Tag Archive for: terrorism

‘Dinah’s Revenge’: Israelis Interpret Unconventional Strike on Hezbollah in Explicitly Biblical Terms

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The terrorists are now terrified. A day after pagers used by the Iran-backed Lebanese terror group Hezbollah exploded, Hezbollah’s handheld radios exploded, too, killing at least 25 and wounding 450 (the first wave of blasts killed 12 and injured nearly 2,800). Some reports indicate that other electronics used by Hezbollah, such as solar energy systems and computers, also exploded, leaving the terrorists to wonder if any electronic device is now safe. Israel followed up with airstrikes on Hezbollah positions on Friday.

The pinprick attack seems to be the result of a years-long Mossad infiltration campaign, whereby Israel actually manufactured the bomb-laden handheld devices purchased by Hezbollah. The pagers bore the logo of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, which sub-contracted the manufacturing to Hungarian company B.A.C. Consulting, which in turn appeared to be a shell company created by Israeli intelligence, according to The New York Times. All of this was in response to Hezbollah’s decision to invest in low-tech pagers to evade Israel’s high-tech communications surveillance.

Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, refuted the claim, made by Israel’s enemies and parroted by Western media, that Israel’s actions risk escalating the current conflict. “It’s been a regional war. It’s been a seven-front war that Iran has been waging against Israel through all of its proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, and from Iran itself,” she said. “The question just becomes, how are the different fronts going to develop?”

“In Lebanon, we’ve seen a massive escalation in the missile attacks on Israel by Hezbollah over the past couple of weeks, where we’ve been seeing over 100 missiles shot into Israel a day,” Glick explained on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “The landscape has changed over the past year in northern Israel because they’ve destroyed large swaths of our forests. … The people have been refugees. They’ve been out of their homes since mid-October. And when they get back, you’re going to have dozens and dozens of homes in their communities … That just no longer exist.”

The most significant phrase there is, “when they get back.” Israel’s seven-front war against Iran and its proxies will not be over until its citizens can return to their homes in peace, and that hasn’t happened yet. But Israel is contemplating what it would take to implement that vision.

“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told soldiers on Wednesday — apparently a new phase that will involve more aggressive operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“We’re not finished with Gaza,” but “we’re in a multi-front war. There’s nothing we can do about it,” Glick noted. “As a maneuver force, the Israel Defense Forces is quite small. So it means that you have to scale back your operations in Gaza in order to have the forces that you need in order to carry out a conventional battle in South Lebanon. … It’s a lot of juggling of the forces and trying to prevent exhaustion of the forces as well, and of our reservists.”

However, she added that “Israel’s economy is much stronger now than it was in previous wars, so that we’re able to withstand prolonged battles. But it’s very difficult and it demands a massive sacrifice from the people.”

“We have to win,” Glick insisted.

On this point, Israel’s critics disagree. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted that the pager attack “clearly and unequivocally violates international law.” This is a telling response to a targeted strike against only members of a terrorist group. “What could be more discriminating than the equivalent of an M80 going off in the pockets of terrorist operatives who were hand-selected by their own leadership? Footage of these devices going off indicates that even bystanders who were mere feet away from these explosions experienced little more than shock,” wrote National Review’s Noah Rothman.

“Of course, Israel’s detractors would object as vociferously to an incursion into Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River [out of what should be a demilitarized zone] as they have to Israel’s use of subterfuge to disable as many individual Hezbollah fighters as possible,” Rothman added. “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the problem Israel’s critics hope to remedy is Israel’s petulant insistence upon its own existence.”

Glick argued that Vice President Kamala Harris shares this view. “Kamala Harris has made very clear that, when she says she supports Israel’s right to defend itself, what she means is that she supports our ability to intercept missiles en route to Israel,” she said. “And, if we miss from time to time, well, you know, tough luck. But she does not support Israel defending itself by defeating its enemies.”

For Israel’s part, public resolve for victory and exhaustion with international criticism seem to have resulted in both a revival of gallows humor and “an extraordinary religious awakening,” as Glick described it. “Even in pop music, the songs that everybody’s singing, they all have biblical allusions. Many of them sound more like prayers than rock songs.”

“There was a lot of intolerance on the Left in the 10 months that preceded the invasion, where they were trying to banish Judaism from the public squares,” she said. “I don’t think that that could happen anymore. … People are realizing that what happened on October 7th happened because we’re Jewish. And, if we want to withstand this challenge to our survival, then we do it as Jews.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted “a stream of people … after these explosions took place, making references to biblical occurrences,” particularly to Genesis 34.

“It was very funny,” responded Glick. “You wouldn’t have seen this in the past, but I started getting on all these WhatsApp groups and seeing on Twitter everybody writing ‘Genesis 34’ and calling this campaign ‘Dinah’s Revenge.’”

In Genesis 34, a Canaanite prince named Shechem raped Jacob’s daughter Dinah (Genesis 34:2), an action the biblical account clearly condemns (Genesis 34:7). Jacob’s sons tricked the entire city into being circumcised (Genesis 34:13-17). “On the third day, when they were sore,” Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, slaughtered every male in the city (Genesis 34:25). Jacob prophetically condemned their disproportionate vengeance both then and later (Genesis 34:30, 49:5-7), but it did frighten the idolatrous Canaanites (Genesis 35:6) and foreshadow the future conquest of the land.

The episode bears a number of parallels to the recent Hezbollah explosions. On one level, an isolated Israel struck at thousands of national and religious enemies through an elaborate ruse. On a more subtle level, many of the exploding pagers, often kept in pants’ pockets or waistbands, resulted in leg injuries, suggesting that a substantial number of Hezbollah militants may been involuntarily circumcised or worse in the blasts.

Israel’s renewed interest in religion parallels that seen in the U.S. after 9/11. However, while vengeance is sometimes appropriate for a nation, the gleeful celebration of it is at odds with the spirit of the Torah, which commands that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

Israel’s spiritual restoration will not be complete until they recognize Jesus as their Messiah and experience true repentance and circumcision of the heart (Deuteronomy 10:16, 30:6). Through the prophet Zechariah, Yahweh foretold a time when “I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn” (Zechariah 12:10).

As spiritual descendants of Abraham, let us pray for God to fulfill this promise, that “the natural branches” may “be grafted back into their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24).

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Expert: Biden-Harris Admin’s Weakness Has Compounded Israel-Hezbollah Crisis

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As the growing conflict between Israel and the Lebanon-based Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah reached an uneasy calm Sunday morning following a ferocious exchange of missile fire, a military expert is warning that the threat of a broader war breaking out at Israel’s northern border is due to the pattern of weakness shown by the Biden-Harris administration and the United Nations.

The looming danger of a full-blown war breaking out between Israel and Hezbollah — with Iran continuing its war drum beat — has been hanging over the Jewish state for weeks since senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed in Beirut by an Israeli airstrike in July. On Sunday, around 100 Israeli warplanes struck targets in southern Lebanon in an attempt to minimize an impending Hezbollah attack. The terrorist group was reportedly still able to launch “hundreds of rockets and drones aimed at military bases and missile defense positions” in northern Israel. One Israeli soldier and three Hezbollah terrorists were killed in the exchange. An Israeli military spokesman stated that “very little damage” had occurred within Israel as a result of the Hezbollah attack.

It remains unclear if Sunday’s hostilities will lead to Israel being pulled into a full-scale war along its northern border in addition to its ongoing war in Gaza against Hamas. Since October 8 of last year, when Hezbollah began its campaign of rocket fire into Israel following Hamas’s October 7 surprise attack, 26 Israeli civilians and 23 soldiers have been killed in northern Israel, with responding Israeli airstrikes killing around 400 Hezbollah terrorists and approximately 100 civilians.

Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), who served with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during his over 25 years in the U.S. Army before retiring as a lieutenant colonel, joined Monday’s “Washington Watch” to unpack the root causes of the ongoing conflict.

“What I see strategically happening [is that] Israel [is] deterring a major response both from Hezbollah and Iran,” he observed. “You’ll notice that Iran has not launched their response as well. So I believe that Israel has actually started their strategic surgical strike campaign against Hezbollah. They’re going after weapons systems. They’re going after the leaders. They’re going after the critical supplies. So I believe this is a long-term campaign that they are running with these surgical strikes — not all at once — timed against threats.”

Self, who deployed to Grenada, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Qatar as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, went on to contend that the weakness shown by the Biden-Harris administration, as well as the incompetence of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), has compounded the conflict.

“I blame a lot of this on the weakness of the Biden administration,” he underscored. “Why do we have a third of our Navy in the Middle East focused on Israel and Gaza and Hezbollah? It’s because the weakness of the Biden administration caused this. And so we’ve pulled naval assets out of the Pacific where our primary adversary is — China. So this is a disaster all the way around in the making. I hope that we can settle this fast. We can get Hezbollah to move north of the Litani River, which is where UNIFIL is supposed to keep them. Once again, we’re seeing the U.N. fail in their mission, just like they did in Gaza. UNIFIL is not keeping Hezbollah north of the Litani River to give that buffer zone to Israel. We need to establish that line at the Litani River. We need to use our assets to back up Israel and allow Israel to defend itself.”

Self concluded by arguing that a Harris-Walz administration would likely continue a hands-off approach to Iran, which launched an unprecedented missile and drone attack against the Jewish state in April and is the primary financial backer of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.

“The Biden-Harris administration has shown that it leans toward Iran,” he insisted. “It has coddled them, just like the Obama administration has given them billions of dollars. We don’t enforce the sanctions on their oil. We coddle Iran under the current administration. I have no doubt that the Harris administration, should it happen … will do that in spades. They will double down on that, because we have two truly committed socialist communists on the Democratic ticket today. Make no mistake about it. I take Harris at her word. I take Waltz at his word. They for years have established their bona fides, their credentials in socialist communist policies.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Israel Braces for Expected Iranian Counterstrike

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Nearly two weeks later, Iran has yet to launch an expected counterstrike after Israel eliminated two terrorist leaders in late July. “It appears that Iran and its terror proxies are calculating exactly how they want to strike Israel,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) suggested on Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill.” Nevertheless, pieces are moving rapidly on the Middle Eastern chessboard, as Iranian, Israeli, and American forces move into position.

The Israelis “don’t know exactly what kind of response Iran’s going to have,” Israel-based reporter Chris Mitchell said Monday on “Washington Watch.” “Could it be symbolic? Could it be much bigger than it was on April 13th and 14th when they fired 50 combinations of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, UAVs, and drones?”

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have brought us closer to that scale of conflict, because we already have regional wars in Europe and the Middle East. And again, that’s because they put more pressure on our allies and are so timid and halting in defense of America’s interests, um, that our adversaries like Iran and its terror network, or Russia or China, think that now is the time to go for the jugular, to achieve the ambitions that they’ve long held.

The Middle East is “a tinderbox,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on “This Week on the Hill.” “One wrong move or lack of leadership by the United States, a lack of resolve … could have devastating consequences.”

American leadership requires “more than just words,” Johnson added. “We’ve got to back it up with action. And our adversaries need to understand that the United States Congress, the United States military, [and] the American people are ready and resolved to act in our interest at any moment.”

Johnson added that “it’s not just foreign troops and foreign countries, our allies,” who are in harm’s way. “It’s our own troops. We’ve already lost a couple this week, tragically.” Earlier this year, a drone strike by Iran-backed militias killed three U.S. service members and wounded 34 at a military base in Jordan.

The U.S. military is currently moving more assets into position. The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group is currently stationed in the Gulf of Oman off the Iranian coast, while the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike group hurries from the South China Sea to join it. The U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Group arrived in the eastern Mediterranean in June.

“I hope we’re doing everything possible. I am heartened to know that we’ve got so many of our naval assets surrounding Israel in that close proximity. I think that is having the deterrent effect upon Iran,” said Johnson.

However, “I don’t know at all times whether the administration is doing what Congress has duly enacted, that is, giving Israel all of the support, the weapons, the munitions that it desperately needs,” Johnson pointed out. “I’ve had some very difficult conversations, very tense conversations, with White House officials in recent days to ensure that every single weapon system that we intend to be there for Israel is indeed being delivered. … I can’t tell you with 100% certainty whether they’ve done that or not, but we’re working on it.”

Cotton expressed concern that “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have brought us closer” to a broader-scale conflict because they “put more pressure on our allies” and tend to be “so timid and halting in defense of America’s interests.” This projection of American weakness may embolden “our adversaries like Iran and its terror network, or Russia or China, [to] think that now is the time to ‘go for the jugular,’” he said.

“China has been increasingly aggressive … because they believe the time is right to achieve their decades-long ambition to replace America as the world’s dominant superpower,” insisted Cotton. “Since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office, they feel like it’s open season on America’s interests. …The dictator that runs China and the Communist Party think that, if Kamala Harris is president, then they have a four-year window to seize their decades long ambition to reclaim Taiwan.”

“Ultimately, that would be a disaster for the United States of America of the highest magnitude,” he continued. “Not only would it lead to almost certain global recession, if not depression, but it could completely unravel the security alliances that the United States has built and that have kept us safe for 80 years.”

With regard to Russia, they invaded “because President Biden … didn’t provide Ukraine the weapons they needed’ when they needed those weapons,’” Cotton explained. “What Ukraine needs is the weapons to conduct full combined arms warfare … and then you can begin to see them put enough pressure on Russian troops … that I think Putin will feel compelled to sit down at the negotiating table.”

Cotton argued that a second Trump administration would provide the best conditions for victory in the Middle East. “With President Trump, we had peace and stability around the world because our enemies were scared of America. No one is scared of Joe Biden. And, of course, no one would be scared of Kamala Harris, who is not a credible commander-in-chief.”

To support this declaration, Cotton pointed to the Biden-Harris administration’s current posture towards Israel and Iran. “Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, rather than warning [Iran] about the ferocious retaliation they would face and therefore deterring these strikes in the first place, is again putting more pressure on Israel than it is on Iran,” he said. “It’s another example of the failed Biden-Harris policy of appeasement and weakness” that might provoke a regional or even broader conflict.

“We all pray and hope that it doesn’t come to that,” Johnson underscored, “and that the White House will stand strong, that Iran will think rationally about their own interest and the interest of everybody in the region and the whole world. … Let’s de-escalate this instead of instead of escalating it. We need to be in prayer for that as well.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: America’s Persian fifth column

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘The History of Kamala Harris’ by Geoffrey B. Higginbotham, Major General, USMC (Ret.)

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Many of our readers sent us a link to a column written by Geoffrey B. Higginbotham, Major General, USMC (Ret.) on the history of the Harris family and of Kamala and her husband Doug Emhoff.

It was published on March 13, 2021 in Government in Exile.

Here are Marine General Higginbotham’s words.

The History of Kamala Harris

For your knowledge and interest about the Biden VP.  Here is a timely editorial that exposes the hidden background of Kamala Harris from the Combat Veterans for Congress Political Action Committee that is posted here with permission of the author. CVFC PAC supports the election of US military combat veterans to the US Senate and House of Representatives. The editorial begins:

Kamala Harris’ father was an avowed Marxist professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Both of Harris’ parents were active in the Berkeley based Afro-American Association; Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were the heroes of the Afro-American Association.

The group’s leader, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), mentored two young Afro-American Association members, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; they created the Maoist inspired Black Panther Party which gained strong support from Communist China; the Black Panther Party served as the model for creation of the Black Lives Matter Marxist organization Khalid al-Mansour subsequently went on to arrange financing and facilitated for Barack Hussein Obama to be accepted as a
student to matriculate at Harvard Law School.

Following her graduation from college, Harris returned to California and subsequently became the mistress of the 60-year-old married Speaker of the California Assembly, Willie Brown, Jr. Brown’s political campaigns were supported and funded by Dr. Carlton Goodlett, the owner of The Sun Reporter and several other pro-Communist newspapers.

Brown was elected as Mayor of San Francisco, and strongly endorsed Harris’ Marxist political philosophy; he guided Harris’ political rise in California politics, leading to her election as California’s Attorney General. Willie Brown, Jr. was a well-known long-time Communist sympathizer. Willie Brown, Jr. was initially elected to public office with the substantial help of the Communist Party USA.

Today, Willie Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area.

While serving as San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris mentored a young San Francisco Radical Maoist activist, Lateefah Simon, who was a member of the STORM Revolutionary Movement; Simon currently chairs the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board. Simon has always been close friends with the founder of Black Lives Matter Marxist Domestic Terrorists, Alicia Garza, as well as STORM member and avowed Communist, Van Jones. Harris has been openly and aggressively supporting Black Lives Matter Marxists; Kamala Harris is still closely associated with Maoist Lateefah Simon and Marxist Alicia Garza.

Kamala Harris’s sister Maya Harris was a student activist at Stanford University. She was a closely associated with Steve Phillips, one of the leading Marxist-Leninists on campus and a long-time affiliate with the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a pro-Chinese Communist group.

Phillips came out of the Left, and in college he studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin, and maintained close associations with fellow Communists. Phillips married into the multi billion dollar Sandler family of the Golden West Savings and Loan fortune. He funded many leftist political campaigns, and the voter registration drives in the Southern and South Western states in order to help his friend, Barack Hussein Obama, defeat Hillary Clinton. Phillips has been a major financial sponsor for Kamala Harris’s political campaigns for various California elective offices.

Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff works for the law firm DLA Piper, which “boasts nearly 30 years of experience in Communist China with over 140 lawyers dedicated to its ‘Communist China  investment Services’ branch. He was just appointed to Professor at Yale to school future lawyers in the fine points of Communism. When she was elected to the US Senate, Kamala Harris appointed a Pro-Communist Senate Chief of Staff, Karine Jean-Pierre. Jean-Pierre was active with the New York-based Haiti Support Network. The organization worked closely with the pro-Communist China/Communist North Korea Workers World Party and supported Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the far-left Communist former president of Haiti and the radical Lavalas movement.

Fortunately for Harris, but potentially disastrous for the Republic, elected office holders are not subject to the security clearance process. If the FBI did a Background Investigation on Kamala Harris, she never would have passed, because of her 40-year close ties with Marxists, Communists, Maoists, and Communist China. Harris would never have been approved for acceptance to any of the 5 Military Service Academies, been appointed to a US Government Sub-Cabinet position, or would have been approved to fill a sensitive position for a high security defense contractor. Yet, since Joe Biden was elected, Harris could be a heartbeat away from being President.

The US constitutional Republic is being threatened by the People’s Republic of Communist China (PPC) externally, and by their very active espionage operations within the United States. The People’s Republic of Communist China (PPC), with 1.4 billion people, is governed by the 90 million member Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that has been working with Russia to destroy the US Constitutional Republic for over 70 years.

If the American voters read the background information (in Trevor Loudon’s article) on Kamala Harris, they would never support her election as Vice President of the United States. Joe Biden is suffering from the early onset of dementia and will continue to decline in cerebral awareness; he will never be able to fill out a four-year term of office. Since Biden was elected, the Socialists, Marxists, and Communist who control Kamala Harris, are planning to enact provisions of the 25th Amendment, in order to remove Joe Biden from office, so Harris can become the first Communist President of the United States.

Since Biden was elected, because Biden would not be up to it, Kamala Harris would lead the effort to appoint very dangerous anti-American Leftist, Communist, Socialists, and Marxists to fill highly sensitive positions in the Washington Deep State Bureaucracy. She would fill all appointive positions in the US Intelligence Agencies, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Department of Defense, in The Justice Department, the Department of State, the FBI, the CIA, most cabinet positions, the National Security Council, and in the White House Staff.

American voters must alert their fellow Americans that Kamala Harris is a very serious National Security threat to the very survival of the US Constitutional Republic; she has been a fellow traveler of Marxists, Communists, Maoists, Socialists, Progressives, and Chinese Communists for over 35 years. President Trump had much more background information on Kamala Harris than we presented here, and he was correct, when he accused Kamala Harris of being a Communist subverter.

Geoffrey B. Higginbotham
Major General, USMC (Ret.)

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EDITORS NOTE: This Government in Exile column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

2 Terrorist Leaders Assassinated in 24 Hours

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In less than 24 hours, two prominent terrorist leaders in the Middle East met separate, violent, and sudden ends. Senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr died Tuesday in an Israeli air strike in Beirut, Lebanon. Around 2 a.m. on Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, died in Tehran, Iran from an explosive device planted in his safehouse months earlier. Israel has not claimed credit for the second strike, but it could be interpreted as a strategy to bring the Gaza war to a conclusion by eliminating the terrorist leadership.

The strikes came three days after a rocket fired by Hezbollah struck a soccer field in northern Israel, killing 12 children in a Druze community. Netanyahu had not yet concluded his trip to the U.S., but when the news broke he rushed back to Israel “and had been ensconced with his cabinet basically since he landed,” described Israeli security expert Caroline Glick on “Washington Watch.”

Fuad Shukr

The first strike came against Shukr, “the Hezbollah chief of staff of their terror forces in Lebanon,” said Glick. “He was responsible for all their precision guided missiles and for all of their missile strikes against Israel,” including the deadly soccer strike.

Shukr has also been wanted by the United States for four decades for his role in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members. “He’s been a known terrorist for decades,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch,” with a “$5 million bounty on his head by the United States.”

“That has to be a setback for Hezbollah in their work against Israel,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins noted on “Washington Watch.” “He’s an operational leader. This is quite significant. This is going toward the head of the snake.”

Ismail Haniyeh

That night, 900 miles away, a bomb exploded in a safehouse of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), where Hamas’s political leader Haniyeh was staying in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. The bomb was apparently planted months beforehand, remained undetected, and was remotely detonated. “When you go to Tehran … Iran is the head of the snake,” Perkins added.

“Israel is not taking credit for the Haniyeh strike,” Glick observed. “It is taking credit for the Hezbollah strike. But that’s a distinction that may or may not make that much of a difference, because obviously it’s being attributed to Israel.” Indeed, Perkins acknowledged that “the Iranians have responded that it is their duty to take revenge against Israel for this hit.”

Reuters and several other media outlets described Haniyeh as “the more moderate face of Hamas” in a poorly concealed jab at Israel for their suspected role in his death. However, after scorching criticism, Reuters quietly amended its original headline, although the article still calls Haniyeh “moderate” and “relatively pragmatic.”

Haniyeh joined Hamas at the terrorist group’s founding in 1987, became prime minister in Gaza in 2006, where Glick noted “he served for many years as the terror master on the ground,” including through the group’s bloody coup in 2007, and became chief of the group’s politburo in 2017. In 2019, he relocated from Gaza to Qatar to minimize his own personal danger.

Haniyeh endorsed donations to Gaza as “financial jihad,” led chants calling for “Death to Israel,” and celebrated the October 7 massacres as they occurred on video. In January, he proclaimed, “We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it.” “You’ll never convince me he didn’t have anything to do with October the 7th,” Graham declared. “He was … in Iran … paying homage to the new Iranian president … and during the swearing in, they were chanting, ‘Death to Israel, death to America.’” Such is the so-called “moderate” face of Hamas.

Haniyeh’s assassination was “humiliating for the Iranian regime,” wrote the National Review editors, “as it means they allowed a leader of one of their proxy groups to be killed right under their noses when he was supposed to be under their protection.”

Assuming the assassination was carried out by Israel, it “sends a strong message to Tehran that no one is going to be under your shelter that we [can’t] eliminate,” suggested Perkins. “The Israeli intelligence is remarkable and able to track these individuals.”

“This shows that Israel can basically take out anybody any time it wants to in Iran. So it’s not only intelligence capability, it’s also operational capability on the ground in Iran,” Glick agreed. “He wasn’t in a major hotel. He was being hidden, effectively. And he was assassinated while under the protection of the IRGC.” As a result, “now they’re more under the gun to stand down against Israel and to accept our demands.”

Resolved to Win

“What we saw on Tuesday in Beirut and in Tehran, again, is going to act to stabilize the political situation and Israel still further, perhaps expand the governing coalition,” predicted Glick. “Over two-thirds of Israelis say that the only important thing is victory. It’s more important than national unity. It’s more important than anything. We need to win this war.”

Uniting Israelis behind a victorious strategy is important to Netanyahu’s government because “a very restive leftist minority has been trying to undermine the stability of the government for the year-and-a-half before October 7th,” Glick explained. “And then, with a short respite of about three or four months at the beginning of the war, they went back to trying to overthrow the government.”

What is holding Israelis together right now is their common sense of purpose, driven by the fact that they are at war along seven fronts. “This idea that there’s this tit-for-tat going on and that we’re not already at war … is part of a word game that is being led really by the United States under the Biden-Harris administration to try to portray this as some sort of … secret assault on Israel by Iran and its proxies,” complained Glick. “We’re at war.”

“Israel has been under continuous attack for the past nine months from Hezbollah and Lebanon, and obviously from Hamas, and from the Houthis, and from Iran, and from Iran’s militias in Iraq and in Syria, and in Judea and Samaria, and so on and so forth,” she continued. So, it’s “remarkable that … the United States keeps saying, ‘Well, we don’t want [certain responses] if Israel is attacked this way or that.”

Glick compared the situation to America’s own “total war” experience in the previous century. “Nobody ever asked, after any [discrete] battle in Europe in World War II — or in the Pacific, or in any battle in any war — ‘Okay, so now they attacked you. Are you going to do something?’ We’re at war. Of course we’re going to do something. We haven’t won yet!” she said. “There’s this whole effort to try to deny reality when it relates to the fact that Israel is in an ongoing regional war against Iran and all of its regional proxies.”

The targeted assassinations suggest a new phase in Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies, one that may evade harassment by the Biden administration. “We’ve been at war,” Glick repeated. “It’s important to be on offense. It’s important to restore Israel’s position.” With sudden, targeted strikes against terrorist leaders, Israel can regain the initiative, avoid American badgering about “red lines,” and keep their enemies on the back foot.

“Israel has a policy,” said Graham. “We will hunt you down — no matter what you do, no matter how long it takes — we’re coming after you if you try to kill Israelis.” Israel seems increasingly eager to fulfill that promise sooner rather than later.

Only three weeks earlier, Israel successfully eliminated Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s chief of staff in Gaza, striking one more name off the shrinking cast of characters around Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar. “Were Israel to eliminate Sinwar, coupled with the killings of Haniyeh and Deif, it would be easier for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to claim that Israel has effectively decapitated Hamas, making it more plausible to declare victory and exit Gaza to focus on the threat from Hezbollah and Iran itself,” proposed the National Review.

Israel inching closer to victory does not mean the threat is reduced — quite the opposite. “I would have to imagine there’s an anticipation of a retaliatory strike by Iran, or at least through one of their proxies,” imagined Perkins. “Israel has always been the most threatened country,” Glick responded. “Certainly, over the past 10 months, Israeli embassies, consulates throughout the world have been subjected to threats and to attacks, whether by radical leftists or Islamists, on the streets, and in London, and in other places.”

One particular vulnerability is “Israel’s athletes now in the Olympics,” she added, who “have already been under [threat] since the very outset of the games last week.” Israel recently augmented their “unprecedented amount of security” by “giving a personal bodyguard to every Israeli athlete.” There is a historical precedent for a heightened threat environment at the Olympics. In 1972, Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes in a terror attack at the Olympic games in Munich. The threat to Israeli athletes will continue beyond the Olympics into the Paralympics, “where Israel tends to win a lot of gold medals because we have so many wounded [military] veterans,” said Glick.

Despite the ongoing threats, Israel has demonstrated the proper — and successful — way to counter the violent hostility of Iran’s anti-Israel, anti-Western regime and its terrorist proxies. Israel has targeted those responsible for murdering its citizens. It has not been deterred by the porous international boundaries or nice distinctions between entities, which its enemies ignore. It identified the head of the snake and cut it off, sending a signal that it has the means, motive, and opportunity to do more. If America wants to deter Iranian aggression and Islamist terror in the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world), its leaders should take note.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: IDF Soldiers Show Compassion To Those In Need

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

What Comes Next for War—Torn Israel?

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Part 1: Perspectives on Israel is the first in a special, multi-part series on Israel brought to you by Lt. Gen (Ret.) William Boykin and Lela Gilbert.

Today — in mid-summer 2024 — Israel has been in a state of war for more than nine months. The battle continues in the Gaza Strip, where Israel battles Iran-funded Hamas terrorists after their horrifying October 7 atrocities against Israeli civilians. At the same time, the Lebanon border is aflame, as another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, continues to launch thousands of rockets and missiles into Israel.

From north to south, Israel’s civilian neighborhoods are targeted, deadly explosions persist, and sirens continue to wail periodically across Israel.

As writers and observers, both of us share a deep concern for Israel and enjoy the company of many long-time friends there. However, even after decades of paying close attention to both Israel’s triumphs and travails, the shocking news reports on October 7, 2023 took us — and most of the world — by surprise.

When horrific violence shattered the peace that day, it exposed the most shocking Israeli intelligence failure in the Jewish State’s history. From elite political leadership in Jerusalem to young military recruits in the south of the country, it was only a small number of Israel Defense Forces females who observed sufficient preparatory work by Hamas to grasp what was about to happen. Their warnings were tragically overlooked.

And in the early morning of October 7, unimaginable atrocities were meted out to the civilian population of Israel. And for hours there was virtually no Israeli response.

Islamist terrorists swarmed like crazed beasts into sleepy Israeli communities along the Gaza border. The invaders seemed intoxicated with hatred and lust. Horrifying phone videos and proud messages from the terrorists to their parents revealed that the bloodthirsty invaders did not simply murder Israelis. In orgies of rape, they ravaged and torturously murdered women, girls and babies; castrated males, violently butchered and beheaded children in front of their parents, set entire families on fire and locked them into blazing infernos. In innumerable vicious atrocities, Hamas slaughtered more than 1,200 innocents.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported:

“In an act of war, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, entering communities near the Gaza Strip — killing hundreds of civilians, taking hostages (including young children and elderly people), and firing thousands of rockets and missiles at cities across the country. More than 1,200 Israelis were murdered, thousands wounded and hundreds of people were taken hostage. In a horrific scene at a music festival, Hamas shot into the crowd and killed at least 260 people and they also grabbed as many hostages as they could. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned of a ‘long and difficult war’ ahead and called for a mass mobilization of army reserves.”

Islamists gleefully celebrated October 7’s brutalities across the region. And on October 8, Hezbollah’s Iran-funded Lebanese terrorists began firing rockets and missiles into Israel from Lebanon. In response, nearly 100,000 civilians in Israel’s north fled their homes, evacuating en masse. To this day they continue to endure nearly a year of displacement. Meanwhile, full-fledged war looms between Israel and Lebanon.

In an unprecedented attack on April 13, Iran directly launched rockets and missiles into Israel. As reported by Foreign Affairs:

“The volley of attacks and counterattacks between Iran and Israel in the first two weeks of April drastically changed the strategic landscape in the Middle East. On April 1, an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus had killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, including two generals. Two weeks later, Iran retaliated with a barrage of drones and missiles, almost all of which were intercepted. Israel swiftly responded with its own drone and missile attack on an airbase in Iran. The exchange exposed and highlighted the shadow war the two countries have been fighting for more than a decade into the open.”

From then until today, uncertainty prevails. The fighting in Gaza grinds on, leaving behind a trail of destruction. At the same time, Israelis face the very real possibility another war with Lebanon. In early July, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Hezbollah, “Whoever harms us is marked for death.” He issued this warning after the Shiite terrorist group fired 200 rockets and drones into Israel.

On July 16, Tablet Magazine reported:

“Netanyahu’s government has been under increasing political pressure to find a way to allow the estimated 70,000 Israelis who fled Hezbollah’s missiles and shelling there and have been living in hotels and temporary shelters to return home. The depopulation of the north near Lebanon and parts of southern Israel near Gaza has hurt Israel’s economy and depressed morale.”

The U.S. has been involved in the defense of Israel, its greatest Middle East ally. However, President Biden’s support for Israel has waned somewhat as the U.S. election approaches, due to wavering support from his political party.

Joe Biden won his ticket by cobbling together a coalition of different groups under the big Democratic tent, but today his electoral strategy is unpopular. It is fracturing the Democratic Party, according to Wa’el Alzayat, the head of a Muslim advocacy organization. “And it’s not just Arabs or Muslims,” Alzayat explains the rejection of many potential Biden voters, “You’re seeing progressives, young voters, Black voters, liberal Jewish voters or progressive Jewish voters. This is a pretty good segment of the party.”

Against this backdrop, an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at an Pennsylvania election rally took place on July 14 — just hours before the Republican National Convention began in Milwaukee. His head still bandaged from the grazing bullet wound, Trump was greeted there by an overwhelming and emotional welcome.

Following Trump’s attempted assassination, both serious questions about the security arrangements at the Pennsylvania rally venue and a surge of support for Trump are considerable. At the same time, the uncertainty surrounding President Biden’s health and capacity to serve another term in office continues to increase.

Against this U.S. political backdrop, Israel’s war grinds on. Hoping to encourage further U.S. support for Israel’s war Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with President Biden in Washington D.C. on July 22. He will also address a joint session of Congress on July 24.

Today’s political stakes for all concerned parties — including Israel — could not be higher. As FRC’s Lt. General (Ret.) William Boykin explains:

“If the United States does not provide the necessary support for Israel, the Jewish State’s chances of fighting a war that they cannot win are significant. That is not to say that America is or should be the only nation in the world supporting Israel in its present conflicts or the sole source of the humanitarian supplies the Israelis need.

“However, when we look at the money that America has squandered on Iran — the same entity today that is funding both Hamas and Hezbollah and their attempts to run Israel into the Mediterranean Sea — it is hard to make a logical case for why we cannot or should not continue to wholeheartedly support Israel.

“The reality is our that president is allowing election-year politics to impact very critical decisions, which will further reduce our standing in the world. Our allies know that Israel is our key strategic partner and closest ally in the Middle East. Any lack of U.S. support for Israel during these difficult days will reflect badly on our country. There is just simply no reasonable excuse for President Biden to not give the Israelis what they need if it can be made available.”

AUTHORS

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin serves as Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.

Lela Gilbert

Lela Gilbert is Senior Fellow for International Religious Freedom at Family Research Council and Fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. She lived in Israel for over ten years, and is the author of “Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. at Second-Highest Threat Level for Terrorist Attack: Expert

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American soldiers abroad and U.S. citizens at home face perilously high odds of suffering a terrorist attack caused by the Biden administration’s policies, a national security expert has revealed. In his estimation, the American homeland stands at the second-highest level of terrorist alert.

His estimation comes days after U.S. European Command (EUCOM), which oversees 83,000 U.S. soldiers across the continent, raised the threat of a terrorist attack over the next week to “Force Protection Charlie,” the second-highest level.

“There are a host of issues that might be at play,” said retired Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis on “Washington Watch” Monday. “Certainly, the Olympics come to mind,” as they start later this month, as well as possible Russian activity in response to U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the Biden administration would give an additional $2.3 billion in taxpayer funding to Ukraine. That comes as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked President Biden for permission to use U.S.-donated Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles to strike deep into the interior of Russia, significantly widening the war.

But, Maginnis warned, the potential to suffer from some form of terrorist attack is far from confined to Americans overseas — and the primary danger comes from uncontrolled illegal immigration.

“Where would you suspect we are right here in the homeland?” asked guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice.

“Probably Charlie trending to Delta,” replied Maginnis.

The force protection levels, from lowest to highest, are: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta.

“We are at a very heightened level, even though it’s not acknowledged by Homeland Security,” said Maginnis, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council and author of the book “Kings of the East: China’s Plan to Eliminate America and Impose a Communist World Order.”

“The risk is high,” he said.

“The southern border has been wide open for a long time. Millions of people have come in” during the Biden administration — an estimated 10 million illegal border crossings, not including unknown gotaways. That includes “many thousands of military-age communist Chinese, many from the Middle East, many from northern Africa — where we don’t have any real friends — and then, of course an odd lot from Eastern Europe that we could very well have bad characters in sleeper cells posted around this country near our critical infrastructure.”

“As we saw on September 11, 2001, it only takes 19 bad dudes to disrupt the entire United States,” said Maginnis.

Potential terrorists continue to swarm over the southern border, a problem that has intensified with each passing month of the Biden administration. Last month, ICE agents arrested eight illegal immigrants from Tajikistan with ties to ISIS in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City. At least two of the potential terrorists had background checks conducted at the southern border by agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but nothing alerted CBP to the men’s nefarious connections — so they were released into the interior of the United States, in accordance with the Biden administration’s standard operating procedure. Another of the men used the CBP One App, created by the Biden administration to expedite the importation of illegal aliens into the U.S., to schedule a smooth entry into the U.S.

“The arrest of eight men affiliated with ISIS in the interior of the United States is enough proof to show that terrorist organizations are, in fact, exploiting our border to possibly carry out an attack on American soil,” wrote a group of Republican congressmen led by House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green (R-Tenn.) to the now-impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Unfortunately, the unacceptable security failures that have allowed individuals with terrorist ties to enter the United States through the Southwest [b]order have become an alarming pattern under this administration.” In addition to the eight Tajikis:

  • An ISIS-affiliated human smuggling ring reportedly brought 400 illegal immigrants into the United States. Only 150 had been arrested as of last week. The whereabouts of 50 of them remained unknown.
  • 48-year-old Mohammad Kharwin, a native of Afghanistan and a suspected member of the terrorist group Hezb-e-Islami (HIG), illegally entered the United States last March 10 near San Ysidro, California. Although he was on the U.S. terrorist watchlist, the information reportedly did not show up on his background check, so agents released him two days later, only to track him down and take him into custody this February.
  • A 2022 George Washington University report on Hezbollah activity inside the United States identified 128 individuals carrying out Hezbollah -related illegal activity in Michigan (55 cases), California (19 cases), North Carolina (16 cases), and New York (15 cases). Of those, 19 offered operational support for Hezbollah, “including as human smugglers, weapons procurers, pre-operational surveillance, and travelers who sought to join the group.”
  • U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered 1,703 people on the U.S. terrorist watchlist since the beginning of the 2021 fiscal year (which began in October 2020): 173 in 2021, 478 in 2022, 736 in 2023, and 316 people so far this fiscal year.
  • Robert Lee, CEO of the energy cybersecurity company Dragos, testified before the Senate last March that it is “a very reasonable assumption” to believe Chinese and Russian sleeper cells have already penetrated the U.S. energy grid in preparation for a future attack. “If they’re not already in key parts of it, I don’t think they’re doing the job very well,” said Lee.

The Biden administration’s soft-on-crime “prioritization of catch, process, and release” at the southern border “presents a grave danger to national security,” the congressmen wrote.

Sleeper cells, which may lay dormant for months or years before engaging in deadly activity, have proven their lethality in every corner of the globe. Last week, a Russian official revealed that “sleeper cells” had carried out the June 23 Islamist terrorist attack on churches and synagogues in Dagestan, which left 22 people dead, including 66-year-old priest Fr. Nikolai Kotelnikov. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the attacks as having “diabolic” origins.

“This is a dangerous time,” Maginnis told Hice.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Israeli Parents Aren’t Willing to Endanger Their Children Just to Help Biden Win Michigan’: Expert

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Joe Biden may think he’s scoring points with his anti-Semitic base, but his Israeli approval rating is probably taking on more water than his Gaza floating pier. For months, the Jewish state has watched the president boast of his “ironclad” support of Israel, only to undermine their war efforts at every turn. It’s “inconceivable” that the Biden White House would keep withholding weapons from Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared this week. But not when you consider that Biden only cares about winning one thing this year — and it isn’t the war against Hamas.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu wouldn’t have given that message if he didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary,” Israeli affairs expert Caroline Glick insisted on “Washington Watch” Wednesday. “And the Biden administration’s response, which was really effectively to have a temper tantrum against the prime minister and insult him in just the most obnoxious ways” shows where their loyalties really lie.

After Netanyahu called out Biden’s munitions delay in a public video, an “enraged” White House retaliated by canceling a meeting with the prime minister on Iran. “… [T]here are consequences for pulling such stunts,” a U.S. official relayed to Axios.

It’s quite a contrast to how the president bends to Ukraine’s every whim, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pointed out. “The Biden administration is telling Ukraine, ‘Yeah, you can go ahead and use our munitions to strike directly into Russia,’ but at the same time tying the hands of our most strategic ally, Israel. How do you square that?” he asked Glick.

You can’t, the senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate replied. The reality is, “The administration is advancing a policy that opposes Israeli victory in this war. They’re willing to allow Israel to defend itself. But the only way that we can defend ourselves is by going on offense and actually defeating our enemies. And that’s something that the White House does not want to countenance — that [it] will not countenance — whether it’s in relation to Hamas or it’s in relation to Hezbollah, which is the looming threat in the North.” And frankly, she pointed out, that’s not just looming, “it’s escalating before our eyes.”

The threat of Hamas, Glick reminds people, is small compared to the danger of Hezbollah in the north. “Israel is being shelled every day, and it’s civilian homes that are being shelled. Over a thousand of them have been destroyed over the months of the Hezbollah missile offensive,” she shook her head. “But it’s not only that. It’s military bases, it’s forest preserves, it’s agriculture. And most important, from a military perspective, it’s also strategic sites in Israel. Just [this week], Hezbollah released drone footage … taking pictures of strategic sites. … So we’re talking about a [grave] threat … given the fact that Hezbollah has 150,000 projectiles pointed at Israel, more if you count their drones, which you should.”

The danger, she warns, rises to a nuclear level with the amount of firepower they can bring to bear in a full-scale war. “This is not theoretical,” Perkins reiterated. “This is happening. It’s been happening since October.” And there will be “no future for Israel as a free and safe nation without addressing this threat.”

A lot of people wonder if the internal shake-up of former Minister of Defense Benny Gantz stepping aside is a cause for concern. Glick reassured people that none of this weakens Netanyahu or Israel. “It doesn’t mean anything in terms of the stability of the government,” she insisted. “The Left and a lot of the people in the United States … want very badly to overthrow Netanyahu. It’s funny because the same forces [have no problem leaving] Hamas in charge of Gaza. So it shows you where their brain is. … So they’re making it seem as though Benny Gantz’s departure from the War Cabinet is going to destabilize the government. But we had a stable 64-member majority coalition making up the government before October 7th and before Benny Gantz came in on October 11th. And that coalition still remains now.”

If you talk to the Israeli people, they still care about the same two things that they did on October 7: national unity and victory in the war. But if the choice is between Benny Gantz staying in the War Cabinet and beating Hamas, the majority, Glick says, want to eradicate the terrorists.

“The majority of Israelis recognize that this is a zero-sum game,” Glick said. “Either we stay alive and they die, or they’re defeated and their ability to kill us is removed, or we’re dead. … There’s no happy middle. … [W]e are facing genocidal foes. They showed that very clearly on October 7th. … Nobody was able to delude themselves into thinking that what happened was something else.”

As for the chaos Biden is causing, the White House’s real priorities are no secret. “I think that the sense among Israelis is that the American election is playing into the American antagonism — meaning, it was one thing when most Israelis trusted Biden and felt that he was our ally in this war, and that he meant it when he said that he had Israel’s back, and that his commitment to Israel’s security was ironclad,” Glick acknowledged. “… But what Israelis have seen over the past three months … is that Biden is openly hostile to Israel’s goal of victory.”

It’s all a very transparent political ploy, she knows. “The widespread sense among Israelis is that what’s motivating him is not some sort of a substantive, understandable, rational disagreement about tactics to reach the common end with Netanyahu, but rather his electoral fortunes. And Israeli parents aren’t willing to endanger their children just to help Biden win in Michigan.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: High-Profile Republicans Set To Appear Alongside Left-Wing Activists At Dark Money-Backed Media Festival

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Terror Threat on U.S. Soil Has Risen Dramatically under Biden, Experts Say

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Amid a rise in terrorist attacks across the globe in the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel, national security experts are warning that the threat of attacks on U.S. soil has risen dramatically even as the Biden administration enacts policies that exacerbate the danger.

In December, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, remarking that before October 7, “we were already in a heightened threat environment.” But since the Hamas attack, he went on, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole other level.” Wray also highlighted the porous southern border as a primary security risk to the country, drawing attention to “a particular network [operating on the southern border]” with “ISIS ties that we are very concerned about.”

In the weeks following President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, he signed an executive order that reversed many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s policies that had tightened the flow of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. As a result, an unprecedented 1.7 million unvetted individuals have crossed into the U.S. interior undetected since then, which is more than were able to sneak in in the entire previous decade.

As Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, explained during Tuesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” this breach could have devastating consequences for national security, especially in light of the security hole left by Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021.

“[T]here are foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS-K in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have been able to take advantage of ungoverned territories in that area, and … the U.S. is not striking them as much [so] that they’ve been able to grow,” he observed. “Chechens and Tajikistanis … in Muslim majority regions of Russia are free to attack. We’ve been seeing the Russian people victimized by some of these groups. They’re on the rise. … [T]he ideology of global jihad and Islamist supremacy under Sharia law isn’t going anywhere.”

Bensman continued, “[W]e’ve had tens of thousands of people from those regions crossing our southern border with very minimal vetting. And that is a significant issue to the homeland because we did kind of crack down on airport traffic and people coming in on legal visas after 9/11 quite a bit. But we haven’t done that much on the southern border for the last three years. And these Tajikistanis — [the] FBI rolled up eight of them in early June — who crossed the southern border … were planning some sort of a bombing attack. That would be the very first time that a group of terrorists — they caught them in three different cities — crossed the southern border to access their American targets on U.S. soil.”

Other senior U.S. officials besides Wray have also raised serious concerns over rising threats. General Erik Kurilla, commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) has highlighted the growing capabilities of Middle Eastern and South Asian terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS), and affiliates like ISIS-K. Former National Counterterrorism Center director Christine Abizaid illustrated “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking in Doha recently. In addition, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged that the “threat level … has gone up enormously” during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week.

The recent Islamist attacks in Africa that have left dozens of Christians dead in Congo and thousands more massacred in Nigeria have also raised the ire of experts, who say that the Biden administration’s lack of focus on combatting terrorism abroad not only has deadly consequences for innocent civilians in foreign lands but will also allow terrorist activity to intensify overseas, which will only increase the danger of that activity eventually filtering into the U.S.

Bensman went on to note that the anti-terrorism policies put in place in the country since 9/11 have proven to be effective, but dangers remain.

“[W]e haven’t been immune from terror attacks … since 9/11,” he acknowledged. “San Bernardino, Boston, New York — there was a truck attack on a bike path there. … They’re not on the scale of 9/11, but the reason that we haven’t had them … is because over 20 years, we got pretty good at counterterrorism. We built up our FBI. We built up all of our federal law enforcement agencies. We started sharing intelligence between agencies. [T]he number of terror plots that we’ve thwarted … are far greater than the successful ones. The threat is not diminished. It’s just that we have stopped an awful lot of them over the last 20 years, and we will probably continue to do that. But they’re still going to get through every now and again.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins further contended that the Biden administration’s “two-tiered system of justice” has caused the American people to lose confidence and trust in the Intel community.

“I think that’s something that we always should be concerned about,” Bensman responded. “When I was in the intelligence business, we underwent a lot of training about what you can and can’t do to make sure that we can maintain the trust of the people we served. I think that there’s still a lot of that going on, but you always have had a mistrust of government power, especially law enforcement power [and] especially surveillance authorities. I think that’s a healthy thing.”

He added, “I hope that they just don’t get sidetracked by political whims, such as, ‘Hey, we need to back off of Islamic terror threats and move all of it over to white supremacy’ and that sort of thing. We can do two things at once. The country’s perfectly capable of juggling several balls at the same time like that.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Putin Rallies China, North Korea, Vietnam Deepening U.S. Tensions

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

VIDEO: Interview with Michael Stürzenberger after he was stabbed numerous times by Muslim migrant

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One of the saddest elements of this interview is how much Michael was concerned about the officer who was also stabbed, but that Michael did not know the officer had died.

The officer even at the time of the interview was already essentially dead, but being kept alive on life support for organ viability, and was declared dead a couple of days later. But Michael’s character and decency really shows in his concern for others after having been savagely stabbed in the face and legs multiple times by an illegal in Germany determined to show how peaceful Islam is.

Michael Stürzenberger interview from Hospital room

This feels a little redundant, but for anyone left on Planet Earth who does not already know, Islam commands its followers to strike at the necks of the unbelievers. It does so in multiple places in the Koran, as well as across the cannon of Islamic scripture.  All of this can be found at the website, The Religion of Peace.

RAIR article can be seen here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved

Pro-Palestinian Protestors and Pride Month Paraders Face ‘Progressive Standoff’

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It’s officially June, which means the celebration of Pride has come out in full swing. Although Pride celebrations this year appear to be a bit more muted, many city streets are still cluttered with numerous festivals and parades rooted in the theme of “inclusion” and “acceptance” of all things gender and sexuality. However, even though such festivities are already rejected by countless Americans, this year the Pride displays seem to have been met with a new foe.

A “progressive standoff” ensued on Sunday as hundreds of LGBT paraders were confronted by hundreds of pro-Palestine protestors during the Philadelphia Pride Parade. The rainbow march was abruptly stopped when their path was blocked off by the anti-Israel crowd, who chanted phrases such as, “No Pride in genocide.” As reported by The Post Millennial, “Drag queens, trans folx, and Pride flag waving persons looked confused as they were unable to proceed down the parade route.”

Police were forced to break apart the two groups as they battled to claim the streets of Philadelphia. In a post on X, one bystander described the scene as “some kind of intersectional civil war.” And considering the somewhat unexpected nature of this controversy, Breitbart News pointed out, “The protest highlights a growing tension between segments of the Democrat Party base who believe that anti-Israel protests should take precedent over other causes like LGBTQ activism.” To that point, Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Strategic Engagement and Biblical Worldview, commented to The Washington Stand, “On one hand, it’s not unusual for a political tribe to have competing priorities.”

He continued, “There are lots of issues in the world, and it’s normal for people who agree in many ways to still have disagreements about tactics or priorities. But what makes this intramural conflict interesting is the awareness that their differences are not superficial.” As Backholm stated, “Many on the Gaza side of this conflict would literally kill the Pride side if they could.”

Interestingly, Backholm noted that while both sides “are united in their disdain for Christianity,” it’s “for totally different reasons.” For instance, he explained, “Palestinians hate Christianity because it allows so much personal freedom that the Pride folks are allowed to exist at all. The Pride team hates Christianity because it doesn’t celebrate what they choose to do with their freedom.”

Since June has only just begun, the question is: Will we see more of these standoffs? As far as Backholm is concerned, it’s entirely possible — especially since pro-Hamas college campus activism is predicted to go into the summer months, as TWS Senior Writer Joshua Arnold reported in May. “College semesters may be winding down, but the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations that have dominated the past month are not,” Arnold wrote, highlighting that not too long ago, Philadelphia saw new campus encampments pop up at Drexel University shortly before their summer term began — a school in close proximity to where last weekend’s events took place.

Regardless of how often these conflicting protests occur, Backholm said, “I suspect the Palestinian protests will always win,” given that, “in political standoffs, the more committed team virtually always wins.” He added, “The rainbow people will not endure actual pain for their cause, the Palestinian side will.”

Backholm predicted that we can also expect to see throughout the month the Left wrestling with how to handle problems of their own making. He expounded, “The challenge for the Left is that their worldview requires them to resolve conflicts by focusing on the identity of the people involved rather than the ideas involved.” He went on to say that “a critical theory framework” means whoever is more oppressed “has a greater right to be heard.” But in the case of Pride versus Palestine, “both the rainbow people and the Palestinian protestors are currently on the Mount Rushmore of oppression,” Backholm said, where “the Left doesn’t know who to listen to and who to ignore.”

From a biblical worldview, Backholm said, “Christians need to understand … that the ideas themselves are always more important than the group identity of the person speaking.” In other words, “We need to evaluate arguments based on how closely they align with truth, regardless of who is speaking, because everyone has the potential to be wrong and everyone has the potential to be right.”

He concluded, “Truth is what matters most,” so it would be wise for believers “to avoid silly games like this.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Pro-Palestine Protestors CLASH With Pride Marchers

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Fight Terrorism, Not Terrorists

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Sounds absurd? Why? All kinds of well-meaning and not so well-meaning people who are alarmed with Islam Mayhem and Murder, Inc. have been proclaiming that their fight is with Islam and not with Muslims. Who knows what motivates these people and how their system of logic runs.

Geert Wilder says that his battle is with Islam, and he does not hate Muslims. No one, please, should take my criticism of Muslims as hating them. I certainly am critical of their belief and feel that Muslims must wake up to the destructive nature of their creed. The Muslims not only need to leave Islam, they owe themselves and the rest of humanity to actively work at putting an end to one of humanity’s most harmful dogmas.

In my thinking, Islam is the problem because there are Muslims who take its holy book, the Quran, as gospel and carry out its divisive and deadly provisions. Without Muslims, Muhammad’s Quran would be just another historic relic sitting on library shelves, next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, gathering dust, and criminals of the world would have to find other instruction manuals to guide their activities.

What good is it to burn the Quran or desecrate it? The fire from burning the Quran only energizes the already zany fanatical believers of Allah to further engage in their world-dismembering acts.

People who keep proclaiming that they have nothing against Islam but that their battle is with Muslim terrorists are an enigma. Perhaps these people are the politically correct, the delusional who rearrange reality to their fancy, or the naïve who are incapable of dealing with facts. These people are either incapable or do not want to see that it is the Muslims, the active jihadists, as well as their masses of supporters who are and remain culprits committing much of what is repugnant and harmful to civilized humanity.

If the fight is with Islam and not with Muslims, then in the interest of fairness, we must apply the same standards to other criminalities.

We should condemn arson, but not arsonists: Rape, not rapists: Theft, not thieves: Murder, not murderers; and all other forms of crimes, but not the people who commit them.

Terrorism has no external reality without terrorists. For as long as there are people who cling no matter how loosely or tightly to Islam, humanity, including Muslims, stands to suffer the consequences. Yet, sadly, many Muslims refuse to recognize the fact that it is their sickly belief system that is at the core of leading them astray and inflicting great harm to all.

It is foolish to wage battle against beliefs that promote mayhem and murder while giving a free pass to those who adhere to those beliefs and carry out their dogma.

“When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.” Quran 8.12

I fully realize that not every Muslim is a card-carrying, hell-bent jihadist. Yet, by being a Muslim, the individual, willingly or unwillingly, directly or indirectly, empowers the zealot jihadist Muslims who live and die to further the cause of Islam.

In what way does your average peaceful Muslim support the work of the not-too-insignificant cadre of Islamist terrorists, you may ask? In multiple ways. For one, by paying his religiously required tax known as Khums (one-fifth of his income) to the imams and mullahs. What do the Islamic clerics do with the funds? They make a very good living by not breaking a sweat day and night, preaching hatred of non-Muslims, and training wave after wave of impressionable young as soldiers of Allah.

These clerical parasites are equal opportunity haters and promoters of violence. They do not limit their campaign to only non-Muslims. They even exhort their just too-happy jihadists to wage war against each other whenever it suits them, and they can get away with it.

Just look at what is happening these days in the lands of the religion of peace. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Bahrain, and even the Islamic showcases such as Egypt and Turkey. Repression and slaughter are in full operation.

Syria’s in-power Alawites and their Shiite allies are engaged in the shocking butchery of the Sunnis, even under the eyes of the impotent United Nations observers. In one recent brutal attack by the Alawite forces of President Bashar Assad, some 90 people, including many children, were murdered.

I hardly need to tally the criminality and horrors of these Muslim-inspired regimes. Peace, tolerance, and respect for others are alien to the followers of Muhammad, no matter which sect they belong to and irrespective of where in the world they live. No sooner in power, in any place, they shamelessly and brutally begin their mayhem and murderous practices.

This primitive chauvinistic creed is custom-made for the savage male, where women are systematically abused in every imaginable way. Not only are women officially worth one-half of a man, but they are also to serve as a man’s property in the tragically ordained manner. Four women to a man in regular marriage and as many women as a man wishes in temporary marriages. Woe upon a woman who thinks of herself as an equal-rights human and violates these Islamic draconian laws. Honor killing awaits the fate of any woman who steps outside Islam’s misogynistic boundaries.

Give the ringleaders of this creed of violence credit. They have perfected their skills at their trade of spreading Islam, the means of making their parasitic living.

These so-called clerics make “good” use of the funds they extract from their followers. For one, they buy the ever-ready-for-purchase politicians to further their cause through legislation that would muzzle freedom of expression by any voice that dares to expose Islam for what it is.

For yet another, with their coffers flush with funds, the clerics enlist lawyers and launch lawsuits to destroy any person who speaks the truth about their barbaric beliefs and practices.

In addition, they honestly report intimidating businesses that fail to toe their line by boycotting their products and services. They force other businesses to withdraw their advertisements from any print or electronic medium that may honestly report the horrors of their beliefs.

Tolerance is a great social virtue that becomes a vice if extended to those who do not practice it and to criminals who take advantage of this noble human attribute. Muslims are the most oppressive and intolerant people in the world, and they justify their intolerance on the teachings of their holy book, the Quran.

The persecution of religious minorities in Islamic states is a legend. Yet, these very intolerant people come to the welcoming Western countries and demand one-sided tolerance from their hosts. Over time, these Muslims increased their demands to the point of aiming to subvert the civilized hosts and transform them into their failed savage system ruled by the Sharia Law.

Remember that Islam operates by stealth when not quite powerful, just as Muhammad did. Then, it gradually builds its power to the point that the soft approach is no longer necessary to subdue others and impose its will.

The stealth soft strategy is presently playing out in the United States. Islam’s tentacles are expanding into the body of this free and welcoming nation. In 2000, there were 1209 mosques in the United States of America. By 2010, the number has almost doubled. By 2021, the number had increased to 2769.

Islam is a bad idea, and Muslims are guilty of living by it and promoting it. Some Muslims take up arms, following the examples of Islam’s founder, Muhammad, in their aim to vanquish the non-Muslims. Other Muslims empower the frontline jihadists by supplying them with material support and manpower. In the same manner that an army can’t fight without the essential logistics supplied to them by civilians, the soldiers of Allah will be incapable of waging their death and destruction campaign without the support of the generality of Muslims. It is long overdue that Muslims be held accountable for the so-called religious belief that controls their actions: actions aimed at destroying anything and anyone non-Muslim.

It is imperative that we see reality and deal with it. No euphemism, no sugarcoating, no politically correct posturing. It is time to abandon all pretenses and place the blame where it belongs. It is the Mayhem and Murder Islam, Inc. that is breeding terrorists. Without Islam, there would be no Islamic terrorists.

©2024. Amil Imani. All rights reserved.

As the ICC Fans ‘Pathetic Lies,’ Israeli Experts Say ‘We Were Gaslighted by [Biden] from the Outset’

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The $300 million boondoggle known as the Gaza pier has been a floating flashpoint ever since President Joe Biden commissioned the project. Now, a few weeks into America’s buoyant humanitarian program, three U.S. soldiers have been injured (one critically) and most convoys of supplies and food have either been ambushed or looted by Hamas terrorists, never reaching its intended civilians.

To be fair, both parties had reservations about the idea, which they aired in a Senate Armed Services hearing back in March. “One of my concerns is security for this operation,” Delaware Democrat Chris Coons said at the time. “Because if the U.S. military is seen to be building and operating it, I think it puts it at greater risk.” On the opposite side of the Capitol, House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) pointed out that “nobody can answer who’s going to provide the security, who’s going to provide the drivers, and who’s going to load and unload stuff?”

Now, less than a month into the “solution” for suffering Gazans, the Biden administration’s insistence that Hamas — not Israel — control the operations there has become an absolute, taxpayer-funded disaster. “… [T]he United States has made it very clear to Israel that it doesn’t want Israel to control [Palestine], including the distribution of food,” Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate, told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “As a result, we had reports last week that Hamas has actually earned $500 million since the beginning of the war by selling the humanitarian aid that the international community insists that Israel be bringing into Gaza. So this entire thing in a way [is] humanitarian relief for Hamas,” she insisted.

“… [T]he United States spent $300 million … to build a pier in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid by sea. And none of the hundreds and hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid that has been brought to that pier has been delivered to anybody in Gaza,” Glick pointed out. … One convoy was commandeered by Hamas and just seized. And every other convoy comes under attack. So it’s all this pathetic lie.”

And it’s all feeding the anti-Israel anger that’s driving bodies like the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable for crimes he’s not committing. “[There are the ICC’s] claims of starvation, which are untrue. … The claims of famine, which are untrue; the claim that Israel deliberately targets civilians for killing, which is untrue. All of these things are geared towards one goal. And that goal is for Israel to be forced to capitulate to international pressure and allow Hamas to survive,” Glick argued. “These are all demands that are being made, all allegations utterly false, that are being waged against Israel because the people who are waging them want Israel to lose this war.”

For all these claims, she pointed out, “There hasn’t been any documented evidence that anybody is starving in Gaza, except for the 128 hostages from Israel that Hamas kidnapped to Gaza on October 7th. So those are the only people we know for certain are starving. Most of the terrorists that Israel has arrested during the course of the war have been fat to obese,” Glick wanted people to know. “So we’re not seeing any privation in terms of food shortages among the members of Hamas that we’re seeing, and we don’t really see it among civilians. They just celebrated the Ramadan … their holiday for holy month. And there were no reported shortages of food for Ramadan. So all of this is just a fabrication, and it’s used in order to foment an Israeli defeat in this war. That’s what it’s all about.”

Perkins believes the entire narrative is being fanned by the ICC and international community to keep Israel from finishing the job against Hamas. It’s the “nefarious mix” of fake news, Glick said, that “all leads to this idea that there’s something criminal about Israel defending itself from the people who committed unspeakable atrocities on October 7th. And, you know, they started the war, they invaded, they massacred 1,200 people in the most sadistic way known to humanity in ways that nobody ever imagined before.”

And yet, she went on, “We were being gaslighted by the Biden administration from the outset. And talk of humanitarian crisis started a week after October 7th, when there was plentiful food and water inside of Gaza. So this is a deliberate fabrication to criminalize Israel and deny us the right to self-defense, much less the right to defeat our enemies. It’s very, very extraordinary.”

It’s escalated to such a point that “you have a prosecutor who has no jurisdiction over Israel … and now he wants to issue arrest warrants against a prime minister, our democratically-elected prime minister and our defense minister, for leading the country in a war for our national survival. … The Germans want to arrest the leader of the Jewish state for defending Israel against modern-day Nazis. That’s an unbelievable statement. And yet, here we are.”

Israel is a much stronger ally than Ukraine and certainly Afghanistan to the U.S., so “you would think we would actually work extra hard to make it easier for Israel,” Perkins pointed out, “but it looks like we’re working extra hard to make it difficult for Israel. And why?”

Incredibly, Glick said, the Biden administration is “unflappable” — even in the face of “the greatest atrocity that mankind has seen since World War II.” Even October’s horrors haven’t moved them “one millimeter from their conviction that the biggest problem is that there’s no State of Palestine for the very people who conducted these atrocities. Don’t forget,” she pointed out, “85% of the Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but in Judea and Samaria as well, support what happened on October 7th. Over 90% of Palestinians said that they are more proud to be Palestinians today than they ever were before October 7th. So these are the people that the White House thinks need to have a sovereign state.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden betrayal is unparalleled in history

RELATED VIDEO: Washington, D.C. Nakba March: “We want to defeat imperialism by Intifada”

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Harvard Prevents Encampment Ringleaders from Graduating after U.S. House Investigation

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The Harvard Corporation prevented 12 seniors from graduating Thursday for their involvement with the illegal protest encampment in support of the terrorist organization Hamas. The decision is a rare instance of campus anti-Semitic activists facing real consequences for their lawbreaking. It only came after significant congressional involvement.

To inflict these real consequences, the Harvard Corporation, which governs the school, made the decision to override their own faculty, in favor of preserving the integrity of “Harvard College’s disciplinary processes,” the university newspaper noted. At a regular meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is usually poorly attended, 115 Harvard faculty turned out to overwhelmingly vote in favor of shielding the anti-Israel protestors from all consequences, and allow the seniors to graduate anyways.

That vote came only three days after the Harvard College Administrative Board had placed 28 students on suspension or academic probation for their involvement with the disruptive pro-terror encampment.

In deciding to overrule the faculty vote, the Harvard Corporation explained that the faculty had simply ignored the Student Handbook, which requires students to be in good standing in order to graduate. “Today, we have voted to confer 1,539 degrees to Harvard College students in good standing,” wrote the corporation. “Because the students included as the result of Monday’s amendment are not in good standing, we cannot responsibly vote to award them degrees at this time.”

While granting that faculty have the right to determine appropriate disciplinary measures for students, Harvard Corporation argued that they didn’t do that. “We respect each faculty’s responsibility to determine appropriate discipline for its students,” they said. “Monday’s faculty vote did not, however, revisit these disciplinary rulings, did not purport to engage in the individualized assessment of each case that would ordinarily be required to do so, and, most importantly, did not claim to restore the students to good standing.”

In other words, the faculty did not argue that the students had not done anything worthy of discipline or that sufficient discipline had already been implemented. They simply declared that the protestors should be immune from the consequences of their actions because it was all for Palestine. It was a political power play.

Acquiescing to this power play would inject more injustice into Harvard’s disciplinary process, protested the corporation. They considered “the inequity of exempting a particular group of students who are not in good standing from established rules, while other seniors with similar status for matters unrelated to Monday’s faculty amendment would be unable to graduate.”

The Harvard Corporation seems to be taking a much harder line against the illegal excesses of pro-Hamas protestors than it did several months ago. This is the same governing board that issued a statement defending Harvard ex-President Claudine Gay before her sudden resignation in early January. Gay faced criticism for refusing before Congress to condemn calls for a genocide of Jews and for widespread plagiarism among her published academic portfolio.

More recently, Harvard executives continued to signal toleration for the anti-Semitic protest. Gay’s replacement, interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber, agreed on May 14 to reinstate suspended protestors and reevaluate the universities investments in exchange for them dismantling their encampment. Harvard University subsequently reinstated over 22 students.

However, the Harvard Corporation seems to have done an about-face after the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee released a report on Friday, which revealed the university had failed to implement the recommendations of its anti-Semitic task force.

House Republicans have held Harvard’s feet to the fire ever since Gay’s disgraceful December testimony, and apparently Harvard got tired of the scathing media attention. It’s relatively easy to defend the indefensible (failing to protect Jews or enforce campus rules) when no one asks any questions. But holding a giant spotlight over the misbehavior quickly makes it awkward for those tasked with defending it. In this case, it took just under a semester for the Harvard Corporation to decide they had had enough.

The Harvard Corporation can now expect to face “a faculty rebellion,” predicted (or promised?) Government Professor Steven Levitsky. An anti-Semitic campus activist group, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (whose name implies the Jews don’t deserve a state), also suggested the encampment might return, saying, “If Harvard won’t live up to their promises, we see no reason to live up to ours.”

The Harvard Corporation previously caved to pro-terror activists because it was afraid of the power of students and faculty. Its new willingness to brave their wrath suggests that it is now more afraid of the power of Congress to keep the spotlight on them if they continue to cave. Even if House Republicans can’t pass conservative legislation through a Democrat-controlled Senate or White House, their investigative power can still have an effect on the behavior of places like Harvard.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Biden ‘Doesn’t Care about Israel. He Doesn’t Care about Peace. All He Cares about Is Staying in Power’

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The war against Hamas has had plenty of plot twists, but the last 48 hours have thrown an already chaotic international scene into even more uncertainty. Not only did Israel’s perpetual tormenter, President Ebrahim Raisi, die in an unexpected helicopter crash, but members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) are trying to arrest both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gazan leaders for “war crimes.”

The death of Raisi, who was aptly nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran,” comes just weeks after Iran launched its first open attack on the Jewish state. After firing 300 drone, ballistic, and cruise missiles toward the Israelis (99% of which were intercepted by a team of allies and the Iron Dome), Raisi claimed, “Iran’s armed forces taught a lesson to the Zionist enemy.” He warned of a “heavier and regrettable response” if Israel retaliated.

Without him at the helm, most experts don’t expect much change in the regime’s posturing — toward the Jewish state or the U.S. “I do not expect any sort of disruption in that field to the extent that it has to do with Iran’s actual support for Hamas and its positioning on the ground,” researcher Hamidreza Azizi told Newsweek. If anything, the Revolutionary Guard’s role could “potentially intensify,” Mideast Gulf Editor Nader Itayim explained on CNBC.

While European leaders expressed condolences, the first Army Green Beret in Congress had quite a different take. “Good riddance,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) posted. “Raisi was a murderous human rights abuser before and during his Presidency. But look for the Iranian regime to blame Israel and the U.S. for an assassination as another excuse to support terrorism.”

“It wasn’t us,” an anonymous Israeli official insisted to Reuters. “The message Israel is sending to the countries of the world is that Tel Aviv has nothing to do with the incident,” another said on his country’s Channel 13.

Meanwhile, the ICC is intent on charging Netanyahu with other crimes he hasn’t committed, including “intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population,” prosecutor Karim Khan said Monday in his formal request for warrants. ““Israel, like all States, has a right to take action to defend its population. That right, however, does not absolve Israel or any State of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and leaders of Hamas’s terrorist organization were also named.

Furious, War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz replied that “the State of Israel is waging one of the just wars fought in modern history following a reprehensible massacre perpetrated by terrorist Hamas on the 7th of October.” He went on, “While Israel fights with one of the strictest moral codes in history, while complying with international law and boasting a robust independent judiciary — drawing parallels between the leaders of a democratic country determined to defend itself from despicable terror to leaders of a bloodthirsty terror organization is a deep distortion of justice and blatant moral bankruptcy.”

Here in the U.S., outraged Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) cautioned the ICC from going forward with the threat. “I will feverishly work with colleagues on both sides of the aisle in both chambers to levy damning sanctions against the ICC” if they proceed, the South Carolinian warned.

“Most importantly, I want the world to know that I, along with my Republican and Democrat colleagues, and members of the Administration engaged the ICC on this issue weeks ago. We were told there would be discussions with Israel before any actions were taken. We stressed that the principle of ‘complementarity’ should be applied in this case. Complementarity requires the ICC to let the nation in question’s legal system move first before any action is taken by the Court.”

Graham said he was told that the investigation “would take months and not weeks, and that there would be meaningful consultation with the State of Israel. Instead of the ICC following through with scheduled consultations with Israel, they announced the warrants. I feel that I was lied to and that my colleagues were lied to. Prosecutor Khan is drunk with self-importance and has done a lot of damage to the peace process and to the ability to find a way forward. Lying prosecutors never bring about just outcomes.”

In the meantime, Hill conservatives and some Democrats are desperately working to get Israel the weapons they need — no thanks to Joe Biden. House leaders still can’t believe that the White House refuses to send munitions to the Jewish state and late last week, they passed the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to force the president’s hand.

“It’s disgraceful and it’s unlawful” to withhold that help from our allies, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Friday’s “Washington Watch.” “But here’s the situation,” he wanted people to know. “The president [is] reading his opinion polls and his radical left base that’s on these college campuses. … [T]hese aren’t your mom and dad’s Democrats. These are far-left anarchists and a very small minority. The president is so far down in the polls, they’re afraid they won’t even be able to bring those people to the table. So this is his [attempt to placate that anti-Semitic base].”

At the end of the day, Burchett pointed out, “He doesn’t care about Israel. He doesn’t care about peace. All he cares about is staying in power and keeping this group of anarchists that are running our country in the White House.” The idea that Congress has to pass a law “to make sure he follows a law that we already passed” is “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” he shook his head.

It’s “shameful,” Hice agreed. And the most absurd part of it all is that the administration is using these weapons as leverage to get Netanyahu to do what they want. “The Biden administration somehow is taking it upon themselves to micromanage a foreign war that’s being conducted by one of our allies.” Frankly, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) quipped, “If Biden had not been so obsessed with restricting Israel to appease his pro-Hamas base, the war likely would have been over by now.”

At the very least, Hice said, passing the bill to send arms to Israel at least shows the American people where the two parties stand. “We don’t support anarchists,” Burchett insisted, “we don’t support terrorists. Yet the Democrat[ic] Party apparently does.” So, if we want to fix this mess, the Tennessean argued, “the American people need to get to the polls. [In 2020,] 20 million so-called evangelical Christians decided to stay home. And that’s [one reason] we’ve got this disaster in the White House.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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POST ON X: You have to see it to believe it: today, the UN lowered its flag in honor of Iran’s mass-murdering President and Foreign Minister. Unbelievable! 

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.