by Daniel Greenfield, GATESTONE  •  February 6, 2024

 Iranians storm the US embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

• We were not ready for the seizure of our embassy in Tehran. We were not ready for the Marine Barracks bombings in Beirut. We were not ready for 9/11. We were not ready for the fall of Kabul. We were not ready for the takeover of shipping in the Red Sea near Yemen.
• What aren’t we ready for next?
• Read more…

by Gordon G. Chang, GATESTONE   February 6, 2024 

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for a photograph during their meeting in Beijing, on February 4, 2022. (Photo by Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / AFP)

• China and Russia [do]… not respect the sovereignty of other states.
• Biden… should realize that there can be no accommodation with regimes that either seek the destruction of the United States—China and Iran, for instance—or regimes helping such enemies—most notably Russia. Biden should be supporting America’s friends to the hilt and seeking total victory for Ukraine and Israel.

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T. Belman. There were so many warnings from so many different people, that it defies understanding that nothing was done and that all these warnings were either ignored or worse, suppressed. The only conclusion available was that people in high places didn’t want anything to be done.

The chief of security of the Supernova festival claims that a friend of his knew of a plan by Hamas to invade Israeli towns, but was forbidden from passing on the information.

Israel National News    Feb 6, 2024, 8:14 AM

The era of reckoning for alternative energy continues.

By James Freeman, WSJ    Feb. 5, 2024 6:02 pm ET

Why do bad things keep happening to customers of alternative energy? The obvious answer is that producing power with only wind or the sun is not efficient. But the fleecing of electricity customers is getting increasingly creative, even in a market that’s been hailed as a model for the future of green power.

As alternative energy’s era of reality checks continues to unfold, it turns out that some customers have been forced to write much larger checks than expected. In the windy United Kingdom, it may have seemed that a future beyond fossil fuels had already started to arrive. Anmar Frangoul reported for CNBC last year:

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Peloni:  Further revelations regarding the Nazi goes to Parlaiment Affair.

Marie Wool, The Globe and Mail February 5, 2024

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Sept. 22, 2023.Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invited Yaroslav Hunka, the Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran who received two ovations in the House of Commons during a visit by Volodymyr Zelensky, to a reception he hosted in the Ukrainian President’s honour the same day.

Read more…

By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS              5 February 2024

What Excites Biden?

Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now daily witness that are nearly destroying the country.

Read more…

By Gadi Taub & Mike Doran  Tablet-Israeli Update  February 4, 2024

A source in the military claims there’s deep dissatisfaction among midlevel reserve officers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at the prospect of the war slowing down or stopping before reaching its main objectives: destroying Hamas as a military threat to Israel and as a political organization capable of ruling Gaza. Gadi also describes testimony, from a third party, that the IDF brass is ignoring orders from the security cabinet. This claim provokes a heated disagreement between Gadi and Mike, who is much more sympathetic to the IDF leadership.

By Irina Tsukerman, JCPA                                          5 February 2024

The Tulkarm Brigade, an amalgamation of fighters from various affiliations, emerged in January 2024, according to the Iranian Tasnim News Agency. (Photograph published by Tasnim)

• Mahmoud Abbas has persisted in de-normalizing relations with Israel as he competes with Hamas in the West Bank. His failed leadership of the splintered Palestinian Authority has caused the West Bank to descend into terror-driven chaos.
• Western leaders have not internalized the increasingly radical politics of the West Bank leadership, still viewing it as a viable, moderate option.
• Read more…

By Yoni Ben Menachem, JCPA                                      5 February 2024

Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar (left), and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s death in Gaza City on March 22, 2017. Note the empty wheelchair on the right. (Paltoday.ps)

Yahya Sinwar is perceived as actively pursuing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s goal of dismantling Israel by the year 2027.

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By Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Attorney and Author

When President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address months after the 9/11 attacks, and identified Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as an Axis of Evil, he made a point to say, “North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens.” That description eerily applies to what Hamas has done in Gaza. It should therefore come as no surprise that the Hermit Kingdom and the fundamentalist Islamic terror group have become dangerous and clandestine allies who together have set the Middle East on fire.
Read more…

Leveraging the fate of the hostages to compel an Israeli surrender to Hamas is a sick, manipulative strategy that is doomed to political failure

By Gadi Taub, TABLET                                                      4 February 2024

An IDF reservist walks past ‘Bring Them Home Now’ street art in the Florentin neighborhood of Tel Aviv on Nov. 16, 2023/ALEXI J. ROSENFELD/GETTY IMAGES

Something fundamental changed in Israel on Oct. 7. We were reminded of the mortal danger our complacency and fantasies about our neighboring enemies pose to our survival. This in turn awakened in us a fierce determination to prevail and a spirit of self-sacrifice we thought we no longer had. At the same time, our political concepts, habits, alliances, and enmities remain those of Oct. 6. In our public square, or what modern states have for a public square—newspapers, TV shows and social media—we still revert to fighting old battles. These fissures are being exacerbated, if not driven, by the preferences and demands of our biggest ally, the United States.

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By Neil Turner, THE CONSERVATIVE WOMAN            5 Feb 2024

IF YOU’VE been watching the situation in Israel, you’ll have noticed a contradiction. On the one hand, the Americans, the British, Australian and EU politicians and officials have been queuing up for photo opportunities on the Gaza border to express their solidarity against the horrific Hamas attack of October 7. On the other hand, in almost every case and the passage of a few days – even minutes – the same people effectively blamed Israel in general and PM Benjamin Netanyahu in particular for causing the problem by oppressing the ‘poor Palestinians’ and failing to provide Statehood.

Confused? Let me explain.

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A principal in Europe: A 12-year-old boy came to me and said, ‘I hate you. We will take back the country’. They reject our culture, our values. Their hatred is unimaginable.”

Giulio Meotti, INN      Feb 4, 2024, 8:08 AM

Katharine Birbalsingh, known as “Britain’s strictest headteacher”, has just been forced to ban Muslim prayers at her school after teachers were attacked. This time we are in London.

The head teacher ended up in the High Court in a lawsuit brought by Muslim students at Michaela School. Birbalsingh decided to stop the prayer rituals after “violence, intimidation and appalling harassment of our teachers”.

Read more…

IPIS and the Crisis Group signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2016, predating much of the latter’s involvement in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF, JPOST FEBRUARY 4, 2024 10:11

Prominent Washington think tank the International Crisis Group, influential in the negotiation of the United States’ nuclear deal with Iran, has extensive but previously undisclosed connections to the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry, according to a report from Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet frequently at odds with Iran’s government, which charges that the theocratic regime has used the experts “to lobby the US government on its behalf.”

Read more…

The following tweet was published by a brother of an Israeli soldier returning from Gaza:

Ido Halbany, X February 2, 2024

My brother returned from Gaza and wanted to share what he saw. These are his words:

“What you see on social media is nothing. in every house in Gaza, there’s evidence of support and involvement in terror by Palestinian civilians considered ‘uninvolved’.

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Peloni:  Washington, not the Saudis, are the source of support for the Pals and the TSS.

After U.S.-led efforts at normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel stalled amid the Gaza war, officials say Riyadh won’t insist Israel take concrete steps toward a Palestinian state – and will accept a political commitment to a two-state solution instead

JPOST   Feb 2, 2024 5:09 pm IST

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman speaks to U.S President Joe Biden during the Jeddah Security and Development Summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 16, 2022.Credit: SAUDI ROYAL COURT/ REUTERS

Saudi Arabia would be willing to accept a political commitment from Israel to create a Palestinian state, rather than anything more binding, in a bid to get a defense pact with Washington approved before the U.S. presidential election, three sources said.

Months of U.S.-led diplomacy to get Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel and recognize the country for the first time were shelved by Riyadh in October in the face of mounting Arab anger over the war in Gaza.

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Biden is more worried about Gaza’s “innocent civilians’ than about the 1,200 really innocent Israeli civilians who were butchered Oct. 7. And he wants to be sure Sinwar gets his reward for killing them – a state. Op-ed.

By Jack Engelhard, INN                                                    4 February 2024

Jack Engelhard

How sweetly this is working out for Yahya Sinwar and the rest of them who run Hamas.

Not for them the disgrace of defeat when this is all over. Not for them anything like Japan’s ceremonial surrender aboard the battleship Missouri, MacArthur seeing to it that the Japanese delegation, heads bowed, signed all the papers to signify their formal humiliation and capitulation.

The Hamas terrorists have no such worries. For what they did Oct. 7, they are not being punished.

Read more…

Peloni:  JPOST describes Ben Gvir’s interview with the WSJ, in which he also called for voluntary emigration, as a“… brief profile, which only included a handful of statements by Ben-Gvir alongside two menacing portraits shot by Jordanian-American photographer Tanya Habjouqa, focused on the political leverage the once-fringe politician has accumulated since being shepherded into the mainstream during Netanyahu’s year-long campaign to return to Balfour Street following his ouster in 2021.” 

Prime Minister Netanyahu rebuked National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for criticizing US President Joe Biden in a recent interview.

INN  Feb 4, 2024

By Pete Hoekstra, GATESTONE                                    4 February 2024

• The common thread weaving Hamas, Hezbollah and the Shia militias together is the significant funding and support each receives from Iran, which has in turn received it from the Obama and Biden administrations. When the Biden administration came in, Iran had $6 billion of reserves; it now has, according to former US Army Gen. Jack Keane, more than $100 billion– which is presumably what it used to finance its proxies and its nuclear program.

Read more…