37th Israeli government, and Netanyahu's 6th term as premier, is sworn in

Israel's 37th government has been sworn in at the Knesset, and this also marks the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu's 6th term as prime minister:

Israel's 37th Government was sworn in on Thursday, with Benjamin Netanyahu beginning his sixth term as prime minister.

The swearing-in ceremony began at 11:00 a.m., during which Netanyahu presented his agenda to the Knesset plenum. These include stopping the Iran nuclear program, developing state infrastructure and restoring internal security and governance.

During his address, which was interrupted by members of the opposition, Netanyahu said "Losing elections isn't the end of democracy – it's the essence of democracy. In a democracy, we don't climb the fences of the Capitol, and we don't climb the fences of the Knesset."

Unfortunately, this is something the current leftist opposition in the Knesset no longer seems willing to respect, and likely never did. I guess that's why the sad part is how Yair Lapid, upon leaving office, refused to shake Netanyahu's hand:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first to take the oath of office. Most of the heads of the opposition parties were present out of respect for the ceremony, but opposition leader Yair Lapid left the plenary hall even before Netanyahu was sworn-in without shaking his hand as is customary.

What really makes this sad is that it hints at where things are headed with the left, which is bad for democratic relations. It could take years to mend the damage Lapid's causing with his ostracizing approach. But, this does demonstrate why it's good he's now out of office. He was causing all the harm he's going to cause, even in the opposition.

So let's hope Netanyahu can handle all the trouble the left's already causing. What if they intent to do everything they can to sabotage his efforts to make peace with Saudi Arabia, for example? Regrettably, that's something they're more than willing to do, if reality says anything about their conduct.

Israel's LGBT activists have no issues with Islam's hostility to their ideology

As explained by Ruthie Blum, following a whole questionable controversy where the left assailed Avi Maoz for wanting to put a stop to LGBT propaganda being pushed in Israeli schools. First, here's what Orit Strook said on Twitter to clarify:

"You can calm down over the much ado about nothing," she tweeted on Sunday. "No one intends to discriminate against LGBT people because of their identity or identification – not in medical care or any other service. LGBTs are human beings who deserve respect and love just like everyone else … It's not at all about the identity of the patient, but about the essence of the treatment."

The idea, she added, is that "a religiously observant doctor will not be forced to provide a medical treatment contrary to halacha [Jewish law], regardless of the identity of the patient. Because in the State of Israel, which was established after 2,000 years of exile, thanks to Jews who gave their lives (who were literally slaughtered, hanged, burned at the stake and tortured to death) for observing the Torah, a believing Jew should not be forced to violate [its laws]."

She went on, "I'm sure a huge majority of the nation agrees with this simple truth and identifies with it, certainly on Hanukkah, the holiday that began with a rebellion against anti-religious coercion."

In conclusion, she suggested wryly that "those who still find it difficult [to accept] do a simple visualization exercise: apply this principle to your [coalition] partners from the Shura Council [the Islamist Ra'am Party]. You'll find that, suddenly, religious and faith principles become somehow easier to swallow."

Her dig at the double standard brings us to the second element of the distortion-hypocrisy couplet that characterizes Lapid's shaky, disparate bloc: the "do as I say, not as I do" practice at which Lahav Hertzanu has demonstrated exemplary skill.

Indeed, the gay parliamentarian denouncing the RZP for "homophobia" is more than tolerant of Ra'am, which labels LGBTQs as "perverts" with an "unnatural lifestyle."

When asked in July 2021 about Ra'am MK Walid Taha's statements to this effect, he replied, "Walid Taha is a member of Knesset who represents a sector. He's legitimate. He's a member of [our] coalition."

Pressed further on Taha's stance, he answered, "I understand it; I can't accept it."

Mere weeks later, he abandoned even that pretense of disapproval. Upon Taha's appointment to the chairmanship of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, the Yesh Atid "progressive" was positively effusive about and toward his Ra'am colleague, lauding him as a "sensitive, caring, committed elected official," and saying, "I'm very happy for your election and very much looking forward to working with you."

A few months after that, Taha attacked Labor MK Ibtisam Marana – also a coalition partner – for her efforts to establish a shelter for Israel's LGBTQ Arab citizens. His method of putting her down was to question whether she was really an Arab, after all.

He proceeded to point out to her that Ra'am follows Islamic law, "which considers same-sex relations to be [among] the most serious crimes in the eyes of Allah, because it is a violation of man's nature and a blatant defiance of Allah himself."

The Koran, he added, "recounts the case of Lot and the heavy punishment that Allah inflicted on the sinners, through their complete destruction with fire and brimstone. [And] the consensus among Muslim scholars [of Sharia] is that the punishment for those who have homosexual relations is execution."

Nary a peep from Lahav Hertzanu, Lapid or the rest of their liberal fellow travelers now carrying on about Strock. If they think that their behavior and bigotry of low expectations do the rainbow flag – or democracy – proud, they've got another thing coming.

So Yesh Atid's openly homosexual MK apparently has no genuine opposition to what Ra'am goes by. Which proves he's only following his lifestyle for the sake of harming the values of a civil society. This should be pointed out repeatedly to all the public who're being constantly told only Maoz and Strook are a problem.

Now, when it comes to healthcare exams, of course LGBT practitioners should be able to see doctors to check if they're suffering from illnesses, and also go to the dentist. But if it's businesses like bakers, they shouldn't be forced to do services for homosexual ideology any more than this Christian baker who was persecuted for years. If LGBT practitioners want services for their ideology, they must prove they can establish their own. If there's one part of being a doctor that religious or otherwise shouldn't have to adhere to, it's the horrific gender reassignment surgeries that're ruining children's lives, along with adults, in the USA and elsewhere now. That's something that should practically be barred from practice, because it risks hurting many people with the awful elements involved. Maybe that's what Strook was referring to? In which case, she'd be making an important case in defense of women and girls. That's something to think about.

New Israeli government formed

At nighttime, Benjamin Netanyahu announced his new coalition to president Isaac Herzog:

Israel has a right-wing government: Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu phoned President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday evening and proclaimed, “I have succeeded in forming a government”.

The phone call took place 18 minutes before the extension granted to Netanyahu from Herzog was set to expire at midnight.

Netanyahu told Herzog, "Dear President, thanks to the enormous public support we received in the last elections, I am informing you that I have been able to establish a government that will act in the interest of all the citizens of Israel."

And since we're on the subject, it was shameful how the New York Times predictably assailed Netanhahu and disrespected the electorate, even if it wasn't shocking. The Jerusalem Post editorial said in response that Israel's democracy is vibrant:

It is now bon ton to forecast the demise of Israel’s democracy.

Everyone is doing it: from august forums such as the New York Times editorial board, to blogs run by North American ex-pats now living in Israel, to Facebook groups set up by disgruntled Israelis encouraging emigration.

For instance, the web headline to a Times editorial on Saturday warning of the dangers of presumptive Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government read: “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State Is in Jeopardy.” And the headline adequately reflected the spirit of the editorial.

The editorial said that Netanyahu’s government “is a significant threat to the future of Israel – its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”

The credibility of the editorial was cast in doubt further down in the piece when the renowned paper inexplicably left out Palestinian terrorism as a reason why “hopes for a Palestinian state have dimmed,” writing instead that the reasons are “the combined pressure of Israeli resistance and Palestinian corruption, ineptitude and internal divisions.”

On this, why doesn't anybody call for a boycott of the NYT, and save a lot of money by not subscribing or buying them? They've been such an insufferable paper for decades on end, and are one of the worst of the USA's most dishonest media sources. What's the use? They insult the Israeli electorate along with the USA public, and it's time to stop buying them in any way.

Not improving matters is that fraud-in-chief Joe Biden's pseudo=administration wants to hold Netanyahu accountable for any directions they oppose:

Netanyahu’s successful welding together of Zionist and orthodox parties into a solid Right-Wing coalition was completed two days after Washington wired a warning, via Politico among other media outlets, that it would hold the Israeli leader personally answerable for any decisions or actions his new government might take that the US doesn’t like.

President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, have not hidden their alarm over the political platforms of the most significant coalition partners – the Jewish Strength Party of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who will come in as Minister of National Security, and the Religious Zionist Party of Bezalel Smotrich, slated to receive ministerial authority over Judea and Samaria.

The two men’s combined goals are to strengthen Israel’s character as the Jewish state by taking steps, among others, to increase security against terrorism, as well as criminal violence, open the Temple Mount to Jewish worship and increase and consolidate the presence of Jewish residents in the towns and cities of Israel’s biblical heartland – Samaria and Judea.

All these aims fly in the face of America’s political intent which, along with that of the rest of the world, is to see the Jews removed from the “West Bank” and the Israel-hating Arab populace enabled to establish in their place a new state called Palestine: the “Two State Solution”.

Not just removed from Judea/Samaria/Gaza, but also from Israel entire. To remove Jews from the main biblical areas is just the beginning of the anti-Israelists' twisted goals. And it's shameful as it's repulsive. This is exactly why the Likud was elected.

Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility

Yes, and it ain't "right-wing" antisemitism.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Some students report being spat upon and harassed, while some campus groups have forced out those who support Israel":

Some college students say they have started hiding their Jewish identity in fear of rising antisemitism. “We have basically been shunned.” https://t.co/ibsI06h6xa

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 14, 2022

Adina Pinsker commutes to Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to study supply-chain management. She is also active in Hillel International, the nation’s largest collegiate Jewish organization.

When she arrives on campus, she takes an indirect route to class and tucks inside her shirt the silver Star of David she wears around her neck. These are precautions, she said, to avoid harassment from students who dislike Israel, the people who support it, or both.

“We have basically been shunned,” said Ms. Pinsker, who said she has been subject to derogatory remarks about her beliefs.

Ms. Pinsker’s actions are emblematic of rising fear among some Jewish college students around the country, who have begun shrouding their religious identity and political beliefs to avoid growing ostracism and harassment, according to interviews with dozens of students.

College campuses have long hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But now, students say anti-Jewish antagonism is on the rise: Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.

Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.

Students at schools including the University of Vermont, Wellesley College and DePaul University have ejected Jewish students who support Israel from clubs and study groups, according to interviews with affected students.

Students at Tufts University, University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles tried to prevent Jewish classmates from serving in student government or attempted to remove them from positions in student government because of their support of Israel, according to students, administrators and campus news reports.

The uptick in incidents and tension on some campuses comes amid a string of recent high-profile controversies that have drawn renewed attention to antisemitism. This month Twitter suspended the account of rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West—who now goes by the name Ye—after he tweeted to his 32 million followers an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, weeks after he tweeted: “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

On campus, students say that stereotypical antisemitic slurs are directed at Jews, but that much of the hostility derives from growing criticism of Israel’s handling of its political and military conflict with Palestinians over land rights. Jewish students say harassment often compounds when criticism of Israel increases.

Most American Jews feel an attachment to Israel, though many are critical of the Israeli government, according to a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center.

Some of the conflict on campus stems from competing definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and whether they overlap.

Anti-Zionism is a political position distinct from antisemitism, which is a prejudice, said Dylan Saba, an attorney with New York-based Palestine Legal, which works to support the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who advocate for Palestinians. The two are conflated by supporters of Israel to discredit critics, he said.

Condemning Israel may make some Jewish students feel uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it is antisemitic, he said. “All we are asking for is equal rights,” he said...

Bullshit. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel is antisemitic. Full stop. "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free" means wiping Israel --- and all its Jewish citizens --- off the face of the map.

It's easy to prove, too. Just walk up to any pro-Palestine student organization --- literally in any college campus in America --- and ask its leaders if they support Hamas. In my experience they will not answer. Not only that, in my case, they'll call the police on you. 

Ohio elects Muslim woman with extremist connections to state legislature

Benjamin Baird informs us of the sad news that another Muslim's been elected to political office in Ohio, and possibly to Congress:

As the first Somali Muslim woman elected to the Ohio state legislature, Munira Abdullahi is expected to bring “diversity” and “new perspectives” to the Ohio House of Representatives, according to her supporters. What they don’t tell you is that the 26-year-old belongs to a radical Sunni Islamist organization that uses youth indoctrination, charity, and social work to grow its political power and spread theocratic, often illiberal views.

Based on her background and career trajectory, Abdullahi could feasibly become the next Ilhan Omar — Minnesota’s far-left congresswoman known for expressing radical, antisemitic opinions and consorting with various Islamist groups. Indeed, the Ohio legislator shares striking similarities with Omar, the first Somali Muslim elected to her state’s legislature in 2016 and the first Muslim woman elected to Congress.

But what's really chilling about her associations is whom she's worked for when it comes to activists:

Omar, who will soon be a third-term congresswoman, works closely with American Islamist organizations and is known to advance legislation on their behalf. For her part, Abdullahi doesn’t just associate with extremist groups — she is a card-carrying member of the Muslim American Society, a notoriously extreme Islamist group that the United Arab Emirates designated as a terrorist organization in 2014.

In fact, MAS is the “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America,” according to federal prosecutors, or the U.S. branch of a global, pan-Islamic organization known for its violent history in the Middle East. Since 2012, Abdullahi has worked part-time as a youth director at MAS-Columbus, and she was promoted in March to the role of program manager at the national office.

One must wonder how many extremist Muslims live in Ohio now, along with their sympathisers, and how badly it'll affect a state that's said to be Republican-led. This is seriously bad news.

Jewish doctor in USA warns Israel will be next victim of transsexual disaster

Ariel Kahana interviewed a Jewish medical professional in New Jersey, who explained the sad obsession that's broken out with getting gender reassignment surgery to seemingly resemble the opposite sex, and warns that Israel is facing this horror too. Over in the USA:

Q: What is the explanation for this wave?

"The figure who formulated the sixties' theory that a person's biology – his body and his chromosomes – are completely separate from his subjective feeling as to whether he is male or female, was a professor of medical psychology named John Money. His research was eventually shown to be a failure and it was scientifically proven that the opposite was true. Nevertheless, the ideas of Money – who was later deemed to have sexually abused children – were adopted by the worlds of medicine, mental health, and psychiatry in the USA, and later on the education system too. Today, from kindergarten age, children already learn that their body might not necessarily reflect their gender." She is quoting a survey published in the New York Times, according to which more than 60% of those questioned in the 30-plus category said they believe that a person's sex is defined by his biological sex at birth. In contrast, 61% of those questioned in the 18-29 age group said they believe that their gender identity is separate from their biological sex.

"The difference between the younger and the older groups stems from the propagation of gender ideology. Children until the age of five undergo indoctrination at school. The result is a social phenomenon of young boys and girls who want to make the change, and on occasion even come to do it together as a group trend. In many cases, these are children who in any event are on the autistic spectrum or suffer from negative social attitudes, so that joining this trend provides them with the attention that they so dearly crave.

"The phenomenon is subject to broad coverage and immense popularity on social media. You might be taken by surprise, but in 2007 there was one clinic throughout the entire USA providing treatment for minors under the age of 18, who were contending with the issue of gender identity. Today, as far as I know, there are 300 of them. And here is one more statistic – the number of mastectomies carried out for gender reassignment more than tripled between 2016-2019. These are data provided by Vanderbilt University in Nashville."

It's devastating so many have been indoctrinated, but not shocking at all. And it's surely not even shocking that one of the advocates of this atrocity came to Israel as well:

In order to validate her claim that this involves experiments on humans, Grossman refers me to things said recently by Dr. Marci Bowers, a biological man who underwent gender reassignment surgery to become a woman and today serves as a leading physician in the field of medical transitioning in the US. According to Bowers, she and her associates work using a trial-and-error method: "Anybody who underwent surgery as a child and received 'blockers' [tablets to suppress the hormones responsible for sexual development] will never have testosterone (the key hormone in sexual development). So that we do not know if they will ever experience sexual satisfaction... I know that the feeling of proximity and intimacy is extremely important, so that a lack of this raised a red flag for me. We need to keep our eyes open and talk about this... Let's see what will occur... There are questions that do not have an answer... Is it possible to prevent the processes of puberty and then attain good results as adults? How can we guarantee that they will have a sexual response? Maybe we need to remove the blockers at a certain stage? Perhaps, to delay a little bit, here and there? Perhaps." By the way, Bowers visited Israel several years ago to provide instruction for physicians here how to conduct the gender reassignment surgery.

Needless to say, any "medic" who's willing to work in such abominable practice is unfit for the job, and should be ostracized if they do. For now, that Bowers paid a most unwelcome visit here should be warning enough of what Israel faces by extension.

The concern shared by Grossman and others is that financial interests combined with a radically progressive agenda are the driving force behind the wave of transgenderism that is sweeping across America. According to this assumption, the drug companies are promoting this gender confusion or "dysphoria" as it is termed in the professional jargon, as this generates mass dependency on their products, often for life.

"This is not the situation everywhere in the West. In London, the authorities closed down a clinic treating gender problems due to concern that it was providing inappropriate treatment for children. In Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, and other countries too, they are no longer prescribing blockers as there is no research data to prove that their use is safe. It is important to remember that from the outset, the blockers were never actually developed for use in gender reassignment."

Just before we part company, Grossman gives me several books she has written, including "You're Teaching My Child What?" and she also puts me in contact with a number of women in Israel who are trying to stem this tidal wave. Only two of them – Roni Sassover and Alix Aharon – are prepared to come forward and do so while being named. The rest prefer to remain anonymous.

As Grossman anticipated, this wave is indeed on its way to Israel. The Minister of Education, Yifat Shasha-Biton, has recently published guidelines relating to transgender students at school. In essence, the guidelines stipulate that a student should be treated according to his or her declared gender, and this of course also relates to sleeping arrangements in boarding schools, access to toilets, sports lessons, etc. According to the new guidelines, the parents might not necessarily be a part of this overall process. Outgoing Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, has welcomed this move.

Grossman: "The most important thing that Israelis need to know, is that those people promoting this agenda will intentionally approach children with a view to the long-term outcomes entailed in this process. When parents discover that their children have been brainwashed, it is already too late to do anything. Consequently, I say to anybody reading this article: please keep an eye on your children.

She's absolutely correct. It's unlikely you'll see most other news sources on the left reporting about this, unlike alleged complaints of religious coercion for Judaism. Of course, LGBT ideology has long come to represent a religion in its own way, and a lot of homosexual advocates practically copied from more common religions in their own approach.

While Ukraine can use aid, their president is no "Jewish hero"

While Russia's assault on Ukraine is offensive in the extreme, Josh Hammer and Jonathan Bronitsky explain why Volodomyr Zelensky, the latter country's president, is not the "Jewish hero" he may want everybody to think he is:

Volodymyr Zelensky is a lot of things — including, to be sure, a “hero” to many. But to anyone who takes Jewish identity, Jewish tradition, and, especially, Jewish survival at least somewhat seriously, he certainly should not be considered a “Jewish hero.”

Zelensky was born to Jewish parents. Like that of most Jews from behind the Iron Curtain, his upbringing was markedly secular. As Beckerman rightly points out, “Jewish identity didn’t exist in the Soviet Union, because it couldn’t.” That said, there were Soviet Jews who found their way to some form of Jewish identity after the breakup of the communist empire. Indeed, more than a million immigrated to Israel in a wave that started in earnest at the beginning of the 1990s.

But Zelensky did no such thing. “Zelensky and his family,” Beckerman concedes, “were part of the few hundred thousand Jews who stayed, content to assimilate in a post-Soviet world.” Zelensky has never even shied away from making light of this reality. For instance, in a 2019 interview with the French newspaper Le Point, Zelensky quipped, “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults.”

Not Jewish

Zelensky married a non-Jewish woman who was baptized, and he and his wife baptized their two children in the Greek Orthodox tradition, according to press reports. Boleslav Kapulkin, the spokesman for Chabad Lubavitch in Odessa, Ukraine, was even under the impression that Zelensky himself had converted to Christianity. Eduard Dolinsky, executive director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, went further. He attested that Zelensky is “a Ukrainian with Jewish ancestry; he’s not a member of the Jewish community, he’s not religious, doesn’t keep Jewish traditions and never speaks of himself as a Jew.”

There’s a long-running and complex debate over what constitutes Jewish identity. But there’s no question that Zelensky’s life choices have been inimical to the survival of the Jewish people and the Jewish faith.

It may be disappointing enough Zelensky's the gazillionth person of ethnic Israeli/Jewish descent who won't promote the Judaist faith as one worthy of following/converting to. But as the following makes clear, it's even worse than you think:

Recently, Zelensky has started to make a habit of referring to his Jewishness in conjunction with pleas for international backing of Ukraine. He blasted Henry Kissinger for calling for a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine War, likening the plea of the former secretary of state and national security adviser to Neville Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in Munich in 1938. He also slammed, of all nations, lo and behold, Israel for refusing to arm Ukraine. (Israel hasn’t armed Russia either.) Now there is reporting that Zelensky is pushing the White House to pressure Israel.

Worse still, Ukraine, under Zelensky, has been rather hostile to Israel at the United Nations, the international forum where the Jewish state has been under sustained assault for decades. According to UN Watch, in a total of 122 resolutions involving Israel, Ukraine has voted against Israel in 95 and abstained in 27. That means it did not vote in favor of Israel once. Yet Zelensky continues to make demands of the Jewish state, which must deal with a Russian presence in neighboring Syria, where Israel conducts counterterrorism operations against Islamic extremists.

Now that's a very valid reason for concern. Ukraine's government, even under Zelensky, acts hostile to Israel at the worst global forum that's no freedom-lover's paradise, and so far, hasn't made any genuine efforts to clean up this act. Of course that's reprehensible. Certainly, it would do some good to provide aid to the country for defense against a country that's still severely influenced by communism, but that doesn't excuse Zelensky's hypocrisy. And why couldn't he show the courage to practice the Judaist religion in any way, and encourage the Ukrainian public to try it as well? This is all something the new Netanyahu government should make a point of, why, if Israel is to aid Ukraine, they must prove they can repay the deed by ceasing all hostility at the UN, in example.

It's a terrible shame how Jews living in foreign countries would rather be part of an establishment mindset than promote certain aspects and customs as worthy of emulation for outsiders. Zelensky's regrettably one of those.

Jerusalem Post editorial is right: left-wing must respect right-wing's right to govern

With Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud and much of the right-wing factions in the Knesset having won an impressive victory during the Israeli election, the Jerusalem Post's editorial division says the leftists should respect the success and let the right run a government:

Israel went to the polls on Tuesday and in rather uncharacteristic fashion rendered a clear decision: Benjamin Netanyahu.

No hung jury this time, no tie, no waffling: The country wants Netanyahu back as the head of a very right-wing and religious government. The nation has spoken, and now it is time to honor its decision.

What does that mean? It means letting Netanyahu form a right-wing, very religious coalition. That is what the people want, that is what they voted for.

Israel voted for Netanyahu. Let him govern

And this is not meant to say to the country, as a parent might to a misbehaving child: “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Rather, this is just acknowledging that in a democracy, the will of the people should be respected, and the election results have made this country’s wishes known unequivocally.

It should also be noted that left-wing parties who campaigned on an "just not Bibi" slogan only hurt their campaigns even more, proving how out-of-touch they were with the public's interest in meaty platforms. That's why Netanyahu ultimately proved successful with the Likud's campaign, and the right-wing found success.

In related news, Amnon Lord explains why Meretz, one of the most reprehensible left-wing movements in history, is now out of the Knesset, and why it's best their run came to an end:

The origins of Meretz, as the party has come to be known in recent years, hail back to some point in the first Intifada (Palestinian uprising) that began in late 1987. A newspaper report appearing in the Hadashot daily in May 1989 tells of the arrest of demonstrators from an elitist left-wing movement that arose during the Intifada, named the "21st Year" (an allusion to the results of the 1967 Six-Day War).

They held a procession in Qalqilya, "threw stones at IDF vehicles... disturbed the soldiers from carrying out their activity and incited the local population in Qalqiliya to rebel. Among those detained was Zehava Gal-On, the director of the B'Tselem human rights organization, along with a group of theater actors and students", so the report claimed.

On occasions, Ratz was to turn into the parliamentary political front for anti-Israeli movements. Thanks to it, Israel became more and more tolerant of acts of cooperation with various forces operating against the state.

Only a week ago, an extremely important article was published in this newspaper by Hanan Greenwood, revealing the handbook of radical left-wing organizations that are essentially involved in acts of espionage against the IDF and the security forces in Judea and Samaria. Under the veneer of its public respectability, Meretz granted legitimacy for the overall activity of these organizations: B'Tselem (which was established at the beginning of the Intifada in 1988), Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence), Yesh Din, Zochrot (Remembering) and other similar organizations that are routinely funded by various foreign organizations.

Their associations with enemies of Israel are definitely disturbing, and explain perfectly why they're no loss to the Israeli political scene in the Knesset proper. A most shameful movement indeed.

Anyway, with all that told, India's premier has congratulated Netanyahu on his electoral success:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulates “my friend” Benjamin Netanyahu for his election win.

“I look forward to continuing our joint efforts to deepen the India-Israel strategic partnership,” he says.

There's somebody who knows how to maintain political relations without applying PC to them. My thanks to Modi for his alliances with Israel. Let's hope that with the current right-wing victory in the election, there'll be more promising directions to come.

Black Adam movie's screenplay builds on left-wing metaphors

Overrated wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne Johnson's new Black Adam movie, last time I looked, fell to 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes' approval ratings. But that aside, when I looked at the reviews so far, Vanity Fair had quite an eye-opener for the political metaphors turning up in screenplay, which surely were to be as expected as what turned up in Wonder Woman 1984. First:

Kahndaq, you see, is a stand-in for not-Iraq/not-Afghanistan under longtime occupation by not-America, but a band of villainous swine called Intergang who plunder the nation’s resources and make the people wait at long checkpoints. They also zoom around on sci-fi skiffs that glow blue (just like Eternium!) and really want that crown.

Soon Adrianna summons the trapped hero, Teth-Adam, who is the gargantuan Johnson wearing a superhero suit and a scowl. Bullets and missiles and grenades can’t stop him, and a mere touch of his hand can turn someone into a skeleton. He goes on a wild PG-13-style kill spree, flinging bodies thousands of yards in the air and ripping off limbs, but without any blood, terror, or agony. [...]

Ah, so that's there excuse for the violence: they didn't add any blood spilling out of severed limbs. Sorry, but doesn't make it any more acceptable, and children shouldn't have to be subject to this kind of mayhem any more than what you see in a Mortal Kombat game. Whether the film lacks terror and agony, however, doesn't really matter when disgust and insult could sum up the proceedings much better. According to the UK Independent, the filmmakers had to remove at least 5 scenes to avoid an R-rating, which confirms just how blatant their vision truly is. And as for the hints given in the above regarding the leftist metaphors, here's that part of it from VF:

There’s not really much to stew on with Black Adam once you’ve left the theater, except to be somewhat amazed at how the story comments-but-doesn’t-comment on the actual political situation in the Middle East. An early checkpoint sequence is clearly meant to mirror the struggles of everyday people crossing from the Palestinian Territories into Israel, and Adrianna’s fed-up line about world powers not doing much for the people after a decades-long presence could be about Iraq or Afghanistan or both. And while there is much reverent talk of Khandaq’s indigenous cultural heritage, there are no Muslim signifiers center stage throughout the picture. Indeed, the Hollywood staple of the muezzin call to prayer is nowhere on the soundtrack, probably a first for a movie set in this part of the world, even when it’s a fictional country. One must marvel at how this massive international project goes out of its way to be even remotely apolitical, taking its cue, perhaps, from the famously politically-unaffiliated Dwayne Johnson. It takes a special kind of movie where the most interesting thing is what’s not in there. During its two-hour runtime, you won’t be asked to exert yourself, either with backstory or political reads. Viewers can just sit back in their cushioned seats, silence all brain functions, and enjoy the CG fireworks.

Oh my, why am I not shocked they could resort to these kind of metaphors, building as they do upon anti-Israel propaganda to boot, with Intergang as the stand-ins? And that's something that'll have to be considered by all concerned when it comes to past and present movies based on DC properties: they may have more leftist metaphors, stealthed or out in the open, than we think. The Marvel movies too, lest we forget. One more reason they're not aging any better than the overload of special effects accompanying the "actors". I hesitate to think what'd a screenplay containing a metaphor for opposing war with Iran's brutal regime would be like, because it's not impossible for these obsessed ideologues to go that far too.

Interesting how the reviewer here seems disappointed specifically because there's little or no serious allusions to Islam, as though this movie couldn't be bad enough. The filmmakers, who should be ashamed of themselves, are already doing enough harm with the metaphors they've injected as it is. The following reviewer from Buzzfeed seems disappointed for similar reasons, and is much more blatant:

It’s too bad that Black Adam ultimately punts on most of the big questions it attempts to raise, because the movie does have something sorely lacking in much of its peers: a willingness, however slight, to engage with the world around it. It’s hard to miss the similarities between Kahndaq, a Middle Eastern country occupied by white military personnel, and a variety of real-world analogs, ranging from the American occupation of Iraq to the ongoing occupation of Palestine. [...]

It’s pretty jarring to see a major superhero movie that even gestures at treating America as the bad guys in anything beyond a “there are a few bad apples in the military” sense. After all, the genre entered its modern era with 2008’s Iron Man, where a weapons contractor is kidnapped by terrorists and escapes captivity in Afghanistan. Black Adam isn’t the movie that’s going to continue exploring that territory, but it’s refreshing to see it try.

So here, the writer is much more hostile to Israel in the sense he won't even mention the country, replacing it as he does with the Roman era name for Israel that's been distorted in modern times for the sake of delegitimizing Israel's claim to Judea/Samaria, by fabricating the lie that there was ever an Islamic/Arabic country there? Now that's even sicker, as is the strong hint his opinions on the USA are extraordinarily hostile too. (Interestingly, the Boston Herald says movie co-star Mohammed Amer is a "Palestinian-American". Could such casting have been intentional, coinciding with the filmmakers' politics?)

I also noticed this review by NPR's terrible writer Glen Weldon, who surprisingly enough actually panned the movie, but, he really screwed up on just who reintroduced Black Adam:

In the early 2000s, writers Geoff Johns and David S. Goyer — with art by Stephen Sadowski and many others — introduced to the comics pages a new version of Black Adam. The character had been around since the 1940s as a supervillain who dogged the family of superheroes that, like him, had been given powers by the wizard Shazam. As such, he came factory-installed with the basic supervillain-threats package: I'll destroy you, I'll rule the world, etc.

Man, is this sloppy, but to be fully expected from such a charlatan who's not a comics fan, no matter how much he insists otherwise. Black Adam was first reintroduced to the DCU proper in 1994, in Jerry Ordway's GN, The Power of Shazam, which later led to an ongoing monthly series for Billy Batson that ran at least a few years. And reprehensible Weldon would rather rob Ordway of the credit, and bestow it upon some of the least deserving of DC's overrated modern writers, Johns and Goyer, instead. As disappointing as I find Ordway's leftism these days, this is still too much. So shame on far-left Weldon for this deception as well.

Now, one more review I checked is from Midwest Film Journal, and in addition to panning the movie, they also make an eyebrow raising note regarding a certain 2013 movie whose star is brought back in this new movie as a special guest for Teth-Adam to clash with:

Man of Steel, which launched the whole misbegotten DCEU in 2013, introduced the world to a darker and more “grounded” take on these heroes. It had its flaws but feels like a masterpiece compared to Black Adam. The two have some very direct points of comparison, too, as supposed launching points for future films. Zack Snyder’s Steel, for example, featured a breathlessly cool prologue on Krypton whereas Adam features an extended sequence narrated by an annoying child. In Snyder’s film, the violence of two Kryptonians battling is destructive and purposely reminiscent (however wrongheadedly so) of 9/11. Here, Adam’s supposed brutal fighting is nowhere near as destructive and, 10 years later, considerably worse-looking. Steel’s fights still inspire awe; Adam‘s are nauseating at best.

Of course, Adam also invites comparison because it delivers on what “fans” have been supposedly clamoring for — the return of Henry Cavill to the role of Superman, a half-decade after his experience filming Justice League turned him off the role and turned Warners off of the franchise he headlined. Bringing Cavill in for a post-credits tease is a Hail Mary by a studio desperate to garner interest in a movie that they clearly know has no interest to any sort of general audience. It’s kind of pathetic, particularly because there’s a blatant joke about Superman being an empty role early on in this film. I’m a fan of Cavill in that role, but there’s no part of me that thinks he deserves to be thrown into more shitty iterations of the character, if Black Adam is any indication of where it will go from here.

Well, like I said, if this new DC movie could be so blatant in its political metaphors, chances are there'd be earlier ones going that route too, and looks like Man of Steel had one that was bound to be troubling. If Batman vs. Superman could boast a scene alluding to protests against illegal immigrants in real life that was insulting to the intellect, we can't be shocked if any 9-11 metaphors Snyder's Man of Steel attached to its screenplay could be just as tasteless. That's why I for one am not pleading for Cavill to resume the role, even in a stand-alone movie for Superman proper, because what if more blatant leftist metaphors seep in? This whole "franchise" of the past decade was decidedly never worth looking forward to in the first place, and the dark angle didn't help matters.

So now, if the above descriptions say anything, I have far less reason to admire Johnson, whom I recall was among several far-leftists who created controversy for the sake of attacking podcaster Joe Rogan over distorted reasons (and Johnson himself wrote extremely crude comments years earlier). And recalling Rogan was just as critical of Hollywood for romanticizing violence as Bill Maher was, he might want to take issue with the Black Adam movie next, because physical/sexual violence has tragically been glorified in Hollywood too over past decades, and this new film is no improvement with its portrayal of Teth-Adam. A most shameless embarrassment it decidedly is, and I wish WB would stop making superhero movies already if this is what it's all coming down to.

French teacher was subjected to death threat over Mohammed cartoons

In France, another teacher had death threats made against him, and it's fortunate the Muslim daughter and father who committed the crime were arrested:

A teacher in a French high school was subjected to death threats after discussing freedom of expression and cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, leading to the arrest of a student and her uncle, in a case redolent of the death of Samuel Paty.

The teacher addressed his class in Éragny, in the Val-d’Oise department near Paris earlier this month on the subject of freedom of expression and cartoons of the prophet Mohammed which allegedly angered a 15-year-old female student in his class.

The teen later spoke to her uncle who arrived at the school in the late afternoon and verbally attacked the teacher, invoking teacher Samuel Paty who was beheaded in the street by a Chechen refugee in October of 2020 after showing cartoons of Mohammed to his class, Le Figaro reports.

The teacher later reported the thinly veiled death threat to police, who arrested the teen and her uncle and a judicial investigation was opened into the pair last Friday.

Since then the teen has been accused of apology for terrorism and her uncle has been indicted for death threats, according to the prosecutor of the Republic of Mulhouse, Edwige Roux-Morizot.

This would not be acceptable in the USA either, and tragically, there are monsters in north America who've committed similar behavior to the Muslim father and daughter over in France. Those who commit such acts should not be allowed to continue in public schools, or any public square, for that matter.

Marvel's Sabra comes under assault by Muslim activist group with terror ties

The Council of Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), which has documented connections to terrorist organizations like Hamas, recently ran the following podcast on Facebook, where they attacked Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema's Israeli character, Sabra, who first debuted in the Incredible Hulk in the early 1980s:

Join us today at 3:00 p.m. ET for a discussion on the Marvel superhero Sabra, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism with American Muslims for Palestine's Outreach Director Taher Herzallah.

From this alone, it's pretty easy to guess where they went with this. No matter how left-leaning Mantlo was in his time as a writer, and no matter how much that influenced his comics writing by extension, it makes zero difference to anti-Israeli sources like these. Whatever they say isn't worth the bytes it's produced on, considering their offensive platforms, for which the FBI later cut off contact with them. It's not too difficult to guess what they think of Gal Gadot as well.

One commentor said:

The Jewish people have so few representatives in comics, do take her away from us

And:

Sabra's young son was killed in a terrorist attack

Yes, it was established, possibly in New Warriors by Fabian Nicieza, that Sabra had a young son who'd been murdered in a terror attack, and that these anti-Israeli movements would invalidate even that viewpoint is definitely reprehensible. The commentor also said:

Did you read Union Jack: London Falling?

In that miniseries, the whole clash-on-the-side between Sabra and Arabian Knight is regurgitated, and Islam is otherwise whitewashed. It's another pathetic example of failure to provide an Israeli with a better depiction. Mostly because in the 2nd part, Sabra gets shot in the eyes, blinding her. Next:

You need to do more research on the character. Your knowledge of her is incorrect

Worse, their standings are entirely deliberate. And all coming from a movement that was an unindicted co-conspirator in terrorism. One more comment made was:

The plot for Captain America: New World Order has not even been released. How do you even know how her character will be portrayed?

Of course, if the screenplay comes within even miles of portraying Israel negatively, that'll be abominable, but not a surprise. Disney and Marvel studios have long been sellouts to anti-Israeli campaigners, and even Steven Spielberg did this almost 2 decades ago with Munich.

So now, another, far more notorious activist movement's damning Mantlo and Sal Buscema's creation for being Israeli, and being written with a background they believe illegitimate. Naturally, you have to wonder why these ideologues want anything to do with publishers that were originally founded by Jewish businessmen, whose viewpoints were anything but aligned with what phony pop culture critics think. It's practically laughable.

Iranian native criticizes Democrats for siding with Islam

Bill Maher's HBO program interviewed a woman reporter from Iran who's rightly disappointed with the Democrats for only caring about Islamophobia, not about women's rights:

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad said that liberals in the West tell her that if she talks about how women are treated in the Middle East, “you’re going to cause Islamophobia.” But “my fear and the fear of millions of Iranian women” is rational because she was told growing up in Iran that “if you show your hair, you’re going to go to jail. You will receive lashes. You will get killed like Mahsa Amini.” She also criticized the Combating International Islamophobia Act passed by Democrats by stating that it’s those who beat and kill women and those who leave Islam that create the phobia, not those who speak out against it.

More at the page. It's definitely offensive and deplorable how the Democrats have succumbed to this over all these years. Their ignorance of women's rights is extremely offensive.

Predictably, Marvel studios indicates they'll go the PC route with Sabra

The Times of Israel reported that, as could surely have been expected, Marvel studios went out of their way to answer anti-Israeli activists offended at the inclusion of Bill Mantlo's minor character, Sabra, in the upcoming 4th Captain America movie:

Marvel Studios said it will take “a new approach” to its controversial character Sabra, to be played by Israeli actress Shira Haas, after Palestinian groups criticized the decision to bring the Israeli comic book character to the big screen.

“While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics, they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago,” Marvel told US media outlet Variety in a statement Friday.

Translation: they'll go so far as to avoid any positive portrayal of Israel, all because they don't have the courage to stand up to Islamic antisemitism. In any case, it was pretty obvious from the start that today's comics publishers and filmmakers wouldn't defend the dignity of the Jewish creators who founded the very industry that today's films are based on. Cartoonist Uri Fink, as noted before, figured this was unlikely to be something admirable, but what's been told now only compounds the impression this'll be something awful when it's ready.

I also discovered the Nerdist website employs a possible Muslim writer who's also a LGBT ideologue(!), and he wrote a smear piece where he said Sabra shouldn't be in the Marvel movieverse. He concludes it like this:

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to put a Jewish hero in the forefront of the MCU; however, putting Sabra, an Israeli government agent, into the world’s biggest blockbuster franchise is a problem. It certainly feels like the powers that be are ignoring the real-life atrocities happening to people. There are already other Jewish heroes that Marvel Studios can include in the MCU. [...]

Ah, so in other words, he's ostensibly saying, "Jewish character = good, Israeli character = bad". But, this kind of shoddy distinction and excuse could easily be used to say, exclude indigenous residents of countries like Holland, who're called Dutch. It could even be used against the Basque of the northern Iberian peninsula where Spain is located. Come to think of it, the approach used in his screed could also be used to say only people of specific ethnicities living in the USA proper are qualified for representation, not foreign-born characters living outside. And he doesn't even care that under the PLO, gays and lesbians are suppressed by their police forces and face terrible persecution. That Nerdist would give a platform to somebody who goes by the kind of ideologies he does is truly despicable, and I will not be linking directly to their site anymore as a result of this disturbing propaganda that entirely omits how "palestinians" are a whole fabrication for the sake of invalidating Israel, and even Newt Gingrich eventually acknowledged this. To think, that nowadays, we have whole sites centered around entertainment topics who actually separate the Jewish creators of comicdom from their homeland origins. This is exactly why old movies like Otto Preminger's Exodus from 1960, based on Leon Uris' book, can no longer be made, because anti-Israelists in Hollywood have almost literally shut the gates to any such projects.

And that's why it's no shock at all when Hollywood kowtows to anti-Israeli movements, with the worst part being whenever those in charge of properties originally created by Jews refuse to defend them, regardless of how specific characters were created in the first place.

Westerners cannot continue to allow Iran or any other Muslim countries to use hijab for oppression

A writer named Ben Cohen makes a case regarding the wrongness of Iran's forcing women to wear hijabs, although he unfortunately also puts in some very questionable claims along the way. The topic stems from the latest protests in Iran, following the murder of a woman who wasn't wearing a hijab:

The immediate trigger for these latest demonstrations was the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, 22. Amini was arrested in Tehran by the regime's so-called "Morality Police" – uniformed thugs whose job would correctly be understood as engaging in sexual harassment in a western context – for the crime of wearing her hijab, or headscarf, improperly.

Since the major wave of anti-regime protests in 2009, many Iranian women have consciously pushed the envelope on the Islamic Republic's austere, misogynistic dress code, adjusting their hijabs to show strands of hair or applying light makeup to their faces. Since Amini allegedly did something along these lines with her head covering, she was savagely beaten while in police custody, losing consciousness and dying of her injuries on Sept. 16, having spent three days in a coma.

The regime's official explanation is that Amini – by all accounts, a healthy young woman with no pre-existing respiratory or cardiac conditions – died of a heart attack after "suddenly" developing a problem. Few people are buying that, of course, least of all Amini's family. In a heartbreaking interview with the BBC's Persian language service, Amini's grieving father, Amjad, accused the regime of "telling lies," adding, "No matter how much I begged, they wouldn't let me see my daughter."

When Amjad Amini was finally allowed to see Mahsa's lifeless body, it had been covered entirely from neck to toe, although he noticed the bruising on her feet. "I have no idea what they did to her," he wept, with the unique agony of a bereaved parent.

Obviously, the poor woman's murder was concealed as much as possible by the vile mutawas. And then, we get to the part about what's wrong with how the west approaches all this:

So far, hundreds of protestors have been wounded and several killed during the demonstrations that erupted in the wake of Amini's death, but as in the past, the regime's methodical violence against its own citizens hasn't yet quelled their spirit. While the regime's President Ebrahim Raisi – known as the "Butcher of Tehran" for his service to the regime's terrifying post-revolutionary "Death Committees" – was attending the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, during which time he denied the Holocaust in an interview with "60 Minutes" and petulantly canceled an interview with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour because of her refusal to wear a headscarf, back home protestors were chanting "Death to Raisi" and wishing the same fate on other regime figureheads, such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the ailing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his potential successor.

The willingness of the Iranian people to confront the regime has been on display time and again during the last 13 years. Sadly, Western publics, who should really be inspired by such scenes, have tended to look the other way, while our governments have been dutiful about expressing verbal solidarity without doing anything meaningful to help dislodge the ruling mullahs.

There are many reasons for this. On the Left, there is a strong sense of colonial guilt, emanating from the 1953 CIA-backed coup against the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, that leaves Western liberals nervous about criticizing domestic repression, even when the victim is a young woman. On both Left and Right, in recent years there has been a greater acceptance of cultural relativism, with both "woke" and conservative rationalizations readily available, alongside a broader disillusionment with the idea that liberal democracy should be a universal system.

Oh yes, it's offensive when allegedly good people do nothing, which enables bad things to happen. But now, here's that part where he undermines his arguments more, when he says:

The hijab, in particular, has proved perplexing. In America and Europe, where Muslim communities often face racism and discrimination, the hijab has virtually become a civil rights symbol, because many Muslim women freely and proudly wear one despite countless cases of physical assaults upon those who do. But in the hands of the Iranian regime, the hijab is a symbol of repression, something imposed on all women regardless of whether they are Muslims or whether they come from the Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Baha'i or other religious minorities.

I'm afraid this dampens the impact of the op-ed. It obscures how there's women in the west who've experienced violence by Muslims, supposedly for not wearing hijabs, though even if they did, it's a forgone conclusion they'd still face horrific assaults. And to act as though it's perfectly normal for a woman to wear a head covering like that, which obscures much of her identity, is offensive. This is exactly why I cannot accept the Christian concept of a Catholic nun wearing a wimple outfit: it denies her an identity, and makes her out to be a sexual being in every way that has to suppress her God-given physique. I also cannot accept the Haredi/ultra-Orthodox way of dress, as that too is more or less the same problem.

This also ignores that even in the west, there's Muslim families who force their daughters to wear such a reprehensible outfit, and Muslim women who've paid a price for not wearing it. Not to mention that, in countries like Saudi Arabia, there have been terrible incidents where Muslim women were raped and the victims punished, while their rapists got off with nary a slap on the wrist. That Cohen would obscure such issues does a terrible disfavor to women everywhere. And for that, seriously, I think he owes an apology for acting as though nothing's wrong with dressing in such a way, religiously or otherwise, or pretending that in the west, this isn't an issue.

If we accept the principle that it is for Muslim women themselves, and not the state authorities, to decide whether or not they cover their heads, then we cannot fail to be moved by the protests in Iran – and particularly the spectacle of women of all ages tearing off their hijabs and waving them defiantly at armed security forces.

The US government has expressed its support for the protests, although President Joe Biden's address to the UN General Assembly was disappointingly thin on Iran, saluting the "brave women" who had taken to the streets, but saying no more. Last Thursday, the US announced sanctions on the Morality Police, citing the killing of Amini, as well as sanctions targeting specific officials who "oversee organizations that routinely employ violence to suppress peaceful protesters and members of Iranian civil society, political dissidents, women's rights activists, and members of the Iranian Baha'i community," according to a Treasury Department statement.

Well, what can one expect from such a leftist-influenced "administration"? Biden's already proven useless when he and his "administration" allowed the Taliban to overtake Afghanistan again, in the most catastrophic ways possible. And the UN's no improvement. But if Cohen really wants to prove he's a realist, then he won't obscure how even in the west, hijabs can be a very bad influence along with Islamofascism itself, and again, he should apologize for acting as though Muslims in the west can't possibly be sexist/racist/antisemitic themselves, and also for obscuring the danger of jihadism in the west to boot. All that does is water down the seriousness of the issue, and then, we get nowhere as a result.

UK allows illegal immigrants from Albania to remain

More examples of illegal immigration to the UK in motion, and here, it's those coming from a mainly Muslim country:

Despite initial claims to the contrary, Albanian migrants who illegally enter Britain on small boats will not be sent home if they claim asylum, the UK Home Office has now admitted.

Illegal migrants from Albania who cross into Britain on small boats will not be sent back home if they decide to claim asylum, the UK Home Office has now admitted.

With the number of illegal arrivals from the country spiking in recent months, the British government had previously planned to put illegal Albanians on the fast track to deportation, having made an agreement with the European Muslim majority state to streamline the process for removing the migrants.

However, in what appears to be the latest example of the so-called “Conservative Party” failing to secure the UK’s borders, the Home Office has now admitted such a plan is not legally possible.

Yup, the pseudo-conservative party has done it again, and demonstrated how un-devoted to vigilance and security they really are. Truly pathetic.

What distinctions regarding anti-religious discrimination are not understood by this man?

Mitchell Silk, an ultra-Orthodox writer who once worked for the US Treasury, warns that the attacks occurring against Jews in NYC could also happen to other faiths, but made a most absurd mistake that won't help in dealing with the war against Islamic terrorism either, nor in defending Jews from Muslim antisemitism. First:

My Chassidic Jewish community in Brooklyn is confronted with an unprecedented level of hostility. Hate crimes abound. Chassidic Jews have been shot at, punched, kicked, violently shoved, or almost run over. During Covid, politicians prohibited our community from coming together to pray, celebrate, and mourn — even when masked and distanced — while permitting and even joining public protests. And now they are coming for our children.

The latest attack comes from The New York Times. On Sept. 11, the Times published a report of its year-long “investigation” into the crown jewel of our community, our education system. Despite the report’s thin trappings of investigative journalism, the charge — plainly stated — was that Chassidic-Americans are too corrupt, abusive of children, and illiterate to be treated as equal members of society.

The Times fired another salvo on Sept. 16, arguing essentially for vesting extraordinary authority in state government and local school boards to “protect” our children from our “failing” schools and better prepare them for the future. Oy!

I fear they have a very different vision for my children’s future than my wife and I do.

[...] Rather than feature even one story of success within our system, the Times chose to push a dehumanizing narrative of ethnic stereotyping. Its 275 interviews over more than a year did not yield even one single voice among the tens of thousands of families touched by our yeshivas in profoundly positive ways.

It is relatively simple to dismantle the Times’ house-of-cards case against our yeshiva school system. First, it claims our schools provide a poor education. Test scores, graduate success, and the parents of roughly 100,000 students in more than 250 schools say differently. Unlike most public schools, where grade inflation runs rampant and roughly 25 percent of graduates are functionally illiterate, our system delivers a high rate of academic success, with most alumni committed to life-long learning.

While I'm aware there are plenty of communities who're providing their children with proper education for topics like mathematics and the accompanying science-based exams, I find it galling the guy won't acknowledge it's insular tribes like Satmar who're guilty of dumbing down education while mooching socialist welfare, and a terrible shame people like him won't lament how Neturei Karta taint their overall image to boot. I've noticed there's Haredi representatives who point to what they see as positives, but refuse to condemn the most insular tribes who give the lifestyle a bad name for any particular reason. Such a failure of vigilance and refusal to question whether the Haredi lifestyle as a whole isn't a good influence is exactly why they'll never manage to combat this image issue properly. Of course, it's no shock if the NYT won't make distinctions either, and that's just as bad.

But now, look where Silk really bungles the impact of his defense for Haredi schools in the USA, when at the end, he adds a certain religion's house of worship to the issue:

But I won’t hold my breath because this campaign isn’t about improving the education in Chassidic schools. It’s about promoting a narrative that casts people of faith as intolerant, ignorant, and uncivilized. In service of this anti-religion narrative, facts will be invented, statistics massaged, and enemies of the people conjured out of whole cloth. The Chassidic-American community is the target today, but expect these attacks to come soon to a church, mosque, synagogue, or meditation retreat near you.

And here's where the guy really screws up royally. Why does he think sources steeped in anti-semitism would actually have any issue with the Religion of Peace, which is built upon koranic verses like 5:60, which describes Jews as apes and pigs. If Silk's really concerned about antisemitism, wouldn't he rather mosques not operate in the USA, based on what they could teach about Jews, and doesn't he realize a lot of the recent antisemitic attacks in the New York region could've been committed by Muslims too? How does Silk expect to combat antisemitism effectively if he won't acknowledge Muslim antisemitism is a serious issue? Talk about dampening the whole subject.

I'm hugely disappointed with Silk for obscuring the serious danger of Muslim antisemitism anywhere in the world, which only suggests that, despite his effort to present himself as a well-learned man, he remains oblivious to the threat of Islamic terrorism, and is failing to recognize that the leftist system is lenient on Islamic bigotry. Worse, it suggests he's not willing to take up the cause of people like Salman Rushdie, who paid terrible prices for speaking out agains the very belief system Silk downplayed in his article. If the leftist dominated systems haven't done what to defend against Islamofascism, why should we assume they'd actually put a stop to what's taught in mosques and madrassas? Silk's only suggested he's no different.

Israeli cartoonist warns new Captain America film's portrayal of Sabra could be woke

There's been news - superficial as could be expected - that Israeli actress Shira Haas was cast in the role of the Bill Mantlo/Sal Buscema-created Sabra in Captain America: New World Order. Here's what i24 News is saying about it:

Israeli actress Shira Haas joined the Marvel cast in the fourth "Captain America" film, in which she will play an Israeli superheroine, according to an announcement made Saturday evening at Disney's D23 Expo conference in California.

According to Variety, Haas will play a former spy agent named Ruth Bat-Seraph aka "Sabra," a term used for Israeli-born Jews. She first appeared in the Marvel comics in 1980.

Sabra served in the Mossad and has superpowers, which include extraordinary strength, stamina and speed. She also possesses anti-gravity devices, allowing her to fly through the air faster than 300 miles per hour.

Alas, this alone is not reason enough to watch a film coming at a time when Kevin Feige's turning their screenplays into woke garbage, as the recent Thor installment makes clear. And on that note, YnetNews says veteran Israeli cartoonist Uri Fink is not optimistic. It also tells what he thinks was a case of plagiarism, based on a character he created early in his art career in the late 1970s:

Since Disney announced that Israeli actress Shira Haas will play an Israeli superhero named Sabra in the next installment of the Captain America series, veteran Israeli comic book artist and writer Uri Fink's world went abuzz.

The reason? In 1978, at the tender age of 15, Fink created Sabraman — the first Israeli superhero — who shares some striking similarities with Marvel's heroine, first and foremost, their names.

"I'm getting messages from people who know the character, asking what I'm going to do about it, as if they're encouraging me to sue Marvel and make a killing off the whole thing," Fink tells Ynet.

"It's not the first time. It already happened in 1980 when [Marvel] first created the character, two years after Sabraman, but I didn't think it was right to sue them and I still don't think this is appropriate and that I would make anything out of it. It's just a word. You can't copyright a word. Sabra is just a word."

Sabra is a prickly pear cactus that is very common in Israel and has become a colloquial term used to describe native Israelis — rough and tough on the outside but soft and sweet on the inside.

Fink says it is likely the American comic book publisher drew inspiration from his work back in the day.

"I do believe they saw Sabraman back in the day. There were articles written about it the world over and I gave interviews to various papers, so it is likely they saw it," he says.

"Many guys in DC and Marvel were Jewish back then and the book made it to the Jewish communities abroad too. The comic was in English, and Jewish American guys dug it, it likely reached them, but it wasn't the most polished comic book in the world."

Yes, maybe it's possible, based on how similar their costumes look, although Sabraman appears to have a mask on, while Ruth Bat-Seraph doesn't wear one. That aside, here's where Fink provides a realist view in context of the PC mentality now ruining much of showbiz:

However, Fink voiced pessimism about how the Israeli character would be portrayed by contemporary comic artists.

"Sabra went on to feature in some stories that weren't very pro-Israel, it was already weird back then. So I don't think this would augur well for how she'd be depicted by Marvel now that they've gone woke," he said, using a term that is popularly used to describe people highly alert to social injustices but is also used by some as a derogatory term for a flavor of contemporary progressive leftist ideology which, among other things, is highly critical of Israel.

Sadly, her first official appearance in 1981 is nothing to write home about, because of the troubling moral equivalence and downright sloppy writing that permeated the story, and some of that unfortunately questionable scripting that took place in the original Hulk #256 where Sabra officially debuted (she may have made her first appearance 6 issues prior in a cameo) is further elaborated upon here. First:

In a move that is already thrilling some Jewish audiences and stirring controversy among other international fans and activists, Marvel Studios announced that an Israeli comic book hero will appear in the next installment of its Captain America movie franchise.

Seriously, I find it dismaying, no matter how much it does happen, when audiences just go bonkers over the mere announcement, when the finished product can be anything but a celebration. And the original debut is just why it could be thought otherwise:

Sabra (also the word for an Israeli prickly pear, which has a bristly outside and soft and sweet inside, and is used as a nickname for an Israeli person) is a Mossad agent and police officer with superhuman speed and strength. The 1981 comic that first prominently features her involves multiple quotes and plot points that would be seen as taboo in a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster.

In the comic, the Incredible Hulk mistakenly ends up in Tel Aviv, where he befriends an Arab boy who gets killed in an attack by identifiably Arab terrorists. Sabra — real name Ruth Bat-Seraph — witnesses the attack and assumes Hulk is in cahoots with the terrorists. She attacks Hulk with “energy quills,” weakening him, but the Hulk explains that the boy was his friend — and references the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Boy died because boy’s people and yours want to own land!” the Hulk tells Sabra. “Boy died because you wouldn’t share. Boy died because of two old books that say his people and yours must fight and kill for land!”

This is all delivered without any genuine quotations from the Judaist Bible/Torah or the Islamic Koran/Hadith provided. What Mantlo injected was incredibly embarrassing, and it makes little difference that it's a "product of its time". That doesn't make it any less poor. This is another example where people don't realize that a specific storyline where a character debuted is, unfortunately, the result of bad writing rushed into production. That the sea port in Tel Aviv isn't even portrayed very accurately is the least of the tale's problems.

Things are not getting better when seeing a columnist for the far-left Forward exploit the moment for confusing propaganda:

Even as the MCU has made efforts to stare down institutionalized American racism and overreach of government surveillance a la the Patriot Act, many still view these movies and shows as little more than military propaganda. (The studio has, in fact, partnered with the military quite a bit.)

He makes it sound as though the army's anything but influenced by leftism. That aside, it's loathsomely reprehensible how this puff piece builds on anti-American propaganda of the sort that claims the USA is "systemically racist". And it's just like them to cite Civil War as though it were a positive example, when it was most definitely not. Once, superheroes, if they fought each other in the past century, it wasn't over partisan politics, and IIRC, in the Avengers/Defenders War of 1973, it was over misunderstandings, and communications with a paralyzed Black Knight that got warped by Loki and Dormammu along the way. Yet these propagandists on the left never care.

Introducing the Israeli counterpart to Captain America, then, whose comic origins tie her directly to the Jewish State’s intelligence agency, has raised eyebrows. It’s scarcely surprising, given how over at DC the mere casting of Gal Gadot as an Amazon from a fictional island generates perennial outrage.

A critic on Twitter wrote that Sabra’s powers will include “demolishing Palestinian homes with her mind.” Many others noted how Sabra’s debut, in an issue of “The Incredible Hulk,” featured the killing of an Arab child (the word “Palestinian” is never used) so that Sabra can have a teachable moment. As we delve into the controversy a little more, let’s start there.

At least this is making clear that, no matter the content of the upcoming film, antisemites reject Mantlo's creation from the outset. Then:

She first shows up in 1980’s “Incredible Hulk” No. 256 “Power in the Promised Land!” She mistakenly believes that the Hulk is working with terrorists and the two fight. In their final confrontation, the Hulk cradles the body of Sahad, an Arab boy he befriended who was killed in an explosion caused by terrorists. The Hulk then lectures Sabra about the toll of the ongoing conflict.

“Boy died because boy’s people and yours both want to own land!” the Hulk yells. “Boy died because you wouldn’t share!” (Remember, this is the Hulk talking.)

What makes the Hulk even angrier is that the crux of the conflict is because of “two old books” (i.e., the Quran and Hebrew Bible) and “now boy is dead — but boy didn’t even read books!”

Many online have rightly noted how Sahad, who first tells the Hulk about the “two old books,” is a racist depiction of a Palestinian kid. He is illiterate, steals and lies to tourists for money. The only other sort of Palestinians the issue shows are terrorists. If this is indeed the nuance we can expect from Sabra’s corner of the world, there’s reason for concern.

Now, let's hold on here for a moment. The kid tells Hulk about the books...yet he's illiterate and never actually read either?!? If that's not some of the most slapdash writing, I don't know what is. Of course, why does the columnist keep insisting on referring to the Arab boy in focus as a "palestinian", and not as an Arab or even a Moslem? Funny how the columnist doesn't suggest maybe the boy should've been a Jewish child instead, since that way, Mantlo could've proven he wanted to at least try to provide insight on Jewish society from a child's perspective.

But Sabra has had a few decades to develop and she has gone on other adventures — helping to keep the son of an ambassador to Israel from turning into the next Adolf Hitler; becoming an advocate for mutants; even working alongside a Palestinian teammate called (sigh) Arabian Knight.

Overall, she’s a pretty minor character with just 50 appearances and it’s far too early to tell what her role in the new film may be.

Oh, and what's this here? I thought Arabian Knight, introduced an issue later, was of Egyptian background, and this sorry excuse for a columnist is taking this out of context too? I'm sorry, but this only compounds the perception he's telling all this out of contempt for Israel, to undermine its birthright history, and suggests he doesn't respect Golda Meir, who refuted the "palestianian" propaganda decades ago. He does make one fairly accurate observation, though:

While some will always balk at the idea of featuring an Israeli superhero at all, this may, in fact, not be where much of the world is at, even as many rally behind BDS. That said, it’s more than likely the film will face a ban in the Middle Eastern countries that have yet to normalize relations with Israel.

Even after the Abraham Accords, don’t expect Haas to be walking a red carpet in Saudi Arabia for the premiere. That new world order is still out of reach.

That is bound to be the case, sadly. If a number of Muslim dominated countries wouldn't screen Gal Gadot's movies, there's no reason to assume this'll be any different.

Through this, I found a Twitter thread posted by Simcha Gross, an assistant professor on ancient Jewish history at the University of Pennsylvania, who found the 1st full tale guest starring Sabra cringeworthy after researching it. He describes the following, in example:

Sahad tells Banner "sometimes it is very hard to be an Arab in Israel. Both my people and the Israelis say that this land is theirs. They could share it, but two very old books tell them they must kill each other over it." Some oversimplification for you! 7

— Simcha Gross (@Simcha_Gross) August 24, 2020

Sahad also tells Bruce "Me, I don't read books." In this issue we encounter only two types of Arabs in Israel; terrorists, and a kindhearted illiterate child thief/con-artist. As for Israelis, we only encounter police officers, soldiers, and Sabra. Not good. 8 pic.twitter.com/AIXP1gGgEy

— Simcha Gross (@Simcha_Gross) August 24, 2020

Not quite, in regards to Arabs: the adult marketeers who yell, "stop, thief!" and give chase are not just Arabic, they're clearly identified as Moslems by the keffiyes they wear on their heads. But, the point about the pseudo-citation of the Bible/Koran is well made, mainly because the boy, as indicated, didn't even read books.

The Hulk takes Sahad's body and flees, with Sabra in pursuit. Here comes the denouement of the story, as the savage Hulk informs Sabra that the Israelis and Arabs are the true savages, mimicking Sahad's geo-political analysis: 12 pic.twitter.com/3TjGQVBpbD

— Simcha Gross (@Simcha_Gross) August 24, 2020

I did think it was odd, in addition, that it's made to sound like Sabra never actually cared about the child in the first place. There's many stories built around the problems of misunderstandings. But this, from a political perspective, really takes the cake. The way it's set up also has the effect of watering down the serious issue of Islamic terrorism, which was just as relevant a topic in the early 80s as it is today.

And, just in case we missed the point of the savage hulk pointing out the inhumanity of the various actors in the conflict "It has taken the hulk to make her see this dead arab boy as a human being. It has taken a monster to awaken her own sense of humanity." 16

— Simcha Gross (@Simcha_Gross) August 24, 2020

And here, it is silly and superfluous to use those kind of descriptions for her personality. Now, you could argue it wouldn't be entirely implausible for the Hulk to dish out an ill-informed lecture. There were other times when he was depicted taking questionable positions, and in Hulk form, Bruce Banner could be mentally messed up (let's also note that in later years, around the time Peter David became writer, multiple personality disorder was emphasized circa issue #377). Even so, the script by Mantlo is very slapdash and the product of people who resorted to cheap paths instead of firm challenges. Not many may realize it, but Sabra's early entries, unfortunately, were not very good, as this story suggests.

And considering Hollywood's track record in the past few decades on the subject of Israel's history, that's one more reason why I'm not optimistic this new Capt. America sequel would respect Israel, let alone Sabra herself. Let's remember, Feige is a bad lot, and has already proven so with the most recent Marvel movies containing wokeness.

21 years after 9-11, lessons still unlearned

Bruce Thornton's written about how the elitists running the political store in the USA still learn no lessons from the horrible tragedy on September 11, 2001:

Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.

This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

[...] Oblivious to this traditional religious imperative, during the Nineties the Clinton administration didn’t take seriously enough the string of al Qaeda’s anti-American rhetoric he backed up with violent attacks on our military and diplomatic personnel. Instead, the Clinton team treated them as criminal matters, or heretical distortions of Islam by renegade Muslims, rather than as salvos in a jihad that climaxed in 9/11.

On the other hand, the George Bush administration, after its swift punishment of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, changed the goals of those conflicts into a misguided, naïve effort to democratize peoples whose creed and its supreme law, Koranic-based sharia, are incompatible with liberal democracy and its cargo of religious tolerance, sex equality, unalienable rights, and separation of church and state. The latter was particularly myopic, given that, as Karsh writes, Islam “was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers.” Muhammad could thus “cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura.”

This mistake by Bush’s foreign policy team was in part the fruit of the wrong lessons taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which arrogantly encouraged the primacy of the Western liberal “rules-based internal order” as the master political paradigm for the whole world. And this hubristic mentality persisted all the way to Joe Biden’s skedaddle from Afghanistan last year, where the U.S. had sponsored seminars on women’s liberation for Afghan males.

Of course, Bush also made clear where he really stands when last year, he used the Memorial service as a cheap excuse to attack Trump, no matter how indirectly, and soiled what should've been a solemn moment. It was most utterly insensitive to 9-11 Families, not to mention victims of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. And then of course, there's the problem of a liberal guilt mentality that only applies to the west, but not to Islamic forces continuing to occupy countries they captured in the past:

Moreover, whereas the Western colonial powers abandoned colonialism and continue to provide aid to their ex-colonies, Muslims still inhabit and rule most of the territories they conquered centuries ago: all of North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey had been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, i.e. proto-Western, for as long as nearly 3000 years before Islam even existed.

Nor is this ancient history: Muslim Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus, which it invaded and has illegally occupied and colonized since 1974, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots; destroying, looting, and vandalizing more than 550 churches; and refusing to this day to inform the Greeks about the fate of over 2000 of their compatriots who disappeared during the invasion. Bullying Israel over its “occupation” of the lands their ancestors inhabited 3000 years ago reveals the West’s shameful sacrifice of history and justice in order to pursue its own economic and ideological interests.

Yes, that's another sad topic to consider. Northern Cyprus continues to remain under Turkish rule, and nobody in the west does anything to reverse it. And back in the USA, who knows what more mistakes will be made, as the elitists continue their own misguided approach to the issues?