Category: SOTU

Charges Dropped Against Gold Star Father Who Heckled Biden

Charges Dropped Against Gold Star Father Who Heckled Biden

State of the Union 2024 TW UNITED STATES - MARCH 7: Steven Nikoui, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, was killed during the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan, heckles President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, March 7, 2024. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
State of the Union 2024 TW UNITED STATES – MARCH 7: Steven Nikoui, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, who was killed during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, heckles President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, March 7, 2024. (Tom Williams/C-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images)

OAN’s Abril Elfi
6:10 PM – Wednesday, March 20, 2024

SEE: https://www.oann.com/newsroom/charges-dropped-against-gold-star-father-who-heckled-biden/; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Charges against the Gold Star father, who was arrested after harassing President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address, have been dropped. 

“A Gold Star Family is the immediate family member(s) of a fallen service member who died while serving in a time of conflict,” according to hopeforthewarriors.org.

Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D-D.C.) withdrew charges against the Gold Star father, who was detained after heckling President Biden during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Republican lawmakers confirmed.

Representative Brian Mast (R-Fla.) told Fox News on Tuesday night that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) assisted in getting the charges against Steven Nikoui, 51, dropped for protesting during Biden’s speech. He was protesting in response to an earlier pleading from Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

“Though he interrupted the event, what Mr. Nikoui voiced out loud was a cry for the acknowledgment of the loss endured by the families of the 13 who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country,” Issa wrote in a letter to Capitol Police chief Thomas Manger on Tuesday.

Nikoui was taken into custody by U.S. Capitol Police after he yelled “Abby Gate!” and “Second Battalion, First Marines!” during Biden’s speech.

At a Capitol Hill hearing on the withdrawal from Afghanistan on Tuesday, he informed reporters that he remained charged despite calls from Mast, Issa, and Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) to have the case dismissed.

On August 26th, 2021, an ISIS suicide bomber outside Hamid Karzai International Airport killed 13 U.S. service members, including Nikoui’s son, Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui.

According to Fox News, the District of Columbia Attorney General’s office defended its decision not to prosecute Nikoui by citing instances of previous protesters who were not charged.

Although Nikoui claims he had no intention of interrupting Biden, he grew irritated when the president only brought up the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, rather than his son or the other twelve U.S. service members who perished in the Abbey Gate explosion. 

“I’ve waited three years, I paid $3,000, and I’ve traveled 3,000 miles to finally hear my son’s name in the State of the Union,” he told DailyMail.com. “That trip to the State of the Union—wwhat a kick in my ass.”

Nikoui had been charged with “crowding, obstructing, [and] incommoding Congress,” which is a misdemeanor that typically results in release after paying a $50 fine. 

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In State of the Union Speech, Biden Parrots Hamas Statistics

  BY 

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/03/in-state-of-the-union-speech-biden-parrots-hamas-statistics; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

In his State of the Union speech, Joe Biden repeated, without any hint of skepticism, the figure put out by Hamas, unverified and unverifiable, of the number of Gazans killed in the current war. This is quite a change for the President. On October 26, when asked by a reporter about Hamas’ figures on casualties, Biden replied “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

Then, after adding that Israel should be “careful” about “going after the folks that are propagating this war,” he reiterated skepticism of the casualty number: “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

That was then. But on March 7, he had apparently decided that he could have every confidence in Hamas figures, for he relied on them in his speech, without a hint of his former skepticism. What changed his mind? Could it have been the desire to justify the pressure his administration is now putting on Israel, trying to get it to agree to a very long ceasefire, and to refrain from entering Rafah, which the Israeli government believes it must do if it is to eliminate Hamas as a military threat? Biden is no longer interested in expressing skepticism about Hamas figures; he accepts — or publicly pretends to, which is even worse — the figures put out by Hamas.

More on this volte-face can be found here: “Biden parrots Hamas propaganda in State of the Union speech,” Elder of Ziyon, March 8, 2024:

During President Biden’s State of the Union address last night, he said:

This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined. More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas.

Biden just confirmed and validated the biggest Hamas lie  about the war.

There is no source for the “30,000” number besides Hamas. None whatsoever. And we know Hamas lied about the death tolls of various specific events during the war, especially those that were blamed on Israel but were actually done by terrorists.

Hamas routinely lies about the “innocent civilians” killed by the Israelis. Remember the claim about a “massacre at Jenin,” when Hamas and other terror groups accused the IDF of killing “500 civilians,” and it was later confirmed that there had been no massacre, but a firefight in which 52 Palestinians, at least 45 of whom were confirmed to be combatants, were killed. In the current war in Gaza, Hamas reported that an Israeli airstrike had hit the Al-Ahli Hospital, killing 500 people. After a thorough investigation, both American and Israeli intelligence concluded that there had been no Israeli airstrike. Instead, a rocket launched from Gaza at Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had misfired and fallen short, inside Gaza, landing not on the hospital itself but on the parking lot beside it. And there were not “500 killed,” but rather, between 10 and 50.The latest tall tale was Hamas’ claim that IDF soldiers had killed up to 100 innocent civilians queuing for food; the IDF never fired on those Palestinians. It did explain that it had fired warning shots as some Palestinians – there were 12,000 besieging those trucks laden with food – came toward them, and then, when some Palestinians came within several meters of the IDF forces, the IDF used live fire; it estimates it may have killed “at most” ten people who had refused to stop after the warning shots, but were moving menacingly toward them.

Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in Tablet this week that showed how unlikely the casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry are from a statistical viewpoint, looking at the first weeks of the war when the ministry broke down the alleged women and children casualties.

On the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which is statistically and substantively not different from 0.

The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant. This lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real.

…Another red flag… is that if 70% of the casualties are women and children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright faked. 

But we know from the IDF that so far — by mid-March — it has managed to kill between 13,000 and 15,000 Hamas fighters, that is, about 50% of the total pre-war number of Hamas fighters.

Why should the Bidenites care? By now repeating such Hamas casualty figures uncritically, Biden hopes to win back those disaffected Arab voters in “critically important” Michigan, and all those “young progressives” across the land who are apparently exercised by the administration’s refusal to be sufficiently anti-Israel. The State of the Union message must have pleased them. Surely accepting Hamas’ lies is a small price to pay — it only hurts Israel, after all — to ensure the reelection of Joe Biden.

Biden Uses State of the Union to Threaten Civil War

Not even Obama violated political norms the way Biden just did.

 by 

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-uses-state-of-the-union-to-threaten-civil-war/; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:


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

Joseph Robinette Biden began his final State of the Union address by invoking FDR. But while Biden has nearly as much trouble getting around as FDR, he didn’t lead a nation out of a depression, but into one, and he didn’t win a war, he did however lose several.

Including a personal war with his diction and his teleprompter at the State of the Union.

Biden’s addresses have gotten longer as he has had less to say. Last year’s State of the Union was the 8th longest on record and this year’s clocks in behind Obama’s 2010 rant. The only reason it wasn’t even longer is that Biden rushed to get through it, mumbling and slurring words, rattling off threats and insults at a speed that made them all but impossible to understand.

Usually presidents use the podium to make promises and take credit for past accomplishments, but there’s not much of that here and so Biden began his speech name-dropping presidents who people liked better than him (a long list) and threatening and berating Republicans.

A few breaths after implicitly comparing himself to FDR during WWII, Biden then compared himself to Lincoln during the Civil War (“not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today”) and then President Reagan before launching an attack on President Trump.

The State of the Union isn’t a place to attack opposing candidates. Bush didn’t take potshots at Kerry in his State of the Union speech and even Obama didn’t mention Romney in his.

And yet Biden attacked Trump a few minutes into his. And then did it again. And again.

But this was not a State of the Union address, it was a fascistic campaign rally of the kind that he had been giving for years, most disturbingly while flanked by Marines at Independence Hall before the 2022 midterms, declaring war on Trump, Republicans and all political opponents.

After accusing Republicans of being in thrall to Russia and then of being “insurrectionists”, he falsely claimed that they were preventing women from getting IVF procedures. (In reality, no one’s IVF procedures were threatened and Alabama rushed through a bill protecting IVF in record time .) That was then followed by attacking Republicans over abortion.

None of this material belongs in a State of the Union address which is not a campaign rally, but a presidential review of the year, and calls for bipartisan cooperation on national priorities. No president has ever delivered a deranged partisan hate-fest of a speech like this at the SOTU.

Not even Obama ever went that far. Not even Obama violated the State of the Union’s norms.

Biden’s State of the Union rant would have been more ominous if it also hadn’t been pathetic. The speechwriters reached (as they always do at these events) for the grandiose, but came off as bellicose, and in Biden’s mouth, even the bellicose became the quavering rattlings of an angry old man who had spent too much time reading Stephen Ambrose and listening to NPR.

Much of Biden’s address had to be reconstructed from the transcript because it was indecipherable. His hands and lips shaking, Biden spoke of strength, but showed only weakness, invoked historical figures only to show how unworthy he was of them.

The threats and attacks on Republicans gave way to absurd boasts. And while presidents always claim credit for more than they accomplished, Biden’s could only occasion eye rolling.

Biden claimed that “our economy is the envy of the world”, that inflation “is the lowest in the world”, that there is “historic job growth”, and that unemployment is “at 50-year lows”.

Why didn’t Biden begin by bragging about these incredible accomplishments? Why bury them toward the middle of his speech? Because not only are they lies, but no one believes them.

Since no one believes them, Biden moved on to promising free stuff. A cap on prescription drug costs, more tax credits for mortgages, universal pre-k, and student loan payoffs. With a $34 trillion national debt, there’s no money for any of that or for any of his other promises. We’re on the way to $1 trillion in interest payments a year thanks to his previous spending sprees.

Desperate for material, Biden warned senior citizens that “Republicans will cut Social Security and give more tax cuts to the wealthy” and promised to pass a bill legislating how many chips there should be in a bag of chips.

All that a bag of chips indeed.

In between attacking Republicans, Biden also attacked Israel for not caring enough about ‘Palestinians’ and promised to lead an “emergency mission” to bail out Gaza. He demanded that Congress take away our guns to “beat the NRA” and promised transgenders, “I have your back”. None of this was aimed at Americans, it was pure red meat aimed at his own base.

What should have been his DNC acceptance speech, somehow became his SOTU address.

Biden violated the most elementary State of the Union decorum. He gave a speech that he should not have been allowed to deliver. And that should have been shut down during. Presidents deliver these addresses as guests of Congress. As a guest, Biden insulted his hosts, soiled the drapes and tried to wrap his partisan hate-fest in name dropping and the flag.

At the conclusion, Biden laid out a clash “for the soul of our nation” between “those who want to pull America back to the past” (conservatives) “and those who want to move America into the future” (leftists) while unintentionally giving everyone a taste of what that future looks like.

The future looks like a senile president arriving at a State of the Union to launch vitriolic attacks on the opposition, wrecking political norms, implying that a new civil war is at hand, threatening the Supreme Court and defining all opposition as a dangerous form of treason.

Americans have seen the future and polls show they don’t like it very much.

After over an hour of non-stop attacks on his political opponents while depicting them as enemies of the state, Biden unconvincingly claimed that he wants to “be a president for all Americans”. Like a small number of men in this nation’s history, he had his chance.

Biden wanted to be FDR, instead he’s doomed to be the worst possible combination of LBJ, Obama and Jimmy Carter, with all of their bad points and none of their good ones, a political hack who bungled everything and accomplished nothing, hated by everyone, loved by no one, and incapable of even convincingly lying about his accomplishments or delivering a speech.

His legacy concludes with a series of unhinged meanspirited rants in which he demands absolute power to save the country from the threat of political dissent. Americans would be scared if they could understand what he was saying. It’s best for everyone that they didn’t.

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Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.