Biden administration “dragging its feet on the prosecution of Hamas sympathizers across the country”

Posted on January 5, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FREE BEACON
Biden Admin Not Investigating Violence and Vandalism by Hamas Supporters, Complaint Alleges
Adam Kredo
January 4, 2024

The Justice Department has effectively issued a “stand-down order” to federal law enforcement and U.S. attorneys to stop them from investigating “incitement, violence, and vandalism” committed by Hamas supporters who hold U.S. visas, according to a complaint filed with the Justice Department and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The complaint, filed this week by the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative legal advocacy group, accuses the Biden administration of turning a blind eye to the massive uptick in violence against Jews across America in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel…In addition to the Justice Department complaint, America First Legal has filed FOIA requests with the Education and Homeland Security Departments to unearth information about pro-Hamas activity on U.S. college campuses…READ MORE

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“You’ve seen the movie ‘The Shawshank Redemption’? That’s what these young men did at first: They dug and put the dirt in their pockets”

Posted on January 5, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

NEW YORK POST
Extremist Jewish teens secretly ‘hired migrants’ to dig covert Brooklyn synagogue tunnel ‘Shawshank’-style
Isabel Vincent
January 11, 2024

Extremist students from an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic group secretly hired migrant laborers to help them build a controversial tunnel at the sect’s world headquarters in Crown Heights — all to fulfill what they felt was a religious obligation to expand the holy site, The Post has learned. Six renegade members of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement secretly began digging the 3-foot-high, 20-foot-wide, 50-foot-long tunnel themselves, using crude instruments and their hands. They stuffed the dirt into their pockets so that their work wouldn’t be detected by the sect’s leaders and wider community, a source in the Orthodox community told The Post. READ MORE

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“The Anne Frank Gift Shop” is joltingly, infectiously funny thanks to a dry humor-filled script by Rapkin, a seasoned journalist and writer who wrote “Pitch Perfect”

Posted on January 5, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

KVELLER
Dark Comedy ‘The Anne Frank Gift Shop’ Is a Must Watch
Lior Zaltzman
January 5, 2024

The first time Mickey Rapkin went into the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam was a religious experience. “You can’t believe you’re there,” he recalls about the visit almost two decades ago. “You’re in this sacred space, and you’re walking around, and you’re silent, taking it all in — and I’m crying, you know, I’m having the emotional reaction you expect you’re going to have.” But when he finished his tour and, like at most museums, exited through the gift shop, that sense of reverence abruptly snapped. “I remember having this almost inappropriate laughter of like, oh my God, I’ve just had this emotional experience. And now I’ll buy a postcard.” READ MORE

GQ MAG How Do You Market Anne Frank to Gen Z? That’s the provocative question posed in The Anne Frank Gift Shop, a new short film from writer-director Mickey Rapkin. “The jokes will not be for everybody, but even that will spark conversation,” he says.

This film is streaming exclusively at GQ.com until January 16th, 2024 at this link

 

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After the war: “It is unclear how Israel will select Gazans who are truly disconnected from Hamas after the terror group’s 16-year rule, but Gallant is confident that groups can be found or formed”

Posted on January 4, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JPOST
Israel-Hamas War: IDF plans for post-war Gaza revealed in war cabinet
Yonah Jeremy Bob
January 5, 2024

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday presented his plan to the War Cabinet and the State Security Cabinet for Israel’s security status once the war in Gaza is over. The plan included the integration of existing Palestinian civilian leadership in Gaza into a more substantial local government. “Hamas will not rule Gaza,” said Gallant in a press briefing before the meeting, “and Israel will not hold a civilian governorship over Gaza.”… In some undefined transitional period, the IDF will retain broad security responsibility, including over the borders and with authority to conduct raids, but some hybrid mix of forces provided by the US, European allies, and Arab allies, such as the Saudis, Egypt, the UAE and others will assist with aspects of internal security and administration. READ MORE

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Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh: Arouri’s killing is “terrorist act,” violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and an expansion of Israel’s hostility against Palestinians

Posted on January 4, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

REUTERS
Israeli drone kills deputy Hamas chief in Beirut
January 3, 2024

Deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday night in an Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a stronghold of the allied Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, signalling the conflict between Hamas and Israel could be expanding to engulf more of the region. In response to questions from Reuters, the Israeli military said it does not respond to reports in the foreign media. Lebanon’s national news agency said the drone struck a Hamas office. Two security sources said the strike had targeted a meeting between Hamas officials and Lebanon’s Sunni Islamist Jama’a Islamiya faction and left a total of four Palestinians and three Lebanese dead. READ MORE

WALL STREET JOURNAL The ‘CEO’ of Hamas Who Found the Money to Attack Israel When Zaher Jabarin ran a Hamas cell in the 1980s, he borrowed cash from his mother to buy weapons. Now, he oversees a financial empire that the U.S. estimates is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and funds Hamas’s operations against Israel. The 55-year-old militant manages Hamas’s financial relationship with its main benefactor Iran and handles how Tehran gets cash to the Gaza Strip, U.S. and Israeli officials say. He looks after a portfolio of companies that deliver income annually for Hamas and runs a network of private donors and businessmen who invest for the Islamist group.

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New York Times uncovers new information, devastating testimony, on systemic targeting of women and girls, use of sexual assault and mutilation during savage Hamas onslaught in Israel

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
In harrowing detail, NYT reports on weaponization of rape, sexual violence on Oct. 7
December 29, 2023

In a comprehensive, horrifying exposé published on Thursday, The New York Times detailed the systematic sexual violence against Israeli women and girls employed by Palestinian terrorists during Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 rampage through southern Israel. The two-month investigation includes interviews with more than 150 witnesses, medical personnel, first responders, soldiers, rape counselors, and government officials, along with the scanning of video footage, photographs and GPS data from cell phones. The piece begins with the description of a harrowing video that circulated widely in the days after Hamas’s monstrous assault on southern Israel that Saturday morning. READ MORE

UNREPORTED TRUTHS Alex Berenson: On the sexual atrocities Hamas committed on Oct.7 We cannot ignore the depravity of these attacks, or what they mean for women. The Times’s descriptions of these crimes nearly beggar belief. They go beyond rape, or gang rape, or even the execution of prisoners. As described by witnesses who survived, and confirmed by video and forensic evidence, Hamas’s attackers turned murder and torture into can-you-top-this sport...

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Why an historic massacre of Jews, even before the Israeli response got underway, triggered a powerful wave of hostility not toward the attackers—but toward Jews

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

THE FREE PRESS
The Wisdom of Hamas
Matti Friedman
December 28, 2023

In the days after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, triggering the current war in Gaza, many believed that Hamas had erred. The word “miscalculation” recurred in news analysis and in statements from Israeli leaders. People here in Israel were galvanized into action by the massacre. Western governments responded with shock and revulsion. The civilians of Gaza were staring at a looming catastrophe. Hamas was in for it now! What were they thinking? But as I write nearly three months later, with several acquaintances dead in battle and one still held hostage in Gaza, it’s easier to understand what Hamas leaders were thinking. Indeed, it’s increasingly worth considering the possibility that they weren’t wrong. In many ways, Hamas understood the world better than we Israelis did. The men who came across the border, and those who sent them, may have grasped the current state of the West better than many Westerners. More than anything, they understood the war they’re fighting when many of us didn’t—and still don’t. READ MORE

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When the kids call, I have no sage parental wisdom to impart about their experiences because I have never been there or done any of that.

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JPOST
Israel-Hamas War: What can we tell the kids?
Herb Keinon
December 30, 2023

…It’s not the first time we’ve had a son fighting in Gaza. The Lad, our oldest, was there during his regular service in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead. But that was only one kid for a relatively short period. Now we have three sons and a son-in-law inside Gaza for much longer stints. That brings anxiety and worry up to an atomic level. It also creates a situation where we don’t always know what to say or do for them, their wives, or their kids. It’s a new experience; frankly, I’m getting old and not as good at dealing with new experiences as I once was. READ MORE

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After 2023, surely no one will deny that Western civilisation is under threat from without and within

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

SPIKED ONLINE
The unholy alliance between wokeism and barbarism
Brendan O’Neill
December 29, 2023

My favourite story about Spinoza concerns the time he lost his cool. A philosopher, a Jew and history’s finest defender of Enlightenment, Spinoza was normally a picture of quiet reason. But when he heard about the lynching of Johan and Cornelis de Witt he became gripped by an uncommon fury. The de Witt brothers were key political figures in the Dutch Republic, the enlightened new nation in which Spinoza enjoyed such great liberty to think and write. On 20 August 1672, at The Hague, they were set upon by a ferocious mob that held them responsible for the invasion of the republic by a French-English alliance. They were murdered, mutilated and clumps of their flesh were eaten. READ MORE

JNS Jonathan Tobin: There’s no middle ground in the fight against DEI antisemitism Allegations that the battle against campus antisemitism at Harvard was “hijacked” by right-wingers or racists are false. Advocates of woke ideology are the real racists. Critical to understanding this controversy or even the justified concerns about the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism is the way leftist ideologies like intersectionality, critical race theory (CRT) and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have played in all of this. The obsession with race above and beyond every other possible consideration pushed morally corrupt figures like [Harvard’s Claudine] Gay to a position of pre-eminence in academia.

POLITICO Harvard agitators turn their ire toward Penny Pritzker The leadership turmoil engulfing Harvard University is putting a major Democratic Party figure on the defensive. Penny Pritzker, a former Obama Cabinet official, current Biden appointee and longtime Democratic megadonor, on Wednesday rejected calls to step down from her role at the top of Harvard’s most powerful governing board. It comes a day after the resignation of university president Claudine Gay…The announcement comes after Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and outspoken critic of Harvard’s handling of claims of antisemitism, called on Pritzker, the former U.S. Commerce secretary, to resign over the handling of Gay’s hiring and ultimate exit from the Ivy League school.

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Flight crew complained that passengers who switched seats made them uncomfortable

Posted on December 29, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

FORWARD
Passengers accuse JetBlue of antisemitism after Orthodox Jews ordered off plane
Beth Harpaz
January 2, 2024

Three Orthodox passengers were ordered off a New Year’s Eve red-eye flight from California to New York after they changed seats. “My inflight crew tells me they do not want to have you on their plane,” the JetBlue pilot can be heard telling the passengers in an audio recording of the incident supplied to The Lakewood Scoop. “I have to support them.”…The kerfuffle began when a visibly Jewish elderly man took what he apparently thought was a vacant seat on a red-eye from Palm Springs to John F. Kennedy Airport. A flight attendant asked if that was his assigned seat, and when he said no, she told him he couldn’t sit there…One of two Orthodox women seated elsewhere on the plane who were traveling with him then intervened, explaining that he couldn’t occupy his assigned seat because of “religious purposes,” presumably because it was next to a woman. READ MORE

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