“Oct 7 2023”

In the midst of the Hamas-Israel conflict — while the world’s attention is fixed on the war Iran and Hamas began — Iran’s ruling mullahs have seized the opportunity to advance their nuclear program.

By backing, arming and training Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran launched a proxy war against Israel, leveraging the conflict in part to divert attention from its nuclear ambitions.

NEW YORK (AP) — As students protesting the Israel-Hamas war at universities across U.S. dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, some universities shut down encampments after reports of antisemitic activity among the protesters.

With the the death toll mounting in the war in Gaza, protesters nationwide are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

Far-left and pro-Palestine extremists mobilized at Columbia University last week for an occupation that’s shut down campus.

Promoters of revolutionary “direct action” chanted explicitly in support of Hamas and urged the Palestinian Islamist terror group to “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.”

Over the weekend, a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters were met by a keffiyeh-wearing woman who held up a sign and arrow declaring: “Al-Qasam’s next targets.”

Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles has given Premier Doug Ford a deadline to step in and reverse the ban on the wearing of keffiyehs at the provincial legislature or else she says the NDP will defy the ban.

In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, Stiles said Ford has until May 6 to reverse the ban. That date is when the legislature is scheduled to resume sitting.

“We’ve been working to reverse the keffiyeh ban inside the walls of Queen’s Park, but Doug Ford’s MPPs keep blocking us,” Stiles said in the video posted on Friday. “So we decided to give the government until May 6 to reverse this unjust rule or expect us and the community to defy the ban.”

h/t Ontario John

The antisemitism campaigner at the centre of a row over the handling of a pro-Palestinian demonstration has called off a counterprotest on Saturday for safety reasons.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), whose chief executive Gideon Falter was prevented from crossing a road by a Metropolitan Police officer who called him “openly Jewish”, said the force had not done enough to guarantee protection for the rally. In response the force said that the charity had declined to give them the route of its counterprotest during discussions this week.

I’ll preface my commentary with the obvious: All of the “mostly peaceful” protests by our “college educated” on campuses nationwide that are clearly pro-Hamas and aimed at Jewish students are wrong, illegal, and all involved should either go back to the classes their parents and taxpayers are funding or be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Let’s conduct a little thought experiment.

Suppose local chapters of the KKK had established a presence on campuses across America while one of their leaders explained that black people shouldn’t live, they would have all been rounded up long ago. Not to mention expelled, canceled, and rendered permanently unemployable, put on no-fly-lists, and banned from Uber, Lyft, and every form of private and public transportation imaginable.

The UN, UNWRA, WHO, numerous NGOs, senior British and American politicians and all the British mainstream news networks, including their flagship programmes, have all been consistently misleading people about the number of deaths in Gaza. But in the last month a series of articles in various publications have started to question this consensus. It is not clear why it has taken so long for this fightback, but what is clear is that the tide is turning.

One of the first major articles questioning the anti-Israel consensus was by Abrahm Wyner, an American mathematical statistician, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Published in the American magazine Tablet on 7 March, his piece was called, “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers”.

Thousands of young students – from universities, high schools and even middle schools – are joining in demonstrations, marches and protests against Israel, against the United States and against Jews. Some even are Jews. They are joining Muslim and Arab anti-Zionists, radical anarchist anti-Americans and community organizers who oppose Israel’s right to exist.

Israel and the United States have agreed on the need to defeat Hamas, including in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, officials from both countries said after a meeting of the Strategic Consultative Group in early April.

As part of that virtual meeting, the US expressed its concerns with various courses of action in Rafah while Israel “agreed to take these concerns into account,” according to a statement released by the White House.

Between the lines, however, the meeting highlighted that militarily, Hamas has not been defeated in Gaza despite more than six months of war. It remains unclear how long Hamas could be able to fight against the Israeli military.