I’m not surprised that Hamas is hiding in a school. I’m just surprised that the school is Harvard.

— Elon Altman (@ElonAltman) December 19, 2023

Banned!

Western Journal:

The Washington Post has taken down a political cartoon after readers wrote it to the paper to complain the cartoon was “racist.”

David Shipley, editor of the opinion section of the Post, wrote in a rather confusingly worded “Editor’s note”… that the paper would “continue to make the section home to a range of views and perspectives, including ones that challenge readers,” as part of the explanation of why it was doing the opposite of that. …

The cartoon showed a man, presumably a Hamas spokesman, saying “How dare Israel attack civilians …” while tied to him as human shields were a woman in Muslim garb, two young children, and two infants, one of which was crying.

The cartoon has apparently also been removed from the cartoonist’s website, as well as his X feed. Other cartoons, many of which depict Hamas in less than favorable images, remain in both places.

Those of us of the Baby Boom generation can remember the old regime in which bad language and risque images and words were commonly banned.

When I was young, people still gasped when Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, right out loud, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” And everyone still marveled that Hollywood actually got away with that one.

It was just a little ways in the past that Ulysses needed to be smuggled into the United States.

All that was swept away by the 1960s and the Sexual Revolution, and those of us who were young in that time of rebellion could never possibly have imagined that we’d live to see another new Age of Victorianism taking a different form.

Today’s scowling Puritan judge is not down on sex or nudity. If anything, he’s violently protective of the privileged status of Sodomy. What he objects to, and is eager to forcibly eradicate, is political incorrectness and any slight upon or failure to accord due reverence and regard to the privileged status of any of the left’s sacred cow victim identity groups. When today’s leper rings his bell, you are not supposed to flee, you are expected to bow down.

Old age is bad enough, but this particular historical development, in my view, ranks with prostate problems at the tippy top of the Universe’s Sick Jokes scale.

Disturbing images ⚠️

Four weeks ago today, 200+ young Israelis were butchered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival.

This is what the aftermath looked like through the eyes of an IDF soldier who came to rescue survivors.

Don’t look away.https://t.co/UV2mWjTE7m

— Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 (@Israel) November 4, 2023

The Business Insider reports that suddenly, who would ever have imagined? Woke Extremism in the form of on-campus support for Hamas may have untoward consequences for students at elite schools like Harvard.

It started when dozens of student groups issued a statement holding Israel’s government “entirely responsible” for the violence that Hamas unleashed in Gaza. That, in turn, prompted billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to demand that his alma mater disclose the names of students who are members of the signatory groups — even those who didn’t know about the statement — so Wall Street firms could avoid hiring them. Adding to the tension, a truck roamed campus displaying the names and photos of students alleged to be involved with the statement.

It was a strange position for Harvard to find itself in. The university has long enjoyed a place of honor among the power elite. It sends more graduates into the bulge bracket banks than any other school. Large law firms also love hiring from Harvard, and Silicon Valley loves to place big bets on the university’s graduates. Over the past three years, according to Crunchbase, about one of every 10 dollars invested in early-stage startups went to Harvard alumni.

But Ackman’s broadside exposed a deeper rift among conservative industries like Wall Street and Big Law and the campuses they’ve historically recruited from. As a new generation of graduates has emerged, they have found themselves and the campus culture they’re a part of increasingly at odds with the values and expectations of the big banks and white-shoe law firms they’ve been trained to staff. …

An investor at an asset management firm in Silicon Valley privately told Insider that he recently spoke to a hedge-fund founder who made no bones about how he approaches hiring. When a résumé hits his desk, the founder said, he skips over the sections on experience and education and instead races to the bottom of the page, where applicants list their “activities.” Then, if he sees something he doesn’t like, he will simply “rip up” the résumé and reject the applicant as a “bad cultural fit.”

For Harvard students — especially those in the business and law schools — having prominent leaders in your chosen profession openly declare that they won’t hire graduates who hold political views they disagree with is not an academic issue — it’s an existential threat. …

now, some Harvard students fear that the backlash from the business community will have a chilling effect on student speech. Like it or not, they say, students have to think about how expressing their views could affect their financial and professional prospects. That’s especially true when Wall Street billionaires are posting on X, formerly Twitter, and professional network LinkedIn has become a home for all kinds of sharing. There’s every chance today that what’s said on campus won’t stay on campus.

A first-year law student told Insider that students would be wise to think through what voicing their opinions could mean for their future employment, especially in a buttoned-down field like law. “The general advice,” he said, “is to keep your opinions to yourself for the most part.”

A second-year law student, who was appalled by the letter, likewise sympathized with fellow students who were unnerved by having their words provoke such ire beyond the campus. “There is a real employment consequence for people — and that is a scary situation,” she said. “We are all here with a lot of student loans, and we need to work.”

This is what "decolonization" means and it won’t stop with Israel pic.twitter.com/vbTUKu96jt

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 9, 2023

🎥🔴 TV Natio world/ RadioGenoa

Palestinians marching around the body of a young Israeli woman. These are the people world leaders want Israel to make peace with. pic.twitter.com/VWR9su4SHs

— Louis Montpellier Natio (@Natio_1976) October 7, 2023

Some religion these people have.

Heck, yes, why! Cornell would even welcome ISIS speakers and let ISIS set up a training camp on campus. Project Veritas interviews Assistant Dean Joseph Scaffido.

Five Hamas terrorists trying to infiltrate the Bahad 4 Israel Defense Forces Training Base by sea are quickly eliminated by helicopter gunship.

Via Bill Jacobson.

It seems that, either on land in Gaza or under the sea nearby, last summer, some ignorant and greedy barbarians came into possession of an unusually intact and highly artistically significant Hellenistic bronze statue of Apollo. Reports differ, but apparently the priceless statue was briefly being offered on Ebay for $500,000, probably only a fraction of its actual value. Its finder, we are told, chopped off a few fingers for testing, thinking that the statue might be gold. Police representing the Palestinian authority, Hamas, subsequently seized the statue, and it has disappeared.

We can only hope that the nearby civilized state of Israel will take steps to secure possession of this important art object on behalf of the rest of the nations of the West.

Businessweek, January 30th: The Apollo of Gaza: Hamas’s Ancient Bronze Statue

The Guardian, February 10th: ‘Priceless’ bronze statue of Greek god Apollo found in Gaza Strip — Hamas officials seize statue after it appears on eBay — Doubt cast on fisherman’s claim to have found item in sea

Businessweek, February 10th: New Details Emerge in Mystery of Bronze Apollo Held by Hamas

The Verge, February 11th: Ancient statue of Greek god Apollo discovered in Gaza strip

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Pallets of mustard gas shells similar to those sold by Libyan rebels to Hamas and Hezbollah

Mossad leak source DEBKAfile reports on what our freedom-loving friends, the Libyan rebels, have been up to.

Senior Libyan rebel “officers” sold Hizballah and Hamas thousands of chemical shells from the stocks of mustard and nerve gas that fell into rebel hands when they overran Muammar Qaddafi’s military facilities in and around Benghazi, debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources report.

Word of the capture touched off a scramble in Tehran and among the terrorist groups it sponsors to get hold of their first unconventional weapons.

According to our sources, the rebels offloaded at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells for cash payment amounting to several million dollars.

US and Israeli intelligence agencies have tracked the WMD consignments from eastern Libya as far as Sudan in convoys secured by Iranian agents and Hizballah and Hamas guards. …

[S]ome of the poison gas may be intended not only for artillery use but also for drones which Hizballah recently acquired from Iran.

Tehran threw its support behind the anti-Qaddafi rebels because of this unique opportunity to get hold of the Libyan ruler’s stock of poison gas after it fell into opposition hands and arm Hizballah and Hamas with unconventional weapons without Iran being implicated in the transaction.

Shortly after the uprising began in the third week of February, a secret Iranian delegation arrived in Benghazi. Its members met rebel chiefs, some of them deserters from the Libyan army, and clinched the deal for purchasing the entire stock of poison gas stock and the price.

The rebels threw in a quantity of various types of anti-air missiles.

—————————–

DEBKAfile subsequently boasts of unnamed parties taking out a couple of senior people in charge of the weapons transfer.

[A]ccusing Israel of killing the two passengers of a Hyundai Sinai near Port Sudan Tuesday, April 5, the Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Karti alleged a missile was fired from an aerial drone or a vessel on the Red Sea. debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources reveal that a special operations unit landed by sea and used a surface missile to hit the car and kill two top handlers of the Iranian-Hamas arms smuggling network in Sudan. The assailants waylaid the vehicle as it drove through the Kalaneeb region on the only blacktop road running through the Sudanese desert between Khartoum and Port Sudan.

Some recent non-Irish visitors to Dubai

The New York Times admired the romantic plot line.

The murder was straight out of a cheap spy thriller. At least 11 professional assassins, some wearing wigs and fake beards, tracked a senior Hamas official to his Dubai hotel in January and killed him with cold precision, fleeing the country afterward on European passports, the Dubai police say.

——————————————-

The Telegraph quoted the Irish government denying the legitimacy of several supposedly Irish passports, and provided details of the assassination.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a senior figure in the military wing of Hamas, was found dead in a hotel room on Jan 20. According to one report he was killed by a female assassin who entered his room by posing as a member of hotel staff, injected him with a drug that induced a heart attack and hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.

But other officers said he was strangled, probably after receiving an electric shock.

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, blamed Israel’s Mossad intelligence service for the killing.

——————————————-

It seems that the late al-Mabhouh played a key role in the smuggling of Iranian rockets to Gaza.

——————————————-

27:27 Security camera footage of suspected assassins

Two figures in the assembled video have their faces digitized out, why?

——————————————-

DEBKAfile is taking a vacation!

——————————————-

the late Mahmoud-al-Mabhouh

Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, writing December 24, 2008 at Palestinian Media Watch (article no longer on-line) quoted at Free Republic:

Hamas members of the Palestinian Legislative Council in Gaza have approved a new bill “to implement Koranic punishments,” including hand amputation, crucifixion, corporal punishment and execution. Drinking, owning or producing wine is punished by 40 lashes, while drinking in public adds three months’ imprisonment. Several laws are directed against Hamas’s Palestinian rivals, including a law intended to inhibit non-Hamas negotiators by sentencing to death anyone who was “appointed to negotiate with a foreign government on a Palestinian issue and negotiated against Palestinians’ interest.”

The following is the description as it appears… on the Al Arabiya website:

Headline: Hamas approves law of punishment by lashes, amputating hands, crucifying, and execution — in order to implement the Islamic Sharia law.

Hamas members of the Palestinian Legislative Council approved in its meeting in Gaza a new bill proposed by the Hamas who have a majority in the Legislative Council, whose purpose is “to implement Koranic punishments.” The newspaper Al Hayat of London reported on Dec. 24, 2008, that this step is seen as unprecedented, and has brought criticism and concern from human rights organizations in the Gaza Strip, especially as this law includes punishments by lashes, cutting off of hands, crucifixion, and execution…

The language of the law proposes “primary and secondary” laws. Primary laws include: “Koranic laws, blood revenge, lashes, crucifixion, and execution …”

The text stresses: “These punishments will not be canceled or pardoned … except if pardoned by the victim himself…

Section 59 of the law establishes that “punishment of death will be enacted on any Palestinian who intentionally does one of the following: Raised a weapon against Palestine on behalf of the enemy during war, was appointed to negotiate with a foreign government on a Palestinian issue and negotiated against Palestinians’ interest, performed a hostile action against a foreign country in a way that endangers Palestine in war or in harming political relations, served a foreign army in time of war, advised or helped soldiers to enlist in this army, weakened the spirit or the force of resistance of the people, or spied against Palestine especially during war.”

The punishment of lashes appears in many sections of the law. Section 84 states that: “Whoever drinks wine, owns or produces wine will be punished with 40 lashes if he is Muslim, and anyone who drinks wine, or angers another person [with wine], or causes him distress when drinking wine in a public place, or goes to a public place while drunk, will be punished with no less than 40 lashes and imprisonment for the minimum of three months.”

Quite an incentive for Palestinian diplomats. Negotiate a treaty or a cease fire with Israel that somebody doesn’t like, and he can get out the old hammer and the nails and come looking for you.