Saturday, July 13, 2019

Hezbollah’s largest attack tunnel and its financial supporters - Eric H. Mandel


by Eric H. Mandel

Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan
 

The significance of the Hezbollah tunnel is clear. It is just one element of the multidimensional, long-term Iranian strategy to threaten and eventually destroy Israel, achieving in the process Iran’s hegemonic ambitions.


Hezbollah’s largest attack tunnel and its financial supporters
An IDF officer stands inside Hezbollah's flagship "Ramyeh" tunnel | Photo: Eyal Margolin/JINI

At the depth of a 25-story building underground near the quiet Israeli villages of Shtula and Zarit lies Hezbollah’s largest attack tunnel stretching 250 feet into Israeli territory, and at the other end traveling more than half a mile to emerge in a Lebanese home in the Shiite town of Ramyeh.

This is what I saw during a visit to Hezbollah’s most sophisticated “flagship” tunnel, arranged by the IDF Spokesperson's Office with my guide Lt. Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, CEO of ALMA, a think tank that specializes in helping understand Israel’s challenges on its northern border with Lebanon and Syria.

There are at least six publicly acknowledged tunnels that have crossed into Israeli territory from Lebanon – all strategically poised for thousands of Hezbollah terrorists to simultaneously emerge near Israeli border towns on the Lebanese border, kidnapping, crippling, killing an untold number of Israeli civilians, while terrorizing the whole nation.

This was no amateur operation. The tunnel took years to build, and over the last decade, Iran and Hezbollah created an elite force (Radwan) whose sole purpose is to kill Jews on Israeli soil. The threat is real, especially after you see it with your own eyes.

And Iran, Hezbollah and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp will try again and again. They have tremendous patience, married to a fanatical Twelver Shiism ideology where Israel as a Jewish state must be destroyed in its entirety.

Who knows how many more tunnels are nearly complete but remain deep underground, just meters from the Israeli border on the Lebanese side of the Blue Line so Israel cannot find them, and which the United Nations peacekeeping force (the UN Interim Force in Lebanon) has displayed no interest in identifying?

Remember, UNIFIL’s primary mission is supposed to be to uphold UN Security Council Resolution 1701 to identify missiles coming into Lebanon for Hezbollah’s use. Of the nearly 150,000 missiles Hezbollah has accumulated since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, UNIFIL has stopped or identified precisely zero missile transfers to Hezbollah. Not a single one.

In regard to the Hezbollah tunnels, the United Nations was grudgingly forced to acknowledge that Hezbollah tunnels crossed the Blue line into Israeli territory.

After a visit like this, my thoughts would normally focus first on how Israel can more effectively detect new tunnels on the Lebanese side of the border or how to prepare Israeli border towns to thwart an attack, but my thoughts went instead to the east, to Germany.

Today, there are nearly 1,000 Hezbollah fundraisers legally operating in Germany to raise money for a terrorist organization. Germany and most of the European Union, with the exception of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, differentiate between the military and political wings of Hezbollah, designating its military wing as terrorists but not its political wing. Hezbollah itself has said there is no difference or distinction between its military and political wings.

Over the last few years, I have been trying to get this on the radar screen of Congress, whose members I believe would be as outraged as when they found out that American taxpayer dollars supported Palestinian terrorists.

After the experiences of the 20th century, Germany should understand the hypocrisy involved in giving money to the nonmilitary part of a regime intent on murder, Lebensraum and ethnic cleansing.

The German parliament to its great credit recently differentiated itself from other European governments in another very important way to help fight against the delegitimization of Israel by passing legislation condemning the BDS movement as anti-Semitic. Yet they so far accept the idea that it’s decent to back the “political” organizers of Hezbollah because they also provide medical care, schools and social services for the local Shiite population from which they groom their militias to destroy the Jewish state.

With Hezbollah receiving fewer funds from Iran due to the effectiveness of US sanctions despite European resistance to them, Hezbollah fundraising in Germany is a lifeline that must end if you care about subsidizing terror.

Germany and the rest of the European Union are trying to preserve the 2015 Iran nuclear deal at any cost and are loath to antagonize Iran by designating Hezbollah altogether as a terrorist entity. Hezbollah is not independent of Iran; it is Iranian-controlled in its entirety. Germany needs to follow Britain’s lead; earlier this year, the United Kingdom broke from the European appeasement strategy to Iran and designated Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist organization.

It is time for Germany and the European Union to stop aiding Hezbollah or pretending that parts of Hezbollah are not terrorists. Hezbollah has veto power in Lebanon and now controls vital agencies in the Lebanese government with large budgets to make sure the money continues to flow. American taxpayer dollars go to the Lebanese Armed Forces, who are forced to look away and sometimes work with Hezbollah.

The significance of the Hezbollah tunnel is clear. It is just one element, albeit a significant one, of the multidimensional, long-term Iranian strategy to threaten and eventually destroy Israel, achieving in the process Iran’s hegemonic ambitions.

However important the tunnels are, they cannot distract Israel from its most serious focus for survival, keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of the likes of Iran's ayatollah, who would be happy to go down in history as the great warrior of God who laid waste to the Jewish nation in a fiery cataclysm.

Reprinted from JNS.org.


Eric H. Mandel

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/07/13/hezbollahs-largest-attack-tunnel-and-its-financial-supporters/

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Warner Video: Why Won’t Muslims Assimilate? - Frontpagemag.com


by Frontpagemag.com


What Islamic doctrine teaches about migration, domination and annihilation.




Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.
This new edition of the Glazov Gang presents the Dr. Bill Warner Moment with Dr. Bill Warner, the president of politicalislam.com.

Dr. Warner asks: Why Won’t Muslims Assimilate? and he unveils what Islamic doctrine teaches about migration, domination and annihilation. 

Don’t miss it!



And make sure to watch Dr. Warner discuss How to Use the Elements of Islam to Vet Muslim Migrants, where he asks: Is the Koran wrong or right about wife-beating, sexual slavery, killing unbelievers and political assassinations?



Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

 
Frontpagemag.com

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274275/warner-video-why-wont-muslims-assimilate-frontpagemagcom

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Catfight intensifies: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignites explosion of fury from her fellow Democrats - Monica Showalter


by Monica Showalter

Apparently, she's become a bigger problem for them than even the Republicans.


So House speaker Nancy Pelosi isn't the only one Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is catfighting with.

She's actually screeching and caterwauling with the entire Democratic Party. Look at the details of this ugly public backbiting between her right hand man, Saikat Chakrabarti, and the House Democratic Caucus, according to this report in The Hill:
The House Democratic Caucus issued a rebuke of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) chief of staff Friday evening amid a public spat between House leadership and a small group of progressive members.
The caucus hammered Saikat Chakrabarti for comments he made going after Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.), who is Native American. Chakrabarti said in the quoted tweet that Davids had taken votes that "enable a racist system."
"Who is this guy and why is he explicitly singling out a Native American woman of color? Her name is Congresswoman Davids, not Sharice. She is a phenomenal new member who flipped a red seat blue. Keep Her Name Out Of Your Mouth," the House Democratic Caucus tweeted Friday evening.
Rather than slink away in embarrassment, after the Democratic Caucus used Ocasio-Cortez's very own race-baiting tactics against her, Ocasio-Cortez's right-hand man rather disgustingly then tried to save face by claiming Davids as "a friend." This is pathetic, high school stuff, and not the people you make your claims to friendship to.

Then it got even worse. Ocasio-Cortez's commie group, called the "Justice Democrats," decided to tweet back that nyaaa, nyaaaa, Pelosi was a hypocrite, Pelosi was a hypocrite, and the Democratic caucus wasn't following Momma Nancy's rules:
Justice Democrats, a prominent progressive group that supported Ocasio-Cortez's long-shot congressional bid last year and gained national renown after her victory, also fired back at the caucus, noting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) urged members this week to not tweet their grievances against other colleagues.
Oh, gawd.

The Hill notes that Team Ocasio-Cortez compared the recent vote on border funding for free toothbrushes and shampoo for illegal migrants to the racism of "Southern Democrats," which was quite an impressive twofer — because it not only insulted current Democrats from the South as knee-jerk racists, but also managed to bring up the truth that Democrats don't want out there: that Democrats are historically the party of racism. That's a double-whammy, with one blow hitting below the belt.

Democrats themselves are murmuring more loudly about what a pain this person is among them. Get a load of this Fox News report that has one of them leaking to Fox that Ocasio-Cortez is "a complete fraud." Boy, is this stuff nasty:
The last straw, for some, was the lawmaker's claim that Pelosi was uniquely disrespectful to minority congresswomen. One senior lawmaker, who is black, scorched Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday for allegedly using the race card against the speaker, calling her comments "so inappropriate." Some lawmakers have even turned the tables, arguing that a group aligned with her is targeting black lawmakers for potential primary challenges in questioning those comments.
HOUSE DEM BLASTS 'JUVENILE' AOC
"Her peers do not take her seriously," the senior Democratic source said Friday, adding: "They think it is absurd to call the speaker racist. Offensive and absurd."
The source said Ocasio-Cortez, who won her seat after a stunning primary victory over longtime House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley, has "no power" — despite her immense Twitter following and unique ability to at times command the news cycle.
"She is a nobody. She is a freshman member of Congress with no power. She is not worth the speaker's brainpower," the source said — accusing her of starting "needless distractions from serious issues," and skipping meetings and conference calls in favor of media interviews, tweets and "glamour."
These people have seen enough of Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, picking and backbiting and political correctnessing all of them, and like Republicans, they absolutely hate her. And as a defense measure, they're now rallying around House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has their back.

This is nothing like the Trump insurgency that took over the Republican Party and left a little knot of NeverTrumps forever fuming in the gloaming.

What we are seeing here is a different social dynamic: the DSA-ification of the Democratic Party. This extreme "splittism" is seen in all fringe leftist groups. Ocasio-Cortez got all of her political training from the Democratic Socialists of America, and how they did things there is exactly how she's decided to do things among the Democrats. Like Trump, win office as an outsider, but the comparison stops there.

She now is spending all of her time not attacking Republicans or even Trump, but her fellow Democrats, as if to "purify" the party into the most socialist possible organ. She's practically holding show trials with her threats to primary non-conformists in distant districts she knows nothing about, and she's insisting on conformity, with only the most extreme ideas and virtue-signaling permitted. She's going after them one by one, declaring anyone who opposes her a 'racist,' including even a Native American congresswoman who sure as heck didn't appreciate that. She's also annoyed Black Democrats as Thomas Lifson noted here

Crazy leftwing groups operate like that. "Mass, Party, Sect, Cult, Gone," as the communists in San Francisco used to joke in the 1990s when the CPUSA broke apart. Now Ocasio-Cortez is taking the same model and shoving it into the Democrats.

Not surprisingly, they're rallying around Pelosi for protection, given this spanner in their works. She's a problem for them. This open catfight demonstrates that she's an bigger problem for them than even the Republicans.


Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/catfight_intensifies_alexandria_ocasiocortez_ignites_explosion_of_fury_from_her_fellow_democrats.html

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Deprived of terror tunnels, Hamas takes to air, sea - Yaakov Lappin


by Yaakov Lappin

Gazan terrorist organizations are looking into armed drones and sea-based commando cells to replace the loss of their underground offensive capabilities, while concentrating fire at Israel’s Iron Dome to overwhelm it.


The discovery of the latest cross-border Hamas tunnel this week stretching from the Gaza Strip into Israel is a reminder of the fact that Hamas will soon lose this offensive capability.

The tunnel was discovered during the construction of Israel’s underground barrier, which is designed to block the path of Hamas’s diggers. The subterranean wall uses sensors that alert the IDF forces if Hamas attempts to dig in Israel’s direction.

Since the end of the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas, the IDF has discovered 18 such terror tunnels, using advanced detection systems, and more recently, through the construction of the underground wall.

The 40-mile-long barrier is due to be completed by the end of this year. When it will be done, Gaza's terrorist squads are expected to lose the ability to sneak under the Israeli border to carry out murderous missions in future wars.

Yet Hamas’s military wing still has a complex network of defensive combat tunnels, which run under Gaza. This “underground city” enables terrorist cells to move around out of sight of the Israeli Air Force, and transfer personnel and weapons around the Strip, particularly in the event of an Israeli ground offensive. It seems safe to assume that the IDF is busy mapping out these tunnels, too, and that it is developing ways of turning them into death traps in a future conflict.

Since the end of the 2014 conflict, enough cement has entered Gaza to build 16 skyscrapers the size of Dubai's Burj Khalifa – the tallest building in the world. That cement has largely gone underground, feeding Hamas’s war machine.

Gaza’s soft sandstone made it possible for diggers to make rapid progress during the peak days of the tunnel project. The tunnels contained rails, electricity, ventilation, communications lines and oxygen tanks – tanks that were originally sent to Gaza for hospital use.

The tunnels are a symbol of Hamas’ priorities: The military buildup always takes precedence over investing funds in Gaza’s civilian population.

Shifting to other attack methods

Hamas is, however, a learning organization, and it appears to have realized some time ago that time is running out on the terror tunnels.

As a result, it and other terrorist factions in Gaza have doubled down on other offensive capabilities.

Foremost among these is the rocket arsenal. Unlike Lebanon, Gaza is not known to have guided rockets at this time, but the size of the Gazan rocket arsenal is growing, and the threat is one of sheer quantity.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the 15,000-strong terrorist group (compared to the 35,000-strong Hamas), has also been investing heavily in expanding its own rocket arsenal and was able to overtake Hamas in possessing the largest quantity of projectiles in Gaza.

Both organizations receive Iranian money – some $100 million in the past two years, according to Mossad Director Yossi Levi – and Iranian technical know-how. They convert these into a sprawling domestic-arms industry that produces Gaza’s rocket arsenal at home, without the need to depend on smuggling.

Hamas uses every component at its disposal for rocket manufacturing, even salt for propellant needed during the initial launch phase. The combined arsenal of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad exceeds 20,000 rockets.

During a recent escalation that erupted in May following a PIJ sniper attack, Gazan terrorist factions fired 690 projectiles at southern Israel in a mere two days and tried to overwhelm the Iron Dome air-defense system.

Iron Dome nevertheless performed well, intercepting 86% of rockets heading for populated areas. Still, Gaza’s factions were able to concentrate their fire in a lethal manner. Four Israelis were killed in the escalation, including one whose vehicle was hit with a Hamas anti-tank missile. Such weapons have also become a focus area for Gaza’s factions.

Both organizations are also trying to create armed drone fleets. Islamic Jihad used one such drone in a failed effort to bomb an IDF tank during the May escalation; this incident is an indication of the growing importance of this attack method.

Israeli homefront the primary target

Hamas, meanwhile, is working on an ability to launch sea-based attacks using terrorist commando cells.

These activities are all presumably occurring under the watchful and piercing eye of the IDF, which is preparing accordingly.

According to Brig. Gen. (res.) Shachar Shochat, former Air Defense Command chief, non-state actors have placed the Israeli homefront as their prime target. The dispersion of rocket launchers in built-up civilian Gazan areas forms an additional challenge. An ongoing cat-and-mouse game of solutions and challenges is underway.

The May escalation also contained a hint of Israel’s overwhelming offensive capabilities.
The Israeli Air Force, for its part, struck more than 350 terrorist targets across Gaza in retaliation, killing some 30 Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, and destroying many high-value enemy targets that were embedded within civilian neighborhoods. The combination of quality intelligence and precision firepower is designed to deal with the asymmetric challenge from Gaza.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ground forces, who have not set foot in Gaza in five years, are preparing a range of new abilities in case they are called to enter the Strip the next time that warning sirens begin going off in Israeli cities.

Reprinted from JNS.org.


Yaakov Lappin

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/07/12/deprived-of-terror-tunnels-hamas-takes-to-air-sea/

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The Qatar Supporter Advising Kamala Harris - Daniel Greenfield


by Daniel Greenfield

Harris has a much bigger problem than some Russian bots.


The biggest split in foreign policy circles isn’t over Iran or Israel. Virtually all foreign policy professionals oppose Israel and support some sort of arrangement with Iran. The real split is over Qatar.

The tiny Islamist country is both a major state sponsor of terrorist groups, especially those aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has wormed its way deep into the political establishment in this country. Qatar’s dark side aligns it with Hamas, Iran and Al Qaeda on one side, and the Brookings Institute, the Washington Post, and D.C. lobbyists on the other. Its hackers target political opponents in the United States and feed the results to major media outlets. Al Jazeera, its propaganda outlet, spans the two worlds, that of the Islamists working to seize power and of Democrat activists in the United States.

Qatar enjoyed unprecedented access and influence in the Obama era. The Arab Spring brought many of its Brotherhood allies to power across the region before Saudi countercoups helped topple them. The struggle between Qatar, Turkey and Iran, and the Saudi-UAE coalition, has rippled through the media and the D.C. political establishment with flash points such as Yemen, Iran, and Jamal Khashoggi.

While the Senate, including much of the GOP, is Qatari territory, President Trump has been skeptical of the Islamic terror state. But the White House is up for grabs in 2020. Last month, Biden refunded a donation from a Qatari lobbyist. The Dem front runner though has been critical of Qatar (along with Turkey, the Saudis and the UAE) for funding Islamic terrorists and may not be a good bet.

Senator Kamala Harris, the politician breathing down Biden’s neck, is a very different story. One of her foreign policy advisors is Dana Shell Smith (pictured above), who had served as Obama's ambassador to Qatar.

Dana Shell Smith resigned her position after she implicitly attacked President Trump over the Comey firing and split from the White House over its criticism of Qatar. While the former ambassador’s tweets at the time were understated, a year later, she made her position abundantly clear.

"Qatar is an important friend and partner, and Trump is a moron," Dana Shell Smith tweeted.

Ambassadors represent United States interests in foreign countries, but Smith’s continued advocacy for Qatar, in and out of her post, raised questions about whom she was representing. When the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies convened a conference on Qatar and the Brotherhood, Smith allegedly contacted participants urging them to tone down criticism of Qatar.

“How naive I was to think that the conference participants and organizers might take into account a factual, balanced briefing from the sitting American Ambassador to Qatar,” she complained last year.

The complaint was packaged with a media hit piece attacking the conference utilizing the emails of an American hacked by Qatar. An investigation later showed that the reporter behind the piece had repeatedly spoken with a registered foreign agent for Qatar. The foreign agent has been accused by Elliot Broidy, a former RNC official victimized by the email hacks, of distributing them to the media.

While the Qatari hacks of Americans had allegedly been carried out by former intel operatives, next year it was Smith’s turn to act outraged when the UAE allegedly hacked Al Jazeera.

Dana Shell Smith, who not only hadn’t objected to Qatari hacks of Americans but had promoted a hit piece based on the stolen emails, demanded action when Qatari allies were on the receiving end. The former ambassador insisted that the government needed to stop Americans from hacking Qatar.

“Folks with these skill sets should not be able to knowingly or unknowingly undermine U.S. interests or contradict U.S. values,” Smith claimed.

She did not explain what American interests or values were undermined by hacking Osama bin Laden’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s favorite jihadist propaganda network.

After stepping down, Dana Shell Smith became the CEO of Decibel Strategy. The “international strategy firm”, which appears to be run out of a house in Arlington, Virginia, has no information about it online except that it was founded to “advance business and professional ties between the United States and the Middle East.” There is no mention of who Decibel’s clients are and in which countries it operates.


Those are questions that should be answered now that Smith is advising Senator Kamala Harris.

Even as Smith is advising a 2020 candidate, she has continued spreading and promoting Qatari propaganda. Sample tweets included, “So happy to see @maddow covering the Gulf blockade and the characters who attempted to turn our government against an essential partner in the region.”

There had been questions about whom Dana Shell Smith had been representing all along. As ambassador, her article on the Islamic state sponsor of terror reads like Qatari propaganda.

Smith uncritically praised Qatar's tyrant. She touted its "highest per capita income" while refusing to mention of the fact that it is dependent on a foreign slave labor force with less human rights than animals do in some countries.

"Our interests, bilaterally and regionally, have never aligned more closely," Smith claimed, even as the Islamic terror state was deeply engaged in backing Islamic terrorists across the troubled region.

Instead of a briefing, the ambassador's article utilized euphemisms that whitewashed Qatar's terror role.

Dana Shell Smith described Qatar's Islamist coups as an "assertive, independent foreign policy", and the resulting clashes as the Islamic terror state being "at odds with friends in the region and western governments, some of which disapproved of Doha’s perceived preference for working with Islamic opposition movements in places like Egypt, the Palestinian Territories, Libya, and Tunisia."

Blink and you miss a defense of Qatar's backing for Hamas.

Dana Shell Smith could have presented arguments in favor of Qatar's policies, but instead her article reads like Qatari PR that reframes problems as fuzzy euphemisms without ever addressing the issues.

Smith likewise reframes Qatar’s backing for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups as a plan to “embrace and include moderate Islamic voices in the governance of their respective countries.” Qatar’s role as a backchannel to jihadists is reframed as “the Emir’s perspective is unique among Middle Eastern leaders and makes Qatar an important conduit to key opposition groups in the region.”

This is Qatar’s agenda filtered through American PR.

There are serious questions to be asked and answered about Qatar’s influence in Washington D.C.

Qatar has been responsible for the rise of violence and instability across the region, for corrupting American political and media figures, and for hacking American political figures in order to influence our political process. These actions represent a far graver collusion threat than Russian bots on Facebook.

Especially considering Qatar’s links to the Islamic terrorists responsible for the murders of countless Americans. Including the thousands dead on September 11, in Afghanistan and across the Middle East.

As long as Senator Kamala Harris is being advised by Smith, those questions should be directed to her.


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

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274242/qatar-supporter-advising-kamala-harris-daniel-greenfield

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Nineteen Eighty-Four at 70: What Orwell Got Right - Nicholas J. Kaster


by Nicholas J. Kaster

1984 remains prescient in its depiction of two key elements of modern-day political correctness conceived of and promoted by the Progressive Left: the war on language and the war on memory.


This summer, George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old, and that anniversary has prompted a surfeit of articles analyzing the book and its continuing relevance to our age.

There is no doubt that the book is one of the most consequential political novels ever written and ought to be on the reading list of every conservative -- not because Orwell was himself a conservative (he remained a man of the Left until his death), nor because the dystopian world that Orwell described turned out to be prophetic.

“The image of a boot stamping across the human face," in Orwell's memorable phrase, is an accurate depiction of present-day North Korea or China, but is not really an apt description of the U.S. or Western Europe, societies that have fallen into the kind of soft despotism described by Alexis de Tocqueville, but well short of the dystopian nightmare foreseen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

However, the novel remains prescient in its depiction of two key elements of modern-day political correctness conceived of and promoted by the Progressive Left: the war on language and the war on memory

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell focuses on an individual living in "Oceania," a socialist society comprising the present-day nations of England and the Americas. In the novel, Oceania is abandoning standard English, which is referred to as “Oldspeak,” and is adopting “Newspeak,” a limited vocabulary designed to restrict thought.

Orwell understood that words enable thought and thought enables action. If there is no word for something, it makes it hard to think about it. This is an ancient insight -- the Bible speaks reverently of “The Word.” 

Orwell tells us that:
“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, at least insofar as thought is dependent on words.”
On the college campuses, the progressives have adopted a form of Newspeak with the identical goal -- to get rid of heretical thoughts. Thus, students are protected by “safe spaces,” works of art that might cause discomfort are preceded by “trigger warnings,” and prohibited statements are referred to as “microagressions,” and “hate speech.” Make the latter phrase a compound word (hatespeech) and it has an unmistakably Orwellian cadence.

Starting in academia, politically correct speech has now infected the media, the arts, tech companies, and corporations.

The protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, works for the ironically named “Ministry of Truth,” which is engaged in the practice of constantly editing history to conform to the current party line. People and places are changed, erased, or added as needed. “Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell explained, “who controls the present controls the past.”

The erasing of America's past, the renaming of holidays, and the defacing and elimination of statues -- the cultural vandalism that proceeds on a daily basis --

Is all part of an effort to conform America's history to the Progressive party line.

This is how Orwell described it:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
“An endless present.” This is what progressive dogma demands: and, by extension, a rejection of wisdom -- the accumulation of human experience. The progressive cannot abide the traditional, because it stands in the way of “progress,” however that is defined at the moment. The impulse is narcissistic -- we are always morally superior to our descendants -- and ultimately totalitarian.

Thus, while it may appear to be a stretch to apply a novel written as an indictment of the USSR under Stalin to the current regime of political correctness, it is not.

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small,” social critic Theodore Dalrymple has observed.

He added:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
This is the lesson of Nineteen Eighty-Four and why it remains relevant today.

You can follow Nicholas J. Kaster on Twitter.

Nicholas J. Kaster

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/emnineteen_eightyfourem_at_70_what_orwell_got_right.html

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Leftists rip and deface American flag at migrant detention center, raise Mexican flag - Monica Showakter


by Monica Showalter

Moral confusion and bottomless stupidity.


Apparently, the rabidly leftist protestors outside a Colorado migrant detention center don't know which flag the Honduran, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and other illegal aliens actually march under.

They attacked a migrant center in Aurora, Colorado; defaced an American flag, which is about par for them; and then raised a Mexican flag, forgetting that Mexicans aren't too happy about Central American migrants traversing their country illegally, either.

Here's the news story compiled by GatewayPundit, complete with Twitter photos:
Protesters took down the U.S. flag, the Colorado and GEO flags and and replaced them with a Mexican flag, a defaced upside down U.S. flag and a third flag of unknown description at a GEO contractor-run ICE detention facility in Aurora, Colorado Friday.
Numerous photos were posted online of the flags.
KCNC-TV reported the American flag was taken down, spray-painted with the words Abolish ICE and then flown upside down next to the Mexican flag.
And here's a news tweet:
It's beyond disgusting to normal Americans, and it certainly does nothing for the prospects of the migrants who want to stay here in the States ahead of would-be legal aliens. It's also intellectually confused: what kind of sense are we talking about here that the flag of the country no one wants to be sent back to is waved as a rallying cry? What's more, you can bet that the ignorant and inarticulate thugs behind this wanted it that way. Their aim was to offend.

But it does shed light on what the real agenda in this migrant surge is, which is negating the idea of citizenship. Not just any citizenship, only U.S. citizenship. They're also about negating the idea of legal immigration, and negating borders themselves. They don't want any of that because they don't want America. They want to destroy America, as can be seen with its defaced flag. To make their point harder, they signal they'd like to have some country such as Mexico — the very country the Central American migrants are refusing to live in, despite Mexico's generous offers — take over instead.

The migrants, by the way, aren't much better, marching as they do in their caravans under the Honduran and Guatemalan flags. These waves of people aren't about becoming Americans, assimilating, leaving one country behind for another. They're about harvesting benefits and returning home with them. Now we have the Left foisting the Mexican flag upon their migration operation, making the whole thing a strange spectacle, indeed.

This is not your grandmother's migration. This looks like activist advocacy with the aim of some kind of deranged "conquest," complete with plunder. Well, now we know what we are up against. One can only hope the stamp-down of this kind of clown show is going to be hard.

Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/leftists_rip_and_deface_american_flag_at_migrant_detention_center_raise_mexican_flag.html

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Clintons mass-booed at Billy Joel concert - Monica Showalter


by Monica Showalter

Götterdämmerung for the grifters?


Is time finally up for the Clintons?

Sometimes it's the little things, such as booing in a stadium, that tell the story.
Apparently, Bill and Hillary Clinton got booed big. According to Fox News:
After singer Billy Joel dedicated a song to the former first couple and flashed them up on the screen at Madison Square Garden, initial cheers turned to boos from the audience.
The former first lady has been under scrutiny for years as she criticized President Trump and attempted to lay out the reasons she thought were behind her loss to him in the 2016 election. Former President Bill Clinton, on the other hand, faced fresh criticism surrounding his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who on Monday was indicted on sex trafficking charges.
It's surprising, given how untouchable the Clintons have been up until now. They've committed scandal after scandal — and nothing ever happens to them, not even bad poll numbers, let alone handcuffs. The pair of them together got away with so much through their vaunted careers that they seemed to be made of some kind of super-Teflon. And the more they got away with, the more shameless they got. What's worse, they set the standard for Democrats and impunity, something Republicans have never been subject to. President Obama, taking the Clinton standard, got away with scandal after scandal by, like the Clintons, just denying that there was one.


This booing suggests that maybe something has changed. Bill has been mired neck-deep in his Lolita Express scandal, which includes getting caught lying about how many private jet trips he took with his child-molesting pal Jeffrey Epstein to (among many places) his Dominican island lair of underage girls for sex. Clinton says he took four rides. The Washington Examiner says he took six

Investigative reporter Conchita Sarnoff says he took 27.

Hillary, by contrast, is already on the outs — with Democrats blaming her for the loss of her 2016 presidential race to Donald Trump by not going to Wisconsin as well as the phony Russian collusion myth, which got disproved by the Mueller report. For Republicans and independents, she's always been a problem, the latest of which was her email scandals involving an easy-to-hack illegal private server, along with hammers, bleachbit, immunity, and impunity. And her former staffers live in dread at the idea of Hillary coming back into public life again.

It all suggests that some kind of critical mass has been reached. Maybe the Clintons really have run out of luck — along with foundation donations. The money dried up. The scams got exposed. The cheering has stopped. There are now just boos, ugly, ugly, boos, and painful for Bill, at least, who thrives on adulation.

The grifters are finally getting word that it's time to skip town.

Image credit: Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with image from ABC/Walt Disney Television, via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 and public domain sources.

Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/clintons_massbooed_at_billy_joel_concert.html

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Call it evangelicalphobia - Jonathan S. Tobin


by Jonathan S. Tobin

Left-wing Jews continue to complain about CUFI but, at a time of rising anti-Semitism, these friends deserve thanks, not contempt rooted in prejudice.


It doesn’t really matter how hard a group like Christians United for Israel tries to reach out to Jews and the organizational Jewish world. Despite their best efforts to show that their support for the Jewish state and opposition to anti-Semitism are genuine, they’re never going to convince American Jews en masse that they aren’t really the enemy.

Why? The answer isn’t so much based on skepticism or fact-based fear as it is in prejudice.

That’s a sad state of affairs, though it hasn’t deterred CUFI, which held its annual conference in Washington this week, from continuing its advocacy. The most important point to be made about this is not so much the tired and discredited arguments in which some on the left seek to downplay or twist evangelical support for Israel into something Jews should fear. It’s that at a time of rising anti-Semitism, growing support for the BDS movement and increasing Jewish disaffection from Israel, groups like CUFI are not just good allies to have, they’ve become absolutely essential.

For decades, many liberals have argued that conservative Christian backing for Israel is essentially worthless or on the flip side, counterproductive and even dangerous.

That argument claims that evangelicals who love Israel don’t actually care about the state or its people but are only fighting the good fight because of a belief that their efforts will lead to an end-of-days scenario that will result in a devastating war, followed by the return of Jesus and the mass conversion of the Jews.

That few Christians and almost none who are active on behalf of Israel actually advocate for this sort of an eschatological narrative means nothing to Jews who simply refuse to believe that conservative Christians are sincere friends. It also bears repeating that it’s not clear why Jews of all denominations and political opinions who don’t believe Jesus is coming back would worry about what would happen if he did return.

You would think that after many years in which Christian groups like CUFI have demonstrated their faithful support for the Jewish state and opposition to anti-Semitism, these false claims would dissipate. But though mainstream Jewish groups, including many that are liberal in their politics, have come to understand that evangelicals deserve our trust as well as our gratitude, these sorts of sentiments continue to be voiced in the Jewish community and in liberal journals, both here in the United States and in Israel.

At the heart of this distrust is something that few Jews would like to admit to: religious prejudice.

The fact is that most in the largely urban and liberal Jewish community don’t actually know any evangelicals. But they have held on to the notion based on conditions in 19th-century Europe that the more religious a Christian might be, the more likely it is that he or she will hate Jews. If that was ever really true in the United States, it’s clearly no longer the case. Indeed, it is the less fervently religious liberal mainline Protestant denominations that are more likely nowadays to spout anti-Semitic memes or openly oppose the existence of a Jewish state. Nevertheless, Jews clustered on the East and West coasts tend to think of conservative Christians in flyover country as ignorant hayseeds who all harbor not-so-secret desires to murder Jews, even though this belief has no basis in fact.

It’s also true that the anti-evangelical argument has changed a bit in recent years. It’s now no longer based entirely on what I’d call Evangelicalphobia as it is in 21st-century politics of both the American and Israeli variety.

Jewish distrust of evangelicals in 2019 has a lot more to do with differences between the two communities over issues that have nothing to do with Israel, such as abortion, gay marriage or one’s opinion of Donald Trump. In a time of heightened partisanship, many Jews simply despise conservative Christians because they are pro-Trump Republicans as they do anyone else who dwells in red-state America.

Just as most other Americans seem unable to rise above their partisan instincts, so, too, do liberal Jews regard conservatives of any kind as members of a hostile alien tribe, rather than potential allies, or even friends and neighbors. The idea that you can agree to disagree on some issues while coming together on those where you do have common ground is the essence of all Jewish communal relations. But it is being lost amid the political warfare that is drowning out every other effort to bridge the partisan divide.

Also driving the two communities apart are opinions about Israel. CUFI and other evangelicals would support Israel no matter who runs its government. But they have a special affinity with the national camp in the Jewish state. Yet their willingness to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his governments, along with their grasp of the fact that the real obstacle to Middle East peace is Palestinian intransigence, rubs liberal Jews the wrong way. Those on the Jewish left who want American governments to “save Israel from itself” and pressure it to make concessions that the majority of Israelis oppose don’t like the Christian right because it is viewed as an obstacle to those hopes.

That’s why it’s hardly surprising that among the most vociferous opponents of CUFI are anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, both of which seek to torpedo all pro-Israel advocacy, Jewish and Christian alike. The notion they put forward that Israel deserves “better allies” than evangelicals is disingenuous since what they really want is for Israel to have no allies – or rights and security – at all.

But in a time of growing anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic BDS activity – and with many left-wing Jews making common cause with Israel’s enemies, as well as seeking to sabotage pro-Israel advocacy – CUFI is more important than ever.

It doesn’t matter what you think of evangelical religious beliefs or their politics. If you care about Israel, then they deserve your gratitude. Period.

Reprinted  from JNS.org.


Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/call-it-evangelicalphobia/

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AOC and 'Concentration Camps' - Harry Onickel


by Harry Onickel

Opening up a new front against the Jewish people.





Trivializing the Holocaust is nothing new. When it comes to hyperbole and shock value, de-valuing the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews to score a political point and/or demean the Jews has become standard practice. Demonstrating that there is no bottom to this insulting tradition PETA has even compared modern animal farms to the Holocaust. With that in mind, and with her past record, AOC adopting this approach to malign President Trump with her description of the detention camps on our southern border was predictable.

What’s new with this episode are all of the writers and news services shielding her and defending the indefensible. When the blowback against AOC’s concentration camps analogy began, sycophants were quick to read and research. Over the next few days, they gave us mini-lessons in history and expounded on the differences between concentration camps and death camps. It seems the British used them during the Boer Wars, and there have been American concentration camps. Thanks to this newly reported history, we were assured that AOC’s statement was completely accurate and that no one could deny it. AOC has even jumped back into the melee, insisting that unnamed concentration camp “experts” have backed up her assertion. She refused the invitation of Holocaust survivor, Ed Mosberg to tour Auschwitz, but maybe she considers Mosberg only a specialist, not an expert.

The problem with all of this new found historical education is that the day before AOC’s bogus comparison, had any of these defenders been asked for words to associate with “concentration camp,” they, like the rest of us, would have come up with “Nazis” and “Holocaust.” But times have changed. Now, rather than discover and report the truth, allegedly honest journalists are using facts to obscure the truth. They are trying to reprogram our brains to substitute “Boer War” or  “United States” for “Nazis” and “Holocaust,” even though most of the people defending AOC had probably never heard of the Boer Wars or American concentration camps prior to her statement.

None of these “shocking exposes,” written to offer cover to AOC’s ridiculous comparison, can change the fact that concentration camps are associated with the slaughter of Jews, especially when AOC invoked “Never again.” While others have said “Never again” in a variety of contexts, it has special meaning when coupled with concentration camps. One is the result of the other.

George Takei, a reliable AOC defender if there ever was one, offered a sober comparison with his childhood imprisonment in an internment camp during World War II. While the Japanese internment camps were a terrible injustice, nobody was worked to death as Jews were, and I have yet to see photos of emaciated, disease-ridden survivors. Sorry George.

But it’s not just George Takei and AOC. People all over the Internet are now insisting the United States is storing illegal aliens – I mean undocumented immigrants in concentration camps at our southern border. It has entered our lexicon to stay.

One of the reasons this mislabeling is being allowed to stand is the lack of serious history education in public schools and universities. That ignorance allows people to get their information from Internet memes and headlines. The misdirection and lies are fit into bite sized pieces that can easily, and with very little thought, be digested and passed along to friends. Adding to the historical knowledge gap about Jews on the university level are Muslim Brotherhood offshoots like Students for Justice in Palestine. To no one’s surprise, they’ve been force-feeding students anti-Israel/anti-Semitic lessons.

AOC’s alma mater, Boston University, has a vocal SJP chapter. While AOC was probably not a member, judging from her previous statements, her willingness to cut funding for Israel, and her co-sponsoring of House Bill H. R. 2047 – “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act,” she is obviously sympathetic to the SJP agenda. That agenda is made clear every time SJP members loudly and proudly chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” To SJP, “free” means free from Jews. SJP is playing the same game as the German neo-Nazi group that updated the old Nazi slogan, “Jews are our misfortune to “Israel is our misfortune,” Then there is AOC’s alliance with Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have made Jews and Israel an issue.

The object, which is being pursued on many levels by many individuals and organizations, is to erase the Jews. Not only must Jews be erased from humanity, but in order to completely fulfill this Nazi/SJP/Muslim Brotherhood dream, the Jews must also be erased geographically with the destruction of Israel and historically with the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust.

Taking a step in that erasure, AOC, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is pushing a secular Replacement Theology. It is now illegal immigrants who are victims of concentration camps. This comes after years of SJP promoting the fallacy of “Concentration Camp Gaza.” Each new lie builds on a past lie until it becomes part of the normal discourse. It becomes natural to replace Jews with the Boer War or immigrants, and to replace the Jews of Israel with the “indigenous Palestinians.” Linda Sarsour has been facing blowback for taking that absurdity a step further in repeating Ilhan Omar’s delusion that Jesus was a Palestinian. Omar was echoing Omar Suleiman, an imam who has come out strongly against Israel but in favor of Sharia Law. Suleiman was not even the first to replace Jesus’ Judaism with a Palestinian origin, but it currently remains a lie whose time has not yet come.

We can continue to point out AOC’s trivialization of the Holocaust. We can even continue to give factual information as to why her comparison is bogus and insulting to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered and to the survivors. The problem is that, willingly or not, she has made herself into another cog in the Jew-hating machine. Other humans in this machine include her high profile allies who took the time to dig for articles and information in order to deny the truth. Followers have condensed these articles into memes and tweets in order to cloud the reality even further, a great example being the tweet stating, “Anne Frank and her sister weren’t gassed. They died of Typhus, a result of living in a crowded camp with poor sanitation.”  It received 3,439 retweets and 5,420 likes. It’s unknown how many times it was shared on other social media sites in order to help more people ignore the 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, who were murdered at Auschwitz.
Not everyone who is pushing AOC’s concentration camp agenda hates Jews. Some are political opportunists who have no historical knowledge and are willing to accept Jews as collateral damage in order support AOC’s theatrics and trash Trump. They will march in lockstep with any historical narrative that serves their purpose. They will perform all of the mental gymnastics necessary to buy the hyperbole and the trivialization.

The truly dedicated haters who seek the destruction of the Jews will gladly accept help from these useful idiots parroting AOC and her concentration camp lies. We must also understand that for some, it goes beyond simple Jew-hatred. Judaism being one of the lynchpins of Western Civilization, the desire to destroy the Jews dovetails seamlessly with the rabid desire to bring down the West.

 In short, AOC did more than trivialize the Holocaust and launch a thousand Google searches. She opened up a new front in the ongoing culture war.


Harry Onickel is a freelance writer. He is currently working on a history of anti-Semitism for high school students.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274262/aoc-and-concentration-camps-harry-onickel

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