A Small Number Of Conscious People Could Transform Life On Earth

CNN  |  A group of US officials who publicly resigned over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy are banding together to support ongoing dissent and put pressure on the government to change course.

More than half a dozen people from across the US government have left their jobs in public protest, saying they could no longer work for the administration, and even more have quietly departed. Many of the officials who resigned publicly said they would instead seek to have an impact outside the government.

President Joe Biden has faced pressure both abroad and at home over his support for Israel eight months into the war in Gaza with Hamas – a conflict that has cost tens of thousands of civilian lives, displaced millions and brought extreme hunger throughout the enclave. Although the rhetoric from the administration has become harsher – with warnings that Israel must do more to protect civilians and allow more aid in – the policies have remained largely unchanged. 

The former officials who resigned publicly – Josh Paul, Harrison Mann, Tariq Habash, Annelle Sheline, Hala Rharrit, Lily Greenberg Call, Alex Smith, and Stacy Gilbert – said that they felt their perspectives, expertise and concerns were not being heeded, and that the administration was willingly ignoring the humanitarian toll caused by Israel’s military campaign. They spoke of the damage they felt US policy on the war is having on the country’s credibility and a sense that the administration did not fully grasp that impact.

All the officials who have resigned publicly and spoke with CNN said they have many colleagues who are still within the government but agree with their decision to leave.

Providing support and advice to those colleagues – whether they choose to leave or continue to dissent from within – is one of the key reasons that they have come together collectively. Another key reason, they said, is to increase the pressure on the administration to change course. 

“We’re thinking about how we can use our shared concern and to continue to press together for change,” said Paul, a State Department official who publicly resigned in protest in October, becoming the first US official to do so.

“When you have numerous career professionals and presidential appointees … who have resigned over this policy, it’s an indicator that something is going wrong,” Mann told CNN.

 

 

How Bad Must The Shit Be For Her To Give Up Her Federal Pension?

reuters  |  The State Department submitted the 46-page unclassified report earlier this month to Congress as required under a new National Security Memorandum that Biden issued in early February.
Among other conclusions, the report said that in the period after Oct. 7 Israel “did not fully cooperate” with U.S. and other efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza.

But it said this did not amount to a breach of a U.S law that blocks the provision of arms to countries that restrict U.S. humanitarian aid.

Gilbert, who worked for the State Department for over 20 years, said she notified her office the day the State Department report was released that she would resign. Her last day was Tuesday.

U.S. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters on Thursday that he would not comment on personnel issues but that the department welcomes diverse points of view.

He said the administration stood by the report and continued to press the government of Israel to avoid harming civilians and urgently expand humanitarian access to Gaza.

"We are not an administration that twists the facts, and allegations that we have are unfounded," Patel said.

 

The Israeli embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Gilbert's accusations.

 

Gilbert’s bureau was one of the four that contributed to a classified initial options memo, reported exclusively by Reuters in late April, that informed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken Israel might be violating international humanitarian law.

 

Gilbert said the State Department removed subject matter experts from working on the report to Congress when the document was a rough draft about 10 days before it was due. She said the report was then edited by more senior officials.

 

In contrast to the published version, the last draft she saw stated that Israel was blocking humanitarian assistance, Gilbert said.

 

Officials who resigned prior to Gilbert include Arabic language spokesperson Hala Rharrit and Annelle Sheline of the human rights bureau.

 

More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's air and land war in Gaza. Israel launched its offensive after Hamas fighters crossed from Gaza into southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year, killed 1,200 people and abducted more than 250, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel Became A Gangster State When Its Lawbreakers Became Its Lawmakers

NYTimes  |  For decades, most Israelis have considered Palestinian terrorism the country’s biggest security concern. But there is another threat that may be even more destabilizing for Israel’s future as a democracy: Jewish terrorism and violence, and the failure to enforce the law against it.

Our yearslong investigation reveals how violent factions within the Israeli settler movement, protected and sometimes abetted by the government, have come to pose a grave threat to Palestinians in the occupied territories and to the State of Israel itself. Piecing together new documents, videos and over 100 interviews, we found a government shaken by an internal war — burying reports it commissioned, neutering investigations it assigned and silencing whistle-blowers, some of them senior officials.
It is a blunt account, told in some cases for the first time by Israeli officials, of how the occupation came to threaten the integrity of the country’s democracy.

Lawbreakers Become Lawmakers
Officials told us that once fringe, sometimes criminal groups of settlers bent on pursuing a theocratic state have been allowed for decades to operate with few restraints. Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government came to power in 2022, elements of that faction have taken power — driving the country’s policies, including in the war in Gaza.

The lawbreakers have become the law.
Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister and the official in Netanyahu’s government with oversight over the West Bank, was arrested in 2005 by the Shin Bet domestic security service for plotting road blockages to halt the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He was released with no charges. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had been convicted multiple times for supporting terrorist organizations and, in front of television cameras in 1995, vaguely threatened the life of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered weeks later by an Israeli student.

Settler Violence Protected, and Abetted
All West Bank settlers are in theory subject to the same military law that applies to Palestinian residents. But in practice, they are treated according to the civil law of the State of Israel, which formally applies only to territory within the state’s borders. This means that Shin Bet might probe two similar acts of terrorism in the West Bank — one committed by Jewish settlers and one committed by Palestinians — and use wholly different investigative tools.

After the Arab-​Israeli War of 1967, Israel controlled new territory in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. In 1979, it agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

The job of investigating Jewish terrorism falls to a division of Shin Bet known commonly as the Jewish Department. But it is dwarfed both in size and prestige by the Arab Department, the division charged mostly with combating Palestinian terrorism.

Jews involved in terror attacks against Arabs over the past decades have received substantial leniency, which has included reductions in prison time, anemic investigations and pardons. Most incidents of settler violence — torching vehicles, cutting down olive groves — fall under the jurisdiction of the police, who tend to ignore them. When the Jewish Department investigates more serious terrorist threats, it is often stymied from the outset, and even its successes have sometimes been undermined by judges and politicians sympathetic to the settler cause.

There's Still A Civil War Bubbling For Control Of The Israeli Government

mondoweiss |   Any Palestinian following the developments in the Israeli protest movement against “the judicial coup” will require nerves of steel to withstand the hypocrisy on display. The protests are estimated to be 100,000 people strong, politicians are jumping over tables in the Knesset, and former army Chief of Staff Yair Golan is calling for a state of “civil disobedience.” Only yesterday, Netanyahu dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after he voiced opposition to the judicial reforms, and angry protestors took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities and shut down highways. The army has been going through its own crisis ever since military reservists, especially those in the Air Force, joined the protests. If that wasn’t enough, large sums of money are being transferred out of Israeli banks for fear of the effects that the judicial reforms might have on the Israeli economy and on the value of the Israeli Shekel. As for gall, that was hardly in short supply in Yuval Noah Harari’s op-ed telling Netanyahu to “stop your coup or we’ll stop the country.” It’s as if Harari has never heard of al-Issawiyya, which continues to be strangled by the Hebrew University where he teaches, or of oppression and occupation, which wasn’t reason enough to warrant speaking of halting the state.

The Israeli government is trying to use these judicial reforms to grant itself absolute power through the passing of two central laws. The first law aims to establish control over the Israeli Judicial Selection Committee, hence appointing judges whose loyalties would lie with specific politicians rather than with the law; and the second law is the “Override Clause,” which would allow the Knesset to override any decision of the Israeli High Court of Justice that passes by a majority of 61 Knesset members. In other words, the government would seize complete control over the state without checks and balances, effectively becoming the sole governing authority in the country given that it also controls the Knesset by virtue of its majority within the parliamentary body. 

All of this is taking place without a constitution. This means, for instance, that the government can decide to hold elections once every ten years instead of the standard four-year limit still in effect, and no one can override it; or it could pass laws granting the government total control over the media, or it could put LGBTQ people in jail. But the true crisis will emerge when the Israeli High Court of Justice repeals the judicial reforms and regards them as illegal — that is when the state will enter a constitutional crisis without a solution. 

Who will the Israeli security apparatus obey: the government or the judiciary? This isn’t merely a crisis of the state; it is far more profound, posing the question of what the state is in the first place. Former commander of the Israeli Air Force Eliezer Shkedi said as much in an interview with Channel 12: “I have never come across a situation where the commander of the Air Force, the chief of staff, the head of the Mossad, or the police commissioner has to decide whether he listens to an executive authority or to a court decision,” going on to say that if he were the head of the Air Force he would never disobey a court decision.

The fact that Israeli society has always echoed this hypocrisy is nothing new, and neither is it a novel discovery that “democracy” was never an honest description of a state that defines itself as a “state of the Jews.” But the protests this time are greater than at any previous point, and 35% of Israelis express fears of a “civil war,” a phrase that has made its way into daily use.

It’s precisely this level of hysteria, however, that makes it especially infuriating — because of the power and influence of the participants in the protests, because it’s the first time that the struggle is over the identity of the state, and because the roots of the crisis relate to profound political questions concerning the Zionist project, which are normally considered off-limits.

Cmdr. Cornpop Leaving His Mark On American History - In His Draws....,

teenvogue  |  While President Joe Biden gave a commencement address (and received an honorary degree) from Morehouse College in Atlanta on Sunday, May 19, several students staged pro-Palestine protests — some turning their backs and others walking out. The students who protested cited the president's ongoing policy decisions in Israel's war on Gaza.

Before Biden took the stage for his address, Morehouse valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher gave a rousing speech calling for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza strip," and was met with applause from both the crowd and Biden, who also shook Fletcher's hand. “From the comfort of our homes, we watch an unprecedented number of civilians mourn the loss of men, women and children, while calling for the release of all hostages," Fletcher said.

The audience also included Morehouse alumni vocally supporting Biden during the ceremony, giving the president a standing ovation as he approached the stage, according to video taken from the event. Meanwhile, some graduates who wore keffiyeh scarves and Palestinian flags opted to turn their chairs away from Biden for the duration of his speech, according to the New York Times. Other graduates walked out of the ceremony as a sign of protest, though the Times notes that Biden's speech was largely uninterrupted. When he finished, attendees in the VIP section chanted, “Four more years.”

“I support peaceful nonviolent protest,” Biden told students in his speech. “Your voices should be heard, and I promise you I hear them.” He also said he is "working around the clock” for an immediate ceasefire.

Young people across college campuses have protested the war with demonstrations taking place nationwide. Pro-Palestine students are demanding their schools disclose and divest from companies with financial investments or economic connections to military companies connected to Israel.

After Morehouse announced that it would welcome Biden to deliver the commencement speech this year and grant him an honorary degree from the historically Black college, current students and alumni pushed back on the Atlanta-area school, urging them to reconsider. In one open letter to Morehouse's faculty from a group with the Atlanta University Center Students for Justice in Palestine, Dr. Marlon Millner, class of 1995, asked that Morehouse “not award [an] honorary degree to someone morally complicit in a war in Gaza.”

“[Morehouse alumni Martin Luther King Jr.] challenged a historically courageous [Lyndon B. Johnson] on Vietnam after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. That’s moral courage, not moral complicity or moral complacency,” Millner wrote. “Morehouse does produce businessmen, but let’s not fail to produce better men. Morehouse does produce politicians, but let’s not fail to produce men of principle. This is a defining moment where actions, not accolades will matter.”

 

 

Funny How America Bristles When Netanyahu Indicted...,

thehill  |   U.S. officials went on the offensive Monday after the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed arrest warrants against two top Israeli leaders over the war in Gaza, a move that Congress and the White House slammed for equating Israel’s conduct with the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7 attack.

President Biden and moderate Democrats united with Republicans in Congress to criticize the ICC shortly after the Monday notice that arrest warrants had been filed for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, along with three top Hamas officials. 

They argued the ICC has no jurisdiction in the case and was undermining its own credibility, while House Republican leaders threatened to sanction the court over the warrants.

Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the ICC inserted a “false moral equivalency” for issuing arrest warrants targeting both Hamas and Israel. 

“Today’s ICC decision is absurd. The ICC, like the rest of the international community, continues to be obsessed with targeting Israel during its time of need,” Risch said in a statement. “Today’s actions have hurt the credibility of the court and seriously harmed legitimate accountability efforts where true war crimes are occurring, like Ukraine, Syria, and across Africa.” 

The White House also criticized the ICC for the arrest warrants, with Biden calling it “outrageous” in a statement and denouncing the equivalence of Hamas and Israel. 

White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told reporters that while there have been too many casualties in Gaza, the Israeli military is not intentionally targeting civilians. 

“[Israeli] soldiers are not waking up in the morning putting their boots on the ground with direct orders to go kill innocent civilians in Gaza,” he said.

The U.S. and Israel have repeatedly contrasted the army’s actions with Hamas, saying the militant group deliberately targeted Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 when fighters killed more than 1,100 people and took another roughly 250 hostages, about 130 of whom are still being held captive, an unknown number alive. They also accuse Hamas of using civilians as human shields in Gaza. 

“There should be no equivalence at all,” Kirby said. “It’s ridiculous.” 

But ICC top prosecutor Karim Khan deflected criticism in a Monday interview with CNN, noting he appointed an independent panel of international law experts to review the warrant process. 

 

WHO Put The Hit On Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico?

Eyes on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico who has just announced a Covid Inquiry that will investigate the vaccine, excess deaths, the EU Pfizer deal and Big Pharma’s ability to control the Government.

‘The Slovak public simply needs an answer. Needs an answer about… pic.twitter.com/V84S04uyan

— Kat A 🌸 (@SaiKate108) January 28, 2024

igor-chudov  |   1. The media taks about the strong motivations of the guy regarding the Ukraine war. Who is interested in Fico being killed, when viewed from the Ukraine war angle?

Clearly, not the Russians. Fico and Orban (the PM's of Slovakia and Hungary) are the only ones in the EU that do not want this war to continue. The rest of the EU is either captured by their corrupt leaders and/or are vested in delivering arms (such as the Czech Republic that has major orders now for ammunition), they want this war to continue, mostly pushed by the US and NATO. Especially the US considers this proxy war "good for business" and both the UK and US foreign ministers are doing a sales roadshow, literally stating how good it is for business (since every military contractor earns money, while soldiers of the Ukraine and Russia, not of other countries, are dying). A despicable immoral attitude, but factual. And people have become totally insensitive to this message, when they should be outraged about politicians openly talking about war like business, ignoring the devastation.

So whatever the motivators in intimidating Slovakia regarding the war, it does not serve Russian interests.

But what is the media full with already? "Pro-Russian militant group with ties to the assassin". Totally illogical. Just like the first media message that emerged about the blowing up of the North-stream pipeline, as if Russia were behind it, blowing up its own money maker. But it does fit with the media and political narrative of the collective West, the military industrial complex and some other interests I will cover in the next bulletpoints. So whatever news will now appear that wants to implicate Russia, is obviously a lie. Like so many other media news on politics, including the reasons for this war, how it's progressing and the effects on the economy. But the power of the media will have the masses believe the official narrative nonetheless, just like that "safe and effective" jab they forced on people.

2. What other controversial topics did Fico deal with that may cause him to be assassinated?

Well, the list is pretty long. He does not like the way NATO is going, he does not want to finance the Ukraine war, he does not like the Covid plandemic enforcement by the WHO and wanted to investigate it, he is opposing the LGBTQ+ narrative, so he pretty much seems to be standing up against the current rages, most of which are fuelled by interest groups in the US. I would say that he is stepping on all of the Deep State toes at the same time with this. BigPharma, the Military Industrial Complex, all globalists' plans on the future of humanity, the whole DEI concept, he is opposing all of these. So there are plenty of interests that would want him gone.

In that sense, I do not think that this assassination is isolated to the WHO or BigPharma interests solely, though they are vested of course.

3. Perhaps the most important aspect is overlooked, as we are frantically looking for the interests behind this: we are beyond conspiracies at this point. A sole gunman or a group that laid out a plan to remove a problematic leader, it boils down to the same: the sign of the times. This is our world now and it is no longer an isolated effect. Whether it's the attempts on Bolsenaro, Abe, Fico or the 4 presidents that died under suspicious circumstances at the start of the plandemic and who were the only ones opposing the WHO orders, we see that radicalization is now mainstream. And it no longer requires conspiracies, as the brainwashing has been so effective that people assume they can afford to do such horrible deeds. The general population's big part has lost its mind, as it has lost its points of reference, since there is no such thing anymore as "normal". Just look at the Eurovision Song Contest with the satanic, queer, LGBTQ+ minority appearances en-masse: what used to be considered as fringe and extreme, is now mainstream, "pop". The foundations of our society are cast down, this IS a tectonic shift and you have to be vast asleep to not be aware of it.

Almost everything that happens as an extremity, is part of a broader narrative, whether it's an isolated event or not. Just like the extremity of an assassination, the extremeties of our politicians are portraying the same narratives. I don't even think that world leaders at this point need to get their talking points from the WEF or WHO to be fully aligned or meet behind closed doors to know their answers to crucial questions, just look at the collective pro-war insanity that almost all of the EU leaders agree on. They have a certain view of how the world should go and they are rolling it out, no matter the cost. Whether it's because they have been brainwashed as "young global leaders" under the WEF as Schwab proudly stated many times, or whether the world has taken a direction of decadence in which such authoritarian leaders are being elected as the masses have an anxiety and dissatisfaction that they want to have channeled via these leaders, it does not make a difference when it comes to the narrative that results from this unified approach. And this happens on both the left and the right, authoritarianism is now universal.

Therefore, I do not believe that this one man needed to be trained for this, that there is a single group or motivator behind him, that it can be pinpointed to parties, leaders, countries or vested groups for that matter. Because I think that ALL of these are behind this, through their collective actions.

We as the people have become divided through many means, mainly (social) media. And we are now part of the problem. I do not fully agree with Mattias Desmet's analysis on the Mass Formation hypothesis (because he does not agree with finding the head kingpins that lead us to the conflict, as he believes that the problems start with us and our leaders are merely a reflection of our needs for such leaders), but I do agree with his assessment that in a time of general dissatisfaction, "free floating anxiety" as he calls it, lack of common goals, people become radicalized, even masses, not just individuals.

And this is exactly the problem. People are so divided now, that at any moment someone can perform a radical deed such as an assassination and consider it "normal", because of lack of reference point. People watch too much media as it is, especially social media and the extremities they witness daily are becoming the norm, while these have nothing to do with real life. Therefore their actions reflect this twisted world view, which in turn DOES change the world around us, making it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm afraid this person is a symptom and this will continue, even accelerate. The two people in the US lighting themselves on fire for a cause that is not theirs (the young soldier in front of an embassy shouting about Palestine, as well as the other person in front of the Trump courtcase having left messages about some financial collapse to come) are excellent examples of the insanity that people have been captured in and increasingly are, as the censorship is ramping up, to hold us back from communicating freely about facts, which would pull us back to the ground and see things more clearly, avoiding panic and fanaticism. In a sense, I see such irrational extremism emerge in the alternative media as well, where rational thinkers tend to see a conspiracy behind everything, as we too are in our echo-chambers. Most of the time these assumptions are right, but it does radicalize and make solutions on the long term impossible, where common ground needs to be found at some point with the equally radicalized oppposing side.

Like Neil Oliver said a few days ago in a podcast: the question is no longer whether our leaders have nefarious plans, but whether they will push us into destruction by coincidence, such is their incompetence and ignorance about the damage they are doing to the world. At this point, clearly they have lost control. And people are imitating their leaders, just like this lone gunman did.

The learning I think is that we need to look a this calmly and avoid a widening of the gap within our societies. People should talk more about the contested topics, instead of going full ad hominem on "the other side". Yes, there are nefarious forces at work behind deeds like this. No, the aim is not to go to war with them, because we cannot win such a war. We need to ignore them and start talking to each other more. That will take the wind out of their sails.

What It Means To Live In Netanyahu's America

al-jazeera  |  A handful of powerful businessmen pushed New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to crack down on pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, donating to the politician and offering to pay for private investigators to help break up the demonstrations, the Washington Post has reported, based on leaked WhatsApp conversations.

The story, published on Thursday, says that several billionaires seeking to influence public perception of Israel’s war in Gaza discussed means of pushing the mayor and the university’s president to end the protests, which were eventually cleared last month amid criticism of the police’s heavy-handed response.

“One member of the WhatsApp chat group told The Post he donated $2,100, the maximum legal limit, to Adams that month,” the story reads.

“Some members also offered to pay for private investigators to assist New York police in handling the protests, the chat log shows — an offer a member of the group reported in the chat that Adams accepted.” The story states that city authorities denied that private investigators were used to help manage the protests.

The report comes as universities across the country continue to employ force against pro-Palestine activism, raising concerns over the repression of political expression. A number of universities have successfully negotiated with student encampments, which have called for divestment from companies involved in Israel’s war in Gaza and boycotts of Israeli institutions.

The WhatsApp chat cited by the Washington Post included prominent businessmen such as former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, brother of former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser on Middle East issues, Jared Kushner.

Other leaders, such as snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt also said that they held a video meeting with Mayor Adams on April 26.

Sending in the police has done little to dampen the spirits of pro-Palestine protesters, and in some cases, has led to heightened support from faculty and fellow students.

While supporters of the crackdowns say they are necessary to ensure the safety of Jewish students, some of whom say they have felt discomforted by anti-Israel rhetoric at the protests, pro-Palestine students – many of them Jewish – have faced the brunt of the violence at protests across the country, with few expressions of concern from authorities.

 

 

I Don't See Taking Sides In This Intra-tribal Skirmish....,

Jessica Seinfeld, wife of Jerry Seinfeld, just donated $5,000 (more than anyone else) to the GoFundMe of the pro-Israel UCLA rally.
At this rally, participants yelled “I hope they rape you” & spat on and used the N-word towards pro-Palestinian students. pic.twitter.com/74G7QG5SVR

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 29, 2024

thedailybeast  |  Jessica Seinfeld, cookbook author and wife to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, is funding a pro-Israel counterprotest at UCLA—where violence broke out Tuesday night after a mob attacked demonstrators inside a pro-Palestine encampment.

A GoFundMe for the effort, which Seinfeld promoted in an Instagram story this week after contributing at least $5,000, has since made the majority of its donations anonymous. The fundraising page has raised more than $93,000 as of Wednesday and also changed its organizer name and description since launching over the weekend.

The Daily Beast left messages for reps for the Seinfelds.

“I just gave to this GoFundMe to support more allies like yesterday’s at UCLA,” Seinfeld wrote this week. “More cities are being planned so please give what you can. Donations are annonymous [sic]. We will continue to share our light and love, as proud American Jews.”

It’s unclear whether Seinfeld coordinated with the GoFundMe to make donations anonymous after they’d been public earlier in the week. Nor is it clear whether supporters or organizers of this fundraiser were among the 100 or so counterprotesters, some wearing masks, who ripped down barricades or tossed objects including fireworks into the camp opposing Israel’s war on Gaza.

Still, it hasn’t stopped X users from roasting Seinfeld.

One observer, who shared video of a mob violently attacking the encampment, wrote, “Jessica Seinfeld must be elated seeing her 5k donation come to fruition.”

A University of California president parody account posted that campus cops were “ready to step in and continue the assault once the counterprotesters tuckered out but Jessica Seinfeld’s Zelle payments kept their fighting spirits high into the wee hours!”

Other celebrities—including actors Melissa Barrera and John Cusack—have shared footage on social media of Israel supporters ambushing the UCLA protest camp.

Billionaire hedge-funder Bill Ackman has taken to X to repost UCLA protest footage, including one account claiming a Jewish woman was beaten during a confrontation, and donated $10,000 to a separate GoFundMe financing a similar video-based effort to be held at the George Washington University.

Despite the chaos, police and campus security didn’t intervene as the counterprotesters moved in around 11 p.m., according to eyewitness accounts from journalists on scene.

UCLA’s student-run newspaper, the Daily Bruin, revealed that a counterprotester with a megaphone shouted, “If they can be there, so can we. You guys are going to want to get this. This is history being made.”

Self-Proclaimed Zionist Biden Joins The Great Pretending...,

Biden, at today's Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony, denounces the "anti-Semitic" student protests in his strongest terms yet. He recalls there were also "anti-Semitic demonstrations" and "organized riots" in Nazi Germany. He proclaims that his defense of Israel will be "iron-clad" pic.twitter.com/NWIGqTwoEp

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) May 7, 2024

NYTimes  |  President Biden on Tuesday condemned a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel and said people were already forgetting the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance, Mr. Biden tied the anti-Jewish sentiment that led to the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews directly to Oct. 7.

“This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust,” he said. “It didn’t end with the Holocaust, either.”

For Mr. Biden, a self-described Zionist, the speech was a clear assertion of his support for Jewish Americans as he struggles to balance his support for Israel with increasingly forceful calls for the protection of civilians in Gaza.

Mr. Biden’s address also comes as protests against Israel’s war in Gaza roil college campuses, with students demanding that the Biden administration stop sending weapons to Israel. In some cases, the demonstrations have included antisemitic rhetoric and harassment targeting Jewish students.

“I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world,” the president said. But, he added, “there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”

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Mr. Biden also denounced attempts to minimize the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,200 people in Israel and sparked a war that has killed an estimated 34,000 people in Gaza.

“Now here we are, not 75 years later, but just seven and half months later, and people are already forgetting,” Mr. Biden said. “They are already forgetting. That Hamas unleashed this terror. It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas who took and continues to hold hostages.

“I have not forgotten, nor have you,” he told the crowd of more than 100, including Holocaust survivors. “And we will not forget.”

Since the outset of the war, Mr. Biden has faced criticism from Arab Americans and Palestinians who have said they don’t hear Mr. Biden talk about the plight of their people with the same empathy and emotion that he uses to describe Israel and the Jewish people.

Our politics reporters. Times journalists are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. That includes participating in rallies and donating money to a candidate or cause.

Learn more about our process.
The leader of the World Food Program has said that parts of Gaza are experiencing a “full-blown famine,” in part because of Israel blocking humanitarian aid.

Jewish groups have been pressuring the administration to take firmer policy steps to combat antisemitism on college campuses, in particular. On Tuesday, the Biden administration fulfilled some of those requests.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released new guidance to every school and college outlining examples of antisemitic discrimination, as well as other forms of hate, that could lead to investigations for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The law prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin, and the department has interpreted it as extending to Jewish students. Since the Oct. 7 attack, the department has opened more than 100 investigations into complaints about antisemitism and other forms of discrimination. The administration also announced that the Department of Homeland Security would also offer new resources, including an online campus safety resource guide.

Nathan Diament, executive director for public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, one of the groups that has been lobbying the administration for more measures for weeks, said that the Jewish community “need them implemented rapidly and aggressively.”

“President Biden’s speech today was an important statement of moral clarity at a time when too many people seem to be morally confused,” Mr. Diament said. “Just as important as the president’s words today is the announcement that his administration is taking more steps to counter the surge of antisemitism in the U.S.”

The president promised that his commitment to the security of Israel “and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad. Even when we disagree,” a reference to the arguments his administration has had with Israel’s right-wing government about the toll the war is taking in Gaza. The speech came against the backdrop of Israel’s plans to move forward with a ground operation in Rafah, which Mr. Biden opposes. More than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering in Rafah.

Mr. Biden made a tacit acknowledgment during his speech that the pro-Palestinian cause has resonated with other minority groups with histories of violence and oppression.

“We must give hate no safe harbor against anyone — anyone,” Mr. Biden said in his speech, adding that Jewish people helped lead civil rights causes throughout history.

“From that experience,” he added, “we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.”

Sheryl Sandberg Lies, The NYTimes Lies, None Of This Shit Happened....,

Billionaire Zionist @sherylsandberg is confronted with a @TheGrayzoneNews takedown of the report she cites to bolster the narrative of her propaganda doc alleging mass r*pe by Hamas on Oct 7

Sandberg tacitly admits that she interviewed zero survivors, claiming without evidence… pic.twitter.com/Xa7W840QOJ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) May 4, 2024

NYTimes |  There is a scene in “Screams Before Silence,” the harrowing documentary about the rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, that I can’t get out of my head. It’s an interview that the former Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the documentary’s presenter, conducted with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the mother of 19-year-old Naama Levy, whose kidnapping that morning was filmed by Hamas. The sight of her pajama bottoms, drenched in blood at the back, was one of the earliest indications that sexual brutality was part of Hamas’s playbook.

“They’re grabbing her by the hair, and she’s all, like, messed up and like, and I’m thinking of her hair, and like, in my mind I’m stroking her hair, like I’m always doing,” Levy Sachar said of the video of her daughter’s kidnapping. “We would like to think that this couldn’t be possible. That nobody would harm a young girl. But then you just see it there.”

To have a child seized, savaged and paraded this way goes beyond a parent’s worst nightmare. Here it is compounded by an additional horror: the combination of indifference and outright denial with which much of the world has treated these sexual atrocities.

Why? “People are so polarized that they want every fact to fit into a narrative, and if their narrative is resistance, then sexual violence doesn’t fit into that narrative,” Sandberg told me when I met her in New York last Thursday, hours before the documentary’s premiere at The Times Center. “You can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel has no choice; you can believe that Gaza is happening because Israel wants to kill babies. You can hold either one of those thoughts. And you should also be able to hold the thought that sexual violence is unacceptable, no matter what.”

To watch “Screams Before Silence” is to be disabused of any lingering doubts about what Hamas did. The personal testimonies of victims, survivors and witnesses are clear and overpowering, as is the photographic evidence Sandberg was shown of mutilated corpses. And some of them have scarcely been heard about outside Israel.

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There is Tali Binner, a partygoer at the Nova music festival who hid in a small camper as other women were raped outside: “I heard a girl that started to yell for a long time. It was like, ‘Please don’t. No, no, stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. No. No. No’. It was like, she was asking someone to stop. What can they stop? Someone is abusing her. Someone touching her. Someone is doing something.”

There is Raz Cohen, who witnessed a rape as he hid with a friend in the brush: “Shoham, who was next to me, said, ‘He’s stabbing her. He’s slaughtering her,’ or something like that, and I didn’t want to look.” Cohen added, in Hebrew: “When I looked again, she was already dead, and he was still at it. He was still raping her after he had slaughtered her.”

There is Rami Davidian, who rushed to help people at the Nova site: “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. Someone murdered them, raped them and abused them, here on these trees. Their legs were spread. Everyone who sees this knows right away that the girls were abused. Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. Over 30 girls were murdered and raped here.”

There is Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped to Gaza for 55 days and raped by her captor when she was trying to bathe: “He came toward me and just pointed a gun really hard at my forehead, screaming at me, ‘Take it off. Take it off,’ and punching me until I could not hold the towel anymore. And he started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom. And then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him.”

 

Why Are Biden And Blinken Complicit In The Ethnic Cleansing Of The Palestinians From Israel?

americanconservative  |   ong after the current administration passes from the scene, President Joseph R. Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be remembered not for their bumbling, embarrassing encounters with the Chinese, nor for their steadfast refusal to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Russians, which set off a disastrous war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Instead, they will likely be remembered as the abettors of Israel’s transformation of Gaza into an abattoir, and will leave a legacy as bloodstained as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s.

But, to be fair, Nixon and Kissinger knew which country was theirs; they understood that the United States and Israel have distinct and vastly different interests. Indeed, it is little remembered today that as Secretary of State, Kissinger once ordered a reassessment of this so-called “special relationship.” 

Lacking the sheen of Kissinger’s not inconsiderable wit and intellect, Tony Blinken, a protege of Marty Peretz, erstwhile publisher of the New Republic and an ideological Zionist, may one day be remembered as his generation’s Robert McNamara: a bland bureaucrat carrying out the obscene orders of his commander-in-chief.

As if more were needed to bolster such a judgment, this week, after acknowledging that five Israeli military units had engaged in gross human rights abuses, the Biden administration signaled it will not apply the Leahy Law—which prohibits aid to militaries that have committed human rights abuses—to Israel. It would be hard to improve upon the following headline from the Hill: “US finds Israeli military units violated human rights; withholds consequences.” 

In an incredible performance this Monday at Foggy Bottom, the State Department spokesman Vedant Patel (yet another foreign-born bureaucrat who clearly knows little about the country he is paid to represent) ran cover for the Israelis once again, claiming that the IDF was now in line with Leahy and all is well.

Yet, given Israel’s widespread, heavily documented crimes, including the deployment of AI systems such as Lavender AI systematically to terrorize the Palestinian population, the application of Leahy would seem a mere slap on the wrist. Yet Blinken and Biden have deemed even symbolic measures of disapproval of Israel’s rampage as too great a burden on Tel Aviv. 

If Blinken and Biden were serious about stopping the carnage, they could have applied section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits security assistance to countries blocking humanitarian aid. In late March, a group of Democratic senators and congressmen called on the administration to do just that, writing, in a letter to the President,

Federal law is clear, and, given the urgency of the crisis in Gaza, and the repeated refusal of Prime Minister Netanyahu to address U.S. concerns on this issue, immediate action is necessary to secure a change in policy by his government.

If Biden and Blinken were serious, they would have applied  Leahy and enforced the terms of the Arms Control Export Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Genocide Convention Implementation Act; if they were serious, they would have supported South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice; if they were serious, they would not have instructed UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield repeatedly to veto measures in the UN Security Council calling for a ceasefire; if they were serious, they would call for the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and others.

But they are not serious.

Politicians Owned By The Tiny Minority Pass Bill To Protect Zionism

AP  |  The House passed legislation Wednesday that would establish a broader definition of antisemitism for the Department of Education to enforce anti-discrimination laws, the latest response from lawmakers to a nationwide student protest movement over the Israel-Hamas war.

The proposal, which passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support, would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-discrimination law that bars discrimination based on shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics or national origin. It now goes to the Senate where its fate is uncertain.

Action on the bill was just the latest reverberation in Congress from the protest movement that has swept university campuses. Republicans in Congress have denounced the protests and demanded action to stop them, thrusting university officials into the center of the charged political debate over Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war was launched in October, after Hamas staged a deadly terrorist attack against Israeli civilians.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would broaden the legal definition of antisemitism to include the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” Critics say the move would have a chilling effect on free speech throughout college campuses. 

“Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute unlawful discrimination,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a hearing Tuesday. “By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.”

Advocates of the proposal say it would provide a much-needed, consistent framework for the Department of Education to police and investigate the rising cases of discrimination and harassment targeted toward Jewish students.

“It is long past time that Congress act to protect Jewish Americans from the scourge of antisemitism on campuses around the country,” Rep. Russell Fry, R-S.C., said Tuesday.

The expanded definition of antisemitism was first adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental group that includes the United States and European Union states, and has been embraced by the State Department under the past three presidential administrations, including Joe Biden’s

Previous bipartisan efforts to codify it into law have failed. But the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas militants in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza have reignited efforts to target incidents of antisemitism on college campuses.

 

UCLA And The LAPD Allow Violent Counter Protestors To Attack A Pro-Palestinian Encampment

LATimes |  University administrators canceled classes at UCLA on Wednesday, hours after violence broke out at a pro-Palestinian encampment set up on campus.

Just before midnight, a large group of counterdemonstrators, wearing black outfits and white masks, arrived on campus and tried to tear down the barricades surrounding the encampment. Campers, some holding lumber and wearing goggles and helmets, rallied to defend the encampment’s perimeter. The violence occurred hours after the university declared that the camp was “unlawful and violates university policy.”

Videos showed fireworks being set off and at least one being thrown into the camp. Over several hours, counterdemonstrators threw objects, including wood and a metal barrier, at the camp and those inside, with fights repeatedly breaking out. Some tried to force their way into the camp, and the pro-Palestinian side used pepper spray to defend themselves.

A group of security guards could be seen observing the clashes but did not move in to stop them. Authorities cleared the area around 3 a.m.

Some in the camp were being treated for eye irritation and other wounds. The extent of the injuries was unclear, though The Times saw several people who were bleeding and needed medical attention. At least one person, a 26-year-old man suffering from a head injury, was taken to the hospital by paramedics, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

UCLA administrators and law enforcement are facing scrutiny from students, professors and the broader community for not intervening faster.

“The limited and delayed campus law enforcement response at UCLA last night was unacceptable — and it demands answers,” Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said in a statement.

UCLA officials decried the violence and said they had requested help from the Los Angeles Police Department. It is not clear whether police made any arrests. UCLA police did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

“Horrific acts of violence occurred at the encampment tonight and we immediately called law enforcement for mutual aid support. The fire department and medical personnel are on the scene. We are sickened by this senseless violence and it must end,” Mary Osako, vice chancellor for UCLA Strategic Communications, said in a statement.

A law enforcement source told The Times on Wednesday that the LAPD reached out to campus police shortly after the violence broke out. They were told not to bring in anti-riot police, but eventually UCLA agreed to accept help from the larger police force. The discussion unfolded over several hours until officers with the LAPD and California Highway Patrol were given the green light to intervene around 1 a.m., the source said.

At around 1:40 a.m., police officers in riot gear arrived, and some counterprotesters began to leave. But the police did not immediately break up the clashes at the camp, which continued despite the law enforcement presence.

One representative of the camp said the counterdemonstrators repeatedly pushed over barricades that outline the boundaries of the encampment, and some campers said they were hit by a substance they thought was pepper spray. As counterprotesters attempted to pull down the wood boards surrounding the encampment, at least one person could be heard yelling, “Second nakba,” referring to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Daily Bruin News Editor Catherine Hamilton said she was sprayed with some type of irritant and repeatedly punched in the chest and upper abdomen as she was reporting on the unrest. Another student journalist was pushed to the ground by counterprotesters and was beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. Hamilton was treated at a hospital and released.

“I truly did not expect to be directly assaulted. I know that these individuals — at least the individual who initiated the mobilization against us — knew that we were journalists,” she said. “And while I did not think that protected us from harassment, I thought that might have [prevented us from being] assaulted. I was mistaken.”

At around 3 a.m., a line of officers arrived at the camp and pushed the remaining counterprotesters out of the quad area. The police told people to leave or face arrest.

“What we’ve just witnessed was the darkest day in my 32 years at UCLA,” said David Myers, a professor of Jewish history at UCLA who is working on initiatives to bridge differences on campus. He called the situation a “complete and total systems failure at the university, city and state levels.”

“Why didn’t the police, UCPD and LAPD, show up? Those in the encampment were defenseless in the face of a violent band of thugs. And no one, wherever they stand politically, is safer today,” Myers said.

Ananya Roy, a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography, echoed concerns about the university’s lack of response when faced with a violent counterprotest.

“It gives people impunity to come to our campus as a rampaging mob,” she said. “The word is out they can do this repeatedly and get away with it. I am ashamed of my university.”

Crackdowns On Pro-Palestinian Protest And Gaza Ethnic Cleansing

nakedcapitalism  |  Many US papers are giving front-page, above the fold treatment to university administrators going wild and calling in the cops on peaceful campus protests, first at Columbia, followed by Yale and NYU. Harvard, in a profile in courage, closed its campus to prevent a spectacle. Demonstrations are taking hold at other campuses, including MIT, Emerson, and Tufts.

This is an overly dynamic situation, so I am not sure it makes sense to engage in detailed coverage. However, some things seem noteworthy.

First, in typical US hothouse fashion, the press is treating protests as if they were a bigger deal than the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am not the only one to notice this. From Parapraxis (hat tip  guurst; bear with the author’s leisurely set-up):

I am employed as a non-tenure-track professor in a university department dedicated to teaching and research about Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness. One day, I arrived at work to find security cameras installed in my department’s hallway. I read in an email that these cameras had been installed after an antisemitic poster was discovered affixed to a colleague’s office door. I was never shown this poster. Like the cameras, I learned of it only belatedly. Despite the fact that the poster apparently constituted so great a danger to the members of my department as to warrant increased security, nobody bothered to inform me about it. By the time I was aware that there was a threat in which I was ostensibly implicated, the decision had already been made—by whom, exactly, I don’t know—about which measures were necessary to protect me from it. My knowledge, consent, and perspective were irrelevant to the process…

The prolepsis of the decision did more than protect me—if, indeed, it really did that. It interpellated my coworkers and myself as people in need of protection…. I was unwittingly transformed, literally overnight, into the type of person to whom something might happen.

My employer has a campus—three, actually—meaning that it has a physical plant. I navigate one of these campuses as my workplace, but it almost never figures for me as “the campus.” In fact, the first time since beginning the job when I felt myself caught up in an affective relation, not to the particular institution where I work, but rather to “the campus” was when I looked up into that security camera and felt myself being “watched” by it. Only then did I think, a couple of months into my temporary contract, that I was not just at my workplace. Now I was on “the campus.”

This incident with the poster and the camera occurred, of course, some weeks after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the onset of Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza. Against so horrific a backdrop, and relative to the intimidation and retaliation to which those who speak out against the war (including—indeed, especially—in the academy) have been subjected, my story sounds banal. And it is. In its very ordinariness, however, the anecdote is quite representative: first, of how decisions get made at contemporary institutions of higher education (generally speaking, without the input of those whom they impact); and second, of the logic of a peculiarly American phenomenon I call campus panic….

The months since October 7 have aggravated the most extreme campus panic I have witnessed. To judge by the American mass media, the campus is the most urgent scene of political struggle in the world. What is happening “on campus” often seems of greater concern than what is happening in Gaza, where every single university campus has been razed by the IDF. When all the Palestinian dead have been counted, it seems likely that these months will be recorded as having inflamed a campus panic no less intense than the one that accompanied the Vietnam War.

Second, many otherwise fine stories, like Columbia in crisis, again by the Columbia Journalism Review, and Columbia University protests and the lessons of “Gym Crow” by Judd at Popular Information, start off with the 1968 protests at Columbia as a point of departure. And again, consistent with the Parapraxis account and being old enough to remember the Vietnam War, I find the comparison to be overdone. Yes, there are some telling similarities, like the role of right-wing pressure in getting campus administrators to call out the cops, the device of dwelling on the earlier uprising seems to obscure more than it reveals. The Vietnam War, unlike Gaza, tore the US apart. Today’s campus students are, with only the comparatively small contingent of Palestinian students, acting to protest US support of slaughter in Gaza. In 1968, for many, the stake were more personal. The risk of young men having to serve was real.

Similarly, conservatives then supported the military and were typically proud of their or any family member’s service. Draft dodging and demonization of armed forces leaders was close to unconscionable. It took years of the major television networks and the two authoritative magazines, Time and Newsweek, showing what the war looked like, and intimating that the US was not succeeding, that shifted mass opinion.

 

CIA Showed The House Speaker Its Pictures Of His Little Johnson.....,

davidstockman  |  What Johnson’s impending Waterloo means, therefore, is not merely the prospect of another wild and wooly succession battle, but actually that there is no point at all in the preservation of a Republican majority and GOP House Speaker. After all, the Washington GOP has become so infected with neocon warmongers and careerist pols who spend a lifetime basking in the imperial projects and pretensions of the world’s War Capital that apparently the best the House GOP caucus could do when it ejected the previous careerist deep stater from the Speaker’s chair was to tap the dim-witted nincompoop who currently occupies it.

The Republican party is thus truly beyond redemption. As JFK once said about the CIA, its needs to be splintered into a thousand pieces and swept into the dustbin of history.

Indeed, when you look at the calamitous fiscal trajectory embedded in the CBO’s latest 30-year fiscal outlook, you truly have to wonder about what miniature minds like Congressman Johnson’s are actually thinking. That is to say, the latest CBO report published in March presumes that there will never be another recession and no inflation flare-up, interest rate spike, global energy dislocation, prolonged Forever War or any other imaginable crisis ever again—just smooth economic sailing for the next 30 years.

And yet, and then. Even by the math of this Rosy Scenario on steroids the public debt will reach $140 trillion at minimum by 2054. In turn, that would cause interest payments on the public debt with rates no higher than those which prevailed between 1986 and 1997 to reach $10 trillion per year.

You simply don’t need paragraphs, pages and whole monographs worth of analysis and amplification to understand where that is going. The nation’s fisc is now on the cusp of descending into the maws of a doomsday machine. So how in the world do these elements of Johnson’s offering make even the remotest sense?

Speaker Johnson's Foreign Aid Boondoggle:

• Indo-Pacific aid: $8.1 billion.
• Israel: $26.4 billion.
• Ukraine: $60.8 billion.
• Total: $95.3 billion.

Apparently, it’s because Johnson and a good share of the Washington GOP have succumbed wholesale to neocon paranoia, stupidity, lies and hollow excuses for warmongering. For crying out loud, Putin has no interest in molesting the Poles, to say nothing of storming the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. He is certainly no Ghandi, but well more than smart enough to recognize that with Russia’s GDP of $2.2 trillion and war budget of $80 billion there would be no point in going to war with NATO’s $45 trillion of GDP and combined war budgets in excess of $1.2 trillion.

Likewise, China’s $50 trillion debt-ridden Ponzi would collapse in months if its $3.5 trillion flow of export earnings were disrupted after attempting to land its single modern aircraft carrier on the California coast. And Iran has no nukes, no intercontinental range missiles and a GDP equal to 130 hours of US annual output.

So, some Axis of evil!

Yet that’s exactly what the Speaker said this morning after going to too many Deep State briefings and apparently having his own johnson yanked once too often. The Swamp creatures surely see the lad’s naivete and blithering ignorance as a gift that doesn’t stop giving. That is to say, a “mark” who knows nothing at all about the world from sources not stamped, “Top Secret (lies)”.

Speaker Mike Johnson: “We’re going to stand for freedom and make sure that Putin doesn’t march through Europe… we’re the greatest Nation on the planet, and we have to act like it”,

This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage. I can make a selfish decision and do something that’s different but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing. “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we've gotten.

I believe Xi, Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they’re in coordination on it. “So I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.

To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game, this is not a joke.

Needless to say, our dufus Speaker doesn’t know the “Baltics” from the “Balkans” where Serbia and other Russian friendlies are definitely not quaking in their boots about Putin.

In point of fact, however, it is not hard to see that the civil war and territorial dispute between Kiev and Moscow over the Donbas and rim of the Black Sea from Mariupol to Odessa is a one-off of Russian and regional history and Washington’s mindless push of NATO eastward to Russia’s very doorstep.

The light-yellow area of this 1897 map gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the Donbas and the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea. Already then, they were part of the 125 years-old New Russia, which had been assembled by purchase and conquest during the reign of Catherine the Great.

Indeed, it was only in 1922 that the yellow area—essentially demarcating the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, which recently voted to rejoin Russia—was appended to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by the great humanitarian and map-maker, V. Lenin.

And yet Speaker Johnson now wants to crash the Republican Party on enforcing a map drawn by one of history’s bloodiest monsters. It’s come down to that.