Author Archives: Dana Pico

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Cori Bush Merritts continually trashed Israel, but she thinks it’s wholly unfair that she gets called to account for it She lost, and she is royally pissed!

Paul Szypula tweeted out the outraged rant of Representative Cori Bush Merritts[1]Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Cortney Merritts, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect. (Hamas-MO) after she realized that she had been defeated in the Democratic primary for renomination to Missouri’s 1st congressional district. Perhaps she realized that, serving four full years in that seat does not make her eligible for a congressional pension. 🙂

So, who needs to be afraid? Why, the Joooos, of course!

Squad Member Bush Vows to Fight Pro-Israel Group After Loss

by Christian Hall and Bill Allison | Wednesday, August 7, 2024 | 3:06 PM EDT

(Bloomberg) — US Representative Cori Bush said that she will go after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee after she lost a bitter and expensive primary battle driven by Democratic divisions over the war in Gaza.

“AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down,” the Missouri Democrat said in a fiery speech following her defeat to local prosecutor Wesley Bell.

Wesley Bell is hardly a great guy, himself a ‘progressive’ prosecutor, but he apparently isn’t an anti-Semite like Mrs Merritts, and he’s not completely insane. In 2020, he decided that he would not press charges against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who justifiably shot and killed Michael Brown Jr, the oversized thug who roughed up a bodega owner half his size in a robbery. He didn’t say that such exonerated Mr Wilson, but said he could not prove murder or manslaughter beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, he is a liberal, and will almost certainly win the general election in the one-sided first district.

The loss is the second for a member of the “squad” — an informal group of progressives in the US House. Just weeks earlier, Representative Jamaal Bowman, another Israel critic, lost a primary in the New York suburbs to George Latimer, who was also backed by AIPAC.

I refer to them as the squadristi, the Italian nickname for Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts. Today’s far left are every bit as fascist as the Italian dictator. I’ve said it many times before: today’s left are pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Bell, who benefited from $9.5 million in ad spending from pro-Israel groups, according to AdImpact, had implored voters to “stand with Israel,” drawing a sharp contrast with the two-term Democrat who has accused Israel of committing war crimes in its response to the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas. The US and European Union deem Hamas a terrorist organization.

Mrs Merritts refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization.

Next up is squadrista Representative Ilhan Omar Mynett[2]Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Tim Mynett, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect. (Hamas-MN), who is facing a primary election next week.

Progressives argued that the massive amounts raised by Israel supporters are intrusive in local races.

“This would not be a race without AIPAC lifting up this man,“ said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, a PAC that supports Bush and other squad members.

How odd. I can’t seem to recall “progressives” complaining when they spent multiple millions of dollars of ‘outside’ money propping up Democratic candidates in the 2018 and 2020 congressional elections. In Kentucky, my home state, they helped make the 2018 sixth congressional district race extremely expensive, propping up Amy McGrath Henderson[3]Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Erik Henderson, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect. in her nevertheless losing general election campaign against Representative Andy Barr (R-KY), or the same Mrs Henderson in her nevertheless losing general election campaign against Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a race into which the left pumped $100 million.

Sauce for the goose, Mrs Merritts.

References

References
↑1 Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Cortney Merritts, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect.
↑2 Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Tim Mynett, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect.
↑3 Just because she didn’t respect her husband, Erik Henderson, enough to have taken his last name does not mean I shall show him similar disrespect.
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Dead man walking: Hamas declare Yahya Sinwar as their new political leader

Following the extermination — I will not use the word assassination to reference the killing of a cockroach — of Ismail Haniyeh as the political leader of Hamas, the leadership of the terrorist group decided that Yahya Sinwar should be their new Fearless Leader.

Israel had long ago declared that that Mr Sinwar is a dead man walking.

Middle East Crisis: Hamas Names an Architect of Oct. 7 Attacks as New Political Leader

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Hamas announced on Tuesday that it had chosen Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack, as the next head of the group’s political office, consolidating his power over the militant group as it continues the 10-month war with Israel.

Mr. Sinwar, who spent two decades in Israeli prisons, has been long viewed by Israeli officials as a sophisticated strategist with a keen understanding of their society. He has been Hamas’s leader in Gaza since 2017. But he will now also replace Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s top political leader, who was a key liaison in the indirect cease-fire talks with Israel.

As The New York Times pointed out on May 12th, Mr Sinwar was among 1,027 ‘Palestinian’ prisoners traded for one Israeli soldier, Staff Sergeant Galid Shalit, in 2011. It is the sad irony of the Middle East that Mr Sinwar planned what turned out to be the deaths of more than 1,027 innocent Israelis on October 7th, along with the capturing of roughly 250 hostages.

In saving one soldier, Israel paid the price of over a thousand innocent non-combatants, plus over 600 soldiers and policemen killed in the current war. I understand the tremendous pressure on the government concerning the return of the remaining hostages, an unknown number of whom are already dead, just as there was during the five-year captivity of Staff Sergeant Shalit, but at some point Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have to realize that releasing multiple numbers of ‘Palestinian’ bad guys in exchange for a few surviving Israelis is not a wise trade.

The Times reported:

While the talks are mediated in Egypt and Qatar, it is Mr. Sinwar — believed to be hiding in a tunnel network beneath Gaza — whose consent is required by Hamas’s negotiators before they agree to any concessions, according to some of those officials.

The psychopath Yahya Sinwar. You can see the crazy in his eyes.

Due to Mr Sinwar’s concealment, it takes considerable time to get any new negotiations communicated to him, and time to get his responses back. If his consent has been required in the past, while Mr Haniyeh was still alive, how much more so is that true now?

He is supposedly hiding in a deep, deep tunnel network, protected by several captured Israelis being used as human shields.

The decision to appoint Mr. Sinwar is an indication that, ten months into the war, the Palestinian group’s leaders remain firmly behind the decision to attack southern Israel on Oct. 7, analysts said. And it signals that Israeli efforts to try and cripple the group by killing off its leaders may have only entrenched the hard-line position Hamas has taken, they said.

Gaza has been, if not completely destroyed, heavily damaged. Whatever jobs they had, whatever infrastructure they had, are gone now.

“This is more about the overall vision for what Hamas wants, which is focusing more on liberation and less on being a governing power,” said Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the official body representing Palestinians internationally.

Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza has driven the Islamist group underground, but Hamas had ruled over the enclave since 2007, fashioning itself into the new government of Gaza and exerting oppressive control over the enclave’s people.

Under Mr. Sinwar’s leadership, Hamas, designated by many Western governments as a terrorist group, had sought to free itself of the challenge of running a civilian government in Gaza, while remaining the ultimate power through its military might.

Mr. Sinwar’s selection was an affirmation of that vision, one that aims to put a greater focus on confronting Israel.

After the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas leaders said they wanted to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts to revive the Palestinian cause, knowing Israel’s response would be aggressive.

In other words, they’re fanatics.

As much as they might have thought the Arab or Muslim nations would come to their aid, that hasn’t been the case. Some Islamist groups like the Houthis and Hezbollah have tried to bring the battle to Israel, none of the Arab nations have done so, because Arab governments have a responsibility to their nations and people, and the last thing they want is another devastating war with Israel. Iran, which is Persian, not Arabic, and Turkey, which is Turkish, not Arab, have made threatening noises, but Iran is 1,000 miles away from Israel, and Turkey 500 miles away.

Hamas would prefer death before surrender, and Israel just might give it to them.

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Hoist by their own petard

The expression “hoist by his own petard” comes from the Bard himself, in Hamlet:

There’s letters sealed; and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

— Prince Hamlet, in Hamlet, act 3, scene 4

Wikipedia notes:

The phrase’s meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown (“hoist”, the past tense of “hoise”) off the ground by his own bomb (“petard”), and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice.

A shorter version might just be one word: karma. And so we have a major dose of karma on the campus of Temple University.

A Temple student pleads to sexual abuse, burglary. Questions arise on whether Temple should let him stay

The incident occurred in October 2022 at American University and led to student protests.

by Susan Snyder | Monday, August 5, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

The 2022 case made headlines and led to student protests at American University: A male student entered two female students’ dorm rooms without permission on Oct. 31, took underwear, and touched one woman on the inner thigh while she was sleeping.

The man, David Kramer-Fried, fled the room when the woman awakened, according to court documents. Police later found a pair of women’s underwear in the front pocket of a hoodie that Kramer-Fried was seen wearing that night on security video, the documents said. The university eventually barred him from campus.

He was arrested last December and on June 14 of this year, Kramer-Fried pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and misdemeanor sexual abuse — charges that don’t require him to register as a sex offender.

Upon reading this story, I tried several searches, but was unable to find a photo or mugshot of Mr Kramer-Fried with which to illustrate this article, and I do so love including mugshots. Even the American University notification that he had been barred from their campus didn’t include his photo, which seems odd: how can Mr Kramer-Fried be barred if other students and staffers do not know what he looks like? There’s nothing I could find which would even tell readers whether he is black or white. From his name, I suspect that he’s white, but have no way of knowing. All that left me was a stock image of crime scene tape to use to illustrate this article.

About the time of his plea, his public defender noted he was enrolled full time as a student at Temple University, while also having to regularly report electronically to the court’s pretrial services. Kramer-Fried, now 21, awaits sentencing scheduled for Aug. 23.

It’s unclear at what point after his arrest Kramer-Fried was accepted to Temple, but the situation around his case raises the question of whether, when and what kind of criminal records or activity of potential students should be considered in the college application process — a subject of intense scrutiny in recent years.

The sentencing scheduled for August 23rd might answer the question as to whether he should be allowed on Temple’s campus, as he could get several years on the burglary charge. Me? I have to wonder how anyone as boneheadedly stupid — if you break into someone’s dorm room, you are automatically stupid — as Mr Kramer-Fried could have been admitted to any college; American University is a private school which has an acceptance rate of 40.6%. Temple’s acceptance rate is much higher, in the lower 80% range, but who’d really want to go to college someplace where random bullets may fly?

The article continues to tell us that the group Student Activists Against Sexual Assault believe that Mr Kramer-Fried should not be allowed on campus, a position with which I agree. Several paragraphs follow to tell readers of the opposition to allowing him to be a student at the University.

But then we get to the “hoist by his own petard” part:

In 2019, Common App removed the criminal history questions from the “common” portion of its application “to provide members with the greatest flexibility to determine how best to comply with their local requirements and institutional policies.”

A year later, it stopped asking applicants to include school disciplinary violations after finding that Black applicants reported incidents at more than twice the rate of white students.

“Requiring students to disclose disciplinary actions has a clear and profound adverse impact,” Jenny Rickard, the group’s president and CEO, said at the time. “This is about taking a stand against practices that suppress college-going aspiration and overshadow potential.”

There’s a lot more at the original, telling us how the left pushed to not have questions about past criminal arrests and convictions become a bar to admissions, though some wanted to make an exception for sex offenses. Mr Kramer-Fried didn’t plead guilty until a couple of months ago, and his acceptance at Temple may have predated his conviction; we’re not told about that, either.

But I am amused how the attempts by the left to not penalize applicants who are black for previous criminal history — no one seems to ask why black applicants might have a higher rate of criminal accusations and convictions — might have allowed a possibly white applicant with charged sex offenses to be accepted, and now people are up in arms about it. Mr Kramer-Fried was only arrested last December, despite having been identified much earlier.

There’s a lot of fault here. Temple didn’t do enough due diligence to reveal that he’d been barred from another university, and apparently knew nothing of his at-the-time alleged offenses. Some of that stems from not wanting to spend much money on due diligence, but it also stems from the leftist mindset that such things shouldn’t be investigated because it might disproportionately affect minority applicants.

Mr Kramer-Fried might be stupid, but so are the liberals who handle cases like this.

 

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Nooo, not anti-Semitism at all!

Back in the days of not-so-long ago, American history teachers used to assign The Diary of a Young Girl, the writings of Anne Frank as her Jewish family and she hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam, after the Germans occupied it.

Born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, under the Weimar Republic, her family emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took power. Germany invaded Holland and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, and the Dutch government fled in just a few days. The Netherlands surrendered on May 15th. As the Reichskommissariat Niederlande, the Nazis civilian occupation government, began increasing oppression of the Jews in 1942, the Frank family went into hiding in a concealed room of a larger house, where they remained until August of 1944, when they were arrested by the Gestapo. They were sent to the concentration camps, and Anne died somewhere between February and March of 1945.

The recovery of her diary writings were published in 1947, and quickly became famous. And so we come to this:

Statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti

Story by CBSNews | Sunday, August 4, 2024

The statue commemorating Anne Frank, one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust, was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti for the second time on Sunday.

The statue is located in Merwedeplein, near the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

According to images published on X, the base of the statue was spray-painted with the slogan “Free Gaza” while the girl’s hands were painted with the same red color, AFP reported.

Sunday was the 80th anniversary of the August 4, 1944 capture of the Frank family by the Gestapo.

Miss Frank had nothing to do with the war in Gaza, or the extermination of Ismail Haniyeh, or anything else. The restoration of the nation of Israel had not occurred when she was captured, and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen camp. So I really don’t want to hear that defacing her statue was some sort of anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli protest without being anti-Semitic as well.

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler. Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, in response to the anti-Semitism in Europe, in Christian Europe, where Jews had been pushed into ghettos, faced serious restrictions in society, and were occasionally the victims of pogroms. Mr Herzl claimed that the only solution to anti-Semitism in Christian Europe was for Jews to get out of Europe, and set up an independent state just where Israel is now. But it wound up taking the Nazis and the Shoah to make Israel a reality.

At the end of the war, half of the Jews in Europe were dead, and almost all of them had been completely dispossessed of their homes, their professions, their property. They quite literally had no place to go, no homes to which to return.

Think of what had happened. Though Germany had been completely under the Nazis’ control, most Germans weren’t Nazis. Yes, every German had been under twelve years of Josef Goebbels’ propaganda, something which told the German people that the Jews were their mortal enemies, that they were a tremendous danger, but if the non-Nazi Germans nevertheless cooperated with the Nazis in rounding up the Jews, so did the French, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Poles, the vast majority of whom were (supposedly) Christian, and who did not spend a dozen years being indoctrinated by the Nazis.

Even if the Jews could have returned to their pre-war homes, that would have left them living side-by-side with the very people who turned them over to the Nazis! 

Anne Frank? She had nothing to do with any of that. Her statue is a symbol of the plight of the Jews wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators in the lands they occupied. Yet now some anti-Semitic thug or thugs have chosen to vandalize her statue.

Let’s not kid ourselves: while the war in Gaza might have made it more newsworthy, anti-Semitism is the bottom cause, not some distinction between hating Jews and opposing Zionism. The Germans exposed the fact that the Christian Europeans really didn’t want the Jews living among them, and now it seems that they don’t want the Jews living anywhere else.

 

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Don’t blame Other People if your neighborhood is a mess

Our good friends on the left like to tell us that the plight of poor people is the result of systemic racism, redlining, poor schools — though never to say that vouchers for private schools or school choice could help! — and disinvestment in poorer communities, basically blaming all of their travails on greedy capitalists, and really anybody other than the poor themselves.

Then I found this, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Residents welcome Philly’s citywide cleanup, but complaint data show trash quickly returns

Mayor Parker’s Office of Clean and Green aimed to deep clean every Philly neighborhood this year. Halfway through the program, Philly 311 data show that trash complaints have not receded.

by Saara Ghani and Ximena Conde | Tuesday, July 30, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

My Nguyen and Cloud, her big and fluffy dog, walk through their Kensington neighborhood every day. She worries that Cloud will rifle through the garbage on the sidewalk and get dirty — or worse, choke on something.

Just a week before, the area had been swarmed by city crews armed with leaf blowers, street sweepers, and water trucks — part of a citywide summer cleanup targeting every corner of Philadelphia.

“It doesn’t last, because people keep littering,” Nguyen said.

From Kingsessing to Kensington, residents have welcomed the added investment but said it is not a long-term solution. Garbage complaints keep rolling in to Philly311, the city’s reporting system for nonemergency complaints.

I certainly appreciate the alliteration the Inky’s reporters used, but it’s worth noting here that Kingsessing and Kensington are two of Philly’s poorer neighborhoods.

The story included a photo by staff photographer Tom Gralish that could be somewhat deceiving, showing the intersection of South 55th and Elliot Streets in Kingsessing, with a bunch of litter and trash in the street, but also six city workers equipped with leaf blowers, and it appears that they were blowing the trash into a smaller area for easier pick up. Nevertheless, there was a lot of trash!

Some of the problems are caused not by the residents just littering the streets, but illegal dumping, presumably from other neighborhoods, but that happens because people know that they can get away with it. Yet, just two weeks after the city cleanup crews have gone through, the system receives more complaints about trash than before the cleaning. Some of that can be attributed to people seeing that hey, someone did clean up the mess, people who might not have complained before because they thought it a waste of time and effort. I suppose that, under previous Mayor Jim Kenney, who mentally checked out of his job long before his term ended, very little got done, so almost anything getting done under the new administration is an improvement.

But, to me, it’s pretty simple: if you don’t want your neighborhood trashed, don’t trash your neighborhood. If you have some garbage in your hands, carry it with you until you get to a trash can; how hard is that? The above linked picture shows dozens of scraps of paper, some soda bottles and drink cups, the kind of thing you’d have after a trip to McDonald’s or a corner bodega. If you’re walking up to your house, and you see little stuff like that littering the sidewalk or the gutter, pick it up and take it in to your trash can. I can understand if the garbage is a used drug needle that no decent person would want to pick it up with his bare hands, but a sandwich wrapper or a drink cup? Just pick it up!

You don’t have to be wealthy to pick up a piece of trash. Just because there are a lot of poor people in the City of Brotherly Love does not mean they can’t try to keep their neighborhoods clean.

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Apparently your Freedom of Speech is dependent upon which side you support

Many on the left decried efforts to curtail anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas demonstrations, and backed the not-so-peaceful demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and Antifa during the 2020 Summer of Hate, shouting about freedom of speech. But now we have the amusing spectacle of The New York Times fretting about how cities can fight “hateful speech” when it comes from the right.

What Can a City Do When Neo-Nazis Start Marching Down Its Streets?

The brazen appearance of white supremacist groups in Nashville left the city grappling with how to confront hateful speech without violating First Amendment protections.

by Emily Cochrane | Thursday, August 1, 2024

They first arrived at the beginning of July: dozens of masked white supremacists, shuffling out of U-Hauls, to march through Nashville carrying upside-down American flags.

A week later, members of a separate neo-Nazi group, waving giant black flags with red swastikas, paraded along the city’s famed strip of honky-tonks and celebrity-owned bars. The neo-Nazis poured into the historic Metro courthouse to disrupt a City Council meeting, harassed descendants of Holocaust survivors and yelled racist slurs at young Black children performing on a downtown street.

The appearance of white nationalists on the streets of a major American city laid bare the growing brazenness of the two groups, the Patriot Front and the Goyim Defense League. Their provocations enraged and alarmed civic leaders and residents in Nashville, causing the city to grapple with how to confront the groups without violating free speech protections.

“I can’t imagine having a mimosa on Fifth and Broadway, and 400 Patriot Front members walk out of a U-Haul — it has to be one of the most jarring experiences as an American and as a tourist in the city,” said State Representative Aftyn Behn, who represents the city’s downtown. “Nashville is a microcosm of the greater country, and we are at a moment where we have to decide who we are.”

I’m not sure how 400 Patriot Front members would fit in “a U-Haul,” but whatever. But it seems to me that the best response to groups advocating things you hate is to ignore them, at least as long as they aren’t setting buildings on fire or physically assaulting people. These groups usually demonstrate with well-disciplined and orderly marches, then get back in their vehicles, and return to their homes.

Both of the groups that visited Nashville this summer have become more visible since the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va, and are now among the top sources of white supremacist propaganda. At the same time, the leadership of the other far-right groups like the Proud Boys has been disrupted by prosecutions over their involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

White supremacists have appeared in Nashville before and have increasingly promoted racist and antisemitic messages across the country. Those include plotting to riot at a Pride event in Idaho, disrupting city council meetings in New England and protesting at the opening New York performances of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in the South.

Did you catch that? They were “plotting to riot,” not that they actually started a riot. According to the embedded Times story, police “received a tip that a group of people had jumped into a U-Haul van near a Pride event.”

Many of the men also had shields and wore shinguards, and the police recovered one smoke grenade, they said. They did not mention other weapons.

So, other than a “smoke grenade,” something which could be used to have a group of marchers emerge from a cloud of smoke, the 31 arrested men were unarmed. That Times story concluded with this gem:

The action in Coeur d’Alene was not the only threat that involved a far-right group and an L.G.B.T.Q. event on Saturday. In San Lorenzo, Calif., members of the Proud Boys disrupted the “Drag Queen Story Hour,” a reading event at the San Lorenzo Library that was attended by children, parents and other community members, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook.

The men shouted homophobic and transphobic slurs at the event organizer and were described as having a violent demeanor, authorities said. Deputies arrived and de-escalated the situation, but a hate crime investigation is underway, the sheriff’s office said.

So, the men in that protest “shouted” mean things at the organizers of the event, and “were described as having a violent demeanor,” but the story does not say that they actually committed any violent acts.

Back to the article originally cited:

(Nashville) City officials said they were reviewing ordinances related to face coverings, littering and permit requirements for parades, as well as consulting a First Amendment expert to ensure that any crackdown would withstand a legal challenge.

The white supremacist groups, city officials said, strategically navigate city regulations to avoid arrest or police interference. Often, they are penalized with littering citations for distributing antisemitic pamphlets; in one instance, a leader of the Goyim Defense League spent a few weeks last fall in a Florida jail.

If you follow the last link, which is behind a paywall, you’ll see that the man listed as having spent a few weeks in jail was sentenced to thirty days for littering. From what little I could see before the paywall blocked everything, there were no charges against him of any violent crimes.

Today’s left in America very much support protests and rallies by the far left, cheering on the Black Lives Matter and Antifa demonstrations which caused multiple millions in damage in break-ins and arson, and they still call Kyle Rittenhouse a murderer for having defended himself against three previously convicted criminals assaulting him during that famous “Fiery but mostly peaceful protest” in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But when a group of men, in “which members generally wear masks and ‘khaki pants and a blue or white polo shirt,’ and sometimes employ smoke bombs,” for dramatic effect, and even have an operational plan consisting of marching in an orderly column until they reach barriers are encountered, and disengage and march back to a pre-arranged spot “once an appropriate amount of confrontational dynamic has been established.”

They might be confrontational, and they might be unpleasant, but they proceed without weapons to exercise their freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. Liberal urban governments really hate that, but let’s tell the truth here, American liberals really do hate the freedom of speech when it isn’t speech they like.

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The Iranians should be worried!

As my good friend Robert Stacy McCain has noted, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it was responsible for the extermination — I refuse to call it an assassination, as one does not assassinate cockroaches — of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, though most people have concluded that they did. Personally, I hope that Israel is responsible! Arash Azizi certainly believes it!

A Wake-Up Call for Iran

Israel can pretty much do what it wants on Iranian soil.

By Arash Azizi | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 | 11:20 AM EDT

Ismail Haniyeh should have known that Tehran wasn’t a safe place for him to be. What has Israel ever wanted to do on Iranian territory that it hasn’t been able to accomplish? In 2018, it stole the country’s entire nuclear archive. In 2020, it killed Iran’s top nuclear-weapons official. In 2022 and 2023, it reportedly abducted, interrogated, and then released security officials who were planning actions against Israeli tourists in the region—and it did this entirely on Iranian soil. Such extensive operations show that Mossad has deeply penetrated Iran’s security architecture, much as it has in the hit Israeli TV show Tehran.

That’s all you get to read at The Atlantic, because the rest falls behind the paywall. But, not to worry, msn.com reproduced it for free! As much as I’m shelling out for subscriptions, free is still my favorite price!

Details are still emerging about the strike on Haniyeh, Hamas’s highest-ranking political leader, who was killed in Tehran in the early hours today. The assassination comes at an incredibly tense moment, less than 24 hours after Israel used an air strike to take out Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah official, in Beirut. Hezbollah has not confirmed Shukr dead, and Israel has not taken responsibility for the attack on Haniyeh. But fingers will naturally point to the country with both the capacity and the motive to go after the Hamas leader.

Israel has a history of targeting militant leaders behind the killing of its citizens. Palestinian militants massacred Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, and Israel responded with Operation Wrath of God, a string of assassinations of militant leaders all over the world that ended only in 1988. Israel was always going to find and kill Haniyeh, a leader of the group that perpetrated October 7, the most lethal terror attack in the country’s history.

“Operation Wrath of God”? Yeah, I like that name!

We are told, of course, just how wrong, wrong, wrong! targeted assassinations are, but let’s tell the truth here: if the United Kingdom had had the ability to take out Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring in 1940, the way Israel supposedly exterminated Mr Haniyeh, does anyone doubt that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would have ordered it done? Does anyone doubt that the world would be a better place today if that had happened?

This supposed capability is hardly surprising. I’m old enough to remember when there was talk in the 1980s, perhaps a bit overblown, that the guidance system for American cruise missiles was so good that we could send it through the men’s room window in the Kremlin. With the ever-increasing capabilities of global positioning satellites, that Israel could put a weapon on any particular building it wished is not really surprising. The more surprising part is that Israel — if it was Israel! — not only knew that Mr Haniyeh was in Tehran, but knew exactly where he was staying. I expect to hear about crackdowns in Iran, as their security apparatus tries to find out how Israel got that information, in time for it to have been actionable. It will not pay to be one of the Usual Suspects in Iran right now!

Oh, who am I kidding? The Usual Suspects have already been in jail in Iran. The Islamic Republic will be scrutinizing anyone who had the information, scouring their computers to see if they can find a Mossad intrusion, interrogating journalists, and putting everyone in the neighborhood to the question. The Ayatollah might want to strike at Israel, but the real strike will be against Iranians themselves.

Ayatollah Ali Khameini has to be worried about something else. If Israel, or whomever, could target and kill Mr Haniyeh in his Tehran safe house, then the mad mullahs could just as easily be killed in their homes. It’s good that he’s worried.

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Karma comes for Ismail Haniyeh He started a war he couldn't finish, and now that war has finished him.

Ismail Haniyeh isn’t smiling anymore.

We noted, on June 6th, that Hamas leaders don’t really care about the lives of ordinary Palestinians, and see the sacrifice of their lives as politically useful:

Ismail Haniyeh is the ‘Chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau,’ and as such is supposedly the chief officer of that terrorist group. On October 7, 2023, he gave a televised speech from Istanbul, telling the world that the October 7th attack was fully justified, which he “highlighted threats to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, the continuation of the blockade on Gaza and Israeli normalization with countries in the region.” Safely living in Qatar, Mr Haniyeh is once again rejecting a ceasefire proposal which does not give Hamas complete victory.

Mr Haniyeh is no longer “safely living in Qatar,” and his estimated net worth of $4 billion isn’t going to do him much good now, as someone has sent him straight to Hell.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is killed in Iran by an alleged Israeli strike, threatening escalation

by Abby Sewell | Wednesday, July 31, 2024 | 7:19 AM EDT

BEIRUT (AP) — Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by a predawn airstrike in the Iranian capital Wednesday, Iran and the militant group said, blaming Israel for a shock assassination that risks escalating the conflict even as the U.S. and other nations were scrambling to prevent an all-out regional war. Iran’s supreme leader vowed revenge against Israel.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which has pledged to kill Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel. The strike came just after Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president in Tehran — and only hours after Israel targeted a top commander in Iran’s ally Hezbollah in the Lebanese capital Beirut.

The assassination of Hamas’ top political leader was potentially explosive amid the region’s volatile, intertwined conflicts — because of its target, its timing and the decision to carry it out in Tehran. Most dangerous was the potential to push Iran and Israel into direct confrontation if Iran retaliates.

Yahya Sinwar, you’re next!

Also read: William Teach, “Israel Strikes Beirut, Kills Hezbollah Commander“

Naturally, the maddest of the mad mullahs, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that revenge was Iran’s duty for “a dear guest in our home,” but Iran has already been striking at Israel, via it’s stooges Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States had no advance knowledge of, and was not in any way involved in, the sending of Mr Haniyeh to his 72 bacha bazi boys virgins, and I believe him: Israel would never have told the US in advance, because they’d rightly fear that the US would warn Mr Haniyeh that the strike was coming.

Israel, under the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, completely evacuated Gaza in 2005, forcibly evacuating the Jewish settlers there, and giving the Arabs in Gaza a chance to build something positive there, build an enclave of peace and prosperity. Instead, the ‘Palestinians,’ led by Hamas, turned it into a fetid and festering sewer of anti-Jewish hatred, terrorist activity, and tunnels for hiding weapons and fighters, and a launching pad for attacks on Israel. Hamas had a chance to strive for peace, by being peaceful, and thus pushing for an Israeli government which would be responsive to that peace. Instead, led in part by Mr Haniyeh, they sought, and got, war.

The diplomats are all worried that this will lead to a wider war, but the truth is that, unless Israel finishes off Hamas, and Hezbollah, too, wider war will come. Mr Haniyeh was living in luxury in Qatar, and frequently traveling around the Muslim Middle East, in seeming impunity, while the people he (supposedly) led were dying in a useless struggle. Now he is in Jahannam.

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Oh, noes! #COVID19 is surging in California! But still, few people are actually getting sick

The news is horrifically frightening, and Taylor Lorenz must be going absotively, posilutely bonkers: almost everyone in the Pyrite State has a cold.

COVID surging in California, nears two-year summer high. ‘Almost everybody has it’

By Rong-Gong Lin II | Monday, July 29, 2024 | 3:00 AM PDT

If it seems like many people around you are getting COVID-19, you’re not alone.

Federal data show coronavirus levels in California’s wastewater are surging to levels not seen in summertime since 2022, indicating a wide and worsening spread of COVID.

“We are seeing … a definite, definite surge,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious disease at Kaiser Permanente Southern California.

The surge is clearly apparent in doctor’s offices and clinics where people are seeking outpatient treatment, Hudson said. But, thankfully, not many people are having to be hospitalized because of COVID-19 at this point.

That’s from the Los Angeles Times original, but if readers are stymied by a paywall, the story can be accessed for free from Yahoo! News.

This ‘surge’ of COVID-19 isn’t being measured by actually testing of individuals, but by testing sewage to detect traces of infectious diseases circulating in a community, even if people don’t have symptoms. People infected can shed pieces of the virus when they use the toilet, bathe, or launder their clothing, and samples of the wastewater are taken and tested before the sewage is processed. The CDC are still testing for Monkeypox, though they now call it Mpox, because they don’t want to offend the poor dears who are most prone to contract it.

In particular, one of the FLiRT strains, known as KP.3.1.1, “has really taken off,” Hudson said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that that strain accounted for 17.7% of coronavirus samples nationwide for the two-week period that ended July 20, up from 6.8% for the prior comparable period.

At that rate of growth, that strain is likely to become increasingly dominant in the next few weeks, Hudson said. “So, unfortunately, I think we are going to see a lot more cases.”

Coronavirus levels in California sewage are considered “very high” for a third consecutive week, the CDC said Friday. Thirty-seven states and the District of Columbia — home to nearly 3 in 4 Americans — have either “high” or “very high” coronavirus levels in wastewater.

For the seven-day period that ended July 20, the most recent data available, coronavirus levels in California wastewater were at 93% of the peak from the summer of 2022. They’ve already exceeded last summer’s height.

Naturally, the newspaper is reporting that some people contracting the FLiRT variant are feeling the worst symptoms yet:

“I’ve had COVID a few times but this is the worst I’ve had it,” wrote one person on Reddit. The person reported recurring fever, being so congested they couldn’t breathe out of their nose, “terrible sinus pressure and headache … and I can’t stand up for too long without feeling like I’m about to pass out.”

Another person wrote that their “throat feels like razor blades” and that they feel like they’re “in living misery.”

Naturally, the Democrats are not going to grossly overreact by ordering the stupid and unconstitutional restrictions of 2020-21, because there’s an election approaching! No one’s really going to call for universal masking, regardless of how much they might wish, because it’s so politically damaging.

In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, there were an average of 286 COVID-19-positive people in hospitals for the week that ended July 20. That’s flat from the prior week’s figure of 291, and about half as many as last summer’s peak and one-quarter as many as the peak of summer 2022.

Yet we were also told that California has already exceeded the 2023 summer peak, which can mean only one thing: if serious cases of COVID-19 are fewer, despite a wider spread, then COVID-19 in 2024 just isn’t as bad as previously. “Almost everyone has it,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases expert at UCSF.

But if almost everyone has it, and we aren’t all dropping like flies, it simply cannot be serious anymore. It will be for a few people, but a few people die from the flu or measles as well.

COVID-19 has lost its ability to scare, and few believe the people who try to ramp up fear.