The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.
I don’t think this will endear Biden to the college crowd.
Nearly 200 Palestinians have managed to escape Gaza and obtain approval to travel to Canada — but they had to pay thousands of dollars to smuggle themselves into Egypt.
That avenue is now closed off, due to the Israeli military campaign underway in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
On Monday, Hamas announced that it had agreed to a ceasefire deal brokered by Egypt and Qatar. Israel rejected the deal — which it said contained elements it could not accept — and began its incursion into Rafah, where more than a million Gazans have sought shelter from the war.
Israel faced international backlash on Saturday over the IDF operation in Rafah and its seizure last week of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing.
“We think an offensive on Rafah would be irresponsible. We warn against it,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a webcast event organized by the German newspaper group RND.
“We don’t believe that there is any approach that would not lead in the end to the incredible loss of human life of innocent civilians,” Scholz said, adding that he had told this to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
What the protesters are really calling for.
In February I wrote about the seemingly strange bedfellows of the red-green alliance – red for progressivism and green for Islam – whose values on many issues seem so diametrically opposed and yet they are united in their determination to dismantle the Western civilization they both see as the obstacle to erecting their differing visions of utopian societies.
The institutions have become too restrictive when it comes to controversial speech — and too lax when it comes to punishing rule-breaking
It was only a matter of time before America’s student protests spread to the UK. In Oxford, tents have been pitched on grass that, in ordinary times, no student is allowed to walk on. The ground outside King’s College in Cambridge looks like Glastonbury, complete with an “emergency toilet” tent. Similar camps can be found at UCL, Manchester University and more. There have been no clashes with police, but that may yet come. In Leeds, for example, pro-Palestinian students tried to storm a university building, leading to bloody clashes with security guards.
The federal government is changing its policy around when it would recognize a Palestinian state in response to what it describes as unacceptable positions and actions taken by both the Israeli government and the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza strip.
On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government said it will now consider recognizing a Palestinian state before the terms of a two-state solution are finalized. Until now, Canada’s position has been that it would recognize a Palestinian state only as the last step in such a process.
In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln famously appealed to the “better angels of our nature” as the country descended into civil war. Lincoln’s words expressed a last hope. In the end, it took four bitter years of conflict to create, at Appomattox, the silence in which our better angels could finally be heard. Still, President Lincoln never stopped listening, even in the darkest moments of the conflict, to his own better angels. When it comes to Israel and anti-Semitism, either Joe Biden’s better angels are silent, or he is too deaf to hear them.
Democrats again indulge their activist fringe as another Chicago convention looms.
Campus unrest and a threatened mass protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago are summoning flashbacks to 1968, touching off the irresistible urge to predict a rerun of that year’s Democratic disaster this November. Cooler heads, like Willis Sparks at Gzero Media, note several distinctions between our moment and those that precipitated the late-sixties clash. Which perspective is right? Both are.
A protest encampment set up on the University of Alberta campus was cleared early Saturday morning by Edmonton police.
In an update issued early Saturday, police sad the action “follows repeated notice to encampment participants by the university that their activities violate university policy and its Trespass to Premises Act.
This is what happening right now. This is going to have lasting impacts on University of Alberta as people around the world watch the brutality you inflicted on your students by sending riot cops on them. pic.twitter.com/C8rPWTqstb https://t.co/PrriNXMDp9
— Terrill Tailfeathers (@Terrilltf) May 11, 2024
The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8.
The UN published the number of fatalities reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and Israeli authorities.
Uh … my grandfathers and every single one of my great uncles fought the Nazis and my grandmothers and great aunts served as riveters in the factories helping build the planes that bombed them. https://t.co/pov1PLJcJm
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) May 11, 2024
Netanyahu is correct that WW II was not a crusade to rescue the Jews of Europe. It was a war to defeat Axis tyranny over all peoples.
The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.
Israel is likely to have breached international humanitarian law with American weapons during its military campaign in Gaza, a US government report has concluded.
However, the long-awaited US State Department report added that Israel’s forces did not act in a way that would prevent Washington sending further military assistance to its ally.
While it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had used US-supplied weapons in ways that could be deemed illegal, it also said that officials in Washington could not reach “conclusive findings” that they were used in specific breaches.
OTTAWA – Canada abstained on a motion at the UN General Assembly Friday designed to move the international body towards recognizing Palestinian statehood.
The motion passed by a wide margin, with only the U.S., Israel and a handful of other countries opposing the move. The motion recognizes that a Palestinian state is ready for admission to the UN. The UN Security Council has already rejected granting a Palestinian state full diplomatic recognition and Friday’s vote calls on the Security Council to reconsider that choice.
Abstention is just cowardice in this instance. Too many votes at risk for Junior to do the right thing I suppose.
In 2019, Ron DeSantis appointed Brian Lamb, a former point guard at the University of South Florida, to the 17-member board of regents for the state university system. The Florida governor, when he made the pick, was clearly thinking more about his athletic accomplishments than his ideological principles, as Lamb soon afterward became head of diversity and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. It therefore probably shouldn’t have been surprising when, after the death of George Floyd, Lamb sent a memo to all presidents of public colleges in Florida demanding they “prioritize and support diversity, racial and gender equity, and inclusion” and telling them that they would be held “accountable for policies, programs, and actions” in this area.
A teenage anti-Israel protester who vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park earlier this week has been arrested — after his father turned him over to the cops, according to the NYPD and police sources.
The 16-year-old boy was charged with criminal mischief in the third degree, a felony, and making graffiti, which is a misdemeanor, for allegedly defacing the 107th Infantry Memorial during an unruly demonstration on Monday night.
