring only to kill Israelis.

LN: Numerous countries – like Australia, Italy, Canada, Finland, and Germany, to name just a few – have suspended UNRWA funding. The United States has as well. Is there anything else to be done to convince the United Nations that such behavior by any of its agencies will not be tolerated and certainly not funded?

JB: The United States is the United Nations’ biggest contributor, sending something north of $12 billion per year, possibly as much as $22 billion. The State Department goes to great lengths to conceal how much we’re donating. We need to cut our contributions by at least 50% to demonstrate to the other members – and the UN staff – that we’re determined not to allow them to play their games with our money.

LN: As you pointed out in your book, the United Nations is seldom an advocate for Western values. When it was founded in 1945, the hope was it would be an organization capable of bringing some modicum of peace to the world. What grade would you give in achieving that goal?

JB: There was never a realistic hope that the United Nations or the League of Nations, its predecessor, could bring peace to the world. The saddest truth of all is that the natural state of man is war, not peace. Si vis pacem, para bellum [If you want peace, prepare for war].

Member of the Club

To complicate matters, in order to stand in the way of mischief so prevalent in the organization’s activities, initiatives, resolutions, and attempts to apply its worldview to its members is that the United States must be an active member. Whatever lofty aims the United Nations might have, it seems raking in money tops the agenda.

In a press statement, UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini pleaded that:

“Nine countries have, as of today, temporarily suspended their funding to UNRWA. These decisions threaten our ongoing humanitarian work across the region, including and especially in the Gaza Strip … UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine.”

As sincere as these words may sound, Lazzarini’s request rings hollow in the aftermath of Oct. 7 when his staff cheered on the carnage Hamas wrought. There is a concept that all leaders, managers, and directors must understand and practice without fail. It’s called “minding the store.” Lazzarini was demonstrably not minding the store when UNRWA hired a large number of actual terrorists to work in Gaza. The situation in which Lazzarini finds his organization is one of his own making.

Israel Warned About UNRWA Supporting Hamas

UNRWA’s support of Hamas is not a new allegation. “Israel has in the past accused individual UNRWA staff of ties to Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the US. Most of the agency’s roughly 30,000 staff are Palestinian. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said UNRWA should be removed from postwar Gaza,” Omar Abdel-Baqui reported for The Wall Street Journal.

Furthermore, American taxpayers have paid for the hundreds of millions sent to UNRWA by the Biden administration. “In total, his administration has provided more than $730 million in US taxpayer money to the organization since January 2021, which provides assistance in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Biden, 81, also announced another tranche of $100 million in aid to UNRWA last October,” Josh Christenson reported in the New York Post. The fact that the United States has withdrawn funding now is little consolation for the more than 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children massacred by Hamas.

Almost comical in its ironic and forehead-slapping naïveté is the notion pushed by the US State Department that the United Nations be somehow involved in the region once the Israel-Hamas war ends. What the world would witness is the UN hiring the same cast of characters that brought us to this point. You might question why this would be the case. It’s simple. It’s the same United Nations that existed on Oct. 6.

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.

 

Read More From Dave Patterson

Biden Puts the DEI in the Death Penalty

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

Over the summer, the Biden administration warned 9/11 family members that it was negotiating a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks, and four other Al Qaeda terrorists directly involved in the plot to murder thousands of people in America.

Biden had previously freed Mohammed al-Qahtani, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, and Zuhail al-Sharabi, another hijacker for an expanded version of the 9/11 attacks, along with an Al Qaeda ally who plotted to smuggle nukes into America and still another terrorist who plotted to blow up gas stations in Maryland, among others of the ‘worst of the worst’ still being held in Gitmo.

No wonder that Biden ducked out on the 9/11 commemoration to avoid facing family members.

While Biden’s people are trying to cut a plea deal for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, they have, for the first time, demanded the death penalty for another killer.

Payton Gendron’s massacre of ten people in a Buffalo supermarket was not the only such supermarket mass killing. A year earlier, Ahmed Al-Issa, a Syrian Muslim immigrant, had opened fire in a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and killed ten people. The case quickly vanished from the news (although the Washington Post did inquire whether the Arab Muslim mass killing of Americans could somehow count as “white male violence”.)

Instead of trying Ahmed in federal court in a death penalty case, the Biden administration was only interested in trying and executing Payton. Why? According to the Justice Department, “Gendron, a white male, committed a mass shooting attack targeting Black people.” (The racial capitalization here comes from the DOJ.) “Gendron’s motive for the mass shooting was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race.”

Gendron’s mass shooting was not even the worst recent racist supermarket shooting

In 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius shot up a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people in order to stop Latinos from taking over America. In early 2023, the Justice Department announced that it wouldn’t pursue the death penalty.. In January 2024, around the same time that Biden decided to seek the death penalty for Gendron, it ruled out the death penalty for Anderson Lee Aldrich who had shot up a gay bar and killed 5 people. It was never clear whether Aldrich was gay or hated gay people, but the DOJ did hit him with 55 hate crime charges. Still no death penalty.

Murdering 5 people in cold blood (or 1 person) whatever the reason ought to be a fast track to a lethal injection. But Attorney General Merrick Garland froze all new death penalty cases on taking office and has so far only signed off on one of them because of entirely racial reasons.

Supermarket shooters, whether they’re white, black or Muslim, should all face the death penalty. So should any number of mass shooters, including Nicolas Cruz, the Parkland high school mass murder who killed 17 people, almost all of them children and teenagers, who was spared the death penalty in 2022 by a soppy jury who chose to value the killer’s life over that of his victims.

The Al Qaeda terrorists we collected in Gitmo, should have been culled a long time ago.

Instead, Biden’s rules are that if you’re a Muslim who kills thousands of Americans, you get a plea deal, if you kill ten, you vanish from the news, and if you kill 17 Latinos, you’ll get some of the book thrown at you, if you’re a black man who kills other black men, you’ll get ignored, but if you’re a white man who kills black people, only then will you finally qualify for the death penalty.

That’s putting the DEI in the death penalty. It also violates the Constitutional protections against handing out different penalties based on the races of the victims of the perpetrators. Civil rights legislation, the basis for federal prosecutions, is already constitutionally dubious, but even it does not allow for picking and choosing which minorities have lives that matter more.

In Muslim countries, the value of a human life depends on the victim’s race, sex and religion.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, killing a Muslim man used to require paying a blood price of 100,000 riyals, 50,000 for a Muslim woman or a Christian man, 6,666 for a Hindu man and 3,333 for a Hindu woman. (This was among the clauses supposedly due for reform by MBS. It’s unclear if this occurred, but similar laws exist across the Muslim world in places like Pakistan.)

America is not supposed to work that way. Unfortunately under Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, an acronym that can just as easily be rearranged to spell DIE as the familiar DEI, it does.

Biden’s plea deal with 9/11 terrorists is a profound betrayal, not just of his constitutional duties and our national values, but of promises made during the Obama-Biden administration by both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be executed.

Like so much else, those were lies.

Instead the Biden administration warned that, “the Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements” that could “remove the possibility of the death penalty.” And it’s hard to imagine any such agreement that wouldn’t

Kill 2,996 people for Islam and you get life in prison, but kill ten people because you’re a racist and you get the needle.

9/11 family members have grown old and died waiting for justice. Meanwhile a corrupt coterie of terrorist sympathizers have kept the wait going to rot the system from within while finding every possible way to help America’s enemies.

A week after the anniversary of 9/11, a military judge struck the name of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a friend of the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, who helped form the Hamburg cell at the heart of the 9/11 attacks, on account of a supposed “mental illness”.

According to his lawyers, the “key facilitator of 9/11” was so traumatized by “torture” that he has trouble sleeping because “invisible forces” make his bed vibrate and “sting his genitals”.

And the souls of 2,996 murdered people take a backseat to al-Shibh’s stinging genitals.

The Biden administration and its DOJ operatives are not pacifists who would never take a human life. As the Buffalo supermarket shooting case shows, they’re willing to demand the death penalty when the killer has done something sufficiently evil in their eyes.

Killing 2,996 people for Islam doesn’t meet that standard. Neither do most mere murders. Massacring children won’t meet that bar or even massacring Latinos or gay people when the motive is at all in question. Only exactly the right kind of racism merits the death penalty.

That’s why the Biden administration is freeing Al Qaeda killers. They may be terrorists, but they’re not racists. On 9/11, they massacred Americans of all races, sexes and orientations in the ultimate expression of diversity. And just to add equity, 2,435 were white, and 286 were black, making 9/11 a form of anti-racist DEI rendered in bodies falling from the sky.

If only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had shouted a racial slur, he could be on death row now.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading. 

Under Pressure: GOP Never-Trumpers in the Hot Seat

Pulling together a fractured party may be Trump’s greatest challenge.

by Sarah Cowgill | Jan 29, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

Former President Donald Trump’s path back to the White House – despite difficulties – appears broader each day, Neither lawsuits, FBI inquiries, jailing of friends and allies, or the January 6 incident seem to be able to quell his momentum. He has even had a smattering of primary opponents step up and endorse number 45 to be 47. But where does this leave the merry band of Republican Never-Trumpers? As the iconic 70s rock band, Queen, might croon: under pressure.

At the top of the double boiler? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. John Thune (R-SD) are just two such folks who didn’t make sure that Trump was out for the count before publicly skewering the guy. And everyone knows the former president already has trust issues.

Never-Trumpers and Unintended Consequences

Seems like it was eons ago when McConnell delivered his scathing review of the January 6 episode. “The mob was fed lies,” McConnell told the chamber, “they were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” Of course, time and hindsight have proven the narrative inspired by the media was heavy on the spin. And perhaps McConnell is now realizing his premature bandwagon jump. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has an explanation for this:

“Just like four years ago and four years before that —people say pretty strong things. And then when he becomes a nominee, they just kiss the ring, as Donald Trump has said. Oh, I’m not going to be doing that.”

Still, roughly 130 House Republicans and 30 Senate Republicans have thus far added their names to the endorsement list. This roster includes some of the minority leader’s closest allies: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), who both counsel McConnell and members of his leadership team. It appears that some folks can battle it out and still leave the animosity on the field.

Thune and McConnell must not have seen this coming, and the insiders are scratching their heads. Trump’s Iowa Caucus win was historic. And through all the fanfare and media touting, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s double-digit loss in New Hampshire soon followed. And that was apparently the reality wakeup call Florida Governor Ron DeSantis needed. With his usual calmness, the Sunshine State governor announced he saw no path to victory and promptly endorsed his rival, the Donald. And that loss and win gave sideline Republicans the confidence to join Team Trump.

The other prominent message besides how big a margin Trump is pulling is unity. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), and former candidates on the GOP ticket, Vivek Ramaswamy and ND Gov. Doug Burgum, all mimicked the soundbite.

The only one standing in the way of presumptive nominee status is Haley. And she is one stubborn opponent. Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel attempted to sway Haley into conceding so that the GOP could present a united front, saying she could not see “the math and the path going forward” and called for everyone to “unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump.” Whether the entirety of the GOP likes it or not.

But that also leaves a nagging question: What happens if Trump wins the whole enchilada? McConnell is still the Senate Minority leader, which could be a damper on getting the work done. “Mitch is a pretty pragmatic guy,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), who has also endorsed Trump. “I think part of the question is: Can Trump work with Mitch? That might be a tougher question.”

McConnell and Thune may want to drop their membership in the Never-Trumpers and instead make a plan on how to govern in concert if the former president grabs the brass ring.

 

Read More From Sarah Cowgill

 

Israel’s War on Hamas is the Least Deadly War in the Region

ByDaniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II”.

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region”. In 2020, the UN had called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War”.

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in, “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts”.)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region had a much higher death toll than the Hamas war: including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that 2 + 2 is really 5. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, they narrowly focus on very specific timetables, they try to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways. The Hamas attack of Oct 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, the New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years”. Of course the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40 year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, the AP cites its own claim that battles against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that, “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible”.

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims that the Iraq War had killed, first 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company, claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.

Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On September 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.

After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the UN agency dedicated to serving the ‘Palestinians’ but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war: only one of the two sides was engaged in a total war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Everything You Need to Know about San Francisco, in a Single Story

 January 28, 2024 by Dan Mitchell @ International Freedom

What’s the worst-governed city in the United States  

 

• Chicago?
• New York City?
• San Francisco?
• Minneapolis?
• Seattle?
• Detroit? 
  

According to researchers, the answer is none-of-the-above. The right answer is either Riverside, CA or Oakland, CA.

But that doesn’t mean the other cities aren’t doing their best to become the worst.

Today, let’s take a look at San Francisco’s campaign to become America’s worst city. And we have a story that tells you everything you need to know.

In a report for the New York Times, Heather Knight describes how the city can’t even waste money properly.

Noe Valley still needs is a toilet. Fifteen months after city officials were ready to throw a party in the Noe Valley Town Square to celebrate funding for a tiny bathroom with a toilet and sink, nothing but mulch remains in its place. The toilet project broke down the minute taxpayers realized the city was planning an event to celebrate $1.7 million in state funds that local politicians had secured for the lone 150-square-foot structure.

That’s enough to purchase a single-family home in San Francisco — with multiple bathrooms. Even more confounding was the explanation that the tiny bathroom would take two to three years to install because of the city’s labyrinthine permitting and building process. City leaders quickly canceled their potty party, and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California took back the funds. …the episode has illustrated why San Francisco so often gets bogged down by inefficiency. …an army of more than 30,000 city employees with a $14 billion annual budget cannot build a simple bathroom in a reasonable way.

Actually, the reason things can’t get done in a “reasonable way” is in large part because there is “an army of more than 30,000 city employees.”

Those bureaucrats are part of various commissions and panels that get to review and micromanage projects. Which means they make things take longer and they increase costs. Typical government. Typical San Francisco.

P.S. Given the city’s problems with public defecation, you would think San Francisco would try extra hard to build toilets.

P.P.S. Then again, the city has long-standing problems with plumbing.

World Court Tells Israel to ‘Avoid Genocide’

Israel was ordered to report on how it’s avoiding genocide in Gaza – but will it happen?

by Dave Patterson | Jan 28, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

(Photo by Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images)

On Friday, January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), often called the World Court, rendered a verdict on a complaint against Israel brought by South Africa. The court’s ruling: Israel should avoid acts of genocide. Solidly in the “so what” category, the decision by the UN judicial body did not explain what Israel should do when the enemy it’s fighting, Hamas, hides behind women and children and launches terrorist attacks against civilians and the IDF alike.

Israel Has a Challenge

What the ICJ failed to do is explain just how the IDF is supposed to destroy an entrenched and vicious enemy that hunkers down in the midst of civilians. The criminals in the Israel-Hamas war could not be more clearly identified: Hamas. There was no finding that Israel had committed genocide, as the South African charge claimed. The dilemma Israel faces was well put in a prominent Washington, DC, newspaper with a headline reading, “UN court orders Israel to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, but no ceasefire.” So, keep shooting at the bad guys that hide behind Palestinian civilians; just don’t hit any of those human shields.

Reacting to the ICJ ruling, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a television audience, stating:

“Like any country Israel has an inherent right to defend itself. The vile attempt to deny Israel this fundamental right is blatant discrimination against the Jewish state. And it was justly rejected. The charge of genocide leveled against Israel is not only false, it’s outrageous, and decent people everywhere should reject it. On the eve of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again pledge as Israel’s prime minister, never again. Israel will continue to defend itself against Hamas, a genocidal terror organization.”

The charge of genocide leveled at Israel in December by South Africa was met with derision by those who understand that Israel was the nation attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and that the consequence is Israel defending itself. That defense has been a comprehensive and methodical military operation by the IDF to destroy Hamas’ capability to ever pose a threat to the people of Israel. Had a ceasefire been ordered and Israel complied, Hamas would have had an opportunity to reconstitute a fighting force. In a short time, Israel would be back where it was on October 6: waiting to be attacked by a determined and murderous enemy bent on Israel’s destruction.

The fact that South Africa would charge Israel with genocide is laughable, considering the problems the African nation has in its own backyard. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), in a blinding flash of the obvious, “criticized South Africa for bringing a genocide case against Israel in the United Nations’ International Court of Justice, saying the African nation should focus on quelling unrest on its own continent,” Danielle Wallace reported on Fox News.

Israelis Have the Right to Defend Themselves

In a daily press briefing, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby commented on the ICJ ruling by reiterating that the US stands for the right of Israel to defend itself. Additionally, Kirby emphasized the need for continued humanitarian aid to the displaced Palestinians in Gaza. The persistent and arduous combat in an urban environment like the densely populated areas of northern, central, and southern Gaza makes killing Hamas terrorists while protecting innocent Palestinians a near-impossible challenge for the IDF. When the Israeli soldiers clear an area and move on, Hamas moves back into the real estate and attempts to re-establish dominance. “An Israeli Army Radio journalist similarly reported on January 16 that Hamas is trying to restore its control over the civilian population in the northern Gaza Strip, in part, by rehabilitating local police there,” the Institute for the Study of War explained.

The 17-judge ICJ ordered Israel to submit a report to the UN judicial body laying out the steps Israeli forces are taking to avoid operations on the Gaza battlefield that would have the appearance of genocide. The court echoed the death toll in Gaza bandied about by so many media outlets – 25,000 – but never bothered to explain that it’s a Hamas-generated number. If even close to correct, it includes Hamas terrorists, Palestinian militia, and civilians. The Jewish state will undoubtedly receive plenty of advice on how to accomplish the avoidance of indiscriminate killing, but Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, made one of the more eloquent comments in a post on X regarding the ruling from the Hague-based ICJ. Ben-Gvir’s assessment was “Hague Schmague.”

The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliation.

 

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