The News & Topicality Thread

[Biff]

https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1721160 ... 53200?s=20

Young Islamists in Germany say Muslims will become the majority in Germany, abolish the German Constitution & introduce Sharia law

Europe has been underestimating the threat posed by Islamism

Europe = moronic 'leaders' as opposed to the street.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: National Catholic Reporter / OSV News
Link: ncronline DOT org/news/catholic-charities-reacts-disturbing-online-threats-staff-over-migration-work

Catholic Charities reacts to 'disturbing' online threats to staff over migration work

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

Washington — Catholic Charities USA, the organization dedicated to carrying out the domestic humanitarian work of the Catholic Church in the United States, responded Oct. 31 to "disturbing" recent remarks by a social media influencer threatening its staff.

The right-wing social media influencer Stew Peters said in Oct. 28 comments that Catholic Charities helps "coach illegals on how to get admitted here."

"We need troops on the border that will shoot people that are trying to invade our country," he said. "That'd be a good first step. But you know what a better second step would be? Shooting everyone involved with these fake charities."

The comments were livestreamed from Fall Freedom Fest in Vero Beach, Florida, on the social media platforms X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble. As of Oct. 31, the video appeared to be removed from Rumble, but was still accessible on X.

Kevin Brennan, a spokesperson for Catholic Charities USA, said in a statement provided to OSV News Oct. 31 that "these comments are deeply disturbing and could endanger Catholic Charities staff members and volunteers, who on a daily basis selflessly serve people in need in every corner of this country."

"Sadly, these reprehensible threats against our agencies are an extension of a disturbing trend from a small but vocal group of critics who misrepresent and malign the basic humanitarian care — a warm meal, fresh clothing, a bed to sleep in for a night — that some Catholic Charities agencies provide to migrants after they have been released into the country by federal authorities," he said. "As our nation continues to mourn in the wake of yet another mass shooting, we pray for all victims of gun violence and for an end to dangerous, hateful rhetoric."

Catholic Charities serves migrants in accordance with Catholic teaching. The group states on its website that "sovereign nations have the right to control their borders while affording protection to refugees and asylum seekers and respecting the human dignity and rights of undocumented migrants."

[…]

Peters doubled down on his comments about Catholic Charities in an Oct. 30 post on X linking to an article about them and writing, "These people are enemy combatants who are facilitating the invasion and overthrow of our country. They should be treated accordingly."

In response to an inquiry from OSV News, a spokesperson for Rumble said the platform "has strict moderation policies banning the incitement of violence, illegal content, racism, antisemitism, promoting terrorist groups (designated by the U.S. and Canadian governments), and violating copyright, as well as many other restrictions." The spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked if the video had been removed.

Recent guests on Peters' show on Rumble include some Republican lawmakers and candidates, such as Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., who signed a letter in December targeting Catholic Charities' work with migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border.

A spokesperson for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from OSV News on whether making threatening remarks on a livestream would violate its terms of service.

An apparent automatic response from X read, "Busy now, please check back later." X owner Elon Musk's layoffs at the company impacted nearly the entire communications department, according to multiple reports.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: America
Link: americamagazine DOT org/politics-society/2023/11/07/antisemistism-oct-7-hamas-israel-246452

Rising antisemitism requires a clear Catholic response [Editorial, Analysis]

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

The Editors — On Oct. 7, Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel, torturing, raping and murdering over 1,400 innocent men, women, teenagers, babies and grandparents who were celebrating Simchat Torah. In the month since the attack, countries around the world have reported a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents.

[…]

America has long called for a solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict that respects the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to live in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories and has criticized Israeli policies that have set back a much-longed-for peace or failed to uphold the human dignity of Palestinians. Last week, America called on Israel to end its total siege on Gaza and to allow in humanitarian aid adequate to the massive and growing lack of food, water, medicine and fuel. The need for such aid remains critical.

But this is not about the cycles of violence, repression and reprisals that preceded Hamas’s horrific attack on Israel on Oct. 7, nor the invasion and siege of Gaza that has followed, but what is happening today on college campuses, social media and the streets of cities around the world. The evil of antisemitism and the threat it poses to Jews around the world must be condemned clearly and distinctly, separate from criticism or support of Israel as the Jewish state.

The world began to see antisemitism almost immediately in the wake of the Hamas attacks. The dead were still being counted in Israel on Monday, Oct. 9, when chants of “Gas the Jews” and “F​uck the Jews” were heard at a pro-Palestinian rally at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. On Oct. 30, in the Dagestan region of Russia, an angry mob stormed an airport in search of Jews arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Antisemitic graffiti is spreading across France, including in Paris, where dozens of stars of David have been painted on buildings around the city, widely seen as an echo of the badge Jews were forced to wear under Nazi regimes.

On Nov. 5, the European Commission said in a statement, “The spike of antisemitic incidents across Europe has reached extraordinary levels in the last few days, reminiscent of some of the darkest times in history.”

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League has recorded a 388 percent increase in antisemitic incidents — including verbal and physical attacks — since the massacre on Oct. 7. “Antisemitism has been intensifying and increasing,” A.D.L director Jonathan Greenblatt said on Nov. 5. “We’ve seen it normalized, and from the far-right and from the hard left.”

Some activists and academics have celebrated Hamas’s atrocities as an act of resistance. At Cornell University, the F.B.I. was called in to investigate violent threats posted to online message boards. “If you see a Jewish ‘person’ on campus follow them home and slit their throats,” one message read. One student has been arrested in connection with the threats. On campuses and city streets, posters displaying the faces of the more than 200 people being held hostage in Gaza have been torn down by critics of Israel.

Universities were quick to denounce antisemitism and white supremacy by name when chants of “Jews will not replace us” rang out during a right-wing march in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017; they should be just as forceful in condemning hate emanating from their own campuses.

Many Americans, seeking to understand the sheer scale of the attack on Oct. 7, have described it as “Israel’s 9/11.” Jews do not need such an analogy. They have a word for this horror: pogrom. Throughout the history of Christian Europe, Jews have been the target of sporadic mob violence. In the medieval period, the Crusades excited religious fanaticism among Christians, who then channeled that fervor into violence against their Jewish neighbors. In the early modern era, Jews, a stateless people with deep religious commitments, were frequently scapegoated as enemies of the emerging nation-state and the Enlightenment project. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, nationalists and Red Army soldiers killed tens of thousands of Jews in modern Belarus and Ukraine.

The reasons for Jew-hatred throughout history have been chameleon-like: Jews are too rich, too poor, too powerful or too weak; they are stubborn monotheists or godless communists. This adaptability also makes antisemitism resilient and is why we must always be attentive to its resurgence in our midst. When some of the chants coming from protests on campuses and streets echo the hatred of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, we cannot answer them with silence.

Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, though many Jews will say it is becoming harder to tell the difference. But celebrating Hamas’s depravity or arguing that the targeting of innocent Israeli civilians is understandable as an act of armed resistance reveals a deeply ingrained, and deeply immoral, disregard for Jewish life.

[…]

Catholic–Jewish relations have made great strides since World War II. With the wider world, Catholics pledged that “never again” would we stand by idly as Jews were persecuted and killed in the name of religion or ideology. Today, our Jewish brothers and sisters are asking us to make good on that promise.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: America
Link: americamagazine DOT org/politics-society/2023/10/31/lateral-expulsion-asylum-migrants-biden-246322

GOP governors busing migrants from the border was bad. Some Biden administration policies are even worse. [Analysis, Opinion]

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

Throughout the summer, Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, the Catholic governors of Texas and Florida, bused hundreds of asylum seekers from the U.S.–Mexico border to Northern cities, saying they wanted to bring attention to the burdens of migration on border communities. The governors’ political showmanship invited wide-ranging criticism, but in reality the transport of nonconsenting asylum seekers is a mainstay of U.S. immigration policy, and certain practices of the Department of Homeland Security have been far more destructive.

One example is “lateral expulsions”: The Border Patrol apprehends people who cross the border in one area, then D.H.S. flies or buses them across the country to an unfamiliar Mexican border city without their consent and without information about where they are going. Lateral expulsions spiked under Title 42, the public health rule that the Trump and Biden administrations used to close the border during the Covid-19 pandemic, especially after the Mexican state of Tamaulipas stopped accepting migrant families that had been expelled by the United States.

Title 42 expired in May, but according to testimony from a D.H.S. official at a U.S. Senate hearing on Sept. 6, lateral flights of families along the border have continued even after the end of the policy, ostensibly in order to “alleviate overcrowding” at certain facilities where migrants are “processed” before expulsion.

We know that from May through October 2021, D.H.S. held more than 22,000 people (mostly asylum seekers) who had crossed the border from Reynosa, in Tamaulipas, to McAllen, Tex., for days at a time in a makeshift processing site under a highway bridge. D.H.S. then flew these people to Tucson, San Diego or El Paso. Finally, the officials bused them to the border and expelled most of them into Mexico, far from where they had crossed. Hundreds of these people eventually arrived in Nogales, Sonora, at the Kino Border Initiative, where they shared details about their experiences. (See the joint report from the Kino Border Initiative and the Strauss Center at the University of Texas.)

Whether this is D.H.S.’s intention or not, many families who experience this treatment decide to give up on their migration attempt and return home. The D.H.S. might consider this an effective kind of deterrence, but it is a moral failure: It indicates that U.S. immigration officials have abused a person enough that, in the last leg of the most difficult experience of their life, they have given up.

[…]

Expelling families into unfamiliar border cities makes them uniquely vulnerable to exploitation and violence. Different organized crime groups (“mafias,” as they’re known locally) control different border cities and the illegal border crossings through that territory. If you’ve taken out a loan or spent your savings to pay smugglers in one city, but D.H.S. flies you to another city and expels you there, you don’t have money to pay smugglers in the new city. They will still demand payment, and even kidnap migrants until they find someone to pay ransom, often with the help of corrupt Mexican law enforcement officers who wait at ports of entry and inform the local mafia when D.H.S. expels a group of migrants.

Advocacy groups documented thousands of violent crimes against asylum seekers expelled into Mexican border cities under Title 42. Granted, we do not know what has happened specifically to the people D.H.S. expelled laterally — it is extremely difficult to track what happens to specific people when both their survival and victimization rely on their anonymity. People try to migrate clandestinely; others try to harm them clandestinely. The dynamics of organized exploitation of migrants in border cities, however, are documented in detail, so for D.H.S. to employ a practice like lateral expulsions is willful, reckless ignorance at best.

Five months after his election, Pope Francis reminded the world that “migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.” Ten years later the metaphor resurfaced: “It is a both sad and tragic day when a government official uses migrants as a pawn for political purposes,” said D.H.S. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, referring to Gov. Abbott’s and Gov. DeSantis’s practice of busing asylum seekers to sanctuary cities. The governors may have used asylum seekers as pawns, but so has the D.H.S.

There are degrees to dehumanization, and the dehumanization that allows the possibility of death or irreparable harm is the kind by which we should judge the moral acceptability of immigration enforcement practices. In a Catholic moral framework that affirms that migration doesn’t diminish a person’s dignity, this is truly an indefensible neglect of the image of God.

[Jocose]

https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/17 ... 37053?s=20

WATCH -
@JoeRogan
and Shane Dorian highlight the Biden administration importing millions of potential Democratic voters through illegal immigration.

"The border has been invaded by hundreds of thousands of illegals. How many are militants? How many are forming terror cells?

They are trying to make it so illegal immigrants can vote. They are sending people back from Venezuela because they oppose socialism, so they are not going to vote Democratic. They are literally importing Democratic voters...

They think by allowing the borders to be porous and by giving people aid and housing that, you're essentially guaranteeing that if you can rig it so that those people are allowed to vote, those people are going to vote Democratic."

Are Democrats pushing for work authorizations for the millions of migrants who have illegally entered the country — so they can vote?

[Jocose]

https://x.com/WallStreetSilv/status/172 ... 18891?s=20

Spain, and hopefully all of Europe, is waking up. They are realizing that our current “leaders” are taking us down a path that is not in our best interest.

Socialism and unlimited immigration doesn’t make sense for anyone. Something has to change soon before it’s too late. This can’t continue.

[Jocose]

https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/17234 ... 29354?s=20

London bridge is falling down

Falling down

Falling down

[Jocose]

https://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/17237 ... 53080?s=20

There may actually be over a million Spanish patriots protesting today in Madrid against the socialist coup

I’ve never seen anything like this

Media can’t hide it anymore

[Jocose]

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Source: Atlantic
Link: theatlantic DOT com/ideas/archive/2023/11/anti-semitism-anti-zionism-activists-hamas-apologists/675937/

When Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitic [Analysis, Opinion]

〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰〰

The most consequential form of anti-Zionism today is the one that deploys guns and rockets.

Nov. 8, 2023 — On October 7, the terrorist group Hamas perpetrated the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. More than 1,400 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, overwhelmingly civilians, including babies and Holocaust survivors. Children were shot in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of their children. Families were incinerated in their homes.

Hamas, which filmed many of its atrocities and posted them on social media, has never been shy about its motivations. Its charter uses “Jews” and “Zionists” interchangeably; claims that Jews control “the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, [and] broadcasting stations”; and promises “struggle against the Jews” and the destruction of Israel. Last week, a spokesperson for the group vowed that “we will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated.” Not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, but the anti-Zionism of Hamas certainly is.

[…]

Much recent media coverage and commentary has focused on the darker expressions of anti-Israel activism at American universities. And it’s true that the largest pro-Palestinian movement on campus, Students for Justice in Palestine, came out in support of the Hamas massacre and abduction campaign, declaring in its national response that “today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” But whatever one thinks of these students, they mostly have placards; Iran and its militias have guns, and they are happy to use them.

Four years ago, I sat onstage at the annual conference of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil-rights organization, and listed all the ways a person could be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. This was not what the audience typically comes to hear, but I thought it was important to explain, because the legitimate Palestinian national cause should not be conflated with anti-Jewish prejudice. Among other points, I noted that it was absurd to expect Palestinians to embrace Zionism, which they experienced as the displacement of their people and the dispossession of their homeland. Likewise, principled secular anti-nationalists who oppose all sectarian and ethnic states, ultra-Orthodox Jews who reject a return to the Jewish homeland before the arrival of the Messiah, and Jewish progressives who focus on Israel’s sins because they are particularly upset by how the country appears to act in their name are also not anti-Semites.

I still believe everything I said that day. I do not think that criticizing Israel — something I’ve done repeatedly in these pages — its current far-right government, or even its existence as a Jewish state is necessarily anti-Semitic. But outside the realm of intellectual abstraction, it has become all too apparent that anti-Zionism has an anti-Semitism problem in practice. What’s more, the inability to separate good-faith criticism from bad-faith bigotry is corrupting the conversation about Israel–Palestine at precisely the moment when we most need to be having it.

The most consequential form of anti-Zionism today is the one that deploys guns and rockets, supported by an array of apologists who justify their use. Any discussion of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic needs to center that reality, instead of focusing on theories or edge cases that are less objectionable, but also far less prevalent in the real world.

The first step to solving this problem is admitting that we have one.

“Tomorrow evening, it will be my pleasure and my honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I have also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well. Unfortunately, the Israelis would not allow them to travel here, so it is going to be only friends from Hezbollah … The idea that an organization [Hamas] that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labeled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.”

This deranged declaration was made not by a 21-year-old activist at a university this past month, but in 2009 by Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of the British Labour Party from 2015 to 2020.

The growth of anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism on college campuses is troubling — as are draconian attempts to clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech in response. But I am more concerned about the many powerful and influential people like Corbyn — politicians, activists, celebrities — who have spent years expressing or excusing anti-Jewish bigotry in an anti-Zionist guise, and building a global permission structure in which it is now acceptable to justify or even celebrate mass Jewish death.

The list of such people is long. There is the foreign minister of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 231 million people, who claimed on CNN in 2021 that Israel controls the media with its “deep pockets.” (Oddly, the Zionists invited him on the air in the first place.) There is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a NATO leader, whose inner circle produced a propaganda film in 2015 that detailed, in the words of the Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol, “how ‘the children of Israel’ want to dominate the world, subjugate other peoples and thus surround the world like a ‘giant octopus.’” To date, Erdoğan has refused to condemn Hamas, some of whose top officials reside in his country.

It’s not just anti-Zionist politicians who turn out to be anti-Semites. Greta Berlin, a co-founder of the Free Gaza activist group, wrote on Twitter in 2012 that “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” She and another Free Gaza co-founder, Mary Hughes-Thompson, later suggested that Israel’s Mossad was behind the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France. (An al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility.) The celebrated author Alice Walker joined one of Free Gaza’s missions to Gaza, and later refused to allow The Color Purple to be reissued in Hebrew. She also spent years posting baldly anti-Semitic material on her personal blog, and even promoted — in The New York Times — a wildly anti-Jewish book by the conspiracy theorist David Icke that claims that Jews bankrolled the Holocaust. When criticized for her conduct, she retorted that “the attempt to smear David Icke, and by association, me, is really an effort to dampen the effect of our speaking out in support of the people of Palestine.” And the less said about the anti-Jewish outlook of the Israel-boycott advocate and former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who recently questioned whether Hamas committed atrocities, the better.

The far right is no exception to this trend. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, perhaps the most infamous white nationalist in America, is also a virulent anti-Zionist, regularly regurgitating classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and replacing the word Jew with Zionist. (A typical sample of the genre: “The Zionists occupy most of the American media and now control much of American government.”) And Duke’s successors have dominated the social-media discourse surrounding the current Gaza war. As Rolling Stone reported this month, “The online alt-right has been enormously successful at co-opting the Palestinian cause to line their pockets and advance separate agendas … Huge swaths of X users have accepted them as reliable authorities on a fast-developing crisis in the Middle East, and thereby introduced new strains of propaganda into their media diet without realizing it.”

One such influencer, Lucas Gage, wrote on October 7 that “it’s hard to have much sympathy for the Israeli regime when they helped perpetrate this attack on my country,” and illustrated his post with images from 9/11. Gage later added some Holocaust denial into the mix, writing, “Now that you’re seeing all these Jewish people getting caught making up atrocities, doesn’t that make you wonder if they lied about past ones?” Gage has since doubled his following, gaining nearly 100,000 followers. Another far-right influencer, Jackson Hinkle, told his 2 million followers on X that Israel greatly inflated its death toll and that most of the murdered Israelis were killed not by Hamas, but by tank shelling from the Israeli army. He falsely sourced these lies to Israel’s premier left-wing paper, Haaretz, which was then forced to repudiate them.

The scale of this influence campaign is new, but the substance isn’t. When the Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene shared a video on Facebook alleging that “Zionist supremacists” were “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” and later accused the Rothschild banking dynasty of causing forest fires with a space laser, she was drawing from this fever swamp. When the Trump supporter Kanye West (now known as Ye), during his 2022 anti-Semitic implosion, declared that “culture is controlled by the Zionist media,” he was simply reflecting ideas that had long circulated on the fringes of the American right, but have become steadily more mainstream. Trump himself has claimed that Israel “literally owned Congress” and told Republican Jews that “you want to control your own politician” — and that was before he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Ye and the anti-Semitic influencer Nick Fuentes. Seen in this context, it should not be surprising that the website "antizionism DOT org" is run not by Palestinians, but by neo-Nazis.

That so many anti-Jewish bigots have found a home in anti-Israel groups or appropriated their language might seem surprising. But it’s actually quite predictable. If half of the world’s Muslims resided in one place, we would expect that place to draw the ire of Islamophobes. Israel is no different. As the address of so many Jews, it is an irresistible target for those who hate them. For this reason, any movement to critique or penalize Israel for its conduct will naturally attract not just principled advocates of human rights, but committed opponents of Jewish life, because criticism of Israel provides a respectable cover to launder their uglier aims. Unfortunately, they have been quite successful.

When Jewish institutions around the world are targeted for vandalism and violence, when Jews are hunted by a mob in a Russian airport, and when Jewish students are threatened and physically assaulted on college campuses, it is not some freak accident or aberration. It is the inevitable end result of a movement unwilling or unable to expel its extremists.