Month: January 2024

Biden Blunders Towards Nuclear War By Arming Iran With Top Secret Hit List~How Worse Can It Get?~US B-52 bombers prepare for a massive airstrike on Iran

In today's special report, we dive deep into the Biden administration's latest debacle, which endangers our troops and national security. Discover how Biden's strategy, or lack thereof, contrasts sharply with the decisive actions of former President Trump. We'll unravel how Biden's missteps have escalated tensions in the Middle East to levels not seen since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's warnings underline the dire situation. Our report sheds light on the crucial need for Trump's foreign policy approach in these perilous times. Tune in for an unfiltered, conservative analysis of this unfolding crisis and understand why America's security demands a return to stronger leadership. Don't miss our final thought, a critical insight into why this story matters deeply to every American.

Iran Nervous! US B-52 bombers prepare for a massive airstrike on Iran after deadly strike on US base

Time To Shut Down UNRWA?

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/time-to-shut-down-unrwa#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Now twelve countries — the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Estonia, Austria, and Japan — have decided to suspend their payments to UNRWA, prompted by the revelation that at least a dozen members of that Agency’s staff took part in the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. That’s a start, but it is not enough.

It is time to consider shutting down UNRWA, which as an organization has long been a willing collaborator with the terror group. It has never protested when Hamas has used its facilities, including schools, to hide its weapons and fighters, and to use as redoubts, from which to launch rockets into Israel, or to fire on the IDF; UNRWA resources have been diverted by Hamas, to be used to build tunnels; thousands of UNRWA teachers have celebrated online the October 7 attacks. More on the UNRWA teachers who instruct their pupils in violent antisemitism, have long been implicated in supporting Hamas, and have recently been exulting in the Hamas terror attacks on October 7, can be found here: “The UN’s Terrorism Teachers,” by Hillel C. Neuer, The Free Press, January 28, 2024:

…On Friday [Jan. 26], UNRWA said it had fired some employees accused of participating in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel. Over the weekend, in an unprecedented rebuke of the agency, more than a dozen of its donor states, including the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, announced their suspension of funds to UNRWA. The latest revelations follow numerous other reported cases of UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas terrorism….

UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”

UNRWA exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which since World War II has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world, and has worked toward their resettlement and relocation, UNRWA deals only with the Arabs from Palestine and has a completely different objective.

Millions of Palestinians who attend UNRWA schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza are taught that the war of 1948 is not over, and that they have a “right of return”—meaning, to dismantle and take over Israel….

UN Secretary General António Guterres said he was “horrified” to discover that UNRWA employees participated in the invasion and massacre of October 7. But in reality, their actions merely translated UNRWA’s core message into action.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what thousands of UNRWA teachers in Gaza say among themselves.

Earlier this month, Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger discovered a Telegram chat group of UNRWA educators in Gaza. “Let me tell you,” he quipped on X, ”they sure do love Hamas and October 7th.” Saying he didn’t have the time to examine the material, he tagged me to ask if we could take it on.

We did. What we found was a chat group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers with discussions about when to expect their next UNRWA salaries mixed together with messages, photos, and videos celebrating the Hamas massacre of October 7, and other acts of terrorism.

My colleagues at UN Watch worked diligently with professional Arabic translators to sift through more than 249,000 user posts in the chat group.

Tomorrow [Jan. 30] I will present our findings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, at a joint hearing of its subcommittees on oversight and international organizations. It’s not pretty. UNRWA teachers routinely encourage and promote Hamas terrorism.

Here’s a sneak preview:

Safaa Mohammad Al Najjar, a computer teacher at UNRWA’s Moghraqa Prep Girls School in Rafah, Gaza, is a highly active administrator in the Telegram group, and routinely praises terrorism against Jews. On the morning of October 7, at 7:33 a.m., Al Najjar excitedly celebrated the Hamas massacre. Sharing video footage of the attacks, she exclaimed, “Resistance on the roof of settlers’ houses,” and she added a red heart emoji. She praised the Hamas “holy warriors” (Mujahideen) as they massacred, mutilated, and raped Israelis.

Another administrator of the Telegram group is UNRWA English teacher Abdallah Mehjez. According to his LinkedIn profile, he previously worked for the BBC. On October 13, Mehjez shared a message from the Hamas Interior Ministry, urging Gazans to stay put and ignore Israeli messages calling on them to evacuate for their safety. In other words, an UNRWA teacher was doing Hamas’s work urging Gaza civilians not to leave harm’s way, and instead to effectively serve as human shields.

Despite all their required “neutrality” training, other UNRWA teachers serving as administrators in the group also have no compunction about declaring their support for the murder of Jews.

On the morning of October 7, administrator Israa Abdul Kareem Mezher, an elementary school Arabic language teacher in Gaza, posting under the username “Sun of Sunshine,” ecstatically celebrated the Hamas terrorists: “May Allah keep their feet steady and guide their aim”; “pray for the Mujahidin”; “God protect them and bring them back safe.” As news of the Hamas atrocities began to spread, Mezher cheered, “God is the greatest.”

When a group member wondered what these “heroes” were “brought up on,” Mezher replied: “They imbibed jihad and resistance with their mothers’ milk.” At 7:17 a.m., commenting on a photo of a dead Hamas terrorist, he wrote: “Our martyrs are in heaven, and their [Israeli] dead are in hell.” A few days later, on October 10, this UNRWA teacher endorsed a call for Hamas to execute their Israeli hostages….

American audiences are regularly assured by UNRWA officials that the agency operates “on the principles of neutrality, impartiality, independence and humanity.” So wrote Elizabeth Campbell in The New York Times, in April 2019, when she served as UNRWA’s chief lobbyist in Washington. Today, she’s the Biden administration’s deputy assistant secretary of state dealing with refugees.

But as the Telegram group shows, this is simply not the case. In my report before Congress, I will identify more than 25 other UNRWA teachers in the chat group who celebrated jihadi terrorism and the murder of Jews….

UNRWA is so riddled with Hamas supporters that after completing their investigations, the Western donors may well call — as they ought to have done decades ago — for a wholesale cleaning of the Augean stables, or ideally, to shut down UNRWA altogether. Every staff member who has praised terrorism, beginning with the 3,000 teachers on that Instagram account who praised Hamas for its October 7 attack, should be discharged. Every staff member who knew about Hamas’ use of UNRWA facilities, and its theft of humanitarian aid in Gaza, and said nothing about either, should be let go. This slimmed down organization, ideally having replaced its bloated Palestinian staff — 13,000 in Gaza alone — with a much smaller professional staff consisting largely of non-Palestinians, should assume a different task: not to keep increasing the aid agency’s rolls but to steadily shrink them, by no longer treating the status of “Palestinian refugee” as an inherited trait, to be passed down to children, grandchildren, and so on, ad infinitum. Put a full stop to that policy, announcing that from now on no one will be added to the list of “Palestinian refugees.”

That’s what I’d call a good start.

Biden May Slow Weapons to Israel to Stop Its Campaign Against Hamas

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/biden-may-slow-weapons-to-israel-to-stop-its-campaign-against-hamas#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

But at least Biden did send over $2 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.

The Biden administration, Qatar and assorted countries are trying to hammer out a hostage deal that would free thousands of Hamas terrorists and effectively end Israel’s war against the terror group. Since Israel isn’t thrilled about the idea, the Biden administration is looking to apply pressure by using weapons shipments. And that’s why foreign aid to Israel exists.

Our defense industry is financed with foreign aid in the form of weapons shipments so that D.C. can then control the countries that receive those shipments. And decide when they can fight and when they can’t.

The Biden administration is discussing using weaponry sales to Israel as leverage to convince the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to heed long-standing U.S. calls to scale back its military assault in the Gaza Strip, according to three current U.S. officials and one former U.S. official.

At the direction of the White House, the Pentagon has been reviewing what weaponry Israel has requested that could be used as leverage, said the sources. They said no decisions have been made.

Mind you, we’re not even talking about the larger weapons package that Biden announced after the attacks.

The Biden administration tied that package to a much bigger package for Ukraine and a border “deal” that’s in oblivion. This is more in the way of regular resupply.

But the way our defense foreign aid setup works is on the razor blade or printer cartridge model. You get the system for what seems like a good deal, but whenever you need ammo, you have to turn to D.C. Whether you buy it or not, D.C. gets to decide. That’s what Taiwan is dealing with right now. And so the deal turns out not to be a good deal after all.

Right now Biden wants Israel to wind down the war on Hamas. Slowing down resupply means Israel will have to slow down, stop or shift its own operations to depending even more on ground personnel which will cost the lives of more soldiers. And it’s dealing with the possibility that if war breaks out with Hezbollah or other Iran proxies, it will be dangerously undersupplied.

But at least Biden did send over $2 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.

‘Disease X’ Preparations Launched; CCP Creates New Deadly Disease | Crossroads

Preparations for a so-called “Disease X”… these were among the discussions held at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos. And during the panel they had on this, global health authorities talked about setting up new plans and procedures to get ready for another global health crisis. Now, just to be clear, “Disease X” is technically the placeholder name they use for any kind of future unknown disease, and it’s being used, notably, as the concept of how we prepare for the next pandemic. Well look, you cannot cure something that doesn’t yet exist. So what are they referring to?

The Planet Is Saved Now: Climate Lunatics Throw Soup on the Mona Lisa

Robert Spencer | 5:07 PM on January 28, 2024
(Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.)
Climate activists are convinced that human irresponsibility has led to catastrophic warming of the planet, to the extent that people are starving. But now they’ve hit on a solution: deface the world’s great artworks with soup. On Sunday, the Mona Lisa got the treatment, and I feel cooler already.

Two women with t-shirts reading “Riposte Alimentaire,” that is, Food Counterattack, entered the Louvre in Paris, made their way to the Mona Lisa, and yelled: "What is more important? Art or the right to healthy and sustainable food? Your agricultural system is sick. Our farmers are dying at work."

This was a glimpse into the muddled mind of a leftist. The Mona Lisa has graced the world with its presence since the sixteenth century. When Leonardo da Vinci first painted it, he did not deny anyone the right to healthy and sustainable food by doing so. Nor does the renowned painting’s continued existence impoverish or starve anyone. And our agricultural system is indeed sick, not because of greedy capitalists heating up the planet, but because (for one thing) of socialist internationalists (like those of Riposte Alimentaire) who are forcing the closure of farms in Germany and the Netherlands, and destroying the livelihood of the farmers, in the name of climate action.

Nevertheless, despite their proclamation making no sense at all, they then proceeded to douse the protective glass that prevents terrorists like them from damaging the Mona Lisa with soup. But Riposte Alimentaire isn’t even alone in employing this lunatic tactic. Back in Oct. 2022, purple-haired climate doom fanatics from a group called Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup onto Vincent Van Gogh’s famed Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London, because it’s an oil painting. Really. That same month, activists hurled mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s Haystacks in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, before they glued their hands to the wall and settled in for a long day of climate hectoring, mythology, propaganda, and sloganeering. The Mosa Lisa has also been attacked before by a nut who smeared its protective glass with cake in May 2022.

It’s an annoying and stupid form of protest. Couldn’t all this soup (and mashed potatoes and cake) have gone to feed the starving people for which these leftists are supposedly agitating? In any case, there is going to be a lot more of it, and worse. One principal reason why this is so is that as this self-righteous and ignorant vandalism continues, authorities do little or nothing to stop it. At the Louvre on Sunday, all that museum security officials did was put black screens between the Riposte Alimentaire soup-throwers and the aghast museum visitors, who were then evacuated.

     Related: Leftist Lunatic in Lipstick and Wig Smears Mona Lisa With Cake to Save the Planet

Authorities are likely hesitant to act because they are essentially just as far to the left as the climate protesters. Riposte Alimentaire demanded the integration of "food into the general social security system," and an end to an economic system that "stigmatizes the most precarious and does not respect our fundamental right to food." They want the French government to give citizens (and almost certainly non-citizens as well) $162 a month for food, with no strings attached. Whether you work or don’t work, whether you’re productive or not, no matter what, you’ll get $162 for food. Who will have to pay for this? Riposte Alimentaire was too busy throwing soup to explain that.

Despite their clear sympathy for the protesters, museums are likely to begin to institute more effective security measures. Then, however, the protesters are likely to up the ante as well. When they see that juvenile stunts in museums aren’t bringing the world back from the brink of the climate apocalypse they’ve been skillfully led to believe is on the horizon, they’re not going to stand down or reexamine their false premises. Instead, they’ll move from perpetrating what looks to be harmless pranks against artistic masterpieces to destroying them. On the one hand, leftists are tearing down statues of military and political heroes because of racism and other deviations from their political line. And meanwhile, they’re also targeting non-political artistic masterpieces to issue their lunatic calls for the implementation of socialism, a political ideology that has all too often been spectacularly oppressive and failed to bring economic justice.

Will the world’s artistic patrimony survive this madness relatively unscathed? We can hope.

Border agents caught 50 people on terror watchlist attempting to enter US so far in 2024

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/border-agents-caught-50-people-on-terror-watchlist-attempting-to-enter-us-so-far-in-2024; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

No one knows how many got through without getting caught, but we’re likely to find out eventually. Meanwhile, what happened to these fifty? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Biden regime were releasing them into this country.

“50 on terror watchlist caught amid Biden border invasion,” by Sara Higdon, Post Millennial, January 27, 2024:

On Friday, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) revealed its agents encountered 50 people who appeared on a terror watchlist attempting to cross the border into the U.S. illegally so far in fiscal year 2024.

According to its website, CBP encountered 49 personnel with records in the Terrorist Screening Dataset coming across the southern border and one attempting to cross the north.

This follows a record number of 172 members of the terrorist watch list being apprehended for trying to cross the border illegally in 2023, almost doubling the 98 in 2022. Before then, apprehensions of those on the terror watchlist were in the single digits for data going back to 2017.

CBP had over 634,066 total encounters with illegal immigrants trying to cross into the US during the first quarter, which is more than the total number for 2020.

Earlier this month, an illegal immigrant threatened a citizen journalist who was reporting at the border. He told the videographer, “Soon, you’re gonna know who I am” after being asked where he was from.

“If you are smart enough you will know who I am. But you really aren’t smart enough to know who I am. But soon you’re gonna know who I am. Very soon,” the man said….

Austrian Broadcasting Corporation removes Jesus Christ from calendar in order to avoid offending Muslims

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/austrian-broadcasting-corporation-removes-jesus-christ-from-calendar-in-order-to-avoid-offending-muslims; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Everything must be done to avoid offending Austria’s hypersensitive new overlords.

“Next excitement: ORF deletes Jesus Christ from the calendar,” translated from “Nächster Aufreger: ORF streicht Jesus Christus aus der Zeitrechnung,” Exxpress, January 27, 2024 (thanks to Medforth):

Something has happened again on ORF: In an article about the climate in the Roman Empire (!), the warm period is described as “around 200 BC. C.E. to 150 C.E.” dated. “Before our time” instead of “before Christ”? How woke is it actually?

The time calculation used by the ORF is mainly used by non-religious people, members of non-Christian religions and in explicitly secular states and the more common abbreviation v. BC preferred. So it’s about not provoking non-Christians. Things have been getting hot again on X (Twitter) since then. “How woke can you actually get in this protected workshop?” asks ÖVP politician Manfred Juraczka.

Muslims’ feelings could be hurt
Small side note: Also in the GDR there were mainly C.E. and (n.)U. Z. the standard formulation. Does the ORF, which is financed by compulsory taxes, simply want to be particularly woke – and is intentionally canceling Jesus Christ? After all, the use of the term Christ in the era is considered a confession of faith. Muslims, Jews, atheists and others may find this discriminatory or their religious beliefs infringing on their freedom of belief.

3 U.S. Soldiers Died Because Biden Won’t Stand Up to Iran

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/3-u-s-soldiers-died-because-biden-wont-stand-up-to-iran#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

They attack, we retreat and they attack some more.

Iran’s terror militias launched a wave of rocket attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and Syria under Biden. There were dozens of these attacks last year alone.

In the spring of 2023, Scott Patrick Dubis, a 52-year-old military contractor who had worked on U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar, was killed in an Iranian backed attack.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin responded by promising that, “as President Biden has made clear, we will take all necessary measures to defend our people and will always respond at a time and place of our choosing. No group will strike our troops with impunity.”

But Iran and its Jihadi proxy militias could and did go on attacking our troops with impunity.

We launched a few light airstrikes for show and the attacks went on. American personnel kept being wounded in Iranian attacks and sometimes we responded and sometimes we didn’t.

After the latest wave of attacks and responses, the Shiite regime in Baghdad demanded that the United States leave Iraq. Biden, obediently, began negotiating the withdrawal.

Three US Army soldiers were killed and over 30 were wounded in an Iranian-backed drone attack on a position on the Jordanian-Syrian border. This is the worst death toll in some time.

A few months after the Shiite Islamic regime in Tehran commemorated the takeover of the U.S. embassy with chants of “Death to America”, it succeeded in inflicting more death on Americans.

Biden has issued a statement vowing that, once again, “we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing.” Like Austin’s previous statement after the murder of Scott Dubis, that means that no one should expect a quick meaningful response.

The message to Iran and its Islamic terrorists is that they have nothing to worry about. And Iran’s message to us is that we can never pull out far enough until we have surrendered the entire region, the rest of the world and then finally our own country to the enemy.

In the spring of 2020, Army Spc. Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts, as well as Lance Corporal Brodie Gillon, a British female medic, were killed in an attack by the Shiite Iran-backed militias. Roberts died trying to save a female comrade.

And the attacks just keep right on coming.

When Biden came into office, Iran had a pretty good lock on Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Biden allowed it to seize control over Yemen. During the winter break, it used its Houthi strongholds in Yemen to hijack shipping in the Red Sea. While Biden was out of office and Austin was in the hospital, it seized a channel used by a third of the world’s container ships.

Much like in Iraq and Syria, Biden responded with limited airstrikes that fell far short of ending the threat while conducting a 30 day review before possibly bringing back sanctions on the Houthis. The Houthis have since managed to hit an oil tanker, while global shipping costs have doubled and the shipping war risks insurance premiums have skyrocketed many times over.

The same pattern of failure that had played out in Iraq is now playing out in the Red Sea.

After retreating in the Red Sea, Iran has decided to push the frontiers of terror all the way to the Jordanian border. Jordan is a key intersection, a Saudi client state that shares a border with Israel, whose population would prefer to be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s arms include Hamas and its state sponsor, Qatar, which is an ally of Iran.

Iran is serious about winning and we are not. We have a plan and we do not. Every tentative response that we make telegraphs the fact that we are afraid to attack it. The Biden administration emphasizes that its strikes are measured, defensive and come with warnings.

Our terrorist enemies however have no such fears or concerns. They hit us where they can.

The Biden administration and the foreign policy apparatus live in fear of “expanding the war” while Iran seeks to expand the war as far as it can. If one side wants to expand the war while the other fears any escalation, the outcome is a cycle of retreats and defeats.

Every time Iran attacks, we retreat, and every time we retreat, it pushes harder. Negotiations, sanctions relief and diplomacy have failed miserably. The so-called “moderates” have been pushed out in Iran and the new regime burned them along with their American puppets like Biden’s Iran envoy Robert Malley, who was outed by Iran regime outlets, as it prepares for war.

October 7 was only one of the points of Iran’s Jihadist ‘blitzkrieg’ across the region as it prepares to become the dominant power in the Middle East. And while it was devastating to Israelis, it may be less significant than the takeover of the Red Sea or its existing nuclear program, under which it now has enough enriched uranium to build several nuclear warheads, its simultaneous launch of three satellites or its ballistic missile program that can deliver nukes.

All of this foreshadows a struggle on a grand scale that will test America and the world.

Much like WWII, this crisis could have been averted through geopolitical maneuvers, maximum pressure, limited intervention and other tools that were never properly used. Instead, Obama attempted to cut a nuclear deal with Iran that he knew was worthless. Biden resumed efforts to restore the deal even though Tehran by then had achieved enough of its goals that it demanded only billions in cash while offering nothing in return but contempt, threats and terror attacks.

The killings of three American soldiers is only the latest consequence of these policies.

Iran got lucky in its Tower 22 attack in Jordan, but the attacks could have also been worse. While American soldiers deployed in Iraq and Syria are used to rocket alerts and quickly run to shelter, those in Tower 22 had not gotten into that same habit. A large stream of rockets or missiles could have inflicted much worse casualties than those 3 dead or 30 wounded.

And that leaves out the possibility that we have yet to consider.

On Oct 7, Israeli soldiers braced for rocket attacks by retreating into shelters only to face a massive assault by thousands of armed Jihadis overrunning their positions under the cover of rockets. Israel wasn’t ready for that kind of attack and the real question is are we ready?

Iran will keep testing and pushing us. And if we fail to take the initiative, the attack will come.

We were not ready for the seizure of our embassy in Tehran. We were not ready for the Marine Barracks bombings in Beirut. We were not ready for 9/11. We were not ready for the fall of Kabul. We were not ready for the takeover of shipping in the Red Sea near Yemen.

What aren’t we ready for next? We only have so much time to wait around and find out.

Wars are fought on by taking the offensive or holding defensive positions. When you are always defending, then you allow the enemy to take the initiative and then you have to find out what comes next.

If we don’t take the offensive, we will have to wait to find out how bad the next attack will be.

Three US soldiers killed, over 30 service members injured in drone attack on small US outpost in Jordan

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/three-us-soldiers-killed-over-30-service-members-injured-in-drone-attack-on-small-us-outpost-in-jordan#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

There shouldn’t be a US outpost in Jordan.

Iran and its proxies are stepping up attacks, knowing that the Biden regime is weak, America-last, and appeasement-minded.

“First on CNN: Three US troops killed in drone attack in Jordan, more than 30 injured,” by Haley Britzky, Natasha Bertrand and Oren Liebermann, CNN, January 28, 2024:

Three US Army soldiers were killed and more than 30 service members were injured in a drone attack overnight on a small US outpost in Jordan, US officials told CNN, marking the first time US troops have been killed by enemy fire in the Middle East since the beginning of the Gaza war.

The killing of three Americans at Tower 22 in Jordan near the border with Syria is a significant escalation of an already-precarious situation in the Middle East. Officials said the drone was fired by Iran-backed militants and appeared to come from Syria. It is still being determined which militia group specifically is responsible.

US Central Command confirmed in a statement on Sunday that three service members were killed and 25 injured in a one-way drone attack that “impacted at a base in northeast Jordan.” Two US officials told CNN the drone hit in the vicinity of living quarters on base, and that three the injured service members were medically evacuated from the area.

The number of wounded is expected to rise.

President Joe Biden vowed on Sunday to hold those responsible for the attack “to account,” saying that while facts are still being gathered, “We know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”

“These service members embodied the very best of our nation: Unwavering in their bravery. Unflinching in their duty. Unbending in their commitment to our country — risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism. … [H]ave no doubt – we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing.”

As of Friday, there had been more than 158 attacks on US and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria, though officials have described the constant volley of drones, rockets, and missiles as unsuccessful as they have frequently not caused serious injury or damage to infrastructure….

International Court of Justice Ruling: Despite the Hectoring Rhetoric, a Win for Israel

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SEE:https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/international-court-of-justice-ruling-despite-the-hectoring-rhetoric-a-win-for-israel#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

The ruling handed down by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on January 26 could have been much worse. The Court might have agreed with South Africa’s contention that in Gaza, the Jewish state is engaged in “ethnic cleansing” or in “genocide.” It might have ordered an “immediate ceasefire” or, still worse, a complete withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza. The ICJ did none of those things. More on this welcome result can be found here: “ICJ badmouths Israel for 35 minutes, then Israel wins – analysis,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, January 26, 2024:

For 35 minutes, the International Court of Justice bad-mouthed Israel, but then it surprised the Jewish state by not issuing any practical orders against the IDF.

There was no order to cease the war and there was no order for the IDF to withdraw from Gaza.

Those were the most important victories for Israel at The Hague. There surely was great disappointment, I should think, in Pretoria, Ramallah, and Khan Yunis, when they realized what the ICJ had not demanded of the Jewish state.

The most troubling practical item in the ruling for Israel is the need to report back to the ICJ in one month, something which leaves the door open to a more serious order at that time.

All of the other measures that the ICJ ordered are items that Israel says it agrees with in general: don’t commit genocide, facilitate humanitarian aid, preserve evidence for probes of alleged war crimes, and prosecute Israelis who engage in illegal incitement against Palestinians.

To understand the complex ICJ decision and why this was a big win for Israel, one needs to understand the difference between declarative and operative law.

Declarative law is basically asking or advising a party to do something but with no teeth.

Only operative law has teeth and punishments.

In fact, the ICJ conclusions are only declarative. The ICJ has no enforcement mechanism. Its decisions can help put pressure on a party to a dispute, but there is no way to force a state — say, Israel — to comply with its decisions. Were the ICJ, for example, to demand that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire, and Israel were to refuse, there would be no way to make the Jewish state do so. On the other hand, such a refusal might lead Israel’s key allies, including the U.S., to increase pressure on the Jewish state to comply.

No definitive action against Israel taken

Israel’s critics hoped there would be an order to end the war and withdraw the IDF. They had every right to expect such a result after the ICJ declared Israel’s West Bank security barrier illegal in 2004 and ordered Israel to remove it.

This would have put Israel in the uncomfortable position of either giving up on its national security to comply or being a public offender [sic] of the ICJ’s decisions.

This would also have put Israel’s allies in a much harder position and possibly led some of them to penalize Israel diplomatically and even economically.

All of this would have had a real-world impact on Israel and the war effort.

Instead, the ICJ heavily criticized Israel for killing Palestinian civilians and causing destruction, but avoided any immediate conflagration [sic] with Israel….

This criticism was, of course, unfair. The ICJ refused to recognize the hellishly difficult nature of warfare on a densely populated urban battlefield. It did not seem impressed with the enormous efforts the IDF has taken to minimize civilian casualties. These include warnings the IDF gave initially to civilians to leave northern Gaza when that area was about to become a battlefield; 900,000 of those civilians heeded the warning and moved south. to relative safety. Similarly, when the IDF subsequently moved its main operations to the south, it dropped leaflets and sent emails that provided maps showing exactly where the IDF would not be operating, so that civilians could move to those areas. Furthermore, the IDF routinely has been warning civilians in Gaza, by messaging, emailing, and leafleting, when a civilian building — a school, a mosque, an apartment building — is about to be targeted. Of course all these warnings also alert Hamas operatives, but that has been a price the IDF has been s willing to pay in order to minimize civilian casualties.

In warning civilians in Gaza, the IDF has so far dropped six million leaflets, made 14 million pre-recorded telephone calls, and 72,000 personal calls. It is the only army in the world that warns its enemy in such a manner. For that, and other reasons, British Colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in the world.” Perhaps, upon reflection during the next month, the ICJ judges will come round to seeing the justice of that verdict.

The intensity of the war has already wound down in the north, where tens of thousands of IDF Reservists have been pulled out, and where the IDF has decreased the number of airstrikes and focused instead on targeted killings. That may now happen in the south, once the city of Khan Yunis has been entirely subdued.

While Hamas is already spinning the ICJ decision as a great victory for its side, it is nothing of the sort. Israel has not been charged with “genocide,” but told only to make efforts to “prevent genocide.” These are different things. The Jewish state has never engaged in “genocide,” so the ICJ need not worry about that score. Israel has not been told to pull out of Gaza; the ICJ recognized the atrocities of October 7 and the right of Israel to self-defense. It also spoke of the need for Hamas to free the hostages. Nor did the ICJ seek to impose a ceasefire, of any length, on the Jewish state. For those decisions by the ICJ, just announced, as to what it condemns and what it condones, Israel should now breathe a sigh of great relief.

It Begins: Texas Border Battle; Texas Vs Biden Admin over MigrantCrisis; Federalizing National Guard

Texas Border Battle. Texas prepared in ‘unlikely event’ Biden federalizes National Guard. Border standoff between Texas, feds intensifies as governor defies Supreme Court ruling. Texas arresting Migrants. "This is not over," Texas Governor Abbott said in a social media post. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court siding with the Department of Homeland Security to allow federal border officials to cut state-installed razor wire along the Rio Grande, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton said the larger legal battle between Texas and the Biden administration is far from settled. Texas keeps adding Razor wires. Texas state Law Passes Allowing State Police to Arrest Immigrants. The Texas House passed legislation earlier making it a state crime to illegally cross the southern border, empowering state and local police to arrest and in some cases deport illegal immigrants, in what the bill’s supporters claim is a response to federal inaction. Senate Bill 4 gives local and state government the authority to arrest illegal immigrants who enter Texas from Mexico between official ports of entry. Under SB 4, those who unlawfully cross the border can be charged with a state misdemeanor and face up to one year in prison. A felony charge, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years, can be leveled if illegal immigrants are charged with additional crimes or don’t comply with a judge’s orders. The bill also authorizes state judges to deport illegal aliens to Mexico rather than pursue prosecution under federal law. 

While Iran Tries to Kill US Soldiers, Biden Regime Provides It With Intel

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/while-iran-tries-to-kill-us-soldiers-biden-regime-provides-it-with-intel#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

“The U.S. government provided Iran with a private warning that there was a terrorist threat within Iranian borders”

Iran controls and finances multiple Islamic terror groups, but being a Shiite state, there are Sunni Islamist terror groups that target it. Some of these are aligned with ISIS. Others have nationalistic reasons linked to the Baloch movement. And some have both.

Recently, an ISIS bombing attack at a commemoration ceremony for IRGC terror leader Soleimani, who was responsible for the deaths of many Americans, made headlines.

The Biden administration is now announcing that it tried to help Iran head off the bombing.

The U.S. secretly warned Iran that Islamic State was preparing to carry out the terrorist attack early this month that killed more than 80 Iranians in a pair of coordinated suicide bombings, U.S. officials said.

The confidential alert came after the U.S. acquired intelligence that Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, ISIS-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, was plotting to attack Iran, they said.

American officials said the information passed to Iran was specific enough about the location and sufficiently timely that it might have proved useful to Tehran in thwarting the attack on Jan. 3 or at least mitigating the casualty toll.

And, out of gratitude, Iran went on trying to kill American soldiers and chanting, “Death to America”..

The obvious question is why do this?

Do we generally intervene when terrorist groups fight each other? Why are we helping Iran, which is actively trying to kill American soldiers in Iraq?

During the Trump admin, we kept hearing that even mentioning that we had certain kinds of intel would potentially expose sources and endanger them. So why are those sources being exposed to help one of our worst enemies.

“Prior to ISIS’s terrorist attack on January 3, 2024, in Kerman, Iran, the U.S. government provided Iran with a private warning that there was a terrorist threat within Iranian borders,” a U.S. official said, using an acronym for Islamic State. “The U.S. government followed a longstanding ‘duty to warn’  policy that has been implemented across administrations to warn governments against potential lethal threats. We provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terror attacks.”

The target was a memorial ceremony for Qassem Soleimani: a terrorist leader. There were as many “innocent people” there as at a memorial for Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin.

Maybe the Biden admin didn’t know the target? But the previous high-profile ISIS attacks in Iran targeted the Iranian parliament and the told of Khomeini.

ISIS tends to hit sites associated with Iran’s Islamist regime. Attack warnings protect the Iranian regime, not the oppressed people protesting in the streets.

This is another unfortunate example of our government’s collaboration with our worst enemies.

There is no reason for us to intervene in a fight between two Islamic terror groups. Yet the Biden admin chose to do that in Syria and now Obama is doing it in Iran.

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