Hamas sympathizer enjoys senior role within Biden’s national security apparatus

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/hamas-sympathizer-enjoys-senior-role-within-bidens-national-security-apparatus;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

At this point, only the most naive and uninformed could possibly be surprised by this.

“Top Biden Intel Official Outed as Palestinian Activist Has Some Very Dark Associates,” Revolver, October 16, 2023:

Hamas’ gruesome terrorist attack against Israel has left the entire world in shock, primarily at the barbarity of Hamas’ actions but also at the monumental intelligence failure on the part of Israel’s vaunted security establishment. The tragic attack has also encouraged some healthy critical reflection on the Biden regime’s Middle East policy. In a colossal blunder worthy of the legendarily inaccurate financial commentator Jim Cramer, Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan just this month bragged that “the Middle East is quieter now than it has been in two decades.”

Of course, no one can be expected to predict the future, but this unfortunate remark strikes us as particularly flat-footed. Possibly more disturbing than the Biden team’s flat-footedness on the emerging conflict is the distinct possibility that a Hamas sympathizer enjoys a senior role within Biden’s national security apparatus. The individual in question is Maher Bitar, who currently serves as the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs on Joe Biden’s National Security Council.

Biden’s choice of Bitar for a senior intelligence role within the NSC is largely forgotten, though it generated considerable controversy in the immediate aftermath of Bitar’s appointment in 2021. Numerous reports emerged of Bitar’s history of activism on behalf of Palestine that extended into support for the BDS movement as well as organizations that have been accused of being friendly to terror groups like Hamas.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that Bitar was not only a member but also an executive director of the controversial “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) group….

Majority of Supreme Court Allows Biden Regime to Use Private Companies to Censor Speech Into 2024

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/majority-of-supreme-court-allows-biden-regime-to-use-private-companies-to-censor-speech-into-2024;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Should a president be able to censor his political opponents? Stay tuned.

The good news is that a reckoning with the Biden administration’s policy of telling companies to censor things they don’t like is coming. The Supreme Court will take up the Louisiana ban on the administration censoring political opponents via private companies. The bad news is that Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett decided to sign on letting the Biden administration go on doing it for another year because the First Amendment is just a theory.

Read the Alito dissent on the majority issuing a stay on an order blocking the Biden administration’s censorship. (Alito was joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.)

Today, however, a majority of the Court, without undertaking a full review of the record and without any explanation, suspends the effect of that injunction until the Court completes its review of this case, an event that may not occur until late in the spring of next year. Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.

This case began when two States, Missouri and Louisiana, and various private parties filed suit alleging that popular social media companies had either blocked their use of the companies’ platforms or had downgraded their posts on a host of controversial subjects, including “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

According to the plaintiffs, Federal Government officials “were the ones pulling the strings,” that is, these officials “‘coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them].’”

… To stop this “campaign,” the injunction, as it now stands, prohibits the covered officials from doing two things. First, they may not “coerce” social media platforms to make “content-moderation decisions.” Second, they may not “meaningfully contro[l]” social media platforms’ “content-moderation” efforts. Displeased with these restrictions, the Government filed an emergency application asking us to stay the effect of this injunction pending certiorari…

Despite the Government’s conspicuous failure to establish a threat of irreparable harm, the majority stays the injunction and thus allows the defendants to persist in committing the type of First Amendment violations that the lower courts identified. The majority takes this action in the face of the lower courts’ detailed findings of fact…

At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate.

Left unsaid by Alito is that the Biden administration will be able to continue censoring opposing views into 2024 as the presidential campaign continues to get underway.

The Biden administration claimed that being unable to censor political dissent during a presidential campaign would cause “irreparable harm” while Alito argues that censoring political dissent will cause “irreparable harm”.

Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett sided with the Biden administration. That does not bode well for the actual case, but we shall see. If the Biden administration wins this one, the First Amendment effectively becomes a dead letter on the internet.

Should a president be able to censor his political opponents? Stay tuned.

CBS and CNN Give Sympathetic Air Time to a Murderous Antisemitic Gazan

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/cbs-and-cnn-give-sympathetic-air-time-to-a-murderous-antisemitic-gazan;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Unfortunately, CBS and CNN did not perform due diligence when they recently allowed on to their news programs a woman from Gaza, Dunia Abu Rahma, whose bloodcurdling hatred of Israel and of Jews has now been revealed by those at HonestReporting who investigated her social media posts. More on her television appearances, and her views, can be found here: “CNN & NBC Give Airtime to Woman Who Celebrated Hamas Massacre & Wished Hitler Had Finished the Job,” by Chaim Lax, HonestReporting, October 19, 2023:

…Dunia Abu Rahma, a 22-year-old architecture student from Gaza, has appeared in recent days on both CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and NBC News to tell her story.

Abu Rahma told the veteran CNN reporter Anderson Cooper, “All I want them to know is that there are civilians, people who wish to live a normal, peaceful life, to feel safe, because we are human, and all we want is to have our rights and live peacefully. As a woman and as a girl, all I want in this life [is] to educate and to graduate and have a job and have a family.”…

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? All she wants the public to know is that she, and all the Palestinians, only want to “live a normal peaceful life.” All they want is their “rights and to live peacefully.” But she’s lying. That’s not what she wants. She wants, her many social media posts reveal, for the Jewish state to disappear, and for the Jews — not only Israelis — to be killed.

Throughout Hamas’ October 7 slaughter, Dunia Abu Rahma both tweeted and reposted several tweets supporting the massacres.

Soon after the Hamas assault began in the early morning, Abu Rahma tweeted “Good morning. I wanted them to loot and liberate the country in my graduation year.”

A couple of hours later, she posted two tweets in succession. One read: “He really freed the prisoners!” This is presumably a reference to the hordes of Hamas terrorists and local Gazans who were rampaging through Israeli communities at the time.

The second post was a quote tweet of a video of a brutal lynching of an Israeli soldier on the streets of Gaza with the caption: “On my own, I go down and beat him with them.”

Yes, she missed the fun of joining a bunch of Hamas goons in tormenting and torturing — and almost certainly killing — a lone Israeli soldier. Too bad she couldn’t have been there. She can dream, can’t she?

Later, she tweeted happily about the border with Israel being overrun, saying in one tweet that she was planning on transferring from her university in Gaza to Bir Zeit (a university in the West Bank) and tweeting later that “In this case, we will pray at Al-Aqsa [in Jerusalem] next Friday.”

On October 7, Dunia Abu Rahma also reposted several tweets by other accounts celebrating the carnage.

One read: “It looks like a blessed Saturday, people of Palestine, good morning” while another mentioned that “One’s heart flutters with joy with every missile that comes out.”

And her heart, too, fluttered with joy, as rocket after rocket was launched from Gaza into the cities of southern Israel. How many Jewish deaths, how much Jewish destruction!

She also reposted an image allegedly of Hamas taking IDF captives captioned “Blessed October” as well as an image of a bloodied Israeli female teenager being manhandled by terrorists with a caption justifying the vicious treatment of Israeli women by Hamas….

Yes, how exciting, how exhilarating, seeing IDF soldiers taken captive, and even more wonderful to see brave fighters of Hamas tormenting them, or better still, having their way with Israeli girls, raping them to their hearts’ content. How good to see the yahudim brought low, tormented, tortured, and killed!

In one tweet, Abu Rahma posts “May God forgive you, Hitler. I wish you had finished with this group of people who went astray.”…

No ambiguity there. It’s language from the Qur’an: The Jews are “those who went astray.” And here is Dunia Abu Rahma, wishing that Hitler had not just murdered six million of them, but finished with all of them. What does Anderson Cooper think, now that he realizes he had on as a guest someone who praises Hitler for murdering Jews, and only wishes he had stayed in power long enough to finish the job?

In December 2021, she shared a video of a soccer game between Algeria and Tunisia and captioned it “The house of the Jews will be destroyed.”

In other words, so obsessive was Abu Rahma’s genocidal hatred of Jews that even a soccer match between two Arab teams, having nothing to do with Israel or Jews, could manage to set her off: “The house of the Jews will be destroyed.”

Along with her antisemitic posts, Dunia Abu Rahma has also called for the destruction of Israel.

Following a tweet that said, “We want a truce,” Abu Rahma commented “We want to get rid of it,” referring to Israel….

Abu Rahma makes clear she wants Israel to disappear. There is no other interpretation of her rejecting the possibility of a truce, and instead insisting that “we [the Palestinians] want to get rid of it.” Rid of Israel, that is.

She wants Israel in the future to disappear, so that “from the river to the sea” there will again be only the Arab state of Palestine. But there never was an Arab state of Palestine. Abu Rahma does not realize that Jews lived in this same area for at least 3000 years — that is, 1600 years before there was a single Muslim Arab in the Land of Israel or, indeed, anywhere.

What happened here was a failure of due diligence. Though both NBC News and CNN have enormous staffs, apparently no one thought it necessary to look into Dunia Abu Rahma’s own views before providing her with sympathetic airtime. Had they done so, they would have discovered she shares the views of Hamas, that is, an annihilationist attitude toward Israel. And they might then have chosen some other Gazans, less fanatical in their hatred of Israel, and of Jews, to interview. Perhaps they’ve learned a lesson at CNN and NBC News, now that Abu Rahma’s mental makeup has been exposed. They need to thoroughly check the social media posts of possible guests from Gaza. Will they do it? Knowing the American media, I doubt it.

Israeli Christian: ‘This is not a war for only Jews against Hamas. It’s the fight of light against darkness.’

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/israeli-christian-this-is-not-a-war-for-only-jews-against-hamas-its-the-fight-of-light-against-darkness;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Yes. But many Christians are blinded to this by a lingering and/or recrudescent antisemitism.

“Israeli Christian says Hamas isn’t just a danger to Jews: ‘Fight of light against darkness,’” by Kassy Dillon, Fox News, October 22, 2023:

Shadi Khaloul, a Christian Israeli, said he believes the ongoing war isn’t just between Jews and Hamas, but between those who defend the value of light against darkness.

A Christian and former Israel Defense Forces paratrooper said he believes Hamas is not just a danger to Jews, but also to followers of Jesus.

“We think that this is not a war for only Jews against Hamas,” Shadi Khaloul said. “It’s the fight of light against darkness.”…

“We, as Israelis, are fighting this fight together with Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze, Arameans like us,” Khaloul said. “We fight this together with Jews in order to defend the values of light of our actually common Judeo-Christian values that our democracies are built in.”

Khaloul, 47, is a part of the Christian Maronite Aramaic community that believes its members are descendants of Jesus’ early followers. Many pray in Aramaic — the language Jesus spoke — and do not identify as Arab….

“It’s not a war between Jews and them,” Khaloul said, referring to Hamas. “It’s a war between them and other people that are different from Hamas.”

Moderate Muslims are also “a target to be attacked,” according to Khaloul, citing Hamas’ attacks on members of the Palestinian political party Fatah….

“No one of the Christians wants to live under this jihadi Islamic regime that treats them as infidels, that treats them as … maybe fifth-class citizens,” Khaloul said.

He pointed out that the Christian population in Gaza has dramatically decreased under Hamas. It dropped from around 3,000 prior to 2007 to about 1,300, according to the University of Notre Dame.

“This is horrible. Because of Hamas, now the Gazan people are suffering,” Khaloul said. “It’s not because of Israel.”…