Brigitte Gabriel: The Brutal Details About Palestinians the Media Ignores

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” talks to Brigitte Gabriel, a national security expert and founder of Act for America, about her personal story of growing up in Lebanon when many Palestinian refugees entered the country; the importance of standing up against evil; the conflict between Lebanon and Israel and the role of the Palestinians in it; the Palestinians' aim to eliminate Israel; the Western world’s inability to see the situation clearly due to propaganda and a focus on feelings rather than logic; what to do about the Democrats calling for the importation of Palestinian refugees into America; and much more.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Proposes Censure Of Rashida Tlaib For ‘Anti-Semitic Insurrection’

On the House floor, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for alleged anti-Semitic statements and actions, and for leading an "insurrection" in the Cannon Building.

Biden is Obstructing Israel’s Fight Against Hamas

Behind the pro-Israel rhetoric are policies that help Hamas.

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-is-obstructing-israels-fight-against-hamas/;

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


After the Hamas massacre of over 1,000 Israeli men, women and children, President Biden and members of his administration appeared to be saying all the right things about the attack.

In reality, the Biden administration tied down the Israeli response, making airstrikes less effective, delaying a ground assault, resupplying Hamas, and slowing down military aid to Israel. Its intervention has made Israel less likely to destroy Hamas and more likely to lose lives.

There was always a great difference between Biden’s public and private responses.

Biden and administration officials began pressuring Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli officials to avoid civilian casualties almost right after the Hamas attacks. Warnings that were initially relayed in phone conversations were leaked to the media. And shortly after they became public warnings. During his speech, three days after the attacks, Biden introduced the emphasis on following the “laws of war” that everyone in his administration would echo.

Administration officials took up the theme with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin lecturing Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on “the importance of adhering to the law of war, including civilian protection obligations, and addressing the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

Avoiding civilian casualties while fighting terrorists whose defensive strategy is hiding behind civilians and embedding their infrastructure around mosques, schools, and hospitals is impossible. But as a result of Biden’s pressure campaign, Israel issued more warnings, allowing civilians, but also Hamas terrorists, to abandon areas and infrastructure they knew were targets.

But that still wasn’t good enough.

In his remarks in Israel and his prime-time speech to the nation, Biden scolded that “when America experienced the hell of 9/11, we felt enraged as well. While we sought and got justice, we made mistakes. So, I cautioned the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.”

The Biden administration returned to this theme of Israel as dangerous, lashing out with rage and prone to killing innocent people unless it was prevented from doing so by Washington D.C. Biden had not lectured Ukraine about not being blinded by rage, but Israel was another matter.

National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson limited the administration’s support to “necessary and proportionate action to defend its country and protect its people”. What the “proportionate” response to mass murder, torture, rape, and beheading was, went unmentioned.

Publicly, Biden’s trip to Israel was hailed as a show of support, but officials suggested to the media that it was seen as the only way to apply pressure on the Israeli government in person.

Biden’s conditions for the trip included Israel ending its ‘siege’ of Gaza, demanding that Israel continue to supply power and water, as well as allow convoys into the Hamas territory even while Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer admitted to CNN that there was no way to stop Hamas from making use of them. $100 million in aid to Gaza was promised by the Biden administration and its proposed aid package of $9 billion to Israel includes $9 billion in aid which can be utilized for the ‘Palestinians’. This ended Israel’s efforts to cut off supplies to Hamas.

The Biden trip was also contingent on Israel delaying its ground assault on Hamas originally planned for that week. Once Biden visited Israel, the ground assault was further delayed under pressure from the Biden administration which demanded that Israel first allow in aid convoys and give it time to properly secure American diplomatic facilities in the region.

Hamas was able to resupply through the aid convoys, but Israeli soldiers still couldn’t go in.

300,000 Israeli soldiers have been mobilized in a nation of 7 million. Ordinary people have closed their businesses, canceled their plans, and collapsed the economy.

Hamas is using this time to prepare more booby traps and a defense strategy for block-by-block fighting in Gaza City. Israel’s efforts to convince Gazans to leave were meant to prepare the ground for an assault. The longer a ground attack is delayed, the more soldiers will die.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had sought to carry out a first strike to decimate Hezbollah’s massive arsenal of rockets in Lebanon, but the Biden administration had vetoed that on the grounds that it would escalate the conflict and instead offered to deploy two aircraft carriers to potentially dissuade a Hezbollah campaign while limiting the fighting to Hamas.

Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terror group that controls Lebanon, instead has waged a lower-intensity conflict with Israel, killing soldiers and civilians, while threatening a larger one.

The ground assault on Hamas in Gaza continues to be postponed. The Biden administration has demanded that Israel have humanitarian plans fully implemented and a post-Hamas governance model in place before Israel can really send ground troops into Gaza.

But, as days pass, the population is trickling back in, which will mean far more civilian casualties. The Biden administration’s obsession with delaying an assault to wait for humanitarian aid would mean far more dead people if a full ground attack takes place. It would have saved more lives to quickly remove Hamas and provide aid than the other way around.

Seeing that the Biden administration had been effective in crippling Israel’s military response, Hamas began releasing a trickle of hostages to further slow down the Israeli operation. The Biden administration and the European Union have come out against a ground assault, now believing that diplomacy can free the hostages from Hamas. All that does is demonstrate to Hamas that having hostages is leverage that can be used to get Biden to stop an Israeli attack.

The hostages weren’t actually ‘hostages’ until Washington D.C. and Brussels made them so by blocking an Israeli ground assault on Hamas. Meanwhile, Iran’s Shiite-backed militias in Iraq and its Islamist allies around the Middle East began attacking and threatening American targets. The Biden administration once again gave in to the hostage situation by asking Israel to hold off its operation until it had managed to further secure American facilities. Why were these facilities not secured after Benghazi, the attacks on other diplomatic facilities on that same day, and years of rocket attacks by Iran’s militias on American facilities in Iraq, and what more can be done to secure them now? And how long will the process of securing them take? Who knows.

What is clear is that Biden demonstrated that Iran can take American facilities hostage across the region to force Washington D.C. to restrain Israel from destroying its terrorist organizations.,

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

Biden chose to tie $9 billion in military resupply to Israel to a $106 billion package of which $61 billion will go to Ukraine and another $14 billion to processing border invaders more rapidly. This had the intended effect of drastically slowing down aid to Israel while creating a crisis with House Republicans who question further aid to Ukraine and oppose Biden’s border policies.

By making Israel’s military resupply dependent on a much larger Ukraine aid package, Biden reinforced the primacy of the Ukraine war over Israel’s campaign against Hamas. While Biden has repeatedly scolded Israel about following the laws of war, no such criticism has been directed toward Ukraine even when sending cluster munitions and other controversial weapons.

Rather than providing military resupply to Israel as quickly as possible, Biden had taken it hostage for political profit, trying to turn pro-Israel voters against House Republicans. It’s a win-win strategy for the Biden administration which for once can position itself on the pro-Israel side of an issue while slowing down aid to Israel in order to delay its military response.

Biden’s rhetoric after the Hamas attack won praise, even from some Republicans, but his policies don’t match his words. While he spoke of backing an Israeli military campaign against Hamas, what his administration actually did was to cripple it. The warnings about civilian casualties encouraged Hamas to hide behind women and children while making Israeli air strikes less effective. The constant delays imposed on a ground operation in Gaza may scuttle it altogether or make it longer and more costly in the lives of Israeli soldiers.

Hamas hostage-taking was rewarded and if real fighting with Hezbollah breaks out, the lack of a first strike may prove to be an even more catastrophic disaster than the original Hamas attacks.

Finally, Biden promised rapid aid and instead turned it into a political game with Republicans to extract $61 billion for Ukraine and score some political points ahead of the 2024 election.

The Israeli government has tried to accommodate the Biden administration, but making its military response dependent on support from Washington D.C. will work out the same way that all past concessions, including those that allowed Hamas to win elections in 2006 and seize control of Gaza in 2007, have, leaving Israel with neither political support nor tactical options.

The greatest level of political support for a campaign against Hamas came right after the initial massacres. As time passes and the media barrages the public with Hamas propaganda like the hospital hoax, that support is disappearing and whatever support the Biden administration is promising will go with it.

Biden will take the admiring newspaper columns in Jewish weeklies and the ‘thank you’ letters sent to the White House, and tell Israel that it needs to wrap up its operation in a week or two. No matter how much Israel struggles to avoid killing civilians and how much aid it allows inside, his administration’s spokesmen will still blame civilian casualties and the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza for the withdrawal of support. And many American Jews will side with Biden.

The Israeli government is waiting around for a level of political support that will never come. It has learned nothing from the failure of past concessions. It is always easier for an administration to sell out Israel than to stand up to Muslim countries and the American Left.

If the Netanyahu government is to fulfill its promise of ending Hamas rule in Gaza, it will have to act sooner rather than later. And it will have to go ahead without Biden’s approval. If it does not, Hamas will remain in power and the politicians will build a bigger wall and rationalize that this time they will make sure that the Islamic terrorists don’t get through it.

Listening to the Biden administration won’t defeat Hamas: it will allow it to survive. And that injustice will disgrace the memory of the dead and threaten the survival of the Jewish State.

‘Mister Speaker’, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson is SECOND AMENDMENT Positive

SEE: https://www.ammoland.com/2023/10/mister-speaker-louisianas-mike-johnson-is-2a-positive;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

NSSF Congressional Report Card: Democrats Fail Miserably, iStock-1154438278
ABOVE: Congress 101 – Confirmation, Impeachment, Oversight, And Spending, iStock-1154438278

Louisiana Republican Congressman Mike Johnson, elected Speaker of the House Wednesday, is described as “a deeply conservative but lesser-known leader” by the Associated Press and Greensboro, NC News & Record, and a look at his record shows him to be squarely on the side of the Second Amendment.

According to NBC News, Johnson voted against Joe Biden’s “modest new gun law,” and his voting record “has earned him a lifetime rating of 92% from the American Conservative Union and 90% from Heritage Action.”

In November 2017, Johnson co-sponsored H.R. 38, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, issuing the following statement: “The constitutional right to keep and bear arms should not be confined by state lines. Our legislation ensures that law-abiding citizens who obtain a concealed carry permit are not denied their rights when traveling to other states. I am a concealed carry permit holder myself and will continue to support measures in Congress that preserve the Second Amendment.”

Earlier this month, he met with representatives of Women for Gun Rights, formerly known as the D.C. Project, posting a message on “X” (formerly Twitter), in which he reported, “It was great to catch up with the Women for Gun Rights representatives today to discuss the safeguarding of our Second Amendment rights.”

In July, he was among the sponsors of the Preserving Rights of Tenants by Ensuring Compliance to (PROTECT) the Second Amendment Act. According to an announcement from his office on July 25, this legislation “would secure the Second Amendment rights of Americans who live in rental properties whose landlords receive financial assistance from the federal government. More specifically, this proposal ensures that landlords and rental property managers cannot unlawfully restrict firearm ownership of tenants.

“Tenants’ Second Amendment rights should not be subject to the whims of a landlord or property manager, especially those receiving federal assistance,” Rep. Johnson said at the time. “I will always fight back against any effort to unlawfully restrict our constitutional rights.”

All of this suggests gun owners have a friend in Johnson, which may become more important in 2024 when gun rights versus gun control is destined to become part of the presidential and congressional election cycle.

The Waco Herald Tribune describes Johnson as “A lawyer specializing in constitutional issues.” He is conservative enough to have gained the support of maverick Republicans who have kept the House in what some have described as “chaos” over the past 20-plus days since Rep. Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker.

The Second Amendment has been under attack since Biden took office in January 2021. He famously declared during a CNN Townhall broadcast that he wanted to prohibit the sale of not only modern semiautomatic rifles but also 9mm pistols, probably the two most popular firearms in the country. The Second Amendment Foundation has used the video clip of him saying so as the centerpiece in a series of television advertisements for more than a year.

According to Fox News, Johnson picked up the Speaker’s gavel with 220 votes over the 209 cast by lockstep Democrat for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. If that vote signaled anything, it is that Democrats hold their ranks tight—much tighter than the majority Republicans—which could spell trouble for Johnson and his GOP caucus allies heading into 2024.

As reported Wednesday by TheGunMag.com, the three main contenders to replace the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein are all anti-gun California members of Congress. All three—Representatives Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee—returned questionnaires to The Trace indicating they support so-called “universal background checks,” waiting periods on gun purchases, raising the minimum age for purchasing guns to 21 years, and support for a national “red flag” law.

While it may seem that gun rights and the Second Amendment remain intact on Capitol Hill, it is by the slimmest of margins, with Republicans controlling the House by a handful of votes, while the Senate remains under Democrat control.

Johnson was the fourth Republican nominee for the Speaker’s post. The Greensboro newspaper noted former President Donald Trump supports Johnson, which may or may not, be to his advantage as the House gets back to doing the people’s business over the next few months.


About Dave Workman

Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.

Dave Workman

Hey, I Finally Found Those Nazis!

Hey, I Finally Found Those Nazis!
(Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.)
It’s exhausting being called Nazis all the time when we’ve never once called for the extermination of an entire people, taken control of the press, or even just annexed the Sudetenland. Some days I’ve had to content myself by looking for The Real Nazis™ on the American Right like OJ Simpson looking for Nicole’s real killer by playing golf on fabulous courses.

It turns out that finding actual Nazis on the Right isn’t easy at all, not even with all those convenient fingers constantly pointing them out from the Left. I’m sure there are some over here, at least in theory, but they must be on the fringes of the margins on the very outer edge of our side.

ASIDE: Sure, there are those “alt-right” jerks, but it turns out that people who reject the ideals of great Americans like Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan don’t have much in common with actual conservatives — thank goodness.

But then came the Hamas Terror Invasion of Israel on October 7-8, and I figured that would have Nazis popping up all over the place. Nothing quite gets that National Socialist blood pumping like the slaughter, rape, desecration, and forcible removal of Jews, right?

Sure enough, since October 7 it’s been easy to find Nazis everywhere — and you don’t even have to squint. I found some last night at that bastion of right-wing nastiness called George Washington University.

“Glory to Our Martyrs” is a celebration of the Hamas terrorists who murdered and desecrated the body of a 30-year-old German tourist named Shani Louk for the crime of dancing her booty off at a music festival. It could also be seen as a call to violence against Jewish students and faculty at GWU.

I’d add that 22 Americans were murdered in Hamas’s little Nazi spree and that more were taken hostage, to be used as human shields — or as human sacrifices as necessary.

“Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” means the literal removal of Israel — IE, all the Jews — from the map of the Middle East. While it doesn’t explicitly call for the murder of all seven million Israeli Jews, it does ring a bell. German Nazis claimed that Europe’s Jews were being “resettled to the East,” if by “resettled” they meant very briefly so at extermination camps. Israeli Jews could possibly just swim away from their ancestral homeland, maybe to Siciliy or Gibraltar or somewhere.

Pretty ballsy coming from the same people demanding an end to “Zionist Genocide,” a thing that does not exist. I find myself in strong agreement with AC Spollen who tweeted, “Everyone involved should be expelled. If here on student visas, they need to be revoked. Immediately.” That’s pretty kind, actually, considering I was told not too long ago that it was perfectly OK to punch a Nazi.

In this video, you can see an actual Trump voter ripping down posters of missing Israeli children. I assume he must have taken off his MAGA hat as soon as he saw the camera.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, warned last week that campus antisemitism — pro-Nazism, if you ask me — is a common occurrence and “is all due to the institutional death-grip that woke progressives have on academia.”

Woke progressives? He must have spelled “conservative Republicans” wrong. I’m told that wokeness is just understanding and that progressivism means caring about everyone.

More seriously, on the actual Right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday “ordered the chancellor of the State University System of Florida to deactivate the ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ group.” Chancellor Ray Rodrigues wrote, “National SJP has affirmatively identified it is part of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood—a terrorist led attack,” and so Florida “contends that the groups are violating a state law that makes it felony to ‘knowingly provide material support… to a designated foreign terrorist organization.'”

Therefore, “the student chapters must be deactivated.”

Now that’s the way to punch a Nazi, and nobody even had to raise a hand.

Israel Calls for UN Chief’s Resignation After Comments Justifying Hamas Attack

Israel Calls for UN Chief's Resignation After Comments Justifying Hamas Attack
(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Israel is calling for the resignation of the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, for comments he made defending Hamas’s brutal attacks on Israel

After an obligatory reference to comments he says he made that “condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel,” Guterres took it all back.

Guterres said that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” pointing to “56 years of suffocating occupation” that the Palestinian people suffered. So “56 years of suffocating occupation” justifies beheading babies, raping women, murdering defenseless civilians, and then celebrating the bloody rampage?

Why yes, says Guterres. Yes, it does. Except when it doesn’t.

“The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” he added. “Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians — or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.”

What planet does this guy live on?

Sorry, Mr. Moral Pygmy. You can’t have it both ways. I’ve said several times when writing about this war that when politicians have tried to straddle the Hamas atrocities by practicing bothsidesism, they ignore the fact that this is an either/or question. Either you justify Hamas atrocities or you stand with Israel against the barbarians. There’s no “in-between.” There’s no middle ground. And politicians like Barack Obama and Guterres who attempt to split the moral difference end up being morally diminished.

The New York Sun editorial board tried to give voice to the rage and hurt inflicted on Israelis and Jews all over the world by those mealy-mouthed words.

The speech today by the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, blaming Israel for the attack on it by Hamas is one of the most shocking moments in the history of the world body. It absolutely infuriated Israel, its diplomats, and the Jewish community world wide. It is hard to imagine that the UN, already a deeply corrupted institution obsessed with Israel, can continue with business as usual.

We grasp that there was a certain diplomatic subtlety to the way Mr. Guterres couched his libel — a blood libel, at that.  There is no justification for the October 7 attack by Hamas, he said, and then justified it by claiming it “did not happen in a vacuum.” As our Benny Avni reports, he enumerated hardships inflicted on Palestinian Arabs. His remarks smacked of attempts by enemies of the Jews to suggest that the Jews deserved the Holocaust.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, responded to Guterres’s blood libel by fighting off tears while reading the names of the dead children murdered by Hamas in the October 7 attacks.

“Mr. Secretary-General, in what world do you live? Definitely, this is not our world.”

Later, Cohen said he would not meet with Guterres and that “there is no room for a balanced approach. Hamas must be erased from the world!”

Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign.

“The U.N. is failing, and you, Mr. Secretary-General, have lost all morality and impartiality. Because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism, and I think that the secretary-general must resign,” he said. “Because from now on, every day that he is here in this building, unless he apologizes immediately, today, we called him to apologize, there’s no justification to the existence of this building. ”

Would Israel leave the UN over this? Cohen seemed to hint it was a possibility. As long as Guterres remains as secretary general of the UN, Mr. Erdan told reporters, “there is no justification for this building.” He added that Israel will have to reassess its relations with the UN.

If Biden was truly “standing with Israel,” he would also call for Guterres’s resignation. But Biden is a Moral Pygmy too, and there’s no chance of that happening.

Guess Who Funded the Pro-Palestinian ‘Insurrectionists’ on Capitol Hill

Guess Who Funded the Pro-Palestinian ‘Insurrectionists’ on Capitol Hill
AP Photo/Tony Dejak
Last week a group of pro-Palestinian protestors stormed the Cannon House Office Building and staged a protest inside the Rotunda. Protests are not allowed in congressional buildings, so they had no right to be there. Roughly 300 of these protesters were arrested for illegally demonstrating, and a few more were charged with assaulting police officers.

The protest, which promptly met the qualifications of an insurrection (according to Democrats), was organized by the supposed “Jewish” organizations Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow. How Jewish are these groups in reality? I dare say very little.

IfNotNow claims to be an organization of Jews but doesn’t appear to have any good relations with longstanding Jewish advocacy groups. Similarly, JVP is likely no more Jewish than Joe Biden. JVP doesn’t even claim to be an organization exclusively for Jewish anti-Zionists but merely “an organization that is inspired by Jewish values and traditions to work towards peace and justice.”

How did such fringe groups acquire the resources to stage a massive protest at the Capitol? Just follow the money, which leads us to George Soros.

“Through Soros’s philanthropic work, JVP was awarded several grants totaling $650,000 that bankrolled its ‘human rights’ campaign and ‘social welfare activities’ in the Middle East, according to a grant database maintained by the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the central hub of the financier’s anti-capitalist, redistributionist network,” writes Mia Cathell over at our sister site Townhall. “The Soros-branded Open Society Policy Center Inc. — once the second-largest spender on federal lobbying after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — donated $150,000 and $200,000 in 2021 and 2019, respectively, to the Jewish Voice for Peace Action Incorporated, JVP’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3). And, in 2017, Soros’s primary grant-giving vehicle, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, gifted JVP $300,000.”

For our VIPs: In the Soros Justice System, No Conservative Is Safe

IfNotNow has also been the beneficiary of Soros’s money. “Soros’s grant-making Foundation to Promote Open Society handed $200,000 in 2019 and another $200,000 in 2021 to the 501(c)(3) IfNotNow Education Fund for growing membership, visibility, and impact around ‘general support’ to end Israeli ‘occupation in the Middle East’ (meaning the eradication of Israel), Open Society Foundations grant records show.”

Should we really be all that surprised that Soros’s hand is in all this? Soros-funded prosecutors have been weaponizing the justice system against Trump and conservatives; with all of his resources, it’s a no-brainer to imagine that he’s funding various organizations that are causing civil unrest. For decades, Soros has made his intentions about using his wealth and resources to advance leftist causes clear. His handpicked prosecutors are trying to put Trump behind bars as we speak. Before long, none of us will be safe from the clutches of the web of corruption funded by Soros.

The real question is, what are we going to do about it? The first step in defeating your enemies is knowing where they are. That’s why we at PJ Media will continue to do our part to report the truth and expose those who have been corrupted by George Soros and his empire. We are not afraid to call them out, but we need your help if we’re ultimately going to succeed.

Big Tech, which doesn’t want the truth exposed, routinely hampers our efforts. Outlets censor our reporting and demonetize us for daring to speak the truth. Our very existence is under threat  Join us in our fight by becoming a PJ Media VIP member today. Use promo code SAVEAMERICA to receive 50% off your membership. Together, we can make a difference.

How the Hamas Attack Took Israel by Surprise

Not just Israel’s 9/11 -- also its Tet Offensive.

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-hamas-attack-took-israel-by-surprise/;

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


A week before its attack Hamas agreed to another truce with Israel. The agreement negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations traded an end to border attacks for more imports, a bigger fishing zone, and more work permits that allowed 20,000 Gaza Muslims to enter Israel.

The agreement reached between Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and Sukkot, the conclusion of the High Holy Days season, offered an end to the explosives and rocks being hurled at Israeli soldiers on the border and the incendiary balloons starting fires on Israeli farms. And terrorist attacks on civilians like the murder of Batsheva Nigri: a kindergarten teacher shot and killed while driving in her car with her 12-year-old daughter.

Qatar, a state sponsor of Hamas and an ally of the United States, claimed that it had “succeeded in de-escalating the situation in the Gaza Strip by mediating an understanding.”

Hamas ended the border riots and Israelis went into the Sukkot holiday with an apparent calm. The Israeli army and security forces continued to focus on the West Bank, where much of the violence appeared to be coming from, rather than the Gaza Strip which seemed quiet.

But the border attacks and the negotiated ceasefire had all been part of a feint. Hamas had been working on a large-scale attack for two years. During this time it had calculatedly tamped down some of the violence and appeared amenable to informal truces in exchange for benefits.

When Hamas began conducting exercises on kidnapping Israelis and “storming settlements” in plain sight in September 2023, experts dismissed it as posturing to extract more concessions. In an article five days before the attacks, the default assumption by a Western diplomat and Israeli defense officials was that Hamas was running short of money and an infusion of Qatari cash along with more work permits, which brought $2 million a day into Gaza, would appease it.

An expert quoted in the media described Hamas border violence as a “tactical way of generating attention about their distress. It’s not an escalation but ‘warming up’ to put pressure on relevant parties that can come up with money to give to the Hamas government.”

It was in this state of tactical blindness, the equivalent of America’s obliviousness before 9/11, that the Hamas attacks executed on the conclusions of the High Holy Days took place.

Israel did not entirely drop its guard. Army units were still watching the border and a unit of the Shin Bet, its domestic security agency, had been dispatched in anticipation of an attack. There had been warnings that something was coming, but in line with previous attacks, the most Israeli security personnel anticipated was a 7-10 man incursion by a Hamas strike force.

No one expected over 2,000 terrorists breaking through at multiple points for a full-scale invasion of neighboring Israeli towns and communities. But they should have.

The Hamas campaign has been described as Israel’s 9/11, but it has more of an analogy to another disaster in America’s military history. In January 1968, Communist forces in Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, taking advantage of a local holiday truce and the conviction of American military leaders that enemy forces were not capable of an attack on that scale.

The ambition of the attack took everyone by surprise. The Viet Cong were able to attack even the U.S. embassy in Saigon and take control of cities like Hue where they murdered and tortured whomever they pleased. While the Tet Offensive failed, it broke the morale of the Vietnamese and helped end Democratic Party support for the Vietnam War.

Like the Tet Offensive, the Hamas attacks violated a cease-fire and depended on diverting Israel’s attention away from the Gaza border and to the West Bank. The border riots and the agreement had lulled Israel into a false sense of security about the scale of Hamas ambitions. Like the Tet Offensive, rocket attacks were followed by a large-scale assault targeting populated areas deeper inside Israel that were not properly hardened. Gazan workers who had been given work permits guided the Hamas terrorists with information about those communities.

Israeli deployments at the Gaza border had been aimed at countering the two usual scenarios over the years: attacks across the border and infiltration by small groups. During border riots, a limited number of IDF soldiers would warn off the rioters, often by firing in the air, and snipers would be on watch for long range attacks. The border fence had been built to block any but the most determined infiltrators and to quickly alert response teams to any incursions. In the event that the border fence was breached, Israeli special units would quickly intercept the terrorists.

In these scenarios, a relatively small number of soldiers could secure the border. No one had planned for a third scenario or brought in sufficient numbers of soldiers to cope with it. Like most militaries, the IDF had focused on winning the wars as they were being fought now.

And that is always a fatal error.

The border fence had been designed to alert Israel to individual breaches so that military forces could quickly converge on the area. But now there were far more breaches than forces. While overwhelmed Israeli border forces tried to stop the invaders, more of them were breaching at multiple points and heading toward their real targets: communities inside Israel.

Unlike the Jewish communities that had existed in Gaza before the disastrous ‘disengagement’ that forced them out in the name of peace or the Jewish ‘settlements’ in the West Bank, the ‘kibbutzim’ were not especially hardened. Whereas Jewish ‘settlements’ tend to be more religious and heavily armed, the equivalent of small towns in Texas, the communities near Gaza attacked by Hamas were more approximately Boston suburbs. They were not entirely helpless: but they were dependent on security teams who kept weapons in a central location.

The Hamas terrorists, who had used the Gaza work permits to gain detailed intelligence on their targets, were well aware of this. Security in these communities had been set up to cope with the usual threat of one or two terrorists but was completely unready for 70 or 90 heavily armed attackers with detailed maps of their targets and a plan to secure their objectives. And that included knowing where the security teams and IDF personnel in those communities lived.

In some communities, members of security teams and ordinary civilians heroically fought back. The story of Inbar Lieberman, a 25-year-old woman who served as the security coordinator for Kibbutz Nir Am, who rallied her neighbors, killed 5 terrorists, and saved the kibbutz has been widely told. But other communities were not so lucky. That was where the massacres happened.

The system fell apart and those on the ground improvised. Troops on the ground used WhatsApp to request fire support from choppers. Commando units used WhatsApp groups to locate veterans with military experience and deploy them to targeted areas. “Suburbanites and urbanites, including some retirees, simply holstered their guns, jumped in their cars, and drove maniacally down South – saving their kids, their grandkids, or mere strangers.”

Where the IDF had been overwhelmed and tied down, an informal IDF of veterans stepped into the breach. And without them, Hamas might have achieved its overall objectives.

Hamas had waited two years and deployed over 2,000 terrorists not just to carry out a few large scale massacres, but to seize and secure the targeted communities as forward operating bases, expanding its territory, and seeking to move beyond them in a battle for all of Israel. Its Jihadis wore cameras and recorded their atrocities to use them as a rallying call to summon Arab Muslims in the West Bank and inside Israel’s ‘Green Line’ to join a battle for all of Israel.

The ultimate plan was “to seize the Gaza corridor and open a pathway to Tel Aviv”: a not unthinkable distance of 44 miles away. Hamas moving its atrocities to Tel Aviv would have been the perfect equivalent of the Tet Offensive.

As the Hamas attacks were underway, Al Jazeera reported that mosque “minarets in the West Bank began making calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ in an expression of support” and “massive processions set out in a number of places in the West Bank…  in Jenin, Tubas, Ramallah… in Hebron, and Bethlehem… to celebrate the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ battle.”

The images of the hostages, the kidnapped children and abused women were intended to panic Israelis and convince Arab Muslims to join a battle on the verge of being won. The Hamas message was that Israel was weak and ripe for destruction. But no real support arrived. Despite its initial victories and massacres, Hamas was unable to sustain its momentum. Like the Tet Offensive, the High Holy Day atrocities were a political victory and a military defeat.

Estimates are that Hamas left behind as many as 1,500 dead inside Israel and more along the border. The Jihadiis, fueled by captagon, known as “the drug of jihad”, a popular amphetamine in the Middle East mass produced by the Assad regime in Syria, and widely used by Islamic terror groups from ISIS to Hezbollah, felt invulnerable and gleefully tortured, mutilated and raped their way across communities, heady with the conviction that they could not be stopped.

The captagon high of ‘poor man’s cocaine’ also made them slow to respond as the tide of battle turned. Many fought and died rather than strategically pull back. A surprise attack had turned into a rout. Like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the larger plans of Hamas resembled those of most Islamists whose military strategies were rooted in a mixture of Marxist guerrilla tactics, Mohammed’s conquests and prophecies of final battles when the end times arrive.

Islamic terrorists and guerrillas execute an attack in the expectation that the larger ummah of the Muslim world will rally to their banners. Islamists like Marxists see all battles as primarily ideological. Victory or defeat in any individual battle is less important than raising morale, terrifying enemies and using that to generate recruitment. The Marxist and Islamist guerrilla aims not as much at winning battles as maintaining a higher level of morale and staying power.

Hamas had won and lost before. Each time it emerged with more financing, fame, and manpower. To defeat Maoist forces in the field, you have to actually destroy them. Or make them completely irrelevant. The Tet Offensive had failed at achieving its military objectives, but demonstrated how the Communists intended to win. That is what Hamas had also set out to do.

Israel had spent so much time focusing on Hamas tactics that it lost track of the terrorist group’s actual long-term objectives. That is a mistake that it cannot afford again with either Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, or any of the Islamic terrorist groups that it is confronting. Washington’s bad habit of looking at Islamic terrorists through the eyes of realpolitik had rubbed off on Jerusalem. Believing that Islamists want what we all want, that Hamas considerations were driven by $2 million a day or fishing zones rather than a religious mandate to destroy Israel was an error.

Counterterrorism is inherently reactive. Israel excelled at counterterrorism, but that success was also a trap. While the Israelis built better mousetraps, they had come to think of the enemy as a mouse. The more they reacted to what Hamas was doing, the better able they were to stop it in the short term, but the more they lost track of countering its larger plans in the long term.

Islamists engage in terrorism, but it was a catastrophic mistake to think of Hamas as merely a terrorist group and to reduce it to its tactics. The Hamas attacks discarded terrorism and turned to guerrilla warfare, drawing on everything from classic Mohammedan warfare to ISIS attacks to Marxist campaigns in Southeast Asia. Hamas stepped out of the box to launch an operation that overwhelmed Israeli forces still thinking of it in terms of counterterrorism rather than all-out war.

To win a war, you must know the enemy. Israel had lost sight of who its enemy really was. But so has every nation in the free world facing a religious war that is over a thousand years old.

Why Israel Still Hasn’t Started its Ground Operation in Gaza

What's Biden up to, exactly?

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-still-hasnt-started-its-ground-operation-in-gaza/;

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


[Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

What’s taking so long? Why hasn’t Israel moved into Gaza and begun to obliterate Hamas? The answer, I’m afraid, is drearily predictable.

The death toll for the Hamas jihad massacres in Israel has now climbed over 1,400, yet over two weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks that appalled the world, the promised Israeli ground offensive has not yet materialized. The reason for the delay can be summed up in what the man who claims to be president would say were two words, and those words are that same man’s name: Old Joe Biden.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that “U.S. and European governments have joined to put pressure on Israel to hold off on its ground invasion of Gaza to allow more time to win the release of hostages held by Hamas, U.S. and foreign officials said.” That pressure almost certainly originates from the Biden regime, which showed its hostility to Israel from the beginning by restoring aid to the Palestinians after Trump had stopped that aid in view of their continuing support for jihad terror, and which reaffirmed that hostility just days ago, when Old Joe went all the way to Israel to stab our most reliable Middle East ally in the back and announce that he was giving $100 million to Gaza, which means, despite his denials, $100 million to Hamas.

Meanwhile, the Journal adds that “several countries have been trying to leverage their contacts with Hamas to press the militant group to release the hostages taken during their onslaught on Israel earlier this month. One U.S. official had said that Qatar’s government had been very helpful on the matter, but noted the difficulties of reaching an agreement given Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the spiraling humanitarian crisis there.”

Yeah, that may be gumming up the works. Another problem may be that Qatar is quite chummy with Hamas. On the day of the jihad massacres in Israel, Hamas leaders were videoed in a plush office in Qatar, watching news of the attacks and then getting down on their knees to give thanks to Allah for the wanton butchery of Israeli civilians. Qatar is a principal backer of the Muslim Brotherhood. In its charter, Hamas (which is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.”

So how can Qatar be “very helpful” in getting Hamas to release the hostages? Only in ways that benefit Hamas and harm Israel. One way to do that is for Qatari negotiators to drag their feet in carrying out negotiations over these hostages, giving Hamas time to prepare for an Israeli ground invasion. In making these preparations, they can likely use material that was delivered on the trucks full of “humanitarian aid” that Old Joe Biden strong-armed Benjamin Netanyahu into allowing through; Old Joe’s “humanitarian aid” to the Palestinians has been diverted to friends of terrorists before.

Every day the ground incursion is delayed, in fact, aids Hamas by giving it time to strengthen its defenses, set traps for Israeli soldiers, and stir up its populace with even more Jew-hatred and bloodlust than they get in ordinary times. At this point, it isn’t even completely certain that there will be any ground operation in Gaza at all, despite the fact that there can be no definitive end of Hamas without one, and so the bloody events of Oct. 7 will just be replayed on another day.

If, after all the delays, Israel does finally enter Gaza with ground troops, its operation will be hamstrung from the beginning. There will immediately be reports of civilian casualties. These reports don’t bother to inform the public that Hamas deliberately stages attacks from civilian areas in order to draw retaliatory fire it can use for propaganda purposes. Old Joe and his henchmen will immediately denounce Israel’s “disproportionate” response and call upon it to show “restraint,” while self-righteously reminding Netanyahu about “international law” that he is supposedly ignoring.

In reality, Israel has been called the most moral army in the world and takes immense care to avoid civilian casualties. Those casualties will come, however, if the Gaza ground operation ever does begin. Hamas will make sure of that. And then Israel will have to endure a chorus of international condemnation that may end up making it end operations short of its goal. That will mean the loss of more innocent lives in the future. But hey, endangering people and mortgaging their future — that’s what Old Joe Biden does.

The Case for Foreign National Deportation

Conditional citizenship is the only way to keep our Republic safe.

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-case-for-foreign-national-deportation/;

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


Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he will rescind student visas of foreign nationals in the U.S. and deport them to their home countries if they expressed support for Hamas terrorists’ attack against Israel.

In unequivocal terms, the presidential hopeful made it clear that the United States had no place for terrorist-supporting foreign nationals attending U.S. colleges and universities, as many pro-Palestinian student groups at various institutions across the nation release statements and organize demonstrations endorsing Hamas’ largest attack against Israel in decades.

“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”

DeSantis told them he will be “canceling your visa, and I’m sending you home” if he wins the presidency in 2024.

DeSantis’ statement comes against the backdrop of hundreds of pro-Hamas and Pro-Palestinian student rallies across the United States.

After the attack against Israel by Hamas on October 7, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement signed by about 30 student organizations that read, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and other pro-Palestinian student groups at many other universities, including George Washington University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Berkley, also released similar statements on the weekend of Hamas’ attack.

Many other pro-Palestinian student groups at institutions across the U.S. still have their statements posted online and continue to participate in protests celebrating Hamas’ attack.

This is all reminiscent of Britain in 2019. In that year Britain stripped ISIS terrorist Jack Letts (known as Jihad Jack) of his British citizenship. Letts also possessed Canadian citizenship. Since the Islamic State fell in March of 2019, Britain faced the horrific possibility of scores of ISIS terrorists returning to the UK. Letts had travelled to Syria when ISIS declared its “caliphate” in 2014; there he admitted to fighting on the frontline with SIS and offered himself as a suicide bomber. After being wounded, he grew disillusioned with ISIS.

He had stated that he hated his family for the sake of Allah, and that he was an enemy of the West, and that he wanted to decapitate a British soldier. The British people have never forgotten the perils of returning UK citizens who are also terrorists. Salman Abebi was allowed back into the UK after living in a war zone with his family. After returning to England he detonated a suicide bomb that claimed the lives of 22 people in Manchester. The youngest victim was only 8 years old.

Earlier in the year the UK government also stripped Shamima Begum of her citizenship after she left her home in East London in 2015 at the age of 15 and married an Islamic fighter in Syria. No one forced her to marry and leave the UK.

In the case of Jihad Jack in England and the revocation of his citizenship, and of Shamima Begum, we should be impelled to think about the conditions and circumstances in the United States that legitimize DeSantis’ intentions. One ought to be grateful to the United States for the privilege of being a student here. By what infernal impertinence would one dare aspire to be in America and espouse support of her sworn enemies? Let us remember that the Charter/Covenant of Hamas not only calls for the elimination of Jewry from the region and the world, and the obliteration of Israel. It calls for the establishment of a Global Caliphate which would see—among other horrific occurrences—the destruction of Christianity and Judaism from the United States.

America will produce its own homegrown terrorists. Why would we import and support foreign nationals who come with a burning hatred of this country that runs so deep they would support terrorist groups that seek the destruction of the West – Israel and the United States in particular?

When I applied for US citizenship after years of being a legal immigrant by virtue of having a green card, I was asked a few citizenship-disqualifying questions. One was whether I had ever been a member of any communist party in the United States; the other was if I had ever advocated and practiced polygamy. These questions were important ones. Polygamy challenged the fundamental tenets of the version of Judeo-Christianity on which most American religious values were based. Communism was and remains inimical to the political and economic DNA of this country. Its political antipode—capitalism—is the bedrock on which our socio-political and economic systems are derived. To promote the antithesis of such foundational systems would be to destroy the United States as we know it and as it ought to be.

I might go further than DeSantis. I would call for the revocation of citizenship of naturalized persons who not only support Hamas, the Taliban, and communism but who, by whatever means and through whatever medium, communicate a deep hatred for the United States.

We are in the midst of a civilizational crisis. It is time to close ranks and revert to type – that is, revert to being patriotic Americans. The right to demean and belittle the United States is not the first right granted to foreign nationals when they are graciously allowed on American soil. Given the war on the West, and the attacks on American civilization on so many fronts, I would recommend that each foreign national student be thoroughly vetted for any anti-American sentiments before entrance into our universities. They must sign a loyalty oath mandating them to defend—if called upon to do so—the reputation of the United States which has granted them refuge, an education, and a chance to make something of their lives which most of them were denied in their home countries. And let us not forget one thing: immigration is not a right; it is a privilege.

If we made naturalized citizenship conditional by literally requiring aspiring citizens to sign a pledge of allegiance and something on the order of a non-disclosure clause that prohibits them from making, not legitimate and rational criticisms of the state but rather, hateful invectives against our republic, we might see a reduction in the proclivities for defamation and destruction among many naturalized immigrants from certain groups who use and abuse this country, who become Americans or permanent residents for reasons of political and economic expediency—such as the 9-11 terrorists.

The time has come for great purges because in a civilizational war when the enemies announce themselves in the open and act with impunity, we must act in the spirit of self-preservation and exercise justice. Why should Americans live in fear of foreign nationals, supercilious young people, many of whom can barely write a term paper, but who want to dictate the terms of our domestic and foreign policy? By what right?

The recommendations laid out here call for a massive re-examination of our refugee and immigration policies. We not only need skilled and growth-enhancing immigrants, we need patriots—folks who love America before they even arrive on her shores. We want immigrants who are assimilable and willing to adapt themselves to American culture and values and to grow into becoming Americans. People who, in the end, will see no distinction between their moral identities and their American identities. These are the vanguards and sentinels who will help us rebuild our crumbling civilization and defeat the nihilists and value junkies from assuming ascendancy in our country.

If such recommendations seem harsh, look around you and consider the results. If you feel fearful of posting your value-laden views on social media for fear that you could be harmed by any sinister monster lurking in the shadows, ask yourself: Why? Why should our universities be the breeding ground for hatred, for bullying, for the celebration of the murder of innocent victims? Why should the universities and their students contribute to radicalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism at the expense of the American people? And why should the visitors to our country, or those on whom citizenship was bestowed as a gift, start dictating the terms of their visit, and be given the freedom to participate in rewriting the American narrative which then determines a redefined way of life for us? One alien to the essence of who we are.

When guests in your own country begin to make you feel as if you cannot understand the order of your home any longer, then, in the words of the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Schold—“Unfortunately, they cannot stay.”

‘AMERICA, WE HEAR YOU’: House Speaker Mike Johnson pledges ‘clarity and conviction’

 

Mike Johnson addresses Congress after being elected House speaker

Mike Johnson Wins House Speaker Vote

WASHINGTON, DC - OCTOBER 25: U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) applauds alongside fellow lawmakers as the House of Representatives holds an election for a new Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol on October 25, 2023 in Washington, DC. After a contentious nominating period that has seen four candidates over a three-week period, the House GOP conference selected Johnson as their most recent nominee to succeed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was ousted on October 4 in a move led by a small group of conservative members of his own party. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) applauds alongside fellow lawmakers as the House of Representatives holds an election for a new Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol on October 25, 2023, in Washington, DC. After a contentious nominating period that has seen four candidates over a three-week period, the House GOP conference selected Johnson as their most recent nominee to succeed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who was ousted on October 4 in a move led by a small group of conservative members of his own party. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

OAN’s Sophia Flores
10:52 AM – Wednesday, October 25, 2023

https://www.oann.com/newsroom/mike-johnson-wins-house-speaker-vote/;

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

The House has voted for Representative Mike Johnson to become the next Speaker of the House.

On Wednesday, in a unanimous vote, the House of Representatives voted for Johnson (R-La.) to fill the vacant speaker role.

Former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was removed from his position after a historic vote on October 3rd. The House has been without a speaker for 22 days.

After a variety of nominees from the Republican party, Johnson won the party’s nomination late on Tuesday night. Prior to him winning the role, Steve Scalise (R-La.) was nominated. However, he dropped out before he was voted on by the House.

Later, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) won the party’s nomination and was voted on three times in the House. Yet, with each round of voting, he garnered less support from members of this party.  

Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the nomination after Jordan.

Soon after the announcement, 45th President Donald J. Trump took to his Truth Social social media account and bashed the representative by calling him a “Globalist RINO.” He also went on to say that Emmer was “out of touch with Republican voters.”

The Minnesota representative soon dropped out of the race following the former presidents' opposition.

This is a breaking story. Check back for updates.

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

_________________________________________________________

We Have a New House Speaker

BREAKING: We Have a New House Speaker
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Well, ladies and gentlemen, the drama is over. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), the latest candidate offered by the Republican caucus, was elected as the new Speaker of the House on Wednesday. After weeks of chaos, Republicans finally rallied behind their fourth speaker-designee on Wednesday afternoon. Johnson replaces former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was ousted earlier this month.Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the interim speaker, declared Johnson the “duly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives” after the vote. There were no defections from Republican lawmakers this time around, with Johnson getting 220 votes.

Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries was also there and got 209 votes from his unified party. Democrats had hoped that Republican infighting might open up an opportunity for GOP defectors to elect Jeffries as speaker, but their dreams were shattered.

The New York Times appeared to lament the results, not only noting that Johnson is “the most junior lawmaker in decades to become speaker” but also that he may be “the most conservative.”

Previous: Fourth Time’s the Charm in the Speaker Vote?
For our VIPs: Wake Me Up When We Have a Speaker

“An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson is the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee and sponsored legislation to effectively bar the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity at any institution serving children younger than 10 that receives federal funds,” wrote Catie Edmondson of the New York Times. “He served on former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment defense team, played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, and was an architect of Mr. Trump’s bid to object to certifying them in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.”

“We will restore trust in this body. We will advance a comprehensive conservative policy agenda, combat the harmful policies of the Biden administration, and support our allies abroad,” Speaker Johnson said in a statement moments ago.

Many challenges await the new speaker, including government funding running out on November 17. One key issue facing Johnson will be aid to Israel. The Biden administration has sought to link aid to Israel with more aid to Ukraine. Biden recently sent a $100 billion aid request to Ukraine and Israel, most of which was allowed for Ukraine and much of it not even to assist its war effort against Russia. While Johnson has supported aid to Ukraine in the past, he has opposed recent efforts to continue throwing even more aid there.