The Woke culture infecting our society today is the direct offspring of the Liberal Democrat party and the radical left. Woke has permeated our government institutions, Universities, and corporate America, Mainly because of the radical left that have become professors in higher learning, brainwashing students to believe it’s okay to mass-murder, rape, and torture innocent people in Israel and attack the Jews in America.
Although many Democrats try to separate themselves from the Wokesters, they are directly responsible for this Diversity-Equity-Inclusion that plants the seed for division and the balkanization of our country.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Talk about bad timing. On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of “hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.”
Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this. Set aside the dearth of evidence that Muslims face persecution or discrimination in mainstream American society. Last year set a record for anti-Jewish hate crimes, breaking the previous record that was set the year before. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, antisemitism has erupted in our cities and on campuses, this time with the imprimatur and cooperation of the identitarian left. The idea that now is the time to address Islamophobia is so out of touch with the reality of the moment, only the Biden-Harris administration could possibly have come up with it.
But the announcement inadvertently serves to highlight a rather disturbing development in our civic life. At this point, some three weeks removed from the Hamas slaughter of 1,400 Israelis, it’s hard to deny that we have a domestic constituency for Hamas in this country. Generally speaking, it’s comprised of a broad swath of the woke left together with a broad swath of Muslim-Americans, united in what amounts to an unstable Red-Green alliance.
It’s also easy to see that this Hamas constituency is warming up for a season of real violence.
We’ve all seen the recent videos of self-righteous Hamas sympathizers tearing down posters of missing or kidnapped Israeli children. In almost every case, their actions are accompanied by either a defiant callousness or a dead-eyed nonchalance. Pleading with them or interrogating them is pointless, as every person who has tried to do so on camera has quickly discovered. These people are antisemites, and it’s not possible to shame them out of their antisemitism. They own it gladly.
But this week, a different sort of video appeared on social media. A group of Jews in Manhattan’s Upper East Side physically protected a bunch of posters of Israeli child hostages from an antisemite who was trying to tear them down. The man, who of course covered his face with a keffiyeh, tried to force his way through and a scuffle ensued. Eventually, a cop pulled up and appeared to arrest the man as a crowd gathered.
Just happened. 68th and Lex. Jews protecting the posters of Jewish children hostages from being torn down. pic.twitter.com/xIrcdSf9Ne
The incident illustrates the violence lurking just beneath the surface of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas sentiment now manifesting all across the country. The kind of people who are willing to casually rip down posters of children taken hostage by terrorists are not those who have any kind of principled commitment to nonviolence. They might or might not individually be cowards, but they clearly have no problem with violence as such — see, for example, the BLM posters celebrating Hamas paragliders who slaughtered more than 250 Israeli concertgoers on Oct. 7.
This is especially true on our nation’s college campuses. This week at Harvard, whose students have staged some of the most blatant and vile pro-Hamas demonstrations, including straightforward calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, a group of keffiyeh-waving students surrounded and then assaulted a Jewish student who was simply trying to get away from them.
Some of these assailants have been identified, like Ibrahim Bharmal, a student at Harvard Law School and an editor at the Harvard Law Review, as well as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a student of Harvard Divinity School. That a Harvard law student feels free to harass and assault Jews on campus — the opposite of what we should expect from a student of the law — suggests not only that antisemitism on campus is a real threat to Jewish students but that the pro-Hamas woke left is growing in boldness and is reasonably confident it can target individual Jews on campus with impunity.
Jon Levine called the Harvard assault a LARP pogrom, which is exactly what it was. And as we know from 2020, left-wing riot and assault LARPers eventually get around to the real thing. Indeed, all the elements are falling into place for a season of civic violence of the kind we saw during the summer of 2020. The White House’s ham-fisted campaign against Islamophobia is all the confirmation you need that Jewish Americans, not Muslims, are the ones in real danger right now.
This is something of a pattern on the left. When a dangerous or unstable element in its coalition is revealed as such, the official narrative is to pretend that element is under unique threat from the American mainstream. Look at the media and Democrat reaction to the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville back in March. The shooter was Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man. She killed three children and three adults before police took her out. Hale was mentally unwell and left behind a kind of trans shooter manifesto, which was suspiciously never released to the public.
In the wake of the shooting, all we heard from the corporate press and Democratic leaders was that transgender Americans were under threat. Not a word about how transgender ideology attracts mentally unstable, unwell people who need help, not affirmation. That was not the conversation they wanted to have, even after the slaughter of six innocent people.
Likewise, we’re going to hear a lot more about how Muslims and left-wing Hamas apologists are the real victims, even as Jewish students suffer escalating attacks, harassment, and threats. Make no mistake, the violent rhetoric you hear at these pro-Hamas rallies, the revolting practice of tearing down posters of Israeli children taken hostage, the targeting of individual Jewish students on campus — it’s all leading somewhere very bad.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
A judge has overturned the results of the Democrat primary for the mayoral race in Bridgeport, Connecticut, after viewing compelling evidence of voter fraud. His ruling creates chaos for the general election that is scheduled to take place in just a few days.
On September 12, incumbent Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim narrowly edged out challenger John Gomes by a mere 251-vote margin in the Democrat primary. Primary election day ballots favored Gomes, but after absentee ballots were tallied later that evening, Ganim prevailed over Gomes, 4,212 to 3,961.
Within days, the Gomes camp cried foul, posting a video to Facebook that appeared to show Wanda Geter-Pataky, a city employee and a long-standing supporter of Mayor Ganim, stuffing a ballot box outside City Hall with absentee ballots. The Gomes campaign later issued similar allegations against Eneida Martinez, a former city council member who also supports Ganim.
Gomes then filed a lawsuit in Fairfield Judicial District Superior Court to contest the results of the primary election, naming Ganim as well as city clerk Charles Clemons, Bridgeport Democratic registrar of voters Patricia Howard, and Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas as defendants.
On Wednesday, Judge William Clark sided with plaintiff Gomes, citing “significant mishandling of ballots by partisans” such as Geter-Pataky and Martinez. In fact, the sheer volume of evidence was “perhaps unprecedented in the State of Connecticut in an election case,” the judge said.
“The evidence here has involved hundreds of applications and ballots, thousands of hours of video of drop boxes, testimony of partisan actors, assertion of privilege against self-incrimination by Ms. Geter-Pataky and Ms. Martinez, and analysis of ballot numbers, particularly in the voting Districts linked to Ms. Geter-Pataky and Ms. Martinez,” Judge Clark wrote in the 37-page ruling.
Mayor Ganim was also called to testify in the case and said he was “shocked” by the evidence, including an 18-minute video of possible absentee ballot fraud committed by his supporters. “Mr. Ganim was … correct to be ‘shocked’ at what he saw on the video clips. … The videos are shocking to the court and should be shocking to all the parties,” Judge Clark concluded.
The judge, however, was not convinced that improperly stamped absentee ballots from the primary election should have been tossed, as Gomes’ attorney, Bill Bloss, had recommended. An assistant town clerk testified that the official stamp with city clerk Charles Clemons’ signature on it had broken, and while Judge Clark indicated that the city should have taken steps to rectify the issue of the broken stamp more quickly, he added that “the court recognizes the practical realities on the ground.”
Though Clark refused to nullify the absentee ballots without Clemons’ stamped signature, he did rule that a new Democratic mayoral primary election was warranted. He then gave attorneys 10 days to confer with state and local officials regarding a new primary election.
While Gomes is celebrating Clark’s ruling as “a victory for the people of Bridgeport,” that victory complicates the general election for Bridgeport mayor scheduled for November 7. Ganim will still be listed as the Democratic nominee on the ballot, while Gomes will be listed as an independent candidate. David Herz will be listed as the Republican.
Lamond Daniels is also running for mayor of Bridgeport, and his campaign website refers to him as a Democrat. It’s unclear what party affiliation he will have on the ballot, if he appears on the ballot at all.
Bloss, Gomes’ attorney, speculated to the CT Examiner that the city will likely host another primary election in December if and only if Mayor Ganim wins re-election. If one of the other candidates prevails in the general election, the city will likely scrap the primary election do-over.
Bloss also suggested that Geter-Pataky and Martinez may even face criminal prosecution at some point. That would hardly be a first for Geter-Pataky. She already will likely face criminal charges for alleged voter fraud in connection with the 2019 Bridgeport mayoral primary race, a race that Ganim barely won after a significant absentee ballot dump late in the evening pushed him over the top.
“I got your back, Mayor,” Geter-Pataky once assured Ganim in a video of a mayoral campaign event.
And Ganim himself, who was first elected Bridgeport mayor in 1991, served seven years in prison for accepting bribes and kickbacks while in office. After he was released, he won his old mayoral seat back in 2015, followed by re-election four years later.
Ganim is still considering whether to appeal Clark’s ruling. In the meantime, he is encouraging local residents to get out the vote in the general election next week.
The following is a video from primary day back in September, before Ganim was declared the winner. Gomes was leading in the vote count at the time this news report aired.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
“Canceling” people who disagree with you over ordinary political issues is bad for civil society. Ruining someone’s life because he wore a MAGA cap or tweeted something stupid or supported the wrong initiative creates an oppressive environment for open discourse.
“Canceling” people who sign petitions and hold up signs that openly celebrate or justify the targeted, brutal murders of women and babies, on the other hand, is good for civil society. Stopping malevolent ideas from being normalized is good. Exercising your First Amendment right to free speech and free association to shun and call out people who spread odious ideas in public life is a moral imperative.
Because people who walk around ripping down posters of kidnapped children and women aren’t pondering the future of a “two-state solution” or the Gazan refugee situation, they are moral degenerates. In the same way you wouldn’t hire the guy who stands in front of Disney World waving around a swastika flag, you shouldn’t hire someone who marches with a sign that reads “from the river to the sea.” Both convey the same sentiment. The ethical line is bright and obvious. If you don’t see it, something is broken in you.
Yet, a bunch of Hamasapologists are calling out conservatives for their alleged hypocrisy on “cancel culture” when it comes to “pro-Palestinian” advocates.
Though I’m not a fan of mobs, I’ve never been a big critic of cancel culture, either. Looking back, I could find only one piece I’ve written on the topic — and it concerned itself with double standards. It’s a slippery term. And there is facet to the debate that’s often overlooked. Americans have no obligation to associate with those who attack their deep-seated values. To hire someone who signs a pro-Hamas petition can be an endorsement of that outlook. Your company is not an open social media platform which exists as a forum for debate, it has a reputation and customers. (Not that I believe the state should be able to compel social media companies to host opinions, either.)
And it’s not as if you asked these people to give you their opinion on genocide. They did so by their own volition. The Harvard petitions blaming Jews for their own murders were signed and released for public consumption. They were released before Israel had even counted the dead, much less invaded Gaza. If law students were celebrating 9/11 on 9/12, would New York firms have a responsibility to provide them with gainful employment? No, they would be rejected in the real world and compelled to get jobs in academia, where such views are welcome.
Of course, the contention that “pro-Palestinian” advocates, or even those who talk about Israel as if it was some authoritarian proto-Nazi state, are being mass canceled is a myth, anyway. They fill the op-ed pages of major newspapers and cable news. They dominate campuses. They aren’t canceled. They are rewarded. When someone like “porn star” Mia Khalifa was “canceled,” it is because she was quite literally rejoicing in the murder of innocent people in real time.
Ibrahim Bharmal, who one suspects is dumber than the average internet prostitute, is the editor of the Harvard Law Review, not some rando trying to wind people up on the internet. He is out there physically and verbally abusing a Jewish student during a pro-Hamas rally on campus like some kind of Brownshirt. Does Harvard have a responsibility to have him on campus? Why should a firm with Jewish partners — or any decent people — hire him?
Harvard, by the way, has assembled a special task force to help students who signed pro-Hamas statements deal with the blowback. Apparently, some people are under the impression they’re the only ones allowed to speak.
The notion that anti-Israel pundits are concerned about double standards, by the way, is risible. You might recall that Harvard rescinded its offer to pro-Second Amendment Parkland kid Kyle Kashuv, ostensibly over things he tweeted as a 16-year-old. No one cared. Today, Georgetown thinks it’s fine to cancel Ilya Shapiro for a single inarticulate tweet, but it will not cancel a professor who complains online about “Zio bitches.” The New York Times cancels an editor for running a column from a sitting senator but hires a writer who praises Hitler (true story).
When I say I’m a free-speech absolutist, I mean it. The state should do absolutely nothing to inhibit or censor pro-Hamas Americans from expressing their opinions. Free speech isn’t contingent on your position. Hate speech is free speech. The government has no business prodding or even suggesting limitations on our rhetorical interactions. Even outside state intervention, we should be upholding the values that promote free expression. We can peacefully coexist with colleagues, neighbors and friends who hold contradictory opinions within the normal parameters of political debate.
Likewise, Americans have a right to use their freedom to call out and disassociate themselves from people who take the side with nihilistic murder cults.
When a tragedy happens, there are inevitably a rush of “how to talk to your children…” articles about how to break down what happened into manageable, kid-appropriate language.
Jews right now are facing a different issue: how not to talk to your kids about what happened on October 7th when it’s all you want to talk about.
How do we move on with life, yell at the kids to put on their shoes or do their homework, while also hugging them too often in our despair for the people whose lives cannot move on.
We are consumed by it. Jews around the world, who don’t know each other, are all posting the same thing. We haven’t slept since that Saturday. We see each other and our eyes are wide saucers, dark circles, full of pain. We refresh the news and absorb new, horrifying, details.
How do we protect our children from our despair and rage but also our fear?
We consider where we can no longer send our Jewish children to college, which countries we can no longer visit. We pass around the familiar stories of Jewish-owned businesses targeted, Jews shouted at, Jews chased, Jews beaten. We parse which friends are suddenly not. We think about which of our neighbors would happily load us on the train.
Pro-Hamas protesters at Harvard surround Jewish student and shout “Shame” “Shame” “Shame” pic.twitter.com/wy4n64KcQ8
My own children are blessedly too young for most of it. They know something bad happened and they know Israel is at war. The eldest, at 13, knows there was an attack in southern Israel where many died, knows hostages were taken but not much else.
I don’t want her to know about the rapes, the details I can’t unknow about the way children who look just like her were killed. In a few years she will be going to music festivals. I don’t want her to live a life of fear, worried that someone is coming to kill her. I don’t want her to know what monsters live on the earth with us and what they are capable of doing.
Our sons are 10 and 7. The eldest boy is a history buff. He knows about historical atrocities. He’s read about torture. But he’s still a baby who calls for me when he’s sick, reaches for me when he’s hurt. I don’t want him knowing that kids were stolen while screaming for their mama, that their parents could not save them. I don’t want him to hear that parents were killed in front of their children and children in front of their parents. And that’s before the truly gruesome particulars. I don’t want him to also not be able to sleep at night thinking of beheaded, burned, baked babies. I want him to believe it when I say I will always protect them, that no one is getting by me. I want to believe it too.
The youngest is too young for any of it. Israel is a faraway land he doesn’t know. He knows he has family there but still can’t quite put together who is related to who. His grandmother’s twin, her husband, her children and grandchildren, we go over the connections to him. He doesn’t know Israel is a safe haven for Jews around the world who are just like him. I’ll tell him, someday, about the hatred and the violence, but when I look at his sweet, innocent face, I think “not yet.”
Not telling them anything is no cure either. Recently a Jewish acquaintance wrote a long piece about how Israel just doesn’t matter to him. I knew before he noted it that his family had been in America since the turn of the last century. Those are always the Jews shrugging their shoulders. They did not experience the Holocaust and they also did not know pogroms in Russia, mass graves in Ukraine, murder and expulsion from Arab states. They have lived ensconced in a safety and security that has simply never been the norm for Jews. So sure, who needs Israel, pass the lox.
🚨 Breaking: Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad says they will repeat October 7-like massacres until Israel is annihilated.
I will have failed as a parent if that is my child. It’s my life goal to not raise my children to feel so blindly privileged. It was the luckiest twist of fate that they were born Jews in America and I will not let them forget that.
I want to tell them the truth, that we’re mostly alone in this world, that most people will not stand up for you. That will include their fellow Jews who had spoken up for others, posted all the right things, but when they see their own comrades are against them, they will quiet and shrink from view until they nearly disappear. Do not count on these Jews. Remember that there are always Jews who imagine they will be killed last. They won’t be. It’s a lesson they never seem to learn.
But if you do life right, there will be people who do reach out to you in bad times like these and offer support. They will pray for you, offer you safety should you need it, say the words to defend you and feel your fear.
I don’t say all this. I tell them for the 5th time to get their cleats on and to put their plate in the sink. I try not to show the darkness I’m feeling. They’ll know it all someday. It can wait.
Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post and writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. She has also written for Time, USA Today, The Observer, Heat Street, Federalist, Daily Beast and other publications. She is the co-author of the new book, “Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.” Follow her on Twitter @Karol.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took aim at President Joe Biden’s sudden push for a pause to Israel’s military action in Gaza, calling it “obscene.” Cruz was reacting to Biden’s response to a heckler on Wednesday in Minneapolis. A self-proclaimed rabbi interrupted Biden’s speech at a fundraiser and demanded that Biden push Israel for a cease-fire, in response to which Biden said, “I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out.”
The White House later clarified that Biden meant hostages, not prisoners.
“Obscene,” Cruz posted to X. “Biden poured hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hamas, which then massacred 1,400 Israelis and dozens of Americans. Now he’s pressuring Israel to stand down so Hamas can regroup. He’s even pressuring Israel to send more fuel to the Gaza Strip, which Hamas will seize and use to attack Israel.”
Cruz’s assertion about fuel came amid Israel Defense Forces releasing audio Wednesday of a conversation it says is proof that Hamas is taking gas from hospitals in Gaza.
On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will “urge” Israel on Friday to pause military operations in order for aid to get into Gaza and hostages to get out. The Biden administration is going to great lengths to define a “pause” as vastly different than “cease-fire,” but both involve Israel putting a halt to its military operation — something Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to do until Hamas is eliminated.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby tried to peddle those semantics last week, but then said multiple pauses over more than one day might be required for aid.
“If that’s what it requires, then we absolutely will try to get such pause or pauses in place.”
Lior Haiat, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said last Friday, “Israel is opposed to a humanitarian pause or cease-fire at this time.”
Five Democratic mayors wrote to President Joe Biden calling for a meeting to discuss the illegal alien crisis their cities are facing. Pictured: Illegal aliens line up outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on Aug. 2. (Photo: Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Five Democratic mayors have asked President Joe Biden for a meeting to discuss the illegal alien crisis their cities are facing. The mayors of Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City sent a letter to Biden on Saturday “requesting an urgent meeting with you to directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support, or resources.”
The mayors, all of whom lead sanctuary cities with the exception of Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, told the president they need four things. First, they are asking for additional federal funding.
Mayors Brandon Johnson of Chicago, Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Mike Johnston of Denver, and Eric Adams of New York City, and Turner begin the letter by thanking Biden for the $1.4 billion in federal funding for food, shelter, and additional services for illegal aliens. But that’s not enough, according to the Democratic mayors.
“Cities have historically absorbed and integrated new migrants with success, but the challenges brought by the new border arrivals are due not only to the high numbers, but also the diversity of nationalities, the large share arriving as families, and the overwhelming number who seek asylum,” the mayors write. “Given the impact this crisis has had—and continues to have—on state and local budgets, we respectfully advocate for additional funding.”
According to the five Democrats, Denver is spending about $2 million a week on shelter for illegal aliens, New York City has spent more than $1.7 billion, and Chicago has spent more than $320 million.
In order to help the illegal aliens arriving in their cities while still providing services to citizens, the mayors have asked Biden for “$5 billion to cover the expenditures our cities have already incurred and to continue serving the growing number of people arriving in our communities.”
$5 Billion. Hey, I think I have a better plan. SHIP THEM ALL BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. That ought a cost a few thousand dollars.
Isn’t it interesting that all these Leftist loves to get in front of a camera, with a microphone, virtue signaling how much they love illegal aliens. However, when it comes actually take care of them, they scream unfair, and “send more money.” SHIP ‘EM BACK AND SEAL THE BORDER!
Additionally, the mayors have asked Biden to “[a]ccelerate approval of work authorization and adjudication for eligible applicants.” Specifically, the leaders are asking Biden to remove barriers to work authorization so applicants can receive approval to work within a 30-day window. Furthermore, the Democrats have asked the president to “increase access to work authorization.”
“Our strong request is that anyone who has arrived in this country and is approved with an Alien Registration Number, or A-Number, has the ability to work,” they write.
Finally, the five mayors have asked Biden to “[a]dopt a collaborative federal approach around coordinated entry.”
The mayors say they are “confident that we could lead a coalition of cities that could identify shared available capacity, welcome newcomers in a way that would set them up for success and relieve the burden on border cities and destination cities receiving far greater numbers than can be supported.”
The mayors of Denver and Chicago met with senior Biden administration officials at the White House on Thursday to discuss the current crisis their cities are facing. Adams, the New York City mayor, was originally slated to attend the meeting, but canceled his trip to Washington unexpectedly Thursday morning.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the two mayors met with White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients and senior adviser to the President Tom Perez, along with other officials from the White Houseand the Department of Homeland Security. Jean-Pierre described the meeting as a “constructive conversation.”
This man is proving the point again that a lot of people jump on “band wagons” without knowing what that “band wagon” actually stands for. The mob is usually wrong.
Just when you think that America’s children have been lost in the pits of woke, this happens. Students demanding the school, and district, go back to gender correct bathrooms.
High school students in Loudoun County gathered today to ask the Loudoun County School Board to restore girls only and boys only locker rooms and bathrooms in schools. @7NewsDCpic.twitter.com/EKUj18Hnsf
He should have started the video with a baby puppy with a duck in his mouth to grab the attention of those who don't pay attention. He is wrong on one issue,only a select view voted for this. Stealing an election has… pic.twitter.com/JKgZ2cB0PM
Top Stories • Texas Abortions Drop to Almost 0, Saving Over 5,000 Babies Per Month • House Speaker Mike Johnson Slams FBI for Targeting Pro-Life Americans • Doctor Confirms Abortion Kills Unborn Children and Hurts Women • Speaker Mike Johnson Doesn’t Apologize for Being a Christian: “It’s Who I Am, It’s How I Think”
More Pro-Life News • Abortion Activist Says You’re a “Racist” if You’re Pro-Life • Issue 1 Would Endanger Parental Rights on Abortion and Sex Changes. Vote NO • Florida AG Ashley Moody Asks Court to Reject Ballot Measure for Abortions Up to Birth • Ohio Abortion Clinic Sends Another Woman to ER After Botched Abortion • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Many in the Democrat party think that Biden hasn’t the mental capacity or physical ability to make it through another election but are afraid to let their feelings known publicly. So some are running covert presidential campaigns to be ready for what they feel is the inevitable—people like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California. There are even rumors that Hillary Clinton may be eyeing that spot again, and there are also rumors that Michelle Obama could be entertaining the idea of running in 2024.
There are no limits to what the desperate Democrats will do to keep Trump from becoming president again, going as far as using lawfare and creating multiple frivolous indictments and legal maneuvering to keep him off the ballot. Knowing that Biden isn’t capable of winning the next election, many Democrats are looking at other possible candidates other than Kamala Harris, who most feel is a total train wreck.
So, you have Gavin Newsom, Hillary, and Michelle Obama, waiting around like buzzards for Biden to drop out.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) responded on Tuesday to liberal critics who have personally attacked him for being an unapologetic Christian. After winning the speakership last week, Johnson told Fox News host Sean Hannity that his Christian faith is central to his personal identity.
“I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, “It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?” I said, “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it — that’s my worldview.” That’s what I believe, and so I make no apologies for it.”
The comments set off a flurry of disgusting attacks against Johnson and his faith.
Bill Maher, for example, compared him to the mass killer who murdered 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, last month. MSNBC host Jen Psaki labeled Johnson a “religious fundamentalist” and mocked his faith, while the Daily Beast compared Johnson to the “Taliban and the mullahs in Iran,” claiming Johnson wants to “institutionalize” his Christian faith.
Speaking with Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany, Johnson condemned the personal attacks on his faith as “disgusting” and absurd.”
“Our religion is based on love and acceptance,” Johnson pointed out. “So to compare that worldview with the Taliban, who seek to destroy their enemies, or with, you know, some deranged shooter who murders people is absolutely outrageous.
“And I think everyone who follows and believes in a Judeo-Christian worldview should be just terribly offended by that,” he said.
Johnson acknowledged that character attacks come with his job and said he’s willing to “take the arrows.”
“But what really hurts me,” he continued, “is that it really is a statement about everyone who believes in this that the country was built upon. Our Judeo-Christian foundation is the heritage of our country.”
Importantly, Johnson also dispelled the accusation that he wants to institutionalize Christianity or establish it as the national religion.
“I just wish they would get to know me. I’m not trying to establish Christianity as the national religion or something,” he said.
“If you truly believe in the Bible’s commands and you seek to follow those, it is impossible to be a hateful person, because the greatest command in the Bible is that you love God with everything you have and you love your neighbor as yourself.”
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Joe Biden received $40,000 from Chinese communists, funneled through his son and brother and their businesses, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer revealed Wednesday morning.
“Where’s the money?,” President Joe Biden quipped over the summer when asked by a reporter to comment on the House’s investigation into the bribery scandal swirling around his family. Comer continues to answer that question for the country, with a press release and video detailing the House Oversight Committee’s latest discovery from subpoenaed bank records that establish Joe Biden directly profited from his family’s influence-peddling.
A 12-page memorandum from the Oversight Committee’s staff to the majority members of the committee, which The Federalist has reviewed, details the latest development Comer summarized in his video and press release. The bottom line is a $40,000 check from Sara and James Biden’s personal checking account written to Joe Biden on Sept. 3, 2017, claiming to represent a “loan repayment.” But following that money upstream reveals it originated from the Chinese “business” partners Hunter Biden had threatened a little over a month earlier in a WhatsApp message.
Hunter Biden had sent that WhatsApp message on July 30, 2017, to Raymond Zhao, an associate of CEFC, the Chinese energy giant Hunter and James Biden began courting in 2016, while Joe Biden was vice president. After Joe Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, according to one of Hunter Biden’s business partners, the Chinese communist-connected CEFC sent them a $3 million wire in March of 2017 as a “thank you” for the Bidens’ assistance in furthering their business interests.
But CEFC had committed to investing another $10 million, which an email recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop indicated would be used to form a joint venture. CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming, was to hold 50 percent interest in the company, and Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, and some of their business associates would hold the other 50 percent. That email noted Hunter Biden would own a 10 percent interest in the holding company for “the big guy,” a moniker used for Joe Biden.
However, as of the end of July 2017, the $10 million cash infusion had yet to materialize, prompting Hunter Biden to text Zhao on WhatsApp, telling him to “Please have the director call me- not James or Tony or Jim- have him call me tonight,” with the “director” being an apparent reference to the executive director of CEFC, and James and Tony being business partners, along with Jim Biden. The text continued:
I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. I am very concerned that the Chairman has either changed his mind and broken our deal without telling me or that he is unaware of the promises and assurances that have been made have not been kept. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand. And now means tonight. And Z if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang (sic) or the Chairman I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. All too often people mistake kindness for weakness — and all too often I am standing over top of them saying I warned you. From this moment until whenever he reaches me. It I [sic] 9:45 AM here and i assume 9:45 PM there so his night is running out.
The Oversight Committee memorandum then detailed how in a WhatsApp message on July 31, 2017, Zhao responded, “CEFC is willing to cooperate with the family.” Hunter later followed up with a text to another CEFC associate, Gongwen Dong, stating, “The Biden’s [sic] are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnershipn [sic]. Please let’s not quibble over peanuts.”
The money soon began flowing, with Hunter Biden first opening a bank account on Aug. 3, 2017, for a new company, Hudson West III, which would serve as the joint venture between Hunter Biden and CEFC’s Gongwen Dong. Hunter Biden’s business, Owasco P.C., owned 50 percent of Hudson West III, and Dong’s company, Hudson West V, owned the other 50 percent.
On Aug. 8, 2017, financial records show Hunter Biden’s new business venture with CEFC received a $5 million wire from the CEFC-connected business Northern International Capital. That same day, Hunter Biden transferred $400,000 out of Hudson West III and into his corporation, Owasco P.C. From those funds, Hunter purchased a Porsche and transferred funds to other of his personal or business accounts.
Then on Aug. 14, 2017, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 from his Owasco account to the Lion Hall Group — the company owned by James and Sara Biden. Two weeks later, Sara Biden “signed a withdrawal ticket for $50,000 from the Lion Hall Group bank account,” and on the same day deposited that $50,000 into her and James’ joint personal checking account. Soon after, on Sept. 3, 2017, Sara Biden signed the $40,000 check payable to Joe Biden.
The House Oversight staff memorandum provides a clear narrative of these transactions and copies of the relevant bank records. The memorandum also added this graphic to further crystalize the money trail:
Significantly, the House memorandum also established that the $40,000 used to supposedly repay a loan to Joe Biden came solely from funds the communist China-connected CEFC paid to Hunter Biden to “cooperate with the family.” The House Oversight staff’s memorandum made that point clear by detailing, in addition to the flow of funds from CEFC to Joe Biden, the balances in the various accounts prior to the receipt of those funds.
For instance, before Sara Biden transferred $50,000 into their personal checking account from which they paid Joe Biden $40,000, their balance was $46.88. And before Hunter Biden transferred the $150,000 into the Lion Hall Group bank account, that account showed a balance of $1,964.62.
So, whether James and Sara Biden actually owed Joe Biden $40,000 is irrelevant because the money they used to repay the supposed loan came from the Chinese company that Hunter and James groomed to serve as the family cash cow during Joe Biden’s vice presidency. And CEFC only provided that capital after Hunter Biden — saying he and his father were sitting there trying to understand why the promised $10 million hadn’t yet materialized — threatened their Chinese counterparts.
It’s also interesting to note that the $40,000 Joe “the Big Guy” Biden received was exactly 10 percent of the $400,000 Hunter Biden received from CEFC.
With Wednesday’s release of a copy of the $40,000 check paid to Joe Biden, Comer has provided two examples of the now-president directly benefitting from his son and brother’s selling of his political influence. Earlier this month, Comer released evidence establishing James Biden paid Joe $200,000 in funds the president’s brother obtained from the since-bankrupted Americore.
Wednesday’s news, however, proves even more scandalous because the funds originated from individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party who first partnered with Hunter and James Biden while Joe Biden was vice president — and the payment followed Hunter Biden’s threatening text message, which invoked his father’s name (and presence) and warned of his wrath.
But to Joe Biden apologists, this will likely remain “no evidence” of corruption.
This article has been updated since publication.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Three weeks after Hamas brutally murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and two dozen Americans during a sneak attack, Southern Poverty Law Center President and CEO Margaret Huang published a 779-word statement lamenting “all acts of hate violence” in the Israel-Hamas war. A few days later, the activist group that made a brand out of tarnishing organizations with Christian missions or conservative ties covertly edited the statement to modify language that insinuated Israel intentionally attacked children in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. In her statement posted on Oct. 28, Huang acknowledged that “Hamas led an unconscionable attack against Israeli civilians, killing more than 1,000 people and kidnapping hundreds,” but couched the SPLC’s response by condemning Israel’s retaliation against the terrorists.
“The tragedy has only continued as Palestinian civilians in Gaza — many of whom are children — have been killed by airstrikes and cut off from food, clean water, medical care and life-saving supplies,” Huang wrote. “It is a humanitarian crisis of unspeakable proportions that has already left thousands dead. Our hearts are with all those who are suffering.”
An earlier version of Huang’s words, Daily Signal Managing Editor Tyler O’Neil reported, suggested that children in Gaza were “targeted” by Israel.
Instead, Huang reiterated that “we reject any attempt to prejudice or persecute communities pushed to the margins.”
The leftist organization claims to “monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States,” including many of which it says are “far right” antisemitic organizations.
Huang, however, hardly mentioned the rising antisemitism Jews all around the world faced after Hamas’ attack. Instead, she joined her concern about “a dramatic increase in the targeting of Jewish” communities with her worries that “Muslim communities” are also suffering.
The SPLC statement also claimed to “denounce all acts of terrorism.” Still, it invoked language such as “ongoing systemic injustice,” which pro-Hamas demonstrators and Palestine activists have used for years to scrutinize Israel, to describe the ongoing Middle East conflict. SPLC previously refused to tell The Federalist whether it had plans to designate the left-wing organizations like Black Lives Matter and Democratic Socialists of America that responded positively to Hamas’ massacre in Israel as “hate groups.”
It was also minimized by the fact that the SPLC Union flatly accused Israel of genocide last week, in a statement which went publicly unpunished or condemned by the SPLC, and a lead attorney for the organization allegedly participated in the pro-Palestine takeover on Capitol Hill.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Architects of Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran giveaway deserve plenty of blame for empowering terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, including the one that murdered 1,400 Jews — over 30 Americans. At this point in history, they should have nothing to do with our Israel policy.
And yet, welcome our new ambassador to the Jewish State, Jack Lew.
Sen. Ben Cardin, the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations, ludicrously claimed during Lew’s confirmation hearing that the former Treasury Secretary was “eminently qualified to serve in this post. He has extensive experience.”
Lew’s only experience in foreign policy is championing pro-Iran policies. During the Iran deal debate, Lew predicted the giveaway “will make our country safer, it will make our allies safer, and it will make the world safer.” Not once, in his Washington Institute speech praising Obama’s foreign policy, incidentally, did Lew mention the word “Israel.” What the deal — and subsequent support for Iran — did was reward the Revolutionary Guard for murdering around 600 Americans in Iraq and incentivize that regime to take more American hostages.
Our allies certainly aren’t any safer. Israel not only has to deal with Iran-funded Hamas but also the Iran-funded Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iran-funded Houthis in Yemen and Iran-funded Islamic terror groups still operating within Judea and Samaria.
The Obama administration, which refused to show any solidarity with the Green Revolutionaries, rarely had a bad word to say about Iran. Not so Israel. Because of his Jewish background, Lew was recruited by the administration to publicly rebuke duly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being critical of the deal. It was “beyond the pale,” said Lew in 2015, the man now being sent to pressure that same man into letting Hamas off the hook.
Then again, it should not be forgotten that Lew went above and beyond for Iran. As Treasury Secretary, he oversaw the $400 million “pallets of cash” transfer to the mullahs (we later learned it was much worse.) For over 37 years, through five administrations, both Democrat and Republican, the United States’ position was that those funds were not “Iran’s money.” Yet, rather than handing the funds to the families of American terror victims who were still owed $53 billion in court decisions against the terror state, Lew sent it to Ali Khamenei.
It got worse. After telling Congress that the mullahs wouldn’t be granted access to the American financial system, Lew secretly helped Iranians convert nearly $6 billion into dollars and then euros. (Apparently, Iran likes their blood money in $6 billion cuts.)
There was no stipulation in the Iran deal compelling the United States to license the exchange of mullah blood money in American banks. But, as usual, Lew lied. “Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” he said in 2016, without explaining how the transaction was legal. Iran, of course, hadn’t upheld its end of the deal. Nor was it in the “spirit” of the deal to covertly circumvent sanctions that were intentionally left standing. Though to be fair, Lew does know a thing or two about shady banking.
In 2006, Lew had parlayed his Clinton-era administration experience into a job heading up a Citigroup hedge fund that bet against the housing market. And still, somehow, under Lew, the fund lost nearly all its value. More than 50,000 employees at Citigroup were fired. For all his good work, however, Lew was cut a $940,000 bonus check right after Washington gave his company a $301 billion federal guarantee taxpayer-funded bailout and right before he became Budget Director for Obama.
Now, “Lew will have to take up Washington’s call to protect civilians in Gaza amid the widening human suffering,” according to CNN. Indeed, the myth that Israel isn’t engaged in a proportional response and hasn’t gone out of its way to warn Arab civilians to get out of the way is a kind of blood libel Democrats like to engage in to placate its pro-Hamas wing. Lew will likely incentivize Hamas to use more civilians as shields, as he did Iran, since it is obviously an effective tactic.
Virtually every instinct of the contemporary Democrat about this conflict has been disastrously wrong. And few of them have been more wrong than Lew.
The Israeli military reported additional casualties inside the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war enters its 26th day. Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7. More than 9,900 people have been killed in the war on both sides since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack.
Israel has entered its fourth week of war against Hamas after the terrorist group infiltrated the country on October 7, firing thousands of rockets at residential areas and butchering civilians
As many as 9,900 people have been killed in the war on both sides, including at least 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers and 35 Americans. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims 8,525 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 111 in the West Bank. At least 10 Americans are feared to be among the 240 people held captive by Hamas
Israel has greatly expanded its ground operations in Gaza over the weekend, marking a new stage in the conflict
The first foreign passport holders were permitted to leave Gaza and enter Egypt through the Rafah crossing, although American citizens are still struggling to leave the warzone
Get the Best of Fox News
Fast, 24/7 alerts delivered to your inbox daily. Subscribe to be in the know of the most important moments around the world.
By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy.
32PostsSort BySort by NewestSort by Oldest
1 hour(s) ago
PINNED
Hamas terrorist gives graphic details about shooting children to Israeli authorities
A Hamas terrorist told an Israel Securities Authority (ISA) official he and another man shot and killed crying children who were inside a safe room, until the sounds could no longer be heard, while acknowledging he entered the house simply to kill.
In a video posted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, the Hamas terrorist is seen wearing prison garb while sitting in a chair with an Israeli flag behind him.
The unnamed man tells the ISA official, who cannot be seen in the video, that he and other members of Hamas entered a house through the window. While checking the house, he told the official, they heard sounds of young children in the safe room and shot at the safe room.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Doron Spielman appeared on “America Reports” to discuss recent Israeli strikes against Hamas, as the war between the two militaries continues.
Host Sandra Smith asked Spielman about a recent attack that killed a Hamas commander in the Jabalia refugee camp, but also several civilians in the process.
“This was a pinpointed strike against the Hamas commander that has been controlling and commanding the anti-tank warfare unit in the Gaza Strip, which they’ve been employing both in the Gaza Strip, towards our tanks, towards people, towards our soldiers,” Spielman explained. “In fact, one of those did result in some of the deaths that we experienced. He was a senior commander and he is confirmed dead, along with a number of other terrorists that were with him.”
The official also explained that Hamas terrorists have been fleeing into civilian areas amid the fighting.
“They are fleeing, I can tell you, into underground bunkers,” Spielman said. “We see them inside of medical clinics, inside of schools. They go in, you open the doors, you can’t find anybody. You walk a few feet in, you pull up a hatch and they’re underneath the ground.”
“They are so embedded within the civilian structures,” he added.
Israel-Hamas war: 5 American aid workers leave Gaza for Egypt
Foreign passport holders board a bus after arriving in the Egyptian part of the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip on November 1, 2023. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Fox News has learned that 5 Americans are part of the civilian group that left Gaza for Egypt on Tuesday.
The evacuation was conducted with the help of the Special Operations Association of America, which worked with the U.S. State Department.
The Americans were all aid workers, part of a group of around 30. The other 25 workers had different nationalities.
The civilians departed through the Rafah crossing after a deal was struck between Egyptian and Palestinian authorities, amid Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant says Hamas has two options: ‘Die or surrender’
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speak during a press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel on October 25, 2023. (Photo by Elad Malka (IMoD)/Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant released a statement on civilian losses in Gaza amid the Israeli military’s war against Hamas terrorists.
The statement was released as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continues airstriking the Jabalia refugee camp for the second day in a row, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.
“The IDF is advancing on the way to defeating Hamas,” the official said. “War has a heavy price, I share in the sorrow of the families who lost their loved ones in the hard battles in Gaza City.”
In the press release, Gallant also referenced Israel’s determination to secure victory over Hamas.
“We are determined to win. The enemy has only two options: die or surrender unconditionally – there is no third option,” the statement read. “The arena of the war is wider, we are on the attack in the Gaza Strip area, but we are defending in the north and are prepared in additional fronts.”
“We are at the forefront of the free world against a world of darkness and all evil,” Gallant concluded. “We must win.”
Fox News Digital’s Yael Rotem-Kuriel contributed to this report.
Hamas official vows to attack Israelis ‘again and again’ until Israel is destroyed
Hamas Spokesman Ghazi Hamad speaks on May 23, 2021 in Gaza City, Gaza. (Photo by Laurent Van der Stockt/Getty Images)
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said in an interview that Hamas will repeat terrorist attacks against Israel “again and again” until the Jewish nation is destroyed.
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Hamad argued. “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force.”
The official argued that Hamas was willing to repeat the attacks until they achieved victory, calling Palestine “a nation of martyrs.”
“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again,” he explained. “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
“We are the victims of the occupation. Period,” Hamad added. “Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”
Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip after winning elections in 2006, a year after Israeli occupation of Gaza ended.
Palestinian official says Gaza’s only cancer hospital is inoperable, faces fuel shortage
This picture taken on April 22, 2021 shows a general view of nurses and patients at the COVID-19 coronavirus intensive care unit , at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital in Gaza City. (Photo by Emmanuel DUNAND / AFP)
The only hospital in the Gaza Strip that treats cancer patients has reportedly gone out of service Wednesday after running out of fuel.
The development surrounding the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital now means 16 out of the 35 hospitals in Gaza are not operating, Reuters is reporting, citing Palestinian Health Minister Mai al-Kaila.
“The lives of 70 cancer patients inside the hospital are seriously threatened,” she was quoted by the news agency as saying. “The number of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip is about 2,000 living in catastrophic health conditions as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Strip and the displacement of a large number.”
The Israeli government has maintained a blockade over Gaza in response to terrorist attacks from Hamas fighters, who have launched around 8,000 rockets since the war began.
Jordan recalls ambassador from Israel in protest of war in Gaza
Seen on a large screen the King of Jordan Abdullah II attends the International Peace Summit hosted by the Egyptian president in the New Administrative Capital (NAC), about 45 kilometres east of Cairo, on October 21, 2023, amid the ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas. (Photo by KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Jordan recalled its ambassador from Israel in protest of the “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
Jordan’s deputy prime minister, Ayman al-Safadi, who is also the foreign minister, said the return of the ambassadors is linked to Israel “stopping its war on Gaza … and the humanitarian catastrophe it is causing.”
Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in 1994, the second Arab country after Egypt to do so.
King Abdullah II of Jordan has called for peace between Gaza and Israel but said Israeli-Palestinian relations could never be stable without a “two-state solution.”
Such a proposal includes Palestinian people getting their own land and country, which Israel opposes.
“There will be no security, no peace, no stability without just and total peace that comes through a two-state solution,” King Abdullah II told the Jordanian parliament earlier this month, calling for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The King of Jordan has also mobilized medical and humanitarian aid teams to the blockaded Gaza Strip through Egypt.
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Democrats could be split for a ‘generation’ as left tears ‘itself apart over Israel’
The Democratic Party is divided over pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions in a major split that may tear the party apart for a “generation,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. (Getty Images // Fox News Digital)
The Democratic Party is divided over pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian factions in a major split that may tear the party apart for a “generation,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
Some of the biggest names in progressive and leftist politics are expressing concerns that the Democratic Party is no longer unified as politicians and commentators continue to battle it out in the public square over Israel. The article, headlined “The Left Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Israel,” was published on Tuesday.
“It has been an incredibly clarifying and terrifying moment at the same time for many progressive Jews,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told the WSJ’s Molly Ball. “They’re calling me, tweeting, messaging, expressing shock and sadness that the people they marched with, the causes they marched for, have abandoned them in their hour of need.”
Others were disappointed that the Democratic Party was not doing enough for pro-Palestinian factions.
“If you are Arab-American, Muslim-American or Palestinian, you feel like you don’t matter, you feel invisible,” said Waleed Shahid, former spokesman for the Justice Democrats. “If you are advocating at all that Palestinian and Israeli lives should be treated equally, there’s a feeling that the party doesn’t care about you at all.”
Shahid also pointed to flagging poll numbers for President Biden among “young and minority voters,” according to the story. A recent Gallup poll found that Biden’s “job approval rating among Democrats has tumbled 11 percentage points in the past month to 75%, the worst reading of his presidency from his own party. This drop has pushed his overall approval rating down four points to 37%, matching his personal low.”
“It shouldn’t be that hard to condemn the murder of innocent women and children and seniors, yet many have either said nothing or equivocated,” said Maryland state delegate and congressional candidate Joe Vogel. “We have a serious problem in our party right now.”
Fox News Digital’s Jeffrey Clark contributed to this update.
Biden says American citizens will leave Gaza through Rafah border crossing
RAFAH, GAZA – NOVEMBER 01: Ambulances carrying Palestinians, injured in ongoing Israeli attacks, arrive Rafah border crossing on November 01, 2023 in Gaza. Injured Palestinians are to receive medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
President Biden on Wednesday said the United States secured safe passage for wounded Palestinians and for foreign nationals to exit Gaza.
“We expect American citizens to exit today, and we expect to see more depart over the coming days,” Biden wrote in a post on X.
He added, “We won’t let up working to get Americans out of Gaza.”
Egypt, Israel and Hamas earlier came to an agreement allowing limited evacuations out of Gaza and into Egypt through the Rafah crossing after Qatar mediated talks.
The deal allows for foreign passport holders and some critically injured Gaza residents to evacuate, though no timeline has been set for how long the crossing will remain open, a source briefed on the deal told Reuters.
Dozens of foreign passport holders reportedly could be seen entering the crossing Wednesday morning in evidence of the deal.
The negotiations came as the Israeli military has been carrying out the second stage of its war against Hamas. The Israel Defense Forces have greatly expanded ground operations in Gaza, clearing Hamas terrorists out of their fortified positions and tunnels.
Military officials have warned that the campaign will be a long and difficult affair. So far, at least 16 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the fighting.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this update.
Cornell University junior Patrick Dai was arrested on a federal complaint Tuesday for allegedly calling for the deaths of Jewish people online and threatening to shoot up an on-campus dining hall.
The 21-year-old engineering student hails from Pittsford, New York, about 80 miles northwest of the Ithaca campus.
His mother told the New York Post that Dai suffers from “severe depression” and was on the brink of suicide before his arrest.
In a string of disturbing posts on a Greek life message board that was not affiliated with the school, Dai allegedly threatened to “shoot up 104 West,” a campus dining hall that serves kosher food, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York.
The cafeteria is next door to the Cornell Jewish Center, which provides housing for Jewish students.
“In another post, Dai allegedly threatened to ‘stab’ and ‘slit the throat’ of any Jewish males he sees on campus, to rape and throw off a cliff any Jewish females, and to behead any Jewish babies,” the press release says. “In that same post, Dai threatened to ‘bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.’”
The deranged threats come in the midst of heightened hostilities and a spike in antisemitism on college campuses across the U.S. spurred by the Israel-Hamas War.
Fox News Digital’s Rebecca Rosenberg contributed to this update.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., accused a pro-Israel political action committee (PAC) of being an “extremist organization” that “destabilizes” American democracy.
The leader of the progressive “Squad” attacked the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Tuesday night amid Israel’s war with the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
Ocasio-Cortez — who accused Israel of committing “war crimes” last month — accused the pro-Israel PAC of being “racist” and “bigoted” toward lawmakers of color.
Ocasio-Cortez also accused AIPAC of being an “extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy.”
“AIPAC endorsed scores of Jan 6th insurrectionists,” the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) congresswoman said. “They are no friend to American democracy.”
“They are one of the more racist and bigoted PACs in Congress as well, who disproportionately target members of color,” she continued.
“They are an extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy,” she wrote.
AIPAC responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s post, blasting the democratic socialist congresswoman over her peddling “of the same tired lies [and] spin.”
“[Ocasio-Cortez] and the Squad summed up: People who disagree with us are racist,” AIPAC posted on Wednesday. “AIPAC stands with pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans of all races, genders, and backgrounds who support the US-Israel alliance.”
“And we oppose those who don’t, like you,” the group added.
Fox News Digital’s Houston Keene contributed to this report.
A Florida doctor is offering a helping hand in Israel after his family’s vacation to the Holy Land took a turn for the worst during Hamas’ surprise attacks on Oct. 7.
“It’s been a very chaotic period of time,” Dr. Cory Harow, medical director of the emergency department of West Boca Medical Center, told “FOX & Friends First” on Wednesday.
“This is not something that you plan for. We had a phenomenal family vacation. We were touring, visiting with friends, extended family, and it was all fantastic being together until air raid sirens woke us up October 7th. We padded out into the hallway of our hotel, and the images that we saw on the televisions were just chilling.”
Harow, a dual American and Israeli citizen, joined the IDF while attending Tel Aviv University.
He currently serves in a unit that specializes in battlefield triage, assessing, treating and stabilizing battlefield injuries.
“We’ve been training every year. We meet for one week a year to maintain a high state of readiness. And then we were mobilized on October 7th when the hostilities began in an attempt to save as many battlefield lives as possible,” he explained.
After Hamas terrorists launched their surprise attacks last month, his phone rang, and he confirmed he was in the country and ready for emergency mobilization.
While his family flew back home to the U.S. the next day, he stayed behind to work with first responders to help treat wounded IDF soldiers.
Fox News Digital’s Taylor Penley contributed to this update.
Yale Daily News (YDN) , the independent student newspaper and oldest college daily in the country, retracted editor’s notes that targeted a pair of recent pro-Israel columns after a huge backlash. The editor’s notes took issue with statements in both pieces that “Hamas raped women,” calling them “unsubstantiated claims.”
An Oct. 12 column by Yale student Sahar Tarak titled, “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?” was hit with an editor’s note without Tarak’s initial knowledge, reading, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
Another column published on Oct. 13, titled “Stop justifying terrorism,” similarly accused the terror group of raping women during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and also had an editor’s note added.
“The News was wrong to publish the corrections,” the newspaper later wrote on Tuesday. “By the time of the first correction on Oct. 25, there had been widely reported coverage from outlets such as Reuters publicly verifying that Hamas raped and beheaded Israelis.”
There have been multiple reports that Hamas terrorists committed rape during their rampage. Israel released footage of one captured attacker who said they were given permission to rape the corpse of a girl, according to The Times of Israel. NBC News reported on “signs of rape” in videos of the attack presented to journalists last week. Military forensic teams in Israel also said they found signs of torture and rape among the victims, according to Reuters.
Additionally, Shani Louk, a German-Israeli citizen who was kidnapped by Hamas and paraded unconscious on the back of a truck, as seen in footage of the Oct. 7 massacre, was discovered dead and beheaded, according to Israeli government officials.
The Yale newspaper wrote that it “failed to ensure that the columnists’ statements were properly cited and attributed” during its editing process because “[a]t the time of the columns’ initial publication, those specific forms of violence during Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack were not independently confirmed by the cited source.”
Fox News Digital’s Jeffrey Clark contributed to this update.
The Israel Defense Forces confirmed three more casualties in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, bringing the total number of soldiers killed in the second phase of the war to 15.
Israel earlier reported that 10 soldiers were killed when hit by an anti-tank guided missile while operating in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7.
Military officials have warned that the war will be long and difficult, potentially spanning months or longer.
The IDF began expanded ground operations this week and ground troops are now tasked with clearing out a complex network of Hamas tunnels and other fortified strongholds. IDF says it has attacked 11,000 targets in Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.
More than 320 soldiers have been killed since the start of the war, many in the initial Oct. 7 attack.
Fox News’ Thomas Ferraro contributed to this update.
A sophomore Yale student whose pro-Israel column published in the Yale Daily News was edited without her knowledge spoke out on Tuesday.
An Oct. 12 column by Sahar Tarak titled, “Is Yalies4Palestine a hate group?” was hit with an editor’s note on Oct. 25, reading, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
Tartak wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Free Beacon this week about how the Yale Daily News, the university’s independent student newspaper, edited a section referring to Hamas’ atrocities in their terrorist attack against Israel.
Tartak said she found out about the edits over the weekend. “The Yale Daily News editor in chief told me that at the time my piece was published—five days after Hamas carried out a pogrom reminiscent of the bloodiest 19th-century atrocities—’there was swirling unsubstantiation [sic] of the rape and beheading claims,'” she wrote, while pointing to several sources substantiating the allegations.
She also reported that another column by a friend, titled “Stop justifying terrorism,” was updated by the Yale Daily News without the author’s knowledge to include a similar editor’s note that read, “This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims of rape.”
But Tartak said, “Yale Daily News editors are not such sticklers when it comes to lobbing accusations at the Jewish state,” in reference to other anti-Israel op-eds they published.
She warned about “history repeating itself” and how the attitudes of Yale students on campus reverberate into the greater media ecosystem when they graduate.
“I wish I could write off my classmates’ foibles as youthful stupidity, but I see professional journalists making the same mistakes. It’s not an accident: The Yale Daily News is their breeding ground, and in a few years, the editors who wrote and approved that correction will go on to careers in the mainstream press, which is chock-full of Yale Daily News editors and reporters. Take the New York Times, where the author of the flagship daily newsletter, the paper’s diplomatic and Supreme Court correspondents, and the host of the paper’s hit podcast The Daily are all Yale Daily News alumni,” she wrote.
“This pipeline is full of sewage, and it shows. The Yale Daily News is now a home for modern-day Holocaust denial, where brutalizing Jews does not need to be justified. It’s just denied outright,” Tartak concluded.
Fox News Digital’s Hanna Panreck and Alexa Moutevelis contributed to this update.
Heads of Israeli universities sent a letter to colleagues around the world expressing concern about rampant antisemitism on some college campuses after the bloody Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks.
The Association of University Heads in Israel also criticized the failure of academic leaders to clamp down on antisemitism on their campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“It’s unsettling to note that many college campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiments, largely fueled by a naïve and biased understanding of the conflict,” the letter said, according to the Associated Press.
“Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of academic freedom, but it should not be manipulated to legitimize hate speech or to justify violence.”
At campuses across the U.S., anti-Israel protesters have organized massive demonstrations since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. The surge in incidents has been paired with antisemitic rhetoric and violence against Jews, leaving many students feeling unsafe and fearful of attending class.
Fox News Digital’s Madeline Coggins and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Cornell Jewish students described still feeling “terrified” after threats from a self-identified “Hamas fighter” led to the arrest of a suspect from the student body in interviews with Fox News Digital.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced it had a suspect – 21-year-old Patrick Dai –, who is a junior at Cornell, in custody for allegedly posting about threatening to “stab” and “slit the throat” of Jewish males, to “rape” Jewish women and throw them off a cliff and to behead any Jewish babies, according to its press release. Court documents show numerous posts allegedly made by Dai, where he allegedly used usernames like “Hamas fighter,” “jew evil” and “glorious Hamas”
“It’s both scary and sad that a member of our own campus community could be so hateful… To see that a student believes and was willing to make comments such as these shows that Jew-hatred can be anywhere and everywhere, even among our fellow students,” said Cornell student Netanel Shapira. He added it was “scary to think that people around you, especially… at an Ivy League school people take pride in… being well-educated and knowing the facts of what’s going on, and [are] believing in that… Just no words.”
Another student, Amanda Silberstein, criticized the university’s professors for peddling what she believed was propaganda against Israel in response to the arrest. She said it was “terrifying to be on campus right now.”
“Upon discovering that the suspect was, in fact, a fellow student at Cornell, rather than an anonymous individual unaffiliated with the university, the situation took on a heightened sense of reality,” said Amanda Silberstein.
“It’s a stark acknowledgment that harmful ideologies and antisemitic rhetoric persist and spread. This includes the propagation of untruths, the denial of atrocities, the tolerance of hate speech under the guise of free speech, the repetition of propaganda by some professors, and the falsehood that anti-Zionism is anything other than a form of hatred against the Jewish community,” she continued.
Cornell did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Silberstein’s opinion of the “propaganda.”
Fox News Digital’s Hannah Grossman contributed to this update.
On October 7, Hamas launched a multi-pronged terror attack on multiple Israeli army bases, civilian communities and a music festival. The Hamas paragliders who murdered teens and young adults at the music festival have been touted by some as a symbol of the attack, such as the Chicago Black Lives Matter chapter, which posted a graphic of a paraglider with the Palestinian flag that read “I Stand With Palestine.”
After asking about the prospect of revoking visas from foreign students calling for the destruction of Israel and Jewish people, Hawley read one such social media post and asked for Mayorkas’ opinion on the rhetoric.
“What about people who say things like, on October the seventh, ‘F Israel’ — I’m cleaning up the language here — ‘F Israel, the government and its military, are you ready for your downfall?’ People who say things like, ‘F Israel and any Jew who supports Israel. May your conscience haunt your dreams until your last breath. Palestine will be free one day. F apartheid Israel,’ This is pretty extreme rhetoric, don’t you think?”
After Mayorkas argued there is a distinction between “espousing or endorsing terrorist ideology and speech that is odious,” Hawley followed with some key details.
“This person works for you,” he said, noting the DHS worker in question is “an employee of the Department of Homeland Security who posted these comments on October the seventh.”
He went on, “That’s not all she posted,” noting the department employee also posted a “fake graphic” depicting a “Hamas paraglider” armed with a machine gun and flying into Israel.
Hawley noted that this employee posted it with the celebratory caption, “Free PALESTINE.”
Hawley addressed Mayorkas and asked if this “asylum and immigration officer who is posting these, frankly, pro-genocidal slogans and images on the day that Israelis are being slaughtered in their beds” is “typical of people who work for the DHS.”
Mayorkas initially denounced the premise of the question, “Your question to suggest that that is emblematic of the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security is despicable.”
“I’m sorry, this person works for the Department of Homeland Security, have you fired her?” Hawley replied.
Fox News Digital’s Alexander Hall contributed to this update.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said most U.S. companies likely do not want to hire someone who proverbially links arms with a terrorist organization, telling FOX News that those who demonstrate with signs and chants in favor of Hamas should be publicly identified.
Haley said that as a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, she knows that most member nations believe Hamas is a terrorist organization, and that she believes the intergovernmental organization is a farce – and that the ideologically corrupt viewpoints expressed are similar to the reason why she wanted America to split from the World Health Organization during COVID.
“I expected this from the UN, you expect all kinds of ridiculous things at the UN. I fought this battle every day for two years. What I don’t expect is to see what’s happening in our cities and what’s happening on our college campuses, because these protests that we’re seeing,” she told “Hannity.”
“Are you telling me that these professors, these college students, they are supporting a terrorist organization?”
She noted Hamas has murdered at least 33 Americans and taken at least 20 hostage while members of the Palestinian-governing party have chanted “Death to America, and the like.
Haley asked whether the Americans who are demonstrating in favor of Hamas or in agreement with Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians therefore also want America to be destroyed.
“If they do, every one of them is dangerous to our country… because that’s what Hamas preaches, is ‘death to America’. So when they get up there, and they hold those signs, or they get upset on why people won’t hire them: it’s because companies don’t want to hire someone who wants to destroy our country,” Haley said.
“That’s why I think every name needs to be … published. Every face needs to be published. And we need to call this out for the hate that it is.”
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
Israeli mom recounts last call from terrified daughter as group vows to find Hamas hostages
“Mommy, I think I’m going to die,” Romi Gonen, 23, said while shot and bleeding in the back seat of a car during the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Her fate is unknown. Gonen is possibly among the 243 people believed held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. (Courtesy of Bring Them Home Now)
Meirav Gonen listened in real-time terror as her daughter, bleeding in the back seat of a car and fearing death, described by phone the surprise attack by Hamas on a music festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
“Mommy, I’m shot. Mommy, I think I’m going to die,” said daughter Romi to her mother during the militant incursion into Israel, as the elder Gonen relayed to Fox News Digital on Tuesday from Tel Aviv.
“I heard her crying very quietly. I heard the shooting all around them,” said the anguished mother.
Gonen does not know the fate of the middle of her five children. But Romi’s best friend, Gaya Halifa, was killed — apparently in the same vehicle.
If Romi Gonen survived, she’s likely one of about 243 people — citizens from up to 20 different countries, including the United States — believed to be kidnapped and held hostage by terrorists in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Bring Them Home Now, a grassroots humanitarian movement with international volunteers, is determined to find every one of them.
“We demand the safe return of all citizens who have been taken hostage by the terrorist group Hamas,” the group says on its website, story.bringthemhomenow.net.
“We will not rest until every hostage is released and returns home safely,” the group says.
Fox News Digital’s Kerry J. Byrne contributed to this update.
Iran’s leader says countries should ‘block the flow of oil and food’ to Israel
TEHRAN, IRAN – OCTOBER 25: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran on October 25, 2023. (Photo by Iranian Leader Press Office / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is calling on countries Wednesday to block the flow of food and oil to Israel over its military action against Hamas inside the Gaza Strip.
Khamenei’s remarks to students in Tehran come after he praised the Palestinian terrorist group for launching its Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel.
“What the Islamic governments should insist is an immediate halt to the crimes [the Israelis] are committing in Gaza. The bombardments should immediately stop,” Khamenei was quoted by state media as saying, according to The Associated Press. “They should block the flow of oil and food to the Zionist regime. Islamic governments shouldn’t have economic cooperation with the Zionist regime.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian called on Iran’s Arab-majority neighbors in mid-October to impose an oil embargo on Israel and for nations within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to expel all Israeli ambassadors.
However, OPEC, the organization of largely Arab nations that overseas oil production in the Middle East, has no plans to impose such an embargo, Reuters reported at the time.
“We are not a political organization,” one OPEC source told Reuters.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this update.
Massachusetts family stranded in Gaza speaks out about situation on the ground
The Massachusetts family stranded in Gaza amid the ongoing war between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists said they continue to struggle to access drinking water, fuel and other resources and are hoping for safety as they await updates from the U.S. government about a possible exit plan.
Abood Okal, Wafa Abuzayda and their 1-year-old son, Yousef, were visiting family in Gaza when Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel on Oct. 7. The family has been in the region since late September, and had intended to return home to Medway, Massachusetts, on Oct. 13 before the violence delayed their plans.
In an audio recording obtained by Fox News Digital, Okal explained that the family ran out of drinking water on Sunday and that a nearby desalination station had run out of fuel needed to power generators. He said they have been roaming the main roads and streets in Rafah City, where they are staying in a single-family home with 40 other people including his sister Haneen and her three kids, in search of trucks or carriages carrying tanks of 1,000 or 2,000 liters of drinking water. Haneen and her children are also Americans.
“We stood in line, I think it was for maybe about two hours, to fill one gallon. They tried to limit the portions, so ours was a gallon. And we’re hoping that would last us for the rest of the day today and for most of tomorrow until we could find another place to get drinking water from,” Okal said in the recording created on Monday.
Israel’s military announced Wednesday that more than 11,000 terrorist targets have now been hit inside the Gaza Strip, while the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) shot down a surface-to-air missile fired from Lebanon at one of its drones.
The Israeli air force said in a series of posts that “During the fighting yesterday, IDF fighters identified many terrorists of the terrorist organization Hamas who had barricaded themselves in a multi-story building in the Jabalia area in the northern Gaza Strip.”
“The building is located near a school, a medical center and government offices. The fighters directed air forces that attacked the terrorists,” it added.
The Israeli air force said as military activity in the Gaza Strip continues “since the beginning of the fighting, the IDF has attacked more than 11,000 targets of the terrorist organizations.”
“In addition, IDF forces identified a vehicle carrying anti-tank missiles as it drove towards the forces operating in the Gaza Strip. Following this, the ground forces directed an aircraft that fired at the vehicle. A hit has been detected,” it also said.
Farther north, the IDF shot down a “surface-to-air missile” fired from Lebanon at an IDF remotely-piloted aircraft, according to the Israeli air force.
“In response, Air Force aircraft attacked the source of the fire from which the missile was launched as well as the squad that carried out the launch,” it said.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman contributed to this update.
Bolivia cuts diplomatic ties with Israel while Chile and Colombia recall their ambassadors
Israeli security forces inspect the damage at a residential building after it was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, in Ashdod, southern Israel, Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2023. (AP Photo/Ilan Assayag)
Left-wing governments in several South American countries have taken actions against Israel this week, criticizing the reported number of Palestinian deaths in the ongoing war with Hamas.
Bolivia cut diplomatic relations with Israel on Tuesday, accusing the Jewish state of “crimes against humanity.” Meanwhile, Chile and Columbia recalled their ambassadors to Israel and criticized the country’s military offensive against Hamas terrorists.
Bolivian officials cited the number of Palestinian casualties in Gaza that have resulted from the latest Israel-Hamas war, but made no mention of the Hamas attack on Israel at the start of the conflict.
“Bolivia decided to break diplomatic relations with the state of Israel in repudiation and condemnation of the aggressive and disproportionate Israeli military offensive taking place in the Gaza Strip,” Freddy Mamani, Bolivia’s deputy foreign minister, said at a news conference.
Chile recalled its ambassador “in the face of the unacceptable violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip,” the South American country’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Neither country mentioned the Oct. 7 attack perpetrated against Israel by Hamas, in which 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, were butchered by terrorists.
Columbian President Gustavo Petro also said he was recalling his country’s ambassador to Israel.
The Hamas-led Gaza health ministry claims more than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations since the start of the war. Gaza authorities do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists in their reports, which cannot be independently verified.
Massie clashes with pro-Israel group over opposition to $14B aid package
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 20: U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a closed-door House Republican meeting at the U.S. Capitol on October 20, 2023 in Washington, DC. The House Republican caucus is searching for a new Speaker of the House candidate after Rep. Jim Jordan failed on three separate attempts to achieve a majority of votes in the House of Representatives. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, responded to criticism from a pro-Israel group after he announced he would vote against a $14.3 billion aid package for Israel.
The aid package for Israel, which is backed by most House Republicans, includes allocating $1.2 billion for the development of the Iron Beam defense system and $4 billion for the country’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems.
“If Congress sends $14.5 billion to Israel, on average we’ll be taking about $100 from every working person in the United States,” Massie wrote Monday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “This will be extracted through inflation and taxes. I’m against it.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee pointed out that the congressman voted last week with nine progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, against a resolution defending Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas.
Massie responded to the post on Tuesday by saying the AIPAC was “intentionally misrepresenting” his intent in voting against the resolution. The congressman has condemned Hamas’ terror attack against Israel, but said last week he opposed the resolution because it calls for sanctions and “asserts the necessity of foreign aid commitments which I have voted against.”
“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first. I won’t be voting for their $14+ billion shakedown of American taxpayers either,” he wrote on Tuesday. “Let them know what you think by replying to their post. They are intentionally misrepresenting my intent and the resolution I voted against.”
The group replied, “The U.S. is stronger when Israel is secure. No misrepresentation, your vote says it all: NO to standing with Israel, NO to condemning Hamas, NO to helping Israel win this war.”
A drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria was thwarted on Wednesday, according to a report.
Two drones targeting Syria’s al-Tanf region were disabled or destroyed by the base defense system, an Iraqi government source told Reuters.
The thwarted attack comes as U.S. and Coalition Forces at Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) installations in Iraq and Syria have been attacked at least 27 times between Oct. 17-31.
Of these attacks, 16 happened in Iraq and 11 took place in Syria. They included a mix of one-way attack drones and rockets.
Most of these attacks were successfully disrupted by military forces and most failed to reach their targets, thanks to robust defenses. One U.S. contractor died as a result of cardiac arrest, when warned of an attack. Several other injuries were reported.
Defense officials have said Iranian-forces are believed to have backed the attacks.
Senior U.S. officials, including President Biden, Vice President Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have discouraged Iran from getting involved. They have also vowed retaliation if U.S. forces are intentionally targeted but have not specified which actions they would take.
The U.S. has deployed carrier group and other forces in the Mediterranean Sea and sent an additional 300 more troops on Wednesday.
Fox News Digital’s Lawrence Richard and Liz Friden contributed to this update.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis took issue with President Biden’s tact of sending detachments of U.S. troops to the Middle East amid the Hamas invasion of Israel, saying the numbers of troops are too small to be effective but large enough to be a target of America’s enemies.
While Vice President Kamala Harris recently said the administration has “absolutely no intention” to deploy troops to fight in Israel or Gaza, several hundred have been deployed elsewhere and about 2,000 were reportedly told to prepare for potential deployment earlier this month.
The Pentagon has said there have been 27 attacks against American troops in the Mideast in October.
DeSantis, who is running for president, told FOX News on Tuesday that the U.S. taken ineffective actions against Iran – the suspected sponsor of Hamas terror – in that the response to attacks on U.S. servicemembers has been “abysmal.”
“I look at all these attacks that are going against US positions in the Middle East, and it seems like Biden has people there that are effectively sitting ducks,” he said on “Your World.”
“They’re there in probably too small a number to really do a whole lot. But they’re in sufficient numbers where they’re an inviting target.”
Fox News Digital’s Charles Creitz contributed to this update.
An Israeli woman who was taken hostage by Hamas recently told Israeli outlet Ynet that her fellow captives are still alive.
Kibbutz Nir Oz resident Nurit Cooper, 79, was released last week after being kidnapped on October 7. According to an English translation of the Ynet piece, she is “slowly recovering” from the traumatic experience. Cooper’s husband is still in custody of Hamas.
“The abductees are alive,” Cooper is quoted as saying. “Everything must be done to bring them back. I want all the families to be as happy as my family is.”
Cooper’s son told the outlet that her recovery is “not easy at all.”
“She remembers details, but doesn’t always share,” he explained. “She prefers to focus on the future. Father is still kidnapped and she worries about him very much. They were kidnapped together and held together in the same underground room, along with five other kibbutz members.”
“Father must have realized that mother and Yochaved were released,” he added. “The event is very traumatic for her, because the kidnapping was very violent.”
Foreign passport holders were seen entering the Rafah Crossing from Gaza to Egypt Wednesday morning.
These individuals are the first travelers to enter the crossing since the war between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists began on Oct. 7.
This, after Qatar mediated an agreement between Egypt, Hamas and Israel in coordination with the U.S. to open the Rafah Crossing on Wednesday. The agreement allows foreign passport holders and some critically injured civilians out of Gaza.
It is unclear how long the crossing will remain open.
More than 9,700 people have been killed in Gaza and Israel since Hamas launched its largest attack against Israel in decades on Oct. 7, leading to retaliatory action from Israeli forces. Thousands more have been wounded, and many others have been taken hostage by Hamas and raped, tortured and murdered.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
The Ivy League student who allegedly made threats of a mass shooting and antisemitic violence at Cornell University has been criminally charged.
Court documents show that 21-year-old Patrick Dai, a junior at Cornell has been federally charged in connection with the threats following an investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
“It is concerning, of course, that the threats came from within the campus. It must be particularly frightening for students to think that someone they sat in class with or socialized with could make such threats,” said William A. Jacobson, a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School. “I hope that there will be a full and transparent investigation of his connections, if any, to any groups or others who may have known of the threats.”
Fox News Digital’s Stepheny Price contributed to this update.
Nearly three dozen U.S. citizens were killed when Hamas terrorists executed a sneak attack on Israel on Oct. 7, according to the U.S. State Department.
“At this time, we can confirm the deaths of 35 U.S. citizens who were killed in the October 7 attacks,” the spokesperson said, adding that an additional U.S. citizen died as a result of continued violence after the attacks.
As far as the number of Americans who have died in Gaza, the State Department spokesperson said they are not aware of any, but information about U.S. fatalities in Gaza is “extremely limited” because of the situation.
“We extend our deepest condolences to the victims and to the families of all those affected,” the spokesperson said on behalf of the department.
Of the 35 U.S. citizens the State Department said have died, 26 have been confirmed.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard and Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
The Israeli military reported additional casualties inside the Gaza Strip, the day after it said its first two soldiers were killed during its ground invasion against Hamas Tuesday morning, the first such casualties in Gaza since Israel began its ground operations there.
According to Fox News’ Trey Yingst, who is in Israel, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were hit by an anti-tank guided missile while operating in the northern part of the strip, leaving at least 10 dead.
Israeli forces entered the second stage of their war with Hamas in what is expected to be a lengthy military operation. Until this week, Israel had largely relied on airstrikes and artillery to retaliate against Hamas’ massacre in Israel on Oct. 7.
Military officials have warned that the war will be long and difficult, potentially spanning months or longer.
The IDF began expanded ground operations this week and ground troops are now tasked with clearing out a complex network of Hamas tunnels and other fortified strongholds. IDF says it has attacked 11,000 targets in Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.
“Combined forces of the IDF attacked many terrorist targets throughout the Gaza Strip during the night, including operational headquarters and squads of Hamas terrorists,” a translated statement from the IDF Wednesday read.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard and Trey Yingst contributed to this report.
U.S. intelligence agencies virtually disregarded Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in the years following the 9-11 attacks, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead, the focus was on leaders of al-Qaida and the Islamic State, according to U.S. officials.
Mainstream media reports in the past several weeks have asked how Israeli and U.S. intelligence failed to discover what Hamas had planned for Oct. 7, when the group’s terrorists attacked Israel. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, and more than 200 others were taken to Gaza as hostages. AP reported that the death toll among Palestinians has exceeded 8,000, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Current and former U.S. officials said intelligence agencies had a handful of analysts tracking events in the Gaza Strip before the attacks, but the U.S. ceded the responsibility for monitoring Hamas to Israel, the Journal reported Wednesday.
“In terms of intelligence failures, which really do lie mostly on Israel, I think we should also share some blame for missing this event,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA operations officer with extensive counterterrorism experience, told the Journal. “Ceding the target to the Israelis now looks to have had consequences.”
Israel’s intelligence services have relied on human intelligence, eavesdropping, and other technical means throughout the West Bank and Gaza.
“It is almost inconceivable how they missed this,” Polymeropoulos told NBC News.
“True intelligence failures result not simply from a lack of information but also an inability to understand it,” Ignatius wrote. “Israelis knew the malevolent hatred that animated Hamas and its backers in Iran. What they didn’t appreciate was the creativity and competence of their adversaries. This was a level of organized malice that was, literally, unthinkable.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a comment Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, blamed the security failures on the country’s defense and intelligence services. However, he soon deleted the post and apologized. Members of Netanyahu’s Likud party have said Israel needs to focus on defeating Hamas before analyzing what went wrong.
Neither Hamas nor Gaza were mentioned in the U.S. director of national intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment, which was issued in February.
Jonathan Schanzer, who tracked Hamas as a U.S. Treasury terrorism finance analyst, now is at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He said the Oct. 7 attacks should prompt a review of U.S. policy toward Iran-backed proxy groups.
“There should be one. If there isn’t, it’s foreign policy malpractice,” Schanzer told the Journal.
The Dao Award seeks to put journalism incentives back where they belong: on courage and accuracy. The Pulitzer Prize seems to have abandoned those values. (Photo: Isabel Pavia/Getty Images)
We’re finally getting an alternative to the Pulitzer Prize, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The Dao Prize, an annual award that aims to showcase and support investigative journalism, is the result of a partnership between two conservative organizations: the National Journalism Center, created by the Young America’s Foundation, and the Dao Feng & Angela Foundation, a philanthropic grantmaker dedicated to “preserving conservative roots” and “universal values.”
The Dao Prize couldn’t have arrived at a better time, given the state of Pulitzer Prize nominees, finalists, and winners over the past decade.Emily Jashinsky, director of YAF’s National Journalism Center, described the current incentive structure in media as “broken” in a post on X, formerly Twitter:
“Reporters who do amazing work are attacked. Reporters who do garbage work are given Pulitzers. The carrots and sticks are all mixed up. But we can fix that.”
She’s not wrong. It’s now more profitable for a journalist to write libelous drivel going after conservatives than to report factually.
The Pulitzer has fallen from celebrating accurate journalism to refusing to rescind awards given to egregious reporting by The New York Times and The Washington Post. The newspapers’ reporting falsely accused the Trump administration of colluding with Russia in the 2016 election, despite overwhelming evidence and Federal Election Commision fines for both Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee over the allegations.
What an incentive structure for the next generation of journalists! Why investigate serious issues and expose corruption, cover-ups, and abuses of power when it’s just as easy to write an unfounded hit piece accusing New York City’s Jewish schools of maleducation and malfeasance?
Forensic bombshells such as the New York Post’s reports on the Hunter Biden corruption and bribery scandal are ignored by the Pulitzer committee while pieces such as Times reporter Brian Rosenthal’s slander of Orthodox Jewish yeshivas gets an immediate nomination.
“Journalists who put narratives over facts get prestigious trophies,” Jashinsky told The Daily Signal, so “it’s all too easy for reporters to get sucked into this cycle, lured by prestige, recognition, and money.”
The National Journalism Center, founded in 1977, seeks to correct this dramatic misalignment in incentives by prioritizing a return to foundational investigative principles.
A press release from YAF lists “accuracy and courage” as the two primary values judged in considering journalists’ work for the prize. The Dao Award committee certainly has its work cut out for it—2023 has seen an incredible bevy of investigative work.
Like the Pulitzer, the Dao Award may be given to an individual journalist or a publication. Jashinsky listed Emma-Jo Morris of Breitbart News, Miranda Devine of the New York Post, Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon, and the “Twitter Files” team, which includes Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, as some of the candidates up for consideration.
The prize is set to be awarded Wednesday night at a gala in Washington, D.C., and also will be livestreamed on the Young America’s Foundation YouTube channel. The winning journalist or publication will receive $100,000 along with the prize, and two finalists will get $10,000.
At a time when institutions we’ve relied on for decades have failed us in monumental fashion, conservatives, centrists, and independents have a responsibility to set up new organizations and awards that praise proper standards.
I look forward to the Dao Award’s impact on investigative journalism as the nation continues to abandon the rotting remains of a legacy media system too wretchedly narcissistic to reform.
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., seen here being sworn in on Oct. 25 after winning the House speakership, said of gender transitioning: “When you’re an adolescent or a young child, obviously, you’re in no position to be making life-altering decisions. And that’s why parental consent on everything is so critically important. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: New House Speaker Mike Johnson sharply criticized experimental surgeries on children as he discussed the “destructive” effects that such experimentation, dubbed “gender-affirming care” by gender ideologists, has upon young people.
“We had some hearings on the subject when I was in [the Judiciary Committee],” the Louisiana Republican said in a Tuesday interview with The Daily Signal, referring to a high-profile hearing that he led in July. “Some of the evidence that the expert witnesses brought forward was just alarming, in terms of some of these experimental surgeries that they’re performing on young children.”
His great concern is whether some of this has been done without parental consent, Johnson said.
“All of it just seems terribly destructive,” he said.
Johnson went on to discuss detransitioners, such as activist Chloe Cole, who attempted to change their gender and then realized that that was impossible. Cole testified emotionally at the July hearing about how attempting to transition has irrevocably changed her life.
“We had also witnesses who had gone through a gender transition and were transitioning back, and they gave very compelling testimony about how damaging this was to their physiology, their physical body, as well as their mental and spiritual health,” he recalled.
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill on Oct. 24, the day before he was elected as House speaker by his colleagues. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“I think it’s a very, very serious issue that demands the attention of lawmakers at the state and federal level,” Johnson continued. “I don’t know that there is a consensus yet on exactly what Congress should do about that, but we wanted to put the advocates of that on notice that we’re deeply concerned about it.”
Why children can’t consent to puberty blockers in under 30 seconds!
Kids that choose 2 Oreos over $10,000 and still believe in the tooth fairy are being told they are able to make the lifelong decision to take chemical castration drugs.
Though lawmakers are still discussing what role Congress might play in protecting children, Johnson emphasized that they are “watching [the matter] closely.”
“Mostly, it is being handled at the state level, and we’ll have to continue to have dialogue here about what role Congress should play,” he said.
He called the plight of detransitioners “tragic, vastly tragic,” condemning gender ideology advocates for overlooking vital components—such as parental consent—“because they’re pursuing an agenda.”
“It just breaks your heart what these young people have been through,” he said. “When you’re an adolescent or a young child, obviously, you’re in no position to be making life-altering decisions. And that’s why parental consent on everything is so critically important.”
Top Stories • They Told Kathy Ireland Being Pro-Life Would “Kill Her Career,” But She’s Still Fighting Abortion • Speaker Mike Johnson Holding the Line Against Shipping Dangerous Abortion Pills Nationwide • Tuberville Slams Biden: He’d Rather “Burn the Senate Down” Than Stop Funding Abortions • Republican Senator Blasts Biden Admin: “No Justification” for Making Americans Fund Abortion Travel
More Pro-Life News • Speaker Mike Johnson Makes Liberals Angry Because He’s a Married Pro-Life Christian • Pro-Life Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves Signed the Bill That Overturned Roe, Vote for Him • Virginia Needs to Vote Pro-Life So Our State Can Save Babies From Abortions • Pro-Life Advocates Arrested for Demanding Investigation of Full-Term Babies Killed in Abortions • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Will the choice in the 2024 election be Tick(Biden) or Treat(Trump)? This is just a thought that came to me this Halloween season after all the damage that Obama 2.0 has done to our country under Biden.
This disaster isn’t just Obama/Biden policies. This is Democrat policy, and unless we get Trump in Office along with taking over the Senate and the House, we will have no hope to save this country. Illegal immigrants Hordes of thousands are coming across our border every day. This is going to destroy our Republic as it was founded based on freedom and justice under the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Governor Gavin Newsom, in an effort to look presidential, takes a trip to Communist China to lick their boots and kiss their ring while ignoring their human rights atrocities and the genocidal slave labor treatment of the Uyghurs.
Governor Newscom is running a covert not-so-stealthy campaign for president, smelling blood in the water with Joe Biden’s failing poll numbers and cognitive decline. Still, he’s not fooling anyone but possibly the mainstream media and a few sycophant followers.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The House Republican Conference has drafted a bill that would provide military aid to Israel funded by redistributed funds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
On Oct. 19, President Joe Biden delivered a speech from the Oval Office calling on Americans to support his administration’s proposed legislation that sends $100 billion of military aid to both Ukraine in its war against Russia and Israel in its conflict against Hamas, with some money being appropriated for border security and immigration processing. Amid widespread opposition among Republicans regarding aid to Ukraine, the House Republican Conference unveiled a bill that would allocate $14.3 billion for military aid only to Israel, offsetting the cost with repurposed funds from a portion of the $80 billion to the IRS enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. (RELATED: ‘The Worst Thing For Israel’: House Republicans Quickly Dismiss Biden’s Latest Aid Package For Israel And Ukraine)
The bill, known as the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, calls for the spending of money to procure weapons, ammunition and missiles, according to its text. It also allocates $1.2 billion to support Israel’s efforts to develop a laser-based missile defense system against rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza, known as the “Iron Dome” program, which is also a priority that the administration’s proposed legislation would fund.
The bill was reportedly introduced by Republican Rep. Kay Granger of Texas’ 12th District, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, according to the New York Post. A similar bill was introduced in the Senate by Republican Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and J.D. Vance of Ohio.
The bill would also allocate $100 million to increase security for U.S. diplomatic missions in Israel and the surrounding region that have faced threats following the United States’ declaration of support for Israel after the attacks. It would further allocate $5o million to evacuate U.S. citizens from the country during hostilities.
The demand for a single bill regarding Israel, aid to which enjoys bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, has been a refrain of Republican members of Congress since Biden announced his package. However, the reduction of funds from the IRS, which has been a target of House Republicans during the 118th Congress, is likely to be opposed by the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The White House and the office of the speaker of the House of Representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iran-backed forces across the Middle East have attacked American positions and allies at least 23 times in the last two weeks, the Pentagon said Monday, adding that a U.S. military response will occur “at a time and place of our choosing, and we’re going to continue to do so.”
Since October 17, in the wake of Hamas’s war on Israel, Iranian terror forces have launched 14 attacks on American assets in Iraq and nine in Syria “through a mix of one-way attack drones and rockets,” a senior Defense Department official told reporters during a press briefing. The U.S. military responded last Thursday to these strikes by bombing Iranian positions in Syria, and American forces will continue to target Tehran’s proxy groups at will, the official said. Iran, the Pentagon assesses, is targeting American forces, threatening to drag the United States into a larger regional war.
“It’s about Iran and the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], who use infrastructure, militants, and proxies on the ground across the Middle East to include both Iraq and Syria,” the Defense Department official said, speaking only on background. “We reserve the right to respond at a time and place of our choosing, and we’re going to continue to do so.”
“Let me be clear,” the official added: “We’re going to continue to respond when the president decides that’s necessary for U.S. force protection.”
In the weeks since the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400, Tehran’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen have stepped up their terrorism activities. These activities include rocket fire and shelling on Israel from areas in both Syria and Lebanon, where Hezbollah forces are stationed.
Iran’s assets in Iraq have also increased their strikes on American forces in the country, resulting in last week’s military response by the United States. The Pentagon also said that Hamas militants are using hospitals and other civilian structures to conduct their terrorism operations against Israel.
The Israeli military’s foray into civilian areas of the Gaza Strip has fueled accusations that the country is intentionally targeting innocents, claims that have been amplified by anti-Israel U.S. lawmakers such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.). The Pentagon, however, says it has seen evidence that Hamas is using civilian structures as command centers.
“What I would say about Hamas is [its] use of civilian structures for command-and-control facilities and to hide weapons,” the official said. “There is an abundance of public reporting about the ways in which Hamas uses civilians as human shields and civilian structures to hide and obfuscate tunnels, as well as weapons.”
This includes “Hamas’s use of hospitals to emplace command-and-control infrastructure or other weapons that can be used against Israeli civilians.”
As of Monday afternoon, the Pentagon said it has no plans to facilitate “military-assisted departures” for American citizens stuck in the region.
A felon with a history of blowing things up attacked a churchgoer and led police on an explosive chase through San Francisco Sunday night, according to the San Francisco Police Department. When captured, the suspect allegedly asked his arresting officer how many points he had racked up on Grand Theft Auto.
The SFPD indicated that officers responded just before 6 p.m. on Sunday to a report of a man brandishing a knife and assaulting a parishioner at Saints Peter and Paul Church across from Washington Square Park in the North Beach neighborhood. KPIX-TV reported that the suspect waltzed into the church and demanded money from a parishioner whom he did not know.
“The parishioner continued to pray and ignored him, at which point the suspect then violently assaulted this parishioner, punching him in the head,” said SFPD Assistant Chief David Lazar. “We believe the parishioner went unconscious temporarily.”
Other parishioners rushed to the victim’s rescue and called 911 while the suspect continued demanding money with a folding knife in hand. Officers arrived on the scene within minutes of the incident and spotted the suspect stealing into a vehicle and preparing to flee the scene. They called for medical aid for the victim, then gave chase.
The SFPD noted that the suspect, who has been identified as 42-year-old Concord resident Daniel Garcia, failed to yield to pursuing officers. Instead, police said Garcia threw two improvised explosive devices at pursuing officers. The first went off in the 1500 block of Jones Street.
“The officers described not only seeing the flames of the device that hit the ground, but when the bomb detonated, they could feel the blowback of that in their vehicles,” said Lazar. “They believe the suspect intentionally tried to seriously injure or kill them.”
Garcia threw the second IED at police near 8th and Mission, according to Lazar. The San Francisco Standard noted that a police officer can be heard on scanner audio recordings reporting, “He threw another bomb. … It blew up on Mission,” at 6:04 p.m..
One of the IEDs was reportedly a pipe bomb, and the other was a Molotov cocktail.
PRELIMINARY REPORT: Assault at Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach. Responding officers encountered a suspect with an improvised device. A pursuit occurred. Suspect apprehended by SFPD in another county. If you are a witness or have video, contact SFPD at 415-575-4444. pic.twitter.com/POzUsftpwW
Garcia allegedly attempted to lose police on the freeway, taking I-80 eastbound, where California Highway Patrol joined the chase. It appears that Garcia gave up on allegedly attempting to murder police officers while on the freeway, as a CHP spokesman told KGO-TV, “No incendiaries were thrown during our portion of the pursuit, however, items were located in the vehicle at the termination point.”
Roughly 30 minutes later, he wrecked his vehicle in Martinez and was captured by police.
Garcia was booked into the San Francisco County Jail and charged with second-degree robbery; assault with a deadly weapon; threatening an officer; three counts of attempted murder; three counts of possession of an explosive; evading an officer with willful disregard; two counts of explosion of destructive device with intent to murder; two counts of explosion of destructive device with intent to injure; three counts of carrying an explosive in a passenger vehicle for hire; resisting, obstructing, and/or delaying of a peace officer or EMT; and various traffic infractions.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin of North Beach indicated that upon his arrest, Garcia asked an officer “how many points he got in his Grand Theft Auto game” — a video game series featuring a star system corresponding to the level of attention the player’s murder and mayhem has warranted from the in-game police.
“In 23 years of doing this stuff, this is probably the most bizarre,” said Peskin.
On Monday, heavily armed police and a bomb disposal robot checked out Garcia’s property. Officers reportedly left the residence with loaded brown paper bags and a box of what appeared to be glass bottles. His neighbor, Stephen Salbato, said, “He’s someone who never smiled.”
This is not Garcia’s first run-in with the law. Garcia was convicted and sentenced in 2012 to 35 years in a federal prison for “malicious use of explosives, possession of a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence, and two counts of possession of unregistered destructive devices.”
He planted a bomb underneath an SUV belonging to his former tenant beside an apartment building in Fairfield. The bomb went off, sending shrapnel into both the vehicle and the neighboring building, where children and others were sleeping. Garcia had apparently targeted the former tenant because he had left behind trash when moving out.
The U.S. attorney at the time said, “The defendant’s attempt to resolve a minor private dispute by detonating a bomb endangered the lives of all those who were sleeping in the apartment building in Fairfield that night. While it is fortunate that no one was harmed, the defendant’s actions, together with his possession of a second bomb in the residential neighborhood where he lived, merit a long prison sentence.”
Evidently, Garcia did not serve the entirety of his prison sentence. The Standard reported that the bomber was released in February 2019 after he successfully challenged his conviction on one of his charges.
Garcia was also arrested in May on domestic violence charges and for illegally owning a firearm. KPIX indicated he was scheduled to appear in a Contra Costa courtroom to face those charges on Tuesday.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
As the carnage in the Middle East persists, an America’s New Majority Project poll recently found that more than 75 percent of Americans are closely following the news about the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. While a majority of voters agree that Israel must do what is necessary to destroy Hamas, and that Hamas is responsible for Palestinian civilian casualties, the outlandish defense of Hamas’s atrocities across the United States– particularly on university campuses – raises great concern.
American universities ought to be centers where ideas, debates, and opinions are freely exchanged, but many, instead, have fostered hateful, antisemitic ideology among the student population. A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 48 percent of voters between 18-24 support Hamas in the current conflict. According to Steven Davidoff Solomon, a corporate law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “Universities have been engaging for far too long in moral equivocation, and terrorist attacks against innocents should be condemned and not justified.”
Amidst escalating tensions on college campuses, 20-year old Melanie Schwartz, a junior at Cornell, told The Washington Post, “Jewish students are fearful and isolated.”
To help students facing hostility on college campuses, Franciscan University of Steubenville, a private Catholic university in Ohio, has created an expedited transfer process.
“[W]ith too many universities preaching tolerance but practicing prejudice, we feel compelled to do more. We are witnessing a very troubling spike in antisemitism and serious threats against Jewish students. We want to offer them the chance to transfer immediately to Franciscan,” Father Dave Pivonka, president of Franciscan University, said.
Although Franciscan achieved record-high enrollment this academic year, university administrators are committed to accommodating and creating a safe haven for Jewish transfer students.
“Our community will welcome them with generosity and respect,” Father Pivonka said. “Our religious differences will not cause any conflict. On the contrary, at Franciscan, our radical fidelity to Christ and the Catholic faith demands of us fraternal charity toward our Jewish brothers and sisters, as it does toward all people.”
In recognition of the need to combat antisemitism in the U.S., Franciscan University recently partnered with The Philos Project, a community of Christians who seek to promote positive Christian engagement in the Near East, to cosponsor a joint conference, Nostra Aetate and the Future of Catholic-Jewish Relations at a Time of Rising Antisemitism. The conference focused on addressing antisemitism, “one of the biggest social problems that we’re facing,” according to President of The Philos Project Robert Nicholson.
Additionally, the conference discussed the significance of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Catholic Church to Non-Christian Religions, promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965. The Declaration marked a turning point in relations between the Catholic Church and Judaism by emphasizing the Jewish roots of the Christian faith and the condemnation of antisemitism.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII faced criticism that not enough was done to support our Jewish brethren. In March 2020, Pope Francis opened the Vatican Archives and made the documents of Pope Pius XII’s wartime pontificate accessible for study. Recent discoveries prove, according to German historian Dr. Michael Hesemann, that Pope Pius XII’s efforts “did more to save Jews and to stop the killings, than any politician or religious leader of his time.”
According to Dr. Hesemann, “What has to be rewritten is the ‘black legend’ of the silent and disinterested Pope… Today, we know that Pius XII not only mentioned the horrible fate of the Jews in three public speeches but also tried to save as many as possible.”
An anti-Israel protester in Cambridge on Monday shouted slurs at the pro-Israel counter-protesters, calling them “pigs” and “Nazis.” (Kassy Dillon/Fox News Digital)
As Dr. Hesemann explained to Vatican News, “[I]n 235 monasteries and convents, 4,205 Jews were hidden, plus 160 in Vatican City. Of 3,200, we know the names, thanks to the newly discovered list. Eventually, about 6,400 of the Roman Jews, or 80 percent survived the Holocaust, more than anywhere else where a SS-razzia happened.”
Today, we see this same fervor among the faithful to bring peace and aid to those affected by the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Amid the current war in the Middle East, Pope Francis has ardently called for an end to the violence and noted that “terrorism and war bring no solutions, but only to the death and suffering of many innocent lives. … Let us pray for peace.”
As the brutality of the Israel-Hamas war wages on, we must eradicate antisemitism and offer our prayers for peace in the Middle East.
The attack by Hamas on Israel will inspire the most significant terror threat to the U.S. since the rise of ISIS nearly a decade ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray said at a congressional hearing Tuesday. Wray said that since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza earlier this month, multiple foreign terrorist organizations have called for attacks against Americans and the West, significantly raising the threat posed by homegrown U.S. violent extremists.
“The actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago,” Wray said.
The remarks came during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee focused on threats to the United States. The U.S. government has seen an increase in threats against Jews, Muslims and Arab Americans since fighting broke out in Gaza, officials have said. The number of attacks on U.S. military bases overseas by Iran-backed militia groups have risen this month, Wray said. Cyber attacks against the U.S. by Iran and non-state actors will likely worsen if the conflict expands, he said.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the hearing, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that hate directed at Jewish students in the U.S. following the start of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza has added to an increase in antisemitism. The White House expressed alarm this week at reports of anti-Jewish incidents at U.S. universities as tensions have prompted university officials to tighten security.
At a ransomware summit organized by the White House on Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had directed the U.S. Justice Department to assist Israeli investigators probing financial flows to Hamas, including those involving cryptocurrency. (Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Andrew Goudsward in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)
The United States is sending an additional 300 troops to the Middle East with a focus on providing support in areas like explosive ordnance disposal and communications, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said the troops would be going from the United States but would not be in Israel.
“They are intended to support regional deterrence efforts and further bolster us force protection capabilities,” Ryder said.
He added that this month there have been 27 attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., speaks at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing, “Threats to the Homeland,” on Tuesday. Johnson was highly critical of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. (Photo: Tom Williams/ CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
During a Senate committee hearing Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas couldn’t answer a question about how many illegal immigrants federal authorities have released into the U.S. interior under the Biden administration.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pressed Mayorkas on the issue, but the DHS secretary couldn’t provide a number at Tuesday’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. Illegal immigration at the southern border of the U.S. has surged past 2 million in both fiscal year 2022, the highest year on record, and 2023, according to federal data.
An Inspector General report in September found that DHS lacks the ability to track all illegal immigrants released from their custody into the U.S. interior, partially because of the overwhelming surge at U.S. borders.
“I’ve asked you this in the past, what numbers are represented here? How many people has this administration let in by encountering, processing, dispersing or that come in as a known or an unknown got-away? Approximately, I don’t need an exact number, so what do we got?” Johnson asked Mayorkas.
“Senator, let me say,” Mayorkas responded before being interrupted by Johnson.
“I need numbers. Don’t filibuster me. How many people has this administration let into the country?” Johnson continued.
Mayorkas began speaking before Johnson again interrupted him for not providing a clear number.
“Let me say at the outset that our job would be a lot easier if the broken immigration system … ” Mayorkas responded.
“Mr. Secretary, I want a number. How many people will have you let into this country? I’ll give you the number, it’s about 6 million, about 1.7 million as known got-aways. Now, again, we don’t know who these people are. We just know that they’ve come to this country and that they’re residing somewhere. Where are all these people residing? Where did the 6 million people go?” Johnson asked.
Border Patrol doesn’t have the ability to always collect migrants’ addresses, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t always validate the addresses before they’re released into the country, the inspector general previously found. Between March 2021 and August 2022, Border Patrol collected 981,671 migrant records, but more than 177,000 migrant records “were either missing, invalid for delivery, or not legitimate residential locations.”
Mayorkas began to attempt to answer Johnson again, but still could not provide a direct response.
“Senator, you speak of encounters, and let me share,” Mayorkas said before Johnson interrupted.
“Would you answer my questions? Where did these 6 million people go? Are you keeping track of them? To what extent [do] we have a handle on where are these 6 million people are in America?” Johnson asked.
Mayorkas continued to attempt to answer Johnson’s questions.
“As you well know, when an individual is indeed released, they are released into immigration enforcement proceedings and are subject to removal if they do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States,” the DHS chief said.
“You’re not answering that question. Where do these people reside?” Johnson asked.
Top Stories • Republicans Need to Flip the Script, Show How Radical Democrats Want Abortions Up to Birth • 40 Days for Life Prayer Campaign Saves 202 Babies From Abortions • Republicans Oppose Devious Democrat Plan to Undermine Tuberville’s Pro-Life Holds • Mike Pence Drops Out of Presidential Race
More Pro-Life News • Gavin Newsom Says Biden Admin Told Him Not To Bring Up China’s Human Rights Abuses With Xi • Firefighters Save Newborn Baby Months After Station Installs “Safe Haven Baby Box” • No Other Political Issue Matters if You’re Killed in an Abortion • Legislator Condemns Abortion: Margaret Sanger Wanted to “Exterminate” Black People, Her Wish is Coming True • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
We are living in scary times, especially with a Democrat at your door taking away your rights, gas stoves, plastic straws, Guns, gas cars, secure borders, energy independence, 401Ks, the worth of the dollar, excellent economy, education, etc. and they’re not “Trick or Treating” in the traditional sense—more like Trick No Treat.
Democrat policies, both foreign and domestic, are responsible for all that’s going wrong in America. What could be scarier than that? Not to mention the threat of horrific terrorist attacks on our homeland due to the thousands of military-age males coming across the border from places that hate the U.S.
Has a single member of the White House staff ever held a dying American soldier in his arms as he bled out, calling for his mother? Have any of them ever loaded the blood-soaked bodies of his wounded and killed onto a medivac helicopter and then endured sleepless nights thinking about the visits their families are about to get and the ensuing destruction of their lives and dreams?
These were the first questions that popped into my mind when I saw the report from Politico that the Biden administration is promoting the war in Ukraine because it is good for American business. I think the members of the administration could not have experienced these things because, if they had, and if they had one ounce of humanity in them, they could not possibly have promoted war on the “it’s good for business” rationale.
Apparently, multiple White House aides have been involved in this abomination because Politico is quite specific:
The White House has been quietly urging lawmakers in both parties to sell the war efforts abroad as a potential economic boom at home.
Aides have been distributing talking points to Democrats and Republicans who have been supportive of continued efforts to fund Ukraine’s resistance to make the case that doing so is good for American jobs, according to five White House aides and lawmakers familiar with the effort and granted anonymity to speak freely.
The Biden administration is fearful that it cannot sell its most recent aid package on the merits and on national security grounds, because “The talking points are an implicit recognition that the administration has work to do in selling its $106 billion foreign aid supplemental request — and that talking about it squarely under the umbrella of national security interests hasn’t done the trick,” Politico states.
The reprehensibility of these comments cannot be overstated. Biden’s administration is peopled with a number of “elites” who probably are familiar, at least in a theoretical, intellectual sense, with John Stuart Mill’s dictum, “War is an ugly thing.” But, hey, if it’s good for business, particularly in electoral swing states, let’s go for it.
I am old enough to remember how the left tarred George Bush, Dick Cheney, and others in the GOP with the argument that they wanted war because it was good for their supporters in big business. I never put any stock in these arguments because I thought no American could be so evil as to support war as a sop to big business. The Biden administration has changed my mind.
My contempt and revulsion for these people knows no bounds.
John Lucas is a retired attorney who has tried and argued a variety of cases, including before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man, later graduating from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger who fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader. He is married with five children. He and his wife now live in Virginia. John also is published at johnalucas6.substack.com.
There’s a simple pattern that the media follow when covering each new crisis that pops up during Joe Biden’s catastrophic presidency: A calamity occurs either domestically or abroad, and rather than examining the cause, the media instantly frame Biden as a hero at battle.
War in Ukraine? “Joe Biden Marshals U.S. Allies Against Russia” (Newsweek).
Obscene gas prices? “Biden’s frustration with soaring prices” (Washington Post).
War in Israel? “Why this Israel-Gaza conflict is so complicated for Biden” (CNN).
Folks! He’s frustrated, folks. It’s complicated for Biden, folks.
The New York Times’ David French offered up that same spa treatment for the president this week under the headline “Joe Biden knows what he’s doing.” In the piece, French implored his readers to “consider” all it is that Biden “confronts”: a war in Ukraine, another one in the Middle East, plus the ever-present threat from China. “And keep in mind,” he said, “Biden is managing these conflicts all while trying to make sure that the nation emerges from a pandemic with inflation in retreat and its economy intact.”
Folks! Keep it in mind, folks. Biden is trying, folks. He’s managing lots of complicated problems, folks. It’s frustrating to the president, too, folks.
Honestly, I felt the same way under President Trump when he was confronted by two hot wars, record inflation, and impossible energy prices. He did the best he could to manage the challenges he faced — the struggles he endured.
Wait, that’s not right. There were neither wars nor inflation during Trump’s term. The U.S. was energy independent, and gas was cheap precisely because he flooded the market with oil for the taking. My mistake!
Actually, now that I think about it, I recall that despite a remarkable period of global calm and even a historic peace deal reached between Israel and the Arab world, the Trump era was marked by nonstop hysterics from the media about our supposedly shaken allies and emboldened foes. (i.e., Trump demanded that Western Europe live up to his part of the NATO bargain and made it known that the U.S. cannot solve all of the world’s problems, especially when large parts of the world don’t see them as such.)
But back to Biden. He’s not confronting or managing a series of events that happened to him. He and his party actively created them. Or, at minimum, they created an environment that anyone could have predicted would lead to them.
Russia has long insisted that NATO stop expanding along its border. The second Biden got into office, he pushed for Ukraine’s membership. Israel had its country under relative control for years right up until Biden’s team gifted Iran, the Jewish state’s greatest threat, $6 billion worth of goodies. We were energy independent until Biden said we couldn’t be. The economy was working itself out until Biden and his party thought it would be a good idea to pump hundreds of billions of dollars more into Covid-era welfare (“childcare” and “living assistance”). And let’s not start on the electric vehicle scheme, wherein car companies grabbed another round of multi-billion-dollar taxpayer funds, courtesy of Biden, for a product that barely works (and for which manufacturers are now rolling back their production of).
Biden isn’t a knight of the kingdom off to slay a dragon. He’s a dunce screwing up everything. He doesn’t get to turn the economy and international stability into ruins and then get credit for saying he takes it all very seriously.
He’s not “struggling” or “managing,” and it’s not “complicated.” Biden is the struggle. He is the thing to manage. He is the complication.
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to stop cutting razor wire on fences along the southern border in Texas meant to stop illegal migrant crossings.
Judge Alia Moses of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on Monday ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop “disassembling, degrading, tampering” miles of razor wire running along the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. The temporary order is a result of a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that federal officials said they had the authority to destroy state property “to allow [illegal] aliens to enter & be processed.”
Paxton asked the court for an immediate injunction last week, noting in his request to the court that “federal agents escalated matters, trading bolt cutters for an industrial-strength telehandler forklift to dismantle [Texas’] border fence.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in the lawsuit that “federal agents used hydraulic-powered pallet forks to rip [Texas’] fence … out of the ground, holding it suspended in the air in order to wave more than 300 migrants illegally into Texas.” (Benjamin Lowy for Fox News Digital)
“Federal agents used hydraulic-powered pallet forks to rip [Texas’] fence – concertina wire, fencing posts, clamps, and all – out of the ground, holding it suspended in the air in order to wave more than 300 migrants illegally into Texas,” the motion for a temporary injunction reads.
Last week, DHS released a statement that said border agents “have a responsibility under federal law” to protect migrants from being injured regardless of their legal status.
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to stop cutting razor wire on fences along the southern border in Texas meant to stop illegal migrant crossings. (Benjamin Lowy for Fox News Digital)
In an 11-page document filed in with the federal court in Del Rio, Moses found that the state of Texas had met the required four-part test needed to be granted a temporary halt to the federal government’s action, but the judge noted one exception.
Federal agents used a forklift to lift Texas’ razor wire fence. (The State of Texas v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
“The Court shall grant the temporary relief requested, with one important exception for any medical emergency that mostly likely results in serious bodily injury or death to a person, absent any boats or other life-saving apparatus available to avoid such medical emergencies prior to reaching the concertina wire barrier,” the judge wrote in the court filing.
The temporary restraining order will remain in place until the parties have an opportunity to present evidence at a preliminary injunction hearing before the court, which is scheduled for Nov. 7.
The Department of Justice, which is handling the litigation, declined to comment.
Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds told Newsmax Monday that recent testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee proves officials from both the Department of Justice and FBI “blocked” federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania from investigating President Joe Biden and his family.
“What we’ve learned now from the Judiciary Committee in the testimony it received last week, was that there were at least 10 times when special federal prosecutors in the Pennsylvania district were stopped from looking into issues of the Biden family business dealings,” Donalds said during “Newsline” Monday. “They were stopped by people at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and at [the] main [Department of] Justice.”
Donalds also pointed to the recent discovery of a check from President Joe Biden’s brother James to Joe repaying a $200,000 loan, which Donalds said is a direct link between the president and the business deals carried out by James and his son Hunter with foreign entities.
“We now see a check paying Joe Biden directly from his brother, James Biden,” Donalds said. “Most people are focused on Hunter Biden, and they should, but James Biden has been involved in the Biden family scheme this entire time, so the check that was actually released last week demonstrates the flow of $200,000 from James Biden to Joe Biden referencing a loan repayment.”
Donalds said that the money, absent any written loan agreements between the president and his brother, could demonstrate tax evasion.
“One of the key ways that wandering money actually occurs, or evading taxes occurs, is when you treat them as loan repayments and not just as payments,” he said. “So, the key questions now are, what were the loan documents from Joe Biden to his brother, Jim, to demonstrate the need for $200,000 repayment. Our investigation is going to continue. We’re going to get to the bottom of this and hold this administration accountable.”
The White House has been striking back at the committee, particularly since Attorney General Merrick Garland testified in September.
“Extreme House Republicans are running a not-so-sophisticated distraction campaign to try to cover up their own actions that are hurtling America to a dangerous and costly government shutdown,” CNN reported the White House saying in September. “They cannot even pass a military funding bill … so they cranked up a circus of a hearing full of lies and disinformation with the sole goal of baselessly attacking President Biden and his family. Don’t be fooled: they want to distract from the reality that their own chaos and inability to govern is going to shut down the government in a matter of days. … These sideshows won’t spare House Republicans from bearing responsibility for inflicting serious damage on the country.”
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
Find NEWSMAX in over 100 million U.S. homes via cable/streaming – More Info Here
Shani Louk, a German-Israeli woman who was thought to have been kidnapped by Hamas during the attack on a music festival on Oct. 7, was killed at some point during that attack and possibly beheaded, according to Israel’s president.
Louk, 22, came to international attention after she was seen being paraded half-naked and apparently unconscious in the back of a pickup truck in Gaza after Hamas attacked a music festival in Re’im on Oct. 7. Louk was initially believed to be kidnapped, but Israeli officials recently informed her family that human remains were matched to her DNA.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog told the German newspaper Bild that Louk’s “skull was found,” and added, “This means that these barbaric, sadistic animals simply chopped off her head as they attacked, tortured and killed Israelis.” Though Israeli officials have not publicly revealed Louk’s cause of death or confirmed many details, some reports state that she was shot in the head and that her head was later found but not the rest of her body.
German and Israeli mediareport that the Israeli Defense Forces and Zika, an organization of volunteer emergency responders, informed Louk’s family that a bone from the base of her skull had been located and matched to her DNA and that medical experts determined a person could not live without this bone, and therefore there is no possibility that Louk is still alive.
“For me, this news is terrible,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters while on an official trip to Africa. “This shows all the barbarism that lies behind Hamas.”
Migrants take part in a caravan towards the border with the United States in Tapachula, Chiapas State, Mexico, on Monday. (Getty Images)
A large migrant caravan comprising many Central Americans and Venezuelans left southern Mexico on Monday for the United States, organizers and officials said, as Washington grapples with renewed pressure on its southern border.
Officials in the southern state of Chiapas said some 3,500 people set off on foot from the city of Tapachula near the Guatemalan border, while one of the caravan’s organizers, Irineo Mujica, said there were around 5,000 in the group.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection next year, is under pressure to curb the number of people crossing illegally into the United States from Mexico. Most of the latest caravan are from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Venezuela, according to Mujica. Escorted by civil protection officials and ambulances, the migrants were walking on a coastal highway around midday, planning to spend the night in the municipality of Huehuetan, about 16 miles (25 km) north of where they started.
Mujica said the migrants opted to leave Tapachula due to frustration about not being able to obtain humanitarian visas. Some migrants even offered to help recovery efforts in the port of Acapulco, which was devastated by a hurricane last week, but did not get a response from the authorities, he added.
The government’s National Migration Institute did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Many migrants are fleeing poverty and political instability in their homelands, and this year has seen record numbers crossing the Darien Gap region connecting Panama and Colombia. Millions of Venezuelans have left home due to the economic crisis plaguing the once-prosperous oil producing country.
“In Venezuela things are very tough, we can’t live with the money we get, it’s not enough for us, and that’s why we’re going to the United States,” said Oscar Gutierrez, a Venezuelan migrant traveling with his wife and two daughters.
Tropical storm Pilar formed off Central America in the Pacific on Monday, and threatens to dump heavy rain on the region and parts of southern Mexico.
An engineer turns off the vent of a natural gas pump. Republicans in Congress want to turn off a Biden tax on natural gas, which they say will increase consumers’ energy bills. (Photo: Olga Rolenko/Moment/Getty Images)
Numerous Republican lawmakers have written to the newly elected speaker of the House asking him to repeal an emissions-reduction program from the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, wrote the letter, which urges House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s Methane Emissions Reduction Program natural gas tax before the year’s end by including its repeal in a possibly forthcoming legislative package.
Pfluger and other prominent Republican signatories, such as Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Byron Donalds of Florida, and Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, slammed the Methane Emissions Reduction Program as an excessive and unwieldy regulation that would stymie innovation and drive up costs for the American energy industry.
“The [Methane Emissions Reduction Program] is an inappropriate and highly unworkable tax on methane emissions,” the letter states.
“If implemented, the ill-conceived naturalgas tax will handicap technological innovation, reduce supplies of affordable energy, and increase both costs and emissions,” the letter continues, adding that “in order to lower costs for American families, we must repeal burdensome regulation, secure supply chains and unleash American energy.”
The Methane Emissions Reduction Program imposes a tax on emissions beyond 25,000 annual tons of carbon dioxide or an equivalent amount of pollution, according to the letter. Companies will be forced to collect the relevant data and pay a fee of $900 for every metric ton above 25,000 starting in 2024, which increases to $1,200 per extra metric ton in 2025 and then $1,500 per extra ton in 2026 and beyond.
The tax is a “statutory codification” of the forced collection of emissions data under a specific sub-section of the Clean Air Act, according to the letter. The Environmental Protection Agency is looking to overhaul that particular section of the Clean Air Act such that the agency can increase the scope and costs of the Methane Emissions Reduction Program.
New fees or taxes on energy companies will raise costs for consumers, creating a burden that will fall most heavily on lower-income Americans,” the letter states. “In fact, this tax alone will drive up the cost of household energy bills for the 180 million Americans and 5.5 million businesses that rely on natural gas. At a time of persistent inflation and record energy prices, this increase is unthinkable for consumers.”
The EPA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats appear to be sticking by Joe Biden as their only presidential candidate for 2024 and don’t seem interested in any debates involving Robert F Kennedy or Dean Phillips of Minnesota. How’s that for upholding democracy? Shouldn’t voters have the ability to hear the opposition in order to make an informed choice within their own party?
There’s a lot of rigorous debating going on within the Republican Party that more closely resembles what democracy actually looks like, as opposed to the Democrats running their party like a communist politburo out of the former Soviet Union or Communist China. Democrats always seem to be in lockstep with each other, especially when it comes to policies that hurt Americans and their constitutional freedoms at large.
Israel is totally surrounded by the Muslim world and is constantly threatened with genocidal rhetoric, along with rockets being constantly fired on their innocent citizens every day from Gaza. The threat is instigated primarily by the Islamic Republic of Iran, a well-funded state sponsoring terrorism across the globe with the help of their branches, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Sadly, whenever Israel acts to defend their population against this barbarism surrounding them, the left in America and much of the world defend Hamas and these bloody acts of Terrorism. Many of the LGBTQ-XYZ groups are also protesting against Israel and defending the Hamas attacks against innocent civilians without any understanding that they themselves would be killed for being gay, lesbian, or trans in Gaza or in much of the Muslim world.
The 1978 blizzard put the kibosh on “global warming,” so the climate scammers came up with “climate change.” That way, whatever way the wind blows, they’re always right! It’s like when the vax fanatics all started getting COVID: “Well, it would’ve been worse without the vaccine!” https://t.co/Mjjs8cxDXK
"Mom, this was $70 and you didn't even get anything"
"Before Covid my grocery bill was $350 per month, now it's $600 per month"
🔊 … 🤨
"They are inflating all of the prices and paying us poverty wages" "We cannot even afford to live in this country. We cannot even afford to… pic.twitter.com/ProA3yJEsq
Democrats have slowly changed what we consider normal in America. They have allowed for those that would need mental help to roam free under the disguise of being ‘bold’ and ‘different’ Democrats created the ideology that being different is independence. There is power in having… pic.twitter.com/Gok6Hk35qK
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) October 26, 2023
Thank you Sydney, Australia for this beautiful tribute to bring our hostages home 💔 pic.twitter.com/27OEpzBBfs
JUST IN: Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman thinks college students have “s**t for brains” and is done donating to Columbia University after the school failed to fire a professor who called the Hamas attacks “awesome”
A woman in England was interrogated before being issued a penalty for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. Thought crimes will now get you punished in England pic.twitter.com/szq6ehephM
This is a great list.If the democrats dislike him, I am for him. America First Candidate! Thanks, Matt, for the information! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/uNRiLBmVRy
Why children can’t consent to puberty blockers in under 30 seconds!
Kids that choose 2 Oreos over $10,000 and still believe in the tooth fairy are being told they are able to make the lifelong decision to take chemical castration drugs.
Megan Rapinoe is gay & married to a Jewish woman. Yet she’s raising money for Palestine after the Hamas terror attack. Does she realize the people in Gaza would murder her for being gay and married to a Jew? Next level athlete stupidity: pic.twitter.com/tohhxWE4cB
🚨NEWS ALERT: An internal memo from federal officials warns that members of terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are likely crossing into the U.S. through Biden’s wide-open southern border ⚠️
Biden paid for his $3 million beach house in CASH. No mortgage. No loan. Cash. How did the poorest man in Washington get so rich? pic.twitter.com/yHmDYs4ZQ4
⚡️THE PEACE MAKER A President with the People, for the People. ▪️No Wars ▪️Booming Economy He EXPOSED them all, now they are coming after him and We the People!#TrumpGirlOnFire 🔥 pic.twitter.com/R8i8W0JPvo
Top Stories • Speaker Mike Johnson: I’m Pro-Life Today Because My Teenage Parents Chose Life • Joe Biden Sends Tax Dollars Meant for Legit Health Care to Planned Parenthood Abortion Biz • Judge Dismisses Satanic Temple’s Lawsuit Against Indiana Abortion Ban • Hard-Hitting New Commercial Exposes How Abortions Kill Women
More Pro-Life News • WATCH: Pro-Life Woman Fined for Silently Praying Outside Abortion Center • Pro-Life Leader Says Speaker Mike Johnson is a “Faithful Christian” Who is Solidly Pro-Life • Warren Buffet Funds Fake “Catholic” Group Promoting Abortions Up to Birth • Science Confirms Human Life Begins at Conception Despite What the Media Thinks • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
The Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney charged with screening evidence of Ukrainian corruption before the 2020 election testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Monday about the bureaucratic obstruction his team faced. The roadblocks detailed by former U.S. Attorney Scott Brady over the course of the six-hour hearing were so outrageous that at one point a lawyer for the minority party asked whether he was speaking in hyperbole. He wasn’t.
The situation Brady faced was also much worse than the media have reported to date, as the full transcript of the interview, reviewed by The Federalist, establishes. Here are the seven most shocking details revealed during Monday’s hearing.
1. FBI Drags Its Feet While Tying Brady’s Hands
Monday’s closed-door hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the DOJ and FBI’s handling of the probe into Biden family corruption, opened with Brady explaining that in early January 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr tapped him to vet evidence related to Ukrainian corruption. While he immediately moved to open a matter in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Brady testified that he didn’t believe the FBI opened its assessment until late March. Part of the problem, Brady explained, was that the FBI maintained it had to operate under the framework of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) and that there was no procedure for handling a vetting assignment such as Barr assigned to the Pittsburgh office.
So, as Brady explained, he had a discussion with the Pittsburgh FBI agents about “how, in their administrative process, it should be characterized.”
“I said, ‘Well let’s all sit together around a table and talk this out; could you please share with me your DIOG,’” Brady testified, explaining the DIOG “is the FBI’s bible for their processes and procedures.”
The local FBI agents told Brady that someone from FBI headquarters directed the local agents not to share the DIOG with the U.S. attorney’s office. Brady’s response, as he relayed to the committee, perfectly crystalized the madness: “I’m a presidentially appointed United States attorney. We’re on the same team, part of the Department of Justice. What do you mean you can’t share your DIOG with me?”
“That’s what we were told, so we can’t, sir,” the local Pittsburgh FBI team replied, in his telling.
And they never did share the DIOG with him, the former federal prosecutor testified, explaining he instead resorted to finding an older redacted version online, and then referenced those standards when discussing with the FBI team how to open the investigation.
2. 17 Approvals Needed — and That’s Not Hyperbole
The FBI eventually opted to open an “assessment” for the material on Ukraine provided by the Pittsburgh-based U.S. attorney’s office. Under the DIOG, an “assessment” could only last for 30 days, after which it would need to be reauthorized. That meant every 30 days, the Pittsburgh FBI office needed to re-up the assessment, which normally wouldn’t be an issue, Brady testified, because a special agent’s immediate supervisor, a supervisory special agent (SSA) at the local field office could reauthorize an assessment.
But not in the case of the Ukrainian corruption vetting.
“In this case,” Brady testified, “it required 17 different people, including mostly at the headquarters level to sign off on it before the assessment could be extended.” Consequently, Brady explained, at times the FBI agents “had to go pens down sometimes for 2 or 3 weeks at a time … because they were still waiting on, again, on someone within the 17-chain signoff to approve.”
The ridiculousness of a 17-person approval was clear to even the Democrat attorney questioning Brady. After noting he had made reference to “17 layers of approval,” she asked: “Was that an actual number, or was that just hyperbole? Were there 17 boxes to check?”
“So it was our understanding, related by someone on the FBI team in Pittsburgh, that that was an actual number, that there were 17 approvals that were required to extend the assessment an additional 30 days.”
3. FBI Headquarters Had To Sign-Off on Everything.
Not only did more than a dozen individuals need to approve the renewal of the assessment, including many out of FBI headquarters, but Brady testified that FBI headquarters was required to “signoff for any investigative steps that FBI Pittsburgh was asked to take by” the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office.
Brady reiterated this point, testifying: “It was my understanding that they could not take any steps absent the approval, the review and approval of FBI headquarters, not just the leadership of FBI Pittsburgh.” And later, when asked to elaborate on challenges with the FBI, Brady noted: “It was my understanding that FBI headquarters had to sign off on every assignment, no matter how small or routine, before they could take action.”
This level of signoff by headquarters was not normal, Brady confirmed, noting that in his experience, even in a sensitive investigation, the investigation is usually contained within the field office, with an SSA approving requests, or maybe an assistant special agent in charge or on occasion even the special agent in charge. But never in his career had Brady seen anything like this.
4. FBI Reluctance in Investigating
The former U.S. attorney’s testimony also made clear the FBI was reluctant to assist their investigation.
“It was a challenging working relationship,” Brady noted, saying he believed “there was reluctance on the part of the FBI to really do any tasking related to our assignment … and looking into allegations of Ukrainian corruption broadly and then specifically anything that intersected with Hunter Biden and his role in Burisma.”
When pushed on where the problems originated, Brady said, “It was somewhere at FBI headquarters,” but he “had no visibility into where that choke point was.” But it was somewhere below the deputy director and principal assistant deputy attorney general because whenever the FBI refused to cooperate, forcing Brady to elevate the issue to FBI headquarters or the DOJ, the issues were resolved by the various high-level officials.
Unbeknownst to Brady, that also proved to be the case when it came to his office briefing the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office on the results of his assessment. Brady testified that he had been trying for some time to arrange a briefing with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office, only to learn later that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf had not wanted to take the briefing. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley recently revealed that the meeting only came about after Main Justice ordered Delaware to meet with Brady’s team to be briefed on the results of their vetting.
5. FBI Headquarters Tells Pittsburgh Agents to Play Coy
“Reluctance” appears to be an understatement, though, as Brady further testified that a member of the Pittsburgh FBI team relayed that FBI headquarters had directed them “not to affirmatively share information” but rather “only to share information with [Pittsburgh] if we asked them a direct question relating to that information…”
That “is not typically how the investigative process goes,” Brady added.
That the FBI agents had directions only to share information with the U.S. attorney’s office if asked a direct question seems to explain Brady’s later testimony. The former U.S. attorney later testified that when the Washington field office discovered an older FD-1023 report that included a discreet statement mentioning Hunter Biden’s service on the Burisma Board, the Pittsburgh office requested to see the FD-1023. Apparently, relying on the FBI to convey relevant information to the prosecutors was not an option. In this case, that FD-1023 led to the confidential human source providing extensive additional information about the Bidens’ involvement and alleged bribe-taking from Burisma, so it is a good thing Pittsburgh asked to see the actual document.
When it came to the Hunter Biden laptop, however, Brady and his team of prosecutors didn’t know what they didn’t know, so they never asked whether the FBI had seized any of Hunter Biden’s electronic devices. With “don’t ask, don’t tell” being Delaware’s protect-Biden policy, the Delaware office opted against informing the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office of the existence of the laptop. Rather, Brady testified that he first learned of the laptop’s existence when the New York Post broke the story in mid-October.
6. Delaware Refuses to Play Nice
Not only did Brady testify about the challenges of working with the FBI, but he also faced issues with the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office.
“[I]t was regularly a challenge to interact with the investigative team from Delaware,” Brady testified. “There was no information sharing” or “very limited” information sharing, from Delaware. In fact, “at one point, the communication between our offices was so constricted that we had to provide written questions to the investigative team in Delaware, almost in the form of interrogatories, and receive written answers back,” Brady testified.
“This was very unusual,” Brady continued, noting that “typical U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney office communications, even on sensitive matters, is fairly clear and transparent.” “We’re all professionals,” Brady explained.
Yet, with Delaware, the Pittsburgh U.S. attorney’s office had to resort to submitting a list of written questions to U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team, which the Delaware prosecutors then responded to in writing, much as interrogatories are served on opposing parties in litigation.
Jim Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, asked Brady if he had ever seen anything like this during his time as an assistant U.S. attorney or U.S. attorney.
“Not where an office had to submit written interrogatories to another office for permission,” Brady said.
7. Lying About Brady
Another challenge he faced, Brady explained, was false representations being made to senior FBI leadership about what the U.S. attorney’s team was or wasn’t doing. “There was information that was being shared up that chain at the FBI that was incorrect,” Brady explained, and it rose all the way up to AG Barr.
Brady noted that while they resolved the issue, it presented an unnecessary challenge to handling the vetting process.
Of course, some of the same people likely used that same tactic by lying about the Pittsburgh vetting process to the press. And more recently, Democrats such as Jamie Raskin resorted to peddling falsehoods, such as that Barr’s handpicked prosecutor, Brady, had closed the assessment into the FD-1023.
During his Monday testimony, Brady also confirmed that Barr had accurately described the true scenario — that the FD-1023 had been passed on to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office for further investigation — and that Raskin was lying, at I reported here in The Federalist.
But what else could a Biden apologist do but lie — after whistleblowers exposed the DOJ and FBI’s obstruction and the evidence of the president’s corruption?
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Investigators Find Suicide Note Suspect Wrote to Son
Friday, 27 October 2023 02:21 PM EDT
Authorities scoured the woods and hundreds of acres of family-owned property, sent dive teams with sonar to the bottom of a river and scrutinized a possible suicide note Friday in the second day of their intensive search for an Army reservist accused of fatally shooting 18 people and wounding 13 at a bowling alley and a bar in Maine.
Nearly two days after the shooting, law enforcement officials gave no indication that they have any leads on Robert Card’s whereabouts. During a lengthy news conference absent of any major developments, Maine Department of Public Safety Commissioner Michael Sauschuck would only say that authorities are leaving all their options open.
“We’re going to be all over the place,” Sauschuck said. “That’s not saying that we know that the individual is in this house, you know, in that house or they’re in that swath of land, this acreage.”
Previously, police had said that Card had left his car at a boat ramp in the town of Lisbon shortly after the shootings Wednesday evening. A gun was found in the car and federal agents were testing it to determine if it was used in the shooting, two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press. The officials were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity. Authorities have not publicly said how many guns were used in Wednesday’s shootings or how they were obtained.
Authorities found an apparent suicide note at a home associated with Card on Thursday that was addressed to his son, the law enforcement officials said. They said it didn’t provide any specific motive for the shooting. Authorities also recovered Card’s cellphone in the home, making a search more complicated because authorities routinely use phones to track suspects, the officials said.
The Cards have lived in Bowdoin for generations, neighbors said, and various members of the family own hundreds of acres in the area. The family owned the local sawmill and years ago donated the land for a local church.
“This is his stomping ground,” Richard Goddard, who lives on the road where a search took place on Thursday, said of the suspect. “He knows every ledge to hide behind, every thicket.”
Authorities say Card, 40, who has firearms training, opened fire with at least one rifle at a bar and a bowling alley Wednesday in Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city about 15 miles from Bowdoin.
Family members of Card told federal investigators that he had recently discussed hearing voices and became more focused on the bowling alley and bar, according to the law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. When he was hospitalized in July in New York, Card had told military officials he had been hearing voices and said he wanted to harm other soldiers, the officials said.
A neighbor, Dave Letarte, said Card’s family let them deer hunt on their property and were kind, although Letarte said he noticed Card appeared to have mental problems for a while.
“People have problems, but you don’t expect them to go off the deep end like that,” Letarte said. “When we saw it on the news last night, I was shocked.”
A telephone number listed for Card in public records was not in service. A woman who answered a phone number for one of Card’s relatives on Thursday afternoon said the family was helping the FBI. She didn’t give her name or additional details.
Wednesday’s shootings left 18 people dead and 13 wounded, three of whom were hospitalized in critical condition, authorities said. Card will be charged with 18 counts of murder once all the victims are identified, authorities said.
The victims of the shootings include Bob Violette, 76, a retiree who was coaching a youth bowling league and was described as devoted, approachable and kind. Auburn City Councilor Leroy Walker told news outlets that his son, Joe, a manager at the bar and grill, died going after the shooter with a butcher knife. Peyton Brewer-Ross was a dedicated pipefitter at Bath Iron Works whose death leaves a gaping void in the lives of his partner, young daughter and friends, members of his union said.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The United States is not trying to dictate limits for Israel, the White House said on Friday, as the Israelis expanded their military operation in Gaza against Hamas militants. The fresh military onslaught by Israel comes as the United States scrambles to arrange a humanitarian pause for deliveries of fuel and relief aid to Gaza civilians. How the expanded ground operation will impact efforts toward a pause was unclear.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, at a news briefing, would not comment on the Israeli expanded ground operation. But he said Washington supported Israel’s right to defend itself after Hamas militants killed 1,400 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7. “We’re not drawing red lines for Israel,” he said. He said the United States continued to discuss with Israel the aims of its operation, the need to protect civilians in Gaza, the effort to gain the safe return of Israeli hostages and the need to consider what comes after ground operations in Gaza.
“Since the very beginning, we have had and will continue to have conversations with them about the manner in which they’re doing this. And we have not been shy about expressing our concerns over civilian casualties, collateral damage, and the approach that they might choose to take. That’s what friends can do, and we’re friends,” he said.
The West is grappling with radical Muslims it voluntarily imported who march in the streets praising Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre as “liberation” of “stolen land.” Polling shows 57% of U.S. Muslims believe Hamas’ attack was at least “somewhat justified.” Pictured: Supporters of Israel rally in Times Square on Oct 19. (Photo: Ed Jones/Getty Images)
The weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel—in which the most Jews were slaughtered in a single day than at any time since World War II—have seen an astonishing rise in global Jew-hatred. One might have thought that the mass carnage and unspeakable barbarism of the Hamas Holocaust would instead galvanize a concerted pushback against Islamic jihadism, but it is the ancient scourge of antisemitism—and not so-called Islamophobia—that is once again the world’s most politically correct and fashionable form of bigotry.
“In every generation, they rise up to destroy us,” Jews read in the Haggadah text every Passover, “but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”
Now, less than 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, today’s Nazis, an Islamist Reich hellbent anew on Jewish genocide, rises up to try to finish what Hitler could not. Like their brownshirt forebears, the jihadists will fail.
Our comfort in the Lord does not necessarily ameliorate the profound pain of the last few weeks, though. For many Jews, the appalling and disgusting mass demonstrations of support for the Hamas terrorists have been just as devastating as the Oct. 7 pogrom itself.
In Berlin—yes, Berlin—a synagogue was firebombed.
In Vienna, a one-time hub of Nazism, a synagogue was attacked and vandalized.
In Paris, a Jewish couple’s apartment door was doused with gasoline and set on fire.
In Los Angeles, a knife-wielding madman trespassed into a Jewish home while shouting, “Free Palestine.”
At George Washington University in the nation’s capital, student jihadists projected “Glory To Our Martyrs” onto the side of a school library.
At Cooper Union, Jewish students were locked in a library by pro-Hamas student demonstrators banging on the doors; the NYPD had to evacuate the students via underground tunnel.
In the heavily Muslim town of Dearborn, Michigan, Islamists thronged the streets while waving today’s swastika, the so-called Palestinian flag, and shouting for extermination of the Jews of Israel “from the river to the sea.”
Other examples abound.
There are many reasons for this dire state of affairs.
First, the chickens of once-fringe, leftist ivory tower piffle—such as critical theory and intersectionality—have come home to roost in a very menacing way. The avant-garde leftism of a half-century ago has led many to now justify, or outright cheer on, genocide perpetrated against the most genocide-d people in world history.
As this column observed in May 2021 during the last major Israel-Hamas conflict: “The American Left and the media organs it controls are exporting their paroxysms of ‘1619 Project‘ rage onto a foreign stage, expiating their ‘white guilt’ sins and armchair-quarterbacking a foreign conflict on a cosplayed chess board.”
It’s all just fun and games—no matter how many “eggs” are broken to make the “omelet,” to paraphrase Stalin-apologist New York Times bureau chief Walter Duranty.
But there is a second lesson from the past few weeks in addition to the harrowing real-world consequences of obscure leftist academic theories: the complete and total failure of mass migration.
For years, liberals and globalists have pushed for open-ended migration of people across borders, as if borders are entirely arbitrary (if not outright atavistic) and all cultures and ways of life are interchangeable.
As the West grapples with the very radical Muslims it voluntarily imported—hundreds of thousands of whom march in the streets of metropolises such as London and Chicago calling for Jewish genocide and thousands of others who lead vile “Students for Justice in Palestine” statements praising the Hamas massacre as a “liberation” of “stolen land”—it has become obvious that assimilation of huge numbers of non-Western immigrants into Western society is simply not working.
A shocking new poll found that 57.5% of American Muslims believe that the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7 was at least “somewhat justified.” That is simply disgusting. Jewish day schools are canceling classes due to fear; the security needed at synagogues is now unprecedented. Jews all across America and Europe have not been this terrified since World War II. And the open-borders dolts who have peddled the insane notion that “all cultures are equal” bear much of the blame.
Many leading Islamists, such as the infamous “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, long counseled immigration to the West as one of the most effective ways of spreading the global jihad. For decades, Western liberals have been all too eager to assist.
Mass migration was always delusional; all cultures are obviously not equal, let alone interchangeable. Now, given the emboldened forces of jihadism the world over, it has never been more important to turn off the spigot. And for those subversive, fifth column actors already here, deportation and denaturalization must be on the table as the law permits.
There are monsters in our midst. They must be dealt with accordingly.
Josh Hammer, a syndicated columnist, is opinion editor of Newsweek and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. He also is counsel and policy adviser for the Internet Accountability Project and contributing editor for Anchoring Truths.
Top Stories • Speaker Mike Johnson Was an Attorney for a Pro-Life Group, Has a “Rock Solid Record on Life” • Christian Leaders: Vote No on Issue 1, Ohio Should Reject Abortions Up to Birth • Tim Scott Would Sign 15-Week Abortion Ban: “We Can’t Have States With Abortion Until Birth” • ACLU, George Soros and Planned Parenthood Pour Millions Into Ohio for Issue 1
More Pro-Life News • Pro-Life Attorneys Ask Court to Dismiss Criminal Case Against Woman Who Exposed Planned Parenthood Selling Aborted Baby Parts • Premature Baby Born at 25 Weeks Proves Unborn Babies are Not Clumps of Cells • 16 Democrat AGs Sign Letter Attacking Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers • New Maine Law Democrats Approved Allows Killing Babies in Abortions Up to Birth • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
We all know that Biden isn’t running the show, and more than likely, it is Obama and hardcore left-wing zealots who are using Biden as nothing more than a meat puppet that can barely read their teleprompter. So, given the Obama administration in the past to institute weak red-lines, will the Obama-run Biden administration do the same?
The Biden administration has already shown to be weak when dealing with our adversaries like China, Iran, etc., so it’s a good bet he’ll be using the same old flimsy red-line rhetoric that Obama has used In the past.
After all many blame Obama and Biden for loading Iran with plenty of cash to institute terrorism around the globe.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Tenth-graders at a Missouri high school last week had to watch a slideshow on “oppression and privilege” that may violate state law by using information from a Planned Parenthood affiliate that lists abortion clinics on its website.
The class of sophomores at Webster Groves High School near St. Louis watched a slideshow titled “Being an Ally,” which lists so-called oppression categories as “racial,” “class,” “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “religion,” and “immigration status.”
“It’s wrong to teach that different categories of human beings are either inherently oppressive or oppressed,” said the mother of one student, who provided a video of the presentation to The Daily Signal.
“This rhetoric is divisive in nature and creates undeserved mentalities of guilt or victimhood,” said the mother, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her child’s privacy.
In an apparent violation of Missouri state law by the Webster Groves School District, the end of the Oct. 18 slideshow included a barcode and link to the website for Teen Health Source, a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood Toronto.
Teen Health Source calls itself a “sexual health information service run for and by youth.” Categories listed on its website include “Birth Control,” “Gender Identity & Sexual Orientation,” “Pleasure,” “Pregnancy,” “Puberty & The Body,” “Sex,” and “STIs” [sexually transmitted infections].
The presentation to 10th-graders isn’t out of the ordinary for Webster Groves School District, which enrolls almost 4,500 students in the suburbs of St. Louis. Last September, a parent read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without the school’s first informing other parents. Starting in kindergarten, students in the school district learn to “examine issues of social justice and equity within an anti-bias framework.”
Two school employees, counselor Carrie Aschinger and social worker Anne Gibbs, presented the “privilege and oppression” slideshow to the 10th-graders, a video of which later was uploaded to an online learning platform.
“Being an ally means using your privilege to help support people who are facing oppression that you might not experience yourself,” Aschinger told the 16- and 17-year-old students, according to the video.
The presentation included tips on listening to those who are oppressed by navigating factors such as “gender pronouns.” Gibbs told the students that “allies” need to go through “unlearning,” which “involves questioning and rejecting oppressive beliefs you might have held for a long time.”
“As you learn about your privilege as a non-oppressed person, try to be honest with yourself about how that privilege has affected your life and who you are,” Gibbs told students, according to the video posted below.
This is a direct attack on Christian homes. Jesus said (John 3:19-21) that human beings love the darkness, instead of the light, because they know their believe system, philosophy, theology, sociology, et., al., is wrong. Their real aim is to take young Christian students away from God and their parents upbringing.
Aschinger and Gibbs didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this report. The Webster Groves School District also didn’t respond.
The mother who leaked the video of the slideshow to The Daily Signal said a public school shouldn’t ask children to evaluate their privilege.
“The district knows that many parents disapprove and continues to push these lessons anyway,” she said.
The “About” page for Teen Health Source, linked in the presentation to the 10th-graders, says it is “non-judgmental, sex-positive, pro-choice, and inclusive.”
Missouri law requires school districts to notify parents of the “basic content of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction to be provided to the student.” It also specifies a “parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction.” However, the school mom who saw and leaked the video of the slideshow said she wasn’t informed in advance.
In a letter to the state association of school boards, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey promoted a model resolution with which school districts could pledge to “uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools.”
Bailey’s draft resolution for the Missouri School Board Association notes that “issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are inextricably intertwined with human sexuality.”
To enforce the laws as written and protect children across the state, I directed a letter to the Missouri School Board Association, urging them to call on their members to adopt a model resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools. pic.twitter.com/kg5pzfotOO
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 31, 2023
On its website, Teen Health Source defines abortion on its website as “a safe medical procedure that ends a pregnancy.” The website also says medical abortions “use medication to stop the growth of a pregnancy and then expel the pregnancy tissue from the uterus” and a surgical abortion “remove[s] the pregnancy tissue from the uterus.”
“Pregnancy tissue” apparently is a euphemism for “unborn baby” or “fetus,” words that don’t appear there in regard to abortion.
The Teen Health Source website has descriptions and links to abortion clinics in the Toronto area. It doesn’t list any pro-life pregnancy resource centers.
Teen Health Source also suggests “trangender care” clinics that offer minors sterilizing hormone therapy and referrals for transgender surgery. Other services listed include support for teenagers who want help “coming out” or are “questioning gender identity and/or sexual orientation.”
Some clinics recommended to Teen Health Source’s audience, which encompasses ages 13 through 19, provide HIV testing, birth control prescriptions, and abortion pills.
A section of the website, called “Navigating sex and gender dysphoria,” defines gender dysphoria as “a term for stress, conflict, or negative feelings people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.” It defines gender euphoria” as “a term for the joy, comfort or connection people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.”
A page on gender dysphoria advises teens who are questioning their gender on how to have “affirming sex” and remind themselves that their “body and gender is awesome and is the gender and sex that you say it is” [sic].
A post on “porn literacy” tells teenagers: “Porn can be good for inspiration.”
“Lots of people use and enjoy porn,” Teen Health Source’s post reads. “Some people are concerned about how they use it. They may worry that they’re using porn too much or that they’re addicted to it, but there’s no one ‘normal’ or ‘right’ amount to use porn.”
“Linking students to any website that publishes articles about gender identity, sexual pleasure, ‘porn literacy,’ and abortion should not occur without notifying parents,” the anonymous mother of a sophomore told The Daily Signal in an email. “They are sneaking in sexual education when some families may have opted out.”
A post on “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality” says: “Some people are transgender, which means their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex.”
“Your gender identity may be fluid and can change throughout your life,” the post reads.
Teen Health Source’s webpage titled “Hookups” describes what it calls “casual sex encounters.”
“Sex is not something that happens only when people are in committed relationships,” the post reads. “There are many different kinds of sexual relationships and sometimes it can be confusing to sort them all out.”
The slideshow presentation that refers to Teen Health Source makes her want to remove her child from the school district, the concerned mother told The Daily Signal.
“The decision-making by district administration and the Board of Education have become increasingly predictable and politically-driven,” she said in an email. “How can parents feel comfortable sending their children to school where they are fed a constant stream of one-sided political propaganda?”
The mother said she believes the Missouri school district violated state law by encouraging students to visit a website associated with Planned Parenthood that contains materials on sex education.
“I would really like to see Webster Groves School District drop the politics from their decision making and curriculum,” she said. “But unfortunately, I don’t see that happening, as they’ve been accelerating in the opposite direction.”
A Missouri law, passed in March, will allow students to transfer from their school district to eligible schools starting with the 2024-2025 school year.
“School choice is just around the corner in Missouri, and I think people will be shocked at the number of families who pull their children from the district, given that opportunity,” the mother said.
Newly elected Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks in the House chamber after his election at the U.S. Capitol on October 25, 2023, in Washington, D.C. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives following three weeks of infighting among GOP members. He delivered his first speech as speaker Wednesday, stressing that God raises up those in authority.
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: “I believe that scripture and the Bible is very clear that God is the one that raised up each of you and God has allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment in time.” pic.twitter.com/IHAkeZb6hg
Johnson, 51, was elected in a 220-209 vote held Wednesday afternoon, in which all present Democrats voted for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and all Republicans present voted for Johnson.
The following features highlights of Johnson’s speech in the House chamber after his election.
A devout Baptist, Johnson said that he does not “believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this,” saying that “the Bible is very clear that God is the One that raises up those in authority.”
“He raised up each of you, all of us,” Johnson said to his Republican and Democrat colleagues. “I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment and this time.”
“This is my belief. I believe that each one of us has a huge responsibility today to use the gifts that God has given us to serve the extraordinary people of this great country and they deserve it.”
Johnson said God called Congress to help “ensure that our Republic remains standing as the great beacon of light and hope and freedom in a world that desperately needs it.”
Johnson spoke about the national motto “In God We Trust” and how the words were placed in the House chamber as a conscious rejection of communism during the Cold War.
He stressed the value of the Declaration of Independence and its statement that “all men are created equal” by God, quoting Christian writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton, who once said that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”
Johnson said that while he believes that right now is “a very dangerous time” and “the world is in turmoil,” he declared that “a strong America is good for the entire world.”
“We are the beacon of freedom, and we must preserve this grand experiment in self-governance,” he said. “We’re only 247 years into this grand experiment; we don’t know how long it will last.”
“We’re in a time of extraordinary crisis right now, and the world needs us to be strong; they need us to remember our creed and our admonition.”
Johnson touched on the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, vowing that “the first bill that I’m going to bring to this floor in just a little while will be in support of our dear friend, Israel.”
“We’re going to show not only Israel, but the entire world that the barbarism of Hamas that we have all seen play out in our television screens is wretched and wrong,” he said. “We are going to stand for the good in that conflict.”
He also spoke of the dangers presented by the wave of illegal immigration and the ongoing fentanyl crisis, declaring that “we must come together and address the broken border.”
Johnson acknowledged that Americans “live in a time of bitter partisanship” and “it has been on display here today” in the House of Representatives.
“When our people are losing their faith in government, when they are losing sight of the principles that made us the greatest nation in the history of the world, I think we got to be mindful of that,” Johnson said.
“We’re going to fight; we’re going to fight vigorously over our core principles because they are at odds a lot of times now in this modern era. We have to sacrifice, sometimes, our preferences because that’s what’s necessary in a legislative body.”
Johnson noted that while “we will defend our core principles to the end,” noting that he considered the “core principles of American conservatism” to actually be “the core principles of our nation.”
“I boil them down to individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity,” Johnson listed.
“Those are the foundations that made us the extraordinary nation that we are, and you and I today are the stewards of those principles.”
During his speech, Johnson spoke about his father, who served as a firefighter in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, and how he had suffered a severe injury in 1984 that left him with a permanent disability.
“After the explosion on that fateful day, he nearly died, and it was a long road back. It changed all of our life trajectories,” said Johnson. “My dad, he lived with pain all the rest of his life.”
Johnson said his father died from cancer three days before he was elected to Congress in 2016, noting that “he wanted to be there at my election night so badly.”
“This was a big deal to him,” the new speaker explained, who added that in 2017, while he was serving as speaker pro-tempore, he felt that “somehow” his late father “knew” what he was doing.
“I just knew in that moment that my father would be proud of me, and I felt that he was. And I think all of our parents are proud of what we’re called to do here.”
Top Stories • Pro-Life Congressman Mike Johnson Elected Speaker of the House • Pro-Life Groups Praise New Pro-Life Speaker Mike Johnson • Babies Have Been Killed in Abortions at VA Clinics Under New Biden Policy • Liberal Media Trashes Speaker Mike Johnson’s Christian Faith, Devotion to Marriage
More Pro-Life News • Pro-Life Laws are Saving Babies From Abortion, Texas Law Saves Over 1,000 Babies Every Month • 13,241 People Were Euthanized in Canada in 2022, Setting New Record • Joe Biden’s NIH Nominee Monica Bertagnolli Supports Research With Aborted Baby Parts • Restaurant Owner Overcomes Losing Staff, Customers for Being Pro-Life, Says Abortion is “Evil” • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2023 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Most people now realize that Iran is directly involved with Hamas and the recent attacks on Israel through the funding they have received from Biden, the $6 billion, and $58 billion through oil revenue when Biden ignored the embargo placed on their production by Trump.
This can even be traced back to when Obama was president, giving Iran pallets full of millions of dollars. Most of the money from Biden and Obama has most likely ended up in the hands of terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah that have killed Jews and Americans.
Obama has long been suspected of favoring Iran over the people of Israel and their welfare and having strong Muslim sympathies that may have been instrumental in his Middle East policies.
We have a New Speaker, Mike Johnson. Will he be the anti-RINO we all have been hoping for?
House Republicans came to their collective senses on Oct. 25 and elected U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the new Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, ushering in new leadership three weeks after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was ousted when 208 House Democrats joined a coalition of 8 House Republicans on Oct. 3 in removing his via motion to vacate the chair.
The vote among Republicans for once was unanimous on the House floor, with Johnson getting even more support than did McCarthy when he was finally elected in January. What remains to be seen is if Republicans will be able to keep the conference united when the House proceeds to imminent appropriations bills Johnson has promised to put onto the floor in the coming days and weeks.
In an Oct. 23 dear colleague letter to House Republicans prior to winning the internal conference election for the Speaker nomination, Johnson laid out the legislative calendar for appropriations for the next 18 months. Per the calendar, four appropriations bills will come up immediately in the next week: Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, Interior and Environment and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development.
Four more would follow in the week after that, in time for the Nov. 17 when the current continuing resolution comes due. Johnson acknowledged that his proposed, expedited schedule for passage of appropriations was “ambitious,” and afforded that there might not be time to work out differences with the Senate.
If so, Johnson also offered another continuing resolution as a fallback: “if another stopgap measure is needed to extend government funding beyond the November 17 deadline, I would propose a measure that expires on January 15 or April 15… to ensure the Senate cannot jam the House with a Christmas omnibus.”
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
By 
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.