Day: May 12, 2024

UN rewards ‘Palestinians’ for October 7, votes 143-9 to upgrade status of ‘Palestine’

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/un-rewards-palestinians-for-october-7-votes-143-9-to-upgrade-status-of-palestine; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

“The message that the UN is sending to our suffering region: violence pays off.”

Exactly.

“UNGA votes 143-9 to upgrade Palestinian statehood status,” by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2024:

The United Nations General Assembly voted 143-9 to upgrade the Palestinian’s status as a non-member observer state, granting it all but voting rights with regard to all activities related to its plenum.

Argentina, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Papa New Guinea, Palau, and the United States opposed the resolution.

Among the countries that supported the test were many European Union members, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.

Australia also supported the resolution, while Canada, Great Britain, and Ukraine abstained.

There are already some 143 countries that recognize Palestine as a state.

The UNGA vote, which is mostly symbolic, is viewed as an international referendum in support of unilateral Palestinian statehood.

Many Western and European countries believe that full Palestinian statehood recognition and Palestinian UN membership should come at the end of a final status agreement that tends to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In light of Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7 that sparked the Gaza War, a number of Western countries have reconsidered their position.

Israel immediately attacked the decision, as a prize for terrorism, given that it comes in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, which sparked the Gaza war.

It also warned that such a step would harm negotiations for the release of the remaining 132 hostages held by Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza.

“The message that the UN is sending to our suffering region: violence pays off,” the Foreign Ministry stated.

“The decision to upgrade the status of Palestinians in the UN is a prize for Hamas terrorists after they committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and perpetrated the most heinous sexual crimes the world has seen,” it stated.

“The decision also provides a tailwind to Hamas amid negotiations for the release of the 132 hostages and humanitarian relief, further complicating the prospects for a deal,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated….

Hamas won’t even release the bodies of dead hostages

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/hamas-wont-even-release-the-bodies-of-dead-hostages; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Further adventures of those who claim the moral high ground.

“38 Israeli families mourn while Hamas holds their loved ones’ remains,” by Amelie Botbol, JNS, May 9, 2024 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Families of deceased hostages whose bodies are still being held by Hamas in Gaza carried an empty coffin through Jerusalem on Thursday to raise awareness of their plight and call for the return of their loved ones.

“I am attending this rally because we, the families of deceased hostages, are a unique group,” Ruby Chen, the father of American-Israeli dual citizen Sgt. Itay Chen, 19, told JNS on Thursday.

Itay, from Netanyahu, was stationed at the Nahal Oz army base as part of a tank unit when he was captured along with three other soldiers on Oct. 7. He was one of six hostages with U.S. citizenship thought to have still been alive in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces declared him dead on March 12.

“We decided to organize an alternative service to highlight the fact that the State of Israel must do everything it can to bring all the hostages back, both the living and the deceased,” Ruby Chen said.

Hundreds of new families will be mourning Yom Hazikaron: Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, though some will not have anywhere to pay their respects.

“We do not have a burial site. If you ask me where I will be going on Monday, I can tell that I don’t have a good answer,” Chen told JNS. He will also be attending Saturday’s rally at Tel Aviv’s “Hostage Square,” which this week will focus on those declared dead in Gaza.

“I am calling on the people of Israel to join us. "I am asking leaders and people worldwide to pray with us regardless of their religion so that we will be able to have closure and that our deceased will be buried in dignity,” Chen said.

According to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, 38 families in Israel will be mourning while the remains of their loved ones are still held by Hamas in Gaza….

Columbia University Custodian Defends Academic Building From Anti-Israel Mob

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/columbia-university-custodian-defends-academic-building-from-anti-israel-mob; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Mario Torres is a custodian at Columbia who tried to stop anti-Israel protesters from taking over Hamilton Hall, where he worked. A photograph of Torres pushing a “student” demonstrator up against a wall has gone viral; that “student” turned out to be a 40-year-old rich kid with no connection to Columbia. More on the custodians and the mob getting in the way of his work can be found here: “Exclusive: Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out,” by Francesca Block, The Free Press, May 6, 2024:

This viral image captured the clash between anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facility worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall. 

Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” he said.

“They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like they had a plan.” Mario said protesters with zip ties, duct tape, and masks “just multiplied and multiplied.”

At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”

There was nothing spontaneous about the takeover of Hamilton Hall. The pro-Hamas demonstrators came prepared with zip ties and duct tape to be used on any employees in the building attempting to prevent their assault, and with masks to hide their identity, and just to make sure they would not be identified, they had quickly managed to cover all the CCTV cameras in the building.

Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I was thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”…

About half of the demonstrators at Columbia who have so far been arrested have turned out not to be Columbia students at all, but outside agitators, determined to swell the ranks of the mob in Morningside Heights. Torres managed to push one of the protesters against the wall and pulled away his face-concealing hoodie. That “student” was discovered to be James Carlson, 40-years-old man who had nothing to do with Columbia, but was eager to participate in any anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstration that might be in progress. Torres wasn’t having any of the disruption. He wanted to do his job as custodian. Having pushed back against the mob, he now worries about whether, for opposing the law-breakers and defending Hamilton Hall, he might be in trouble with the pusillanimous administrators who had been so reluctant to arrest the demonstrators holding the building hostage.

Mario Torres should be asked to appear on news programs such as the “Hero of Hamilton Hall,” a Hispanic male version of Barbara Frietchie, protecting university property from the frenzied hate-animated mob. He needn’t worry about losing his job; Columbia’s trustees and alumni, and the wider public, too, wouldn’t stand for it. In fact, he’s due for a raise, for defending his building against those who, according to plan, smashed its windows and doors, and were preparing to do even more damage once inside. Fortunately, the Columbia administration finally called in the NYPD, which cleared Hamilton Hall in a five-hour operation. The cost to the NYPD was $200,000, One hopes that the City of New York will be able to recover that amount from fines leveled on hundreds of demonstrators.

Biden Risks American Lives to Protect Hamas

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/biden-risks-american-lives-to-protect-hamas; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

No American should die to protect Hamas supporters in Gaza.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently admitted at a congressional hearing that American soldiers operating Biden’s disastrous “aid pier” for Gaza could come under attack from Islamic terrorists.

Biden has not sent a single soldier to recover American hostages being held by Hamas, but there are now soldiers in the line of fire in order to send aid to Gaza.

In the event American forces on the pier come under attack, they would be allowed to fight back, Austin promised. But based on the rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, all the terrorists have to do is attack from a mosque or from behind civilians, and American soldiers would be banned from fighting back.

And those are the ways that Hamas tends to attack.

Late last month, Islamic terrorists fired mortar shells at the pier, forcing a UN team to flee for cover and damaging some of our equipment. After the attack, it was announced that the Israeli military would be tasked with providing security for the pier since Biden’s efforts to recruit Muslim allies to protect it had failed.

After the mortar attack, the terror pier was moved to the Israeli port of Ashdod, allegedly because of the bad weather, but also because of the terrorist attacks. It’s still sitting in Ashdod, despite having been completed because it’s too fragile to move in stormy weather. What’s going to happen if there’s bad weather once the pier is in place? If this one breaks, we’ll probably have to build another one.

But after having wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on the terror pier, Biden is waiting on the Israelis to secure it. Even with the Israelis physically attaching the pier, so that Biden can claim that there are American “no boots on the ground”, American personnel will still be within firing range of Islamic terrorists in Gaza.

This would not be a threat if Biden stopped interfering with Israel’s war on terrorists. But the pier is part of the Biden administration’s campaign to undermine Israel’s war effort. And that’s putting American lives at risk.

Beyond the terror pier, there are now reports that, after Israel finally took control of the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza (despite years of lies about an ‘open-air concentration camp’, Egypt, an Arab Muslim country, has its own border crossing with the Islamic terror state), Biden wants America to step in.

Unwilling to have Israel control the Rafah crossing into Egypt, where the majority of Hamas’ terror forces are based, negotiations are reportedly underway to bring in a “private American security company” that “has operated in several African and Middle Eastern countries, guarding strategic sites like oil fields, airports, army bases and sensitive border crossings” which “employs veterans of elite U.S. Army units.” This is likely to be Blackwater (which has been renamed several times) or some company like it with similar capabilities.

The ex-military personnel won’t count as “boots on the ground” but having private security contractors performing military tasks and then getting killed is no better than American military forces dying in combat with terrorists. The use of contractors during the War on Terror helped hide casualty rates, but didn’t lessen the fact that Americans were still being killed. As we saw in Benghazi.

Above all else, there is no reason for American forces, no matter how they’re classified to be tasked with securing the so-called aid crossings, whether it’s Biden’s terror pier or the Rafah crossing, when the Israelis should be in charge.

And the Israelis want to be in charge.

The only reason Americans are being put in harm’s way is because Biden doesn’t want the Israelis in control. After trying to solicit anyone else to step in, Americans are being put at risk to protect Islamic terrorists from Israel.

Opponents of the Jewish State have often accused Israel of putting Americans at risk, but it’s those opponents, especially in the Biden administration, whose obsession with protecting Muslim terrorists from Israel is really endangering us.

What is America’s national interest in protecting Iran’s terror proxies in Gaza?

Set aside any sentimental attachments to the Jewish State or any religious and cultural sympathies, and there’s still no conceivable reason to prop up another of the terrorist ‘dragon’s teeth’ that Iran has sown in Yemen, Lebanon and Israel.

The lineage of the 'Palestinian' cause can be traced back to the Soviet Union’s Marxist terrorist operations, Nazi Germany’s influence operation with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. What all of those had in common was that they were efforts to subvert Western presence in the Middle East by recruiting and funding Muslim terror groups.

America tried to stay out of it until Jimmy Carter decided to make common cause with Islamic terrorists. This disastrous policy led to the Islamic takeover of Iran and then Afghanistan, and to the deaths of thousands of Americans. Carter also embraced the ‘Palestinian’ cause and Clinton committed us to spending endless billions trying to create an Islamic terror state in Israel.

Until Trump, no president had the courage to try and disentangle us from the Palestinians. And until Biden, no president was this close to committing American troops to protecting a population that universally wants to kill us.

Israel wants to end the terror threat from Gaza and the West Bank. Biden should let it. Life was a whole lot better for everyone before Clinton’s experiment in ‘nation building’ led to endless waves of terror in pursuit of a Palestinian state.

If Biden really cared about the lives of Arab Muslims living in Gaza, he would let Israel quickly finish the job of putting down the terrorists. Like the rules of engagement imposed on American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, the only thing that the restrictions imposed on the Israeli military have done is get good men killed while dragging out a war that could have been ended long ago.

Too many American civilians were already killed in Islamic terror attacks in Israel. If Israel is willing to drain the terror swamps in the West Bank and Gaza, let it.

No American should die to protect Hamas or its supporters in Gaza.

The idea that we were going to neutralize ‘trouble spots’ through nation building has been tested and failed badly. While Biden washed his hands in Afghanistan, he still insists on keeping the mirage of a Palestinian state going even though it predated our involvement in Afghanistan by a decade and failed even worse.

It’s time to end the worst and longest nation building experiment to date.

The obsession with creating a ‘Palestinian state’ has cost billions of dollars and the lives of American civilians. Now Biden is risking the death of American soldiers, in or out of uniform, to keep the nation-building dream alive.

Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, but now he wants to get us into Gaza.

Introducing James Carlson, 40-Year-Old Professional Agitator and One of Columbia’s ‘Student Protesters’

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SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/introducing-james-carlson-40-year-old-professional-agitator-and-one-of-columbias-student-protesters; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Between one-third and one-half of those “students” taking part at Columbia in the frenzied mob protests against Israel and for Hamas turn out not to be students at all, but older people, some of them professional left-wing agitators with long records of fomenting violence., and always eager to join any group of troublemakers willing to “stick it to the man.” Most often, nowadays the “man” in question is the “apartheid, settler-colonial, genocidal state” of Israel. More on James Carlson can be found here: “‘Violent’ Columbia protester is heir to the ad empire, has mansion, model babymama — and long rap sheet,” by Tina Moore, Chris Harris and Matthew Sedacca, New York Post, May 4, 2024:

One of the most violent leaders of the Columbia University riots is allegedly a professional agitator and limousine liberal — the scion of millionaire ad execs who owns in a $3.4 million Brooklyn townhouse, has a model babymama and a stepmom dating John Cougar Mellencamp.

James Carlson, aka Cody Carlson, aka Cody Tarlow, is “a longtime anarchist,” a high-ranking police source said.

He bought his 2,893-square-foot, three-story townhouse with four wood-burning fireplaces and a carriage house in Park Slope in 2019 for $2.3 million, according to property records and online listings….

Carlson is a trust-fund baby, living large with a likely net worth — extrapolating from the value of his house — of at least ten million dollars. He doesn’t need a job, so why should he work? Instead, what fun it is for him to join whatever group is now causing the most mayhem and mischief. It gives him something to do, and allows him to believe that his life has a point after all — he is a true revolutionary, making the world a better place by whipping up others in whatever mob he has joined. In the present disarray, those “others” whom he eggs on are students at Columbia.

Carlson is a rabble rouser and an attorney by trade, according to sources.

He is certainly a rabble-rouser, but he will likely not be an “attorney by trade” much longer. He is almost certain to be disbarred after being arrested for taking part in the violent takeover of Hamilton Hall.

He is being looked at as a “possible leader” of the anti-Israel protesters who broke into Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall Tuesday night and barricaded themselves inside, a City Hall source said.

Emergency Services Unit cops used a military-style truck to get inside and arrested the rioters, including Carlson, early Wednesday morning. 

He was charged with burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and criminal trespassing.

If he is convicted of even one of these charges, Carlson will be disbarred. But he doesn’t care; he has plenty to live on, thanks to his indulgent parents, without having to suffer the indignity of going to an office and working for a living.

“I observed the defendant inside the location with several other individuals,” a police officer wrote in the arrest report. “I did observe doors with shattered windows, doors off hinges, broken desks and exits blockaded by piled-up chairs.”

Carlson destroyed a camera inside a holding cell at One Police Plaza while he was in custody around 1 a.m., police sources said….

He can’t help himself. Carlson appears to be possessed by an obsessive will to destroy.

Carlson was among the anti-Israel protesters in January who wreaked havoc on the city by blocking traffic at the Holland Tunnel as well as the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, a source said.

His rap sheet dates back to at least 2005, when he was charged in San Francisco for participating in the violent “West Coast Anti-Capitalist Mobilization and March Against the G8,” where protesters cracked a police officer’s skull, nearly killing him, and attempted to set a police cruiser ablaze, according to a City Hall source and news reports.

Carlson was charged at the time with suspicion of attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery on a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and willful resistance to a police officer that resulted in serious bodily injury, according to the source.

The charges were dropped in 2007, CNN reported.

Carlson is a serial menace, a violent man who joins whatever group is likely to provide him with the most convenient outlet for his violence and left-wingery. In 2005, he was engaged in “Anti-Capitalist Mobilization” (though the money he gets from his parents comes from their success in the capitalist advertising rat-race), and was charged with “attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery to a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon.” Wasn’t all that enough to keep him in jail for a very long time? Apparently not. Nor was he in the least chastened by that experience. His latest display of mayhem in Morningside Heights, including his leading assault on Hamilton Hall, is evidence of that.

Carlson has no known links to Columbia University. About 30% of those busted in the Hamilton Hall takeover were outside agitators, according to Columbia and Mayor Adams.

It is estimated that on the 43 American campuses where anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrations have so far taken place, between 30% and 50% of those taking part have no connection to the universities they are subject to such mayhem. The word is out: if you want to have fun chanting at the top of your lungs, destroying property, harassing Jewish students, this is your chance. James Carlson can say, just like the corrupt politician of Tammany Hall fame, George Washington Plunkitt, that “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” Carlson will come out for any cause that will provide him with the virtue-signalling opportunity for the violent expression of his predictable left-wing views." Anti-capitalism in 2005, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas in 2024, and just as soon as he is let out of prison for his latest offenses, James Carlson will no doubt be found leading a group taking over and ransacking the offices of fossil fuel companies, as their way – the least convincing way — to protest global warming.