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International

Why Biden’s Gaza refugee plan is a hard hell no

Published

11 months ago

9 minute read

From Todd Bensman

As published May 7, 2024 by The New York Daily News

Just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

As President Biden considers bringing Gaza war refugees into the United States, he would do well to recall what happened when other good-hearted people took a similar chance – and paid with their blood.

Before the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli citizens sponsored work permits for thousands of security-vetted Palestinians to earn money working on some of their farms in towns not far from the Gaza Strip.

Some of those Gazan day laborers are believed to have used their access to provide tactical information that helped Hamas terrorists kill hundreds of Israelis on October 7.

The bad apples lesson of that still developing story – and another where security-vetted Palestinian UN workers directly assisted the October 7 attackers – is central to the problem with an American plan to import Gazan war refugees. It’s an unacceptable national security risk.

That’s because just about all of the Gaza Strip’s two million inhabitants have gone through decades of institutionalized cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the ruling Hamas’ upside down 7th century Islamist value system, which features at its core and extremely violent religious ideology.

Hamas relentlessly preaches that humanity’s highest virtues are suicide bombing, armed combat, genocide, intolerance of difference, and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews and Americans.

Yes, there will be exceptions among Gazans who are independent-minded enough to rebel. But if Israel can’t readily suss out the tolerant, then certainly America’s refugee bureaucrats will have far less luck.

A large number of respectable academic and think tank studies have shown how Hamas indoctrinates the people of the Gaza Strip.

Recall the recent reports of jubilant children, women and men cheering, spitting at, and even beating both alive and dead Israeli hostages paraded through Gaza after the October 7 attack.

“These are the people you might be bringing here,” said Nayla Rush, a refugee policy expert for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, who recently penned a column titled “Resettled Refugees Do Not Necessarily Leave Their Beliefs and Biases Behind.” “How are you going to vet them? What do you do, go to the Hamas authorities and ask? That’s a huge breach of any vetting. It’s impossible.”

Hamas starts things up in kindergarten and ramps up the ideological training all the way through the Islamic University of Gaza, a redoubt of hatred established by Hamas’ founding father in 1978 and which offers law degrees from a “Sharia Law Department” and whose engineering department is there to churn out combat engineers for Hamas tunnels.

As a 2013 New York Times report put it, the required school textbooks and curriculum “infuse the next generation with its militant ideology” as part of a required national education course of study in government schools.

SEE ALSO: Debunking The Argument For Columbia Journalism School’s Terrorist Propagandist Memorial​

The children are taught never to recognize modern Israel as anything more than a target of genocidal violence, Gaza school curricula is replete with thousands of examples of violent incitement against the Jewish state and Jewish people.

Tens of thousands have attended Hamas summer camps, where its armed terrorist operatives serve as camp counselors dishing out violent Islamist ideology and military training to prep them for conscription into Hamas’ armed forces.

Teachers and authority figures of every stripe teach the children that waging jihad that kills Jews is a solemn religious duty where martyrdom earns the believer paradise in heaven, a November 2023 analysis of collected Arabic television news segments shows.

“The next generation of Palestinians is being relentlessly fed a rhetorical diet that includes the idolization of terrorists, the demonization of Jews and the conviction that sooner or later Israel should cease to exist,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of intelligence and international affairs, wrote in a 2013 New York Times opinion column.

He noted that, for instance, some Facebook pages of government-supported Palestinian schools glorified Adolph Hitler’s genocide against European Jewry and that “Jews and Zionists are horrible creatures that corrupt those in their vicinity.”

​A 2021 European Union analysis of 156 Palestinian school textbooks found that many glorified suicide terrorists as role models and demonize Jews as dangerous and deceptive so as to generate feelings of hatred.

Hamas’ popular Al Aqsa TV gained international notoriety when its children’s show star, the Mickey Mouse-like character, Farfour, was outed for promoting radical Islam, hatred of Jews, and for urging children to take up AK-47 assault rifles.

The station’s response to international outrage was to depict an “Israeli” bureaucrat unjustly beating Farfour to death, then replaced the character with a bee named Nahool who continued to preach violence.

And so much for tolerance. Any Gazan at any age who might be brought to the United States can be expected to regard non-Muslims as sub-human after years of indoctrination backed by extreme violence against Christians in Gaza.

Islamist proselytizers have kidnapped thousands of Christians and forced them to convert to Islam and burned churches to the ground.

The tiny population of Christians that have not fled Hamas persecution remain subject to targeting “in ways even more acute and systemic than Christians in the West Bank and Israel,” a 2022 University of Notre Dame analysis concluded.

Christians feel coercion to covert to Islam, while Christian women are harassed and pressured to cover their hair and adopt Islamic forms of clothing.

Polling of Gazans consistently show majority support for the October 7 attack and for Hamas, whose backing has risen since the attack.

And large majorities have long viewed the United States as an enemy of Palestinian Arabs, one Pew poll showing that number at 76% a decade ago and soaring, if that is even possible, since the new war began

“The level of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism is huge among Palestinians because of the positions they have taken regarding international humanitarian law and what is happening in Gaza,” pollster Khalil Shikaki told the Associated Press in December.

Absent even a national security risk in importing men, women and children deeply schooled in blood lust, why would the Biden administration think it wise to import such America-haters into the country?

But in the end, Gazans must be regarded as too great a national security threat for a US humanitarian gambit.

By all means, do facilitate their exits to friendlier and safer neighborhoods in the region. Provide humanitarian aid. Arrange for medical treatment elsewhere. Send doctors on the UN Navy’s Mercy hospital ship.

But importing them into the United States as refugees? These are not the people, and this is definitely not the time.

​Todd Bensman is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Possible Criminal Charges for US Institute for Peace Officials who barricade office in effort to thwart DOGE

Published on March 24, 2025

By

 

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Thomas English

The Department of Justice is exploring potential criminal charges against former U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) officials who attempted to block the Trump administration’s leadership changes at the federally funded think tank Monday, a senior DOJ official told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The official, who requested anonymity, told the DCNF the DOJ is examining whether certain USIP actions — such as the removal and destruction of internal and external door locks — created illegal fire hazards. The official also flagged the widespread distribution of internal flyers instructing USIP staff not to cooperate with incoming Trump administration officials as potentially obstructive conduct. The DCNF was the first to report on USIP’s internal flyer campaign and destruction of door locks.

“Eleven board members were lawfully removed, and remaining board members appointed Kenneth Jackson acting president,” Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, previously told the DCNF. “Rogue bureaucrats will not be allowed to hold agencies hostage. The Trump administration will enforce the President’s executive authority and ensure his agencies remain accountable to the American people.”

The inquiry — which remains in its early stages, the official emphasized — follows a contentious standoff Monday after former USIP leadership tried to block the installation of Kenneth Jackson, who President Donald Trump appointed as the institute’s new president on March 14. The Trump administration determined the institute had failed to comply with a Feb. 19 executive order requiring federally funded organizations like USIP to scale operations down to their bare statutory minimums, triggering a leadership shakeup the institute attempted to resist.

USIP leadership began preparing for a confrontation weeks before the executive order was issued. A Feb. 6 internal document exclusively obtained by the DCNF outlined plans to deny building access to outside officials and reasserted the institute’s discretion over security systems and facilities. Flyers with the names and photos of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officials were posted throughout the building, instructing staff to report their presence and avoid conversation.

After Jackson and other DOGE officials arrived on March 14 with law enforcement and a copy of Trump’s order, they were turned away by USIP’s legal counsel, sources previously told the DCNF. Over the following weekend, USIP leadership escalated its resistance — terminating its private security firm, disabling internet and phone systems and resorting to walkie-talkie communication inside the building.

DOGE officials returned Monday to find the building locked down and staff barricaded on the fifth floor. USIP officials called the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), sources previously told the DCNF, who only later arrived at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. after reports of obstruction by institute staff. MPD entered the fifth floor through emergency stairwells and removed former USIP President George Moose and other senior officials from the premises.

While a federal judge declined to issue a restraining order halting the leadership transition Wednesday, she sharply criticized DOGE’s cooperation with law enforcement, despite the circumstances surrounding USIP’s refusal to comply.

The DOJ official did not specify which individuals were under investigation or when a decision on charges might be made.

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International

Pope Francis appears frail as he returns to Vatican following 38-day hospital stay

Published on March 24, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Michael Haynes, Snr. Vatican Correspondent

The Pope blessed the gathered crowd at Rome’s Gemelli hospital before leaving to return to his Vatican residence.

Pope Francis made his return to the Vatican Sunday, after first greeting crowds from the balcony of the Gemelli hospital.

For the first time in 38 days, Pope Francis appeared before the public eye on Sunday. Greeting crowds who had gathered outside the Gemelli hospital where he has been treated for double pneumonia since February 14, Francis was noticeably weakened and frail.

He wore no nasal cannulas during his less than three minute greeting on the balcony. But the toll of being without oxygen was marked, as Francis appeared particularly breathless as he was wheeled back inside.

Francis thanked the crowds before singling out and praising a woman who had brought a bouquet of flowers with her.

Accompanied by his personal nurse Massimiliano Strappetti, Francis did not seem able to raise his arms freely. After a very brief few words of thanks, Francis had to be reminded to give his blessing before then being wheeled inside by Strappetti.

This was the first time the Pope had been seen in-person since his hospitalization in mid-February – an event which his doctors noted Saturday was fraught with considerable life-threatening danger for the Pope.

Following his balcony appearance – which was live-streamed on the Vatican News media channels – Francis was driven back to the Vatican in his customary Fiat 500. But he made an unscheduled stop at St. Mary Major’s on the journey, giving the bouquet of flowers he had noticed at the hospital to the Cardinal Rolandas Makrickas, the co-adjutor priest of Francis’ favored Roman basilica.

The event was in keeping with Francis’ long-established custom of visiting the icon of Mary, Salus Populi Romani, in the basilica before and after every papal trip he has made. Indeed he has announced his desire to be buried in the basilica, and preparations have begun accordingly to ready an area close to the icon for his interment.

His motor and respiratory therapy will continue, as evidenced by the undeniable need for oxygen yesterday when he did not use it for three minutes on the balcony.

Doctors stated during Saturday’s press conference that Francis nearly lost his life twice during his time in the hospital, confirming reports which had circulated about the Pope’s condition. Indeed, Dr. Sergio Alfieri, who leads the Pope’s medical team, said that when Francis was hospitalized February 14 he “presented [with] an acute respiratory failure,” which led to “severe” double pneumonia.

Nurse Strappetti and Dr. Luigi Carbone – who is deputy director of the Health and Hygiene Department of Vatican City State and Francis’ physician in the Vatican – will coordinate the daily medical care of the Pope.

His social contact is limited by necessity as doctors warn about the danger of his contracting any new infection. As such, it will likely be the case that his already small inner circle of three secretaries and medical staff will be those who form part of Francis’ daily household.

While a regular visitor in the Pope’s normal schedule, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin only visited Francis three times in his 38-day hospitalization. Such a distance between them would suggest that Parolin himself might not be anticipated to be as regular a visitor as in the past.

For now, though, Francis’ pontificate is going to be placed under particular scrutiny. He has returned to the Vatican but he is expected to be a much more hidden and vocally quiet pontiff than before.

Yet perhaps, bereft of voice, he will focus more on issuing documents and pushing through agendas he has long had in mind – such as the recent three-year extension of the Synod on Synodality.

Doctors described him as eager to return to work. His appearance on Sunday gave the impression of a man much more frail than the image painted by his clinical team.

Whether a quiet period will descend upon Vatican hill, or a season of frenzied activity begins, now remains to be seen.

Regardless, speculation of a conclave has already long begun thanks to Francis’ hospitalization, and cardinals will likely be ever more on the lookout for candidates as the year progresses.

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