HardThrasher
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November 7, 2024
Forgotten War Ep4 – Rise of the Chindits
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November 4, 2024
Ujjal Dosanjh blames Justin Trudeau for the rise of Sikh extremism in Canada
The Liberal Party normally manages to avoid having any internal differences come to public attention, so having a former Liberal cabinet minister come out and directly criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rather noteworthy:
Ujjal Dosanjh speaking at the 12th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas – Engaging Diaspora Connecting Across Generation, in New Delhi on January 08, 2014.
Photo by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (GODL-India) via Wikimedia Commons.
“A silent majority of the Sikhs do not want to have anything to do with Khalistan. They just don’t speak out because they’re afraid of violence and violent repercussions,” reports Ujjal Dosanjh, as a Sikh living in Vancouver, B.C.
The call for a separate Sikh homeland in Punjab, India — to be called Khalistan — has been brewing since the 1930s, when British rule in India was nearing its end. Although the movement now has marginal support in India, it has taken wings in Canada and escalated into the present derailing of relations between two friendly Commonwealth democracies, India and Canada.
Unlike many of his Sikh peers in Canada, Ujjal — a former NDP premier of British Columbia and a former federal cabinet minister under Liberal prime minister Paul Martin — isn’t afraid to speak out. He’s been extremely vocal, especially since 1985; that’s when the bombing of Air India Flight 182 by Khalistani extremists, killing 329 people, brought the separatist movement to Canada.
Ujjal, now 78, has faced death threats from extremists but remains unwavering in his determination to convince fellow Canadians that the overwhelming majority of the nearly 800,000 Sikhs in Canada do not support the Khalistani movement. “I’d say less than five per cent, less than five per cent,” he emphasizes.
[…]
While accountability for this violence is an imperative, the purpose of my conversation with Uijal is not to sift through the evidence and intelligence. What I want to understand is how we got to this place where Canada’s Sikh population, the largest Sikh diaspora in the world, has in effect been co-opted by the Khalistanis to the point where this obscure separatist movement has become a Canadian problem.
Without hesitation, Ujjal points to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
For two reasons, Ujjal blames Trudeau: “One, he’s never really understood the vast majority of Sikhs are quite secular in their outlook, despite the fact that they go to the temple,” he says. And the second reason: “Khalistanis are not a majority, and the fact nobody speaks against them is out of fear”. Through intimidation, Ujjal elaborates, Khalistani supporters control many of the temples in Canada. And it’s Trudeau’s fault, he asserts, “that Canadians now equate Khalistanis with Sikhs, as if we are all Khalistanis if we’re Sikhs”.
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October 7, 2024
A grim anniversary
In the National Post, Barbara Kay notes the anniversary of the Hamas attacks along the Gaza-Israeli border that killed many Israeli civilians and led to the still-ongoing captivity for hundreds more:
One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again”.
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
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October 3, 2024
Middle East situation – “There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play”
CDR Salamander on the situation in the Middle East as we come up on the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians on the border between Israel and Gaza:
“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Less than a week since the invasion of Israel from Gaza and the resulting pogrom that witnessed the largest one day murder, rape, kidnapping and tortures of Jews since World War Two — it is clear that Israel has decided that it was finally time to reset and repair the damage from decades of bad international theory and delusion.
There are really two international delusions we are seeing in play, one Israel has more control over, one has yet to be fully revealed to be the folly it is.
You can see the threads heading back decades earlier, but the first delusion hit its peak during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, the withdrawal from the Southern Lebanon security zone in 2000, and finished its summit with Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
The delusion was that The Smartest People in the Room™ in DC, New York, Brussels, and Tel Aviv could, if they talked enough, wished enough, and said nice things to each other enough, would find a way to get the various Palestinian. Hope, wishes, and a mistaken trust in international organizations convinced Israel to give peace a chance.
Peace had a chance, and it culminated on October 7th, 2023.
Now, it appears, Israel will take the world as it is, not as it and others wished it to be. The key part of “this world” that some schools of international security affairs for decades have refused to recognize is the common, evil thread connecting them all: The Islamic Republic of Iran.
Gaza
Hamas was always a proxy for Iran. It could not have been able to be the threat it was without two things: 1) Iran; 2) UN. There can be no returning to the world of October 6th, 2023.
Whatever status Gaza winds up having in the future, it will not be like the past. While there remains much hard work to be done in Gaza, the hardest military part is done. It will be pacified thoroughly, and then the really hard part — what will happen to the population and territory of Gaza — will have to be worked out.
Egypt wants nothing to do with it. The Arab nations have already let it be known they don’t want that radicalized population, and Israel cannot let another Hamas like governance take over that strip of land that points in to Israel like a dagger.
It appears that Israel is following a variation of my COA-A I posted four days after last year’s attacks. The bitter fruit of a half-century of bad theory will have to be fixed, somehow.
Lebanon
From its birth as a Shia militia boosted by Iran, Hezbollah has, even more than Hamas, been a proxy for Iran. Only vaguely connected to the Palestinian cause, it has simply become an advanced military force for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
For a year, well over 60,000 Israeli citizens have been internally displaced from their homes in Northern Israel due to unending rocket attack from Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. As they rightfully focused on the war in Gaza, (as President Lincoln advised, “One war at a time“), Israel took the blows with minimal response until the last few weeks.
The formerly Christian led government of Lebanon cannot police their own nation, and have not been able to for decades, and the UN is more of a problem than a solution, Israel will have to take steps to secure her own safety.
Like the Gaza situation, this will create problems down the road because the hostile population is not going anywhere. That is an issue for later. For now, the rockets must stop.
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September 28, 2024
Lebanon is no longer a nation … it’s a parasitized husk operated by Iran’s proxies
In UnHerd, Tom McTague explains why there can be no “settlement” of the South Lebanon problem, because Lebanon ceased functioning as an independent state and is now largely controlled by Hezbollah, which means it’s indirectly controlled by Iran:
[…] A similar assessment was made about Lebanon, a country without a functioning state or economy and at the mercy of Iran’s colonial army, Hezbollah. This, also, was a situation that was thought to be containable — even as Iran exploited the anarchic chaos of Iraq and Syria to supply its proxy with enough weapons to devastate Israel.
The central conceit of the Abraham Accords was that, irrespective of Hamas, Hezbollah and the occupation of the West Bank, once the Israel-Saudi axis was formed, Iran could be pushed back and contained without direct American involvement. But, then, the depth of Hamas’s murderous brutality on 7 October shattered that assumption, leaving not only a traumatised and vulnerable Israel, but also a traumatised and vulnerable Western order forced to confront the stark realities of the Middle East.
Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.
By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.
With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.
Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered.
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September 22, 2024
Canada’s latest moral preening on the international stage includes a partial arms embargo against … the USA?
In the National Post, Conrad Black points out that the Canadian government’s tedious and never-ending virtue signalling has reached a new and barely believable low:
It is the usual pious and cowardly humbug that causes Ottawa to announce it is suspending the sales of some non-lethal military equipment to Israel because it has the effrontery to opine that the Israeli Defense forces are insufficiently protective of the lives of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. But it is breathtaking that Canada should include in this practically irrelevant step an embargo on some equipment to the United States that it suspects the Americans might pass on to Israel. This initiative is a trifecta of fatuous error. First, it is clear from thoroughly available evidence that Israel has achieved an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian to authentic military casualties for modern urban counter-guerrilla warfare. This is especially difficult as the enemy in this case, Hamas, proudly states that civilian casualties are useful to its propaganda campaign (which has brainwashed our foreign policy-makers), and which habitually embeds its terrorist cadres in and near schools, hospitals, and places of worship to incite as much collateral damage on its own population as possible.
Second, it departs completely from any real concept of the nature of war. The invasion of Israel on October 7 and the slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli, mostly civilians, was intended and received as an act of war. Wars are not fought by dropping pamphlets or posturing with trivial gestures. As General Douglas MacArthur famously said during the Korean War, “In war there is no substitute for victory”. This is particularly the case in the current war in Gaza as Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. As long as that condition prevails, there can be no peace and Israel’s pledge to exterminate Hamas as a terrorist force enables it accurately to be described in the Wilsonian phrase: “a war to end war”. Canada’s government is engaged in a contemptible assertion of moral relativism between the heroic and democratic state of the long wronged Jewish people and a ragtag of vicious terrorists happy to be the cannon fodder of the principal terrorism-promoting state in the world — the primitive racist totalitarian theocracy of Iran.
Finally in the trifecta, in the bankruptcy of their imagination, our foreign policy makers have taken up the trite evasion of the outgoing Biden administration, that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, but we reserve the right to coach it on how to do that and this effectively limits self-defence to the expulsion of invaders but muffled and insulated retaliation against the invaders after they have been evicted from Israel. This is a formula for perpetual conflict and is a moral and military under-reaction to the enormity of Hamas’ provocation. What our government imagines it is accomplishing with this pallid, torpid, and ludicrous gesture surely escapes the imagination of all interested parties.
It must slightly bemuse the United States government that it is boycotted by Canada, which has benefited from an American guarantee of our security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, said that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were invaded by any power from another continent.
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September 21, 2024
“This might be the greatest asymmetrical attack in human history”
Terrorist organizations in the Middle East always have to be aware of the risk of coming to the attention of Israel accidentally, and they’ve suffered losses whenever their operations have been prematurely exposed. The attack on Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure is, as Phil A. McBride says in The Line, “something genuinely new in warfare”:
The attack on Hezbollah’s communications through exploding pagers, radios, and other electronic devices triggered a cascade of instant memes.
Detonating the pagers and other devices would have been a relatively easy thing to do (to the extent that any of this was easy!), since it’s obvious that Israel had already penetrated the pager network, and Hezbollah’s communications generally, before the devices were even deployed. Once Israel was confident that they’d put all the devices into the right hands, they simply sent a message — remember, these devices are all intended to receive telecommunications — that somehow triggered the explosions we saw. I don’t know if the explosives did all the damage, or if the batteries were somehow overloaded as well. What is clear is that the explosions were enough to kill, injure and maim people who were directly holding the devices, but not much more. Videos posted online show people suddenly dropping to the ground in agony after their device explodes in their hands, pockets or backpacks, but people in their immediate vicinity are unharmed.
Again, none of this is easy, but if one is looking to remotely detonate a bomb, it helps when the bomb it intended to literally receive incoming communications.
[…]
That covers the pagers and two-way radios, but what about the other various items that exploded? While almost everything electronic you can buy these days has internet/wireless capability, Hezbollah went through a lot of trouble to be as disconnected from the internet as possible. I can only assume they wouldn’t have connected a device meant to read the fingerprints of terrorists trying to enter a safe house to the internet, where a Mossad hack is a constant threat. This means that any other device that exploded not only had explosive charges installed, but also a radio capable of receiving a remote detonation command. The most efficient approach would have been to tune those radios to the same frequencies used by Hezbollah’s two-way radios to minimize the infrastructure needed to pull off what was already an insanely complex operation, but we will need more information to even begin to understand that part of Israel’s plan.
And let’s talk about the plan. The level of sophistication for such an operation cannot be understated. Everything that we’ve seen over the last few days indicates a complete and total breakdown of Hezbollah’s internal security. Israel managed to intercept and infiltrate both their primary and backup communications networks before they were even deployed, as well as a swath of other electronic equipment, and turn them into bombs.
It has been said that communication is the most important component of any military system, but I don’t think anyone had ever thought of actually weaponizing the opposition’s communications infrastructure itself before now. This is something genuinely new in warfare.
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September 4, 2024
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy indulges himself with a Trudeau-esque bit of geopolitical posturing
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the British government’s odd choice of timing to announce suspension of (some) arms shipments to Israel:
Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with “optics”. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: “Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?”
This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.
Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a “clear risk”, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.
Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. “What is the point?”, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.
The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.
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August 28, 2024
1974 – Britain’s nadir
In the second part of Ed West‘s appreciation of Dominic Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun, Britain was described as “sliding, sinking, shabby, dirty, lazy, inefficient, dangerous, in its death throes, worn out, clapped out, occasionally lashing out” by Margaret Drabble in her 1977 novel The Ice Age, and it certainly seems to fit the bill quite well:
The Times reported in October of that year that London’s West End was in a “sorry state”, with parts of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road “in the sort of condition that, in Birmingham or Manchester, would qualify them for wholesale slum clearance”.
Journalist Clive Irving wrote that London had become “a semi-derelict slum”, a city blighted by “tacky porno shops, skin movies, pinball arcades, and toxic hamburger joints” while “behind neon facades the buildings are flaking and unkempt”.
The capital had lost a million and a half people since its peak in 1939, and would continue its decline for another decade. Whitehall Mandarin Ronald McIntosh declared that “London is evidently losing population quite heavily [and] services are steadily deteriorating, and nobody seems to have the least idea of how to deal with it”.
The country as a whole was haemorrhaging people, and in 1975 its population fell for the first time since records began. In the spring of 1974 applications for emigration to Canada went up 65 per cent, while New Zealand even felt compelled to put restrictions on people fleeing the old country.
Doctors in particular were leaving in droves, and recruitment agency Robert Lee International estimated that the number of professionals wanting to move abroad rose by 35% in just six months, from January and July 1975. Interest was keenest among engineers, accountants, scientists and teachers.
Many high earners were fleeing excessive tax rates, so punitive that even the Bond producer Albert R Broccoli left to make the iconic British movies elsewhere, and Moonraker would be filmed in France.
Gone were the days of the Swinging Sixties; instead, the London of George Smiley was “the city of the Sex Pistols and The Sweeney, not the Beatles and The Avengers; a city of tramps and hooligans, hustlers and muggers, the downtrodden and the disappointed, haunted by the deadly figure of the IRA bomber”.
Britain’s second city was in an even worse state. During Wilson’s first term Birmingham had been hailed as “the most go-ahead city in Europe”. Now the Times admitted it looked like a “large and chaotic building site”.
Travel writer Jonathan Raban described Southampton’s Millbrook estate as “a vast, cheap storage unit for nearly 20,000 people”. The country’s increasing problem with crime, hooliganism, graffiti and drug addiction meant that residents wouldn’t even hang their clothes in communal areas, for fear of theft.
The great architectural feats of the post-war era were beginning to look like a miserable failure, and none more so than the utopian social housing schemes, which had often entailed destroying closely-knit and organic communities in overcrowded and run-down – but rescuable – terraced housing.
Christopher Brooker visited Keeling House in Bethnal Green and found “its concrete cracked and discolouring, the metal reinforcement rusting through the surface, every available inch covered with graffiti”. Here was the story of modern Britain, “the bright, anticipated dream followed by a seedy, nightmarish reality”.
The National Theatre’s Peter Hall visited the New York Juilliard School and upon return home “found it depressing to compare it with our own already run-down, ill-maintained South Bank building”.
“The English apparently no longer care enough about material surroundings,” he wrote: “They even seem to take a positive pleasure in defiling them.”
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August 8, 2024
Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly on a US government terrorist watch list
Publicly demolish the candidate who goes on to become Vice President and then Presidential candidate, get on a terrorist watch list, apparently:
Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t exactly been toeing the progressive line since she left the House. In fact, she’s been on a bit of a rampage, destroying the extreme left with every public appearance.
Yet as a former federal lawmaker and a military veteran — one who didn’t leave her unit high and dry as they prepared for deployment, unlike some others I could name — you’d think she’d be someone we wouldn’t suspect of anything illegal.
And I’m willing to bet that no one does suspect her of anything.
That didn’t stop the feds, though.
In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. The photo below is a screenshot from the actual Target Package used by the FAMS to surveil Gabbard.
The whistleblowers first shared the information with Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), a national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs). According to LaBosco, at least one of the whistleblowers is ready to go on the record with pertinent documentation. LaBosco shared that Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards. LaBosco has attempted to contact Gabbard and her staff but has not received a response.
There’s literally nothing about Gabbard that should warrant this kind of attention. I can think of a few folks where I can at least comprehend an argument for such a thing, but Gabbard is far from one of them.
So what gives?
Matt Taibbi has more:
This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection”. The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.
“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.
“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.
That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military’,” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’
Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics’. And he said, oh.”
The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled”. Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening”, along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”
It’s not just high profile people like Gabbard who’ve been added to this domestic harassment enhanced security list, it’s apparently anyone deemed to be too closely identified with a current presidential candidate who can be added to these lists:
Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts”, especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat … TSA is out of control against the American people.”
Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset”. After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.
“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”
July 12, 2024
They’ll confidently claim they’re merely “anti-Zionist“
James Pew on the disturbing rise of antisemitism in all western nations that got turbocharged by the October 7 atrocities by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians on the Gaza border:
“Student encampments – UofT – Camping at the university” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Jew hatred in this country, and around the world, is something I completely miscalculated. Like so many others, including many Jewish people, I naively thought that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Or at least, it was something that had been greatly diminished to the extent that it ceased to be much of a problem. Tragically, I was wrong about this.
The global expansion of Islamo-fascism and the mixing of pro-Jihadism with leftist critical social justice activism, is something I also, similarly, underestimated.
When I think of October 7th I am overcome with disgust and sadness. The world should be aligned with Israel, and aggressively opposed to Palestine/Hamas (Hamastinians) and the corrupt United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA). That in many cases it appears to be the other way around, that many political leaders, media, and insufferable celebrities support Hamas’ terrorist aspirations, their evil nonsensical movement to wipe Israel off the face of the planet, is something that is incomprehensible to me.
In one of the late Rex Murphy’s final National Post columns, he proclaimed that “Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time”. Placing the blame for the “red-ignorant core” of the post-October 7th rise in antisemitism on “woke campuses”, Rex wrote the following concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel:
Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.
While I’m the first to admit that no nation, including Israel, is beyond criticism, I feel there is both a time and place, and an appropriate proportionality that should be reflected in a fair critical analysis of any nation. When Douglas Murray made the point at the recent Munk debate that no serious person ever questions the legitimacy of the nation of Pakistan — a nation founded in a way similar to Israel — like they question and challenge the legitimacy of Israel, so-called anti-Zionists claimed that the audiences’ embrace of Murray’s logic was simply evidence of their Islamophobia.
Murray expanded on his Pakistan/Israel comparison by asking the audience to imagine someone who feels that Pakistan is not legitimate and therefore should not exist at all. Imagine also, that this person holds no antipathy directed at the Pakistani people. Preposterous! Yet the anti-Zionists ask us to believe this in regards to Israel. The anti-Zionist will look you straight in the eyes, and with all the sincerity in the world, express their belief that Israel should not exist, and absurdly, implore this does not mean they hate Jews (the majority of Israelis). Why in the case of an analogy where Pakistan is at stake, is it so clear which position is the correct and moral one? Alternatively, why are such questions involving Israel so difficult to answer?
In Canada, the increase in antisemitism has been going on for years. Record levels of antisemitism were recorded in 2021, with dramatic increases in Quebec and British Columbia.1 B’nai Brith Canada reported the number of antisemitic incidents across the nation more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, now reaching an unprecedented high.2
In February of 2024, Global Media reported that “Homes, businesses, schools, places of worship, neighbourhoods and institutions have all been targeted in what community leaders are calling an unparalleled spike in hate crimes against Jews”. And the Toronto Police warned the following month that “56% of reported hate crimes in 2024 have targeted Jewish people”.3
None of this distracts Canadian Islamists, like Younus Kathrada, from what they feel are the important social issues. Kathrada has been known to the government’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre since at least 2020.4 He preaches to his Islamic followers in British Columbia, “I want our children to understand this well: the non-Muslims are the enemies of Allah, therefore they are your enemies”.5
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July 5, 2024
“Private property rights? How do they work?” (U of T students, probably)
In The Line, Josh Dehaas rounds up the concept of private property rights for the University of Toronto students (and non-student antisemitic fellow occupiers) who have been squatting for Palestinian terrorists on university property for the last while:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
After Justice Koehnen delivered his ruling Tuesday ordering the occupiers to dismantle the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto, one of the protesters accused the school of hypocrisy.
“It’s quite interesting that a university that claims to practice decolonization is falling back on this claim of private property,” master’s student Sarah Rasikh told a journalist on the day before the students began taking down their tents.
“U of T and the Court more specifically is quite literally telling Indigenous students to leave and get off of their own land,” she added.
Rasikh has a point, sort of.
As someone who did law school relatively recently, I can attest that many university professors are downright hostile to the concept of private property. They commonly claim that all of Canada belongs to Indigenous people and that Indigenous peoples don’t believe in private property. Rather, they believe in “sharing”. Decolonization therefore requires that land be treated communally, or so the theory goes. University administrators who pay lip service to the concept of decolonization shouldn’t be surprised when students try to turn theory into action.
Thankfully the law still protects private property rights. Students who didn’t get taught how that works by their professors ought to give Justice Koehnen’s decision a read.
As Justice Koehnen explained, “in our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property”.
“If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters,” he went on. “That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.”
“If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all,” Justice Koehnen added.
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June 19, 2024
Nazi Werwolves: Post War Terror – War Against Humanity 135
World War Two
Published 18 Jun 2024The guns are silent in Germany but the Allied Forces continue to suffer a flurry of bombings, assassinations, and shootings. Who is to blame? Well, the press suspects the Nazi Werwolves – terroristic bands of men, women, and children determined to carry on Hitler’s war. But just how serious is this violence really, and how many of the attackers are true believing Nazi fanatics?
(more…)
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June 8, 2024
Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada
Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.
Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.
The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.
When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.
I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.
His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.
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May 3, 2024
“Columbia Delenda Est“
From late last month, Robert Graboyes, who is an alumni of Columbia University, thought it appropriate to follow Cato the Elder’s prescription for Carthage in this case:
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, 1921.
From Wikimedia. Textured and rendered as ruins by Robert Graboyes.
As an alumnus of Columbia University (MPhil and PhD), I recommend that every peaceful, legal means available be employed to destroy the reputation of my alma mater — an institution that has chosen to make itself Ground Zero for Jew-hatred in America. Paraphrasing Cato the Elder:
“Columbia Delenda Est” — “Columbia Must Be Destroyed.”
Cato’s entreaty — “Carthago Delenda Est” — was intended not only to punish the Carthaginians, but also to warn other states from behaving as Carthage had. Laying waste to Columbia’s prestige would send a chilling message to other institutions choosing to tolerate, appease, and celebrate threats and acts against Jews.
WHY COLUMBIA SPECIFICALLY?
America’s elite universities are awash in antisemitism. When Rep. Elise Stefanik repeatedly asked the presidents of Harvard, Pennsylvania, and MIT whether they would discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, the feckless trio humiliated themselves before an international audience — though they seem unaware of that fact.
Recently, a Jewish student at Yale was stabbed in the eye by a protestor wielding a Palestinian flag. At Berkeley, students invited to the (Jewish) law school dean’s home decided that was an appropriate setting for a pro-Hamas demonstration and refused to desist or leave when asked. Encampments similar to Columbia’s are ongoing at Emerson College, MIT, NYU, Rutgers, the New School, Tufts, UMaryland, UMichigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt, Washington U, and Yale. Thousands of antisemitic incidents have been recorded at hundreds of schools. The University of Southern California has surrendered to the mob by canceling this year’s commencement ceremony.
Use the wrong pronoun or wear a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, and your university will consider bringing out the firehoses and German shepherds; but assault Jewish students and call for their extermination (along with the eradication of a sovereign nation), and the same university will defend your actions as representing the sacred right to free and open speech. Antisemitism has spread like ebola across American Academia. But there are at least three good reasons to single out Columbia.
FIRST: With antisemitism blooming at so many American universities, it is impractical to try attacking the phenomenon everywhere all at once. It is better to choose one prestigious university, inflict as much pain as possible on that lone institution, and let the stinking carcass of its reputation stand as a warning to other universities — leaving all of them to wonder which university is second on the list. This strategy reminds me of a passage from Hagakure: Way of the Samurai:
According to what one of the elders said, taking an enemy on the battlefield is like a hawk taking a bird. Even though it enters into the midst of a thousand of them, it gives no attention to any bird other than the one that it has first marked.
Or, more prosaically, as activist Saul Alinsky wrote in his Rules for Radicals:
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
SECOND: Columbia is located in New York City — the world’s leading media market. No doubt, that geographic locale has contributed to the school’s outsized prominence in the current wave of on-campus pogroms. Any blowback falling on Columbia as a result of its moral collapse will also will attract blaring coverage by the press and/or by the denizens of social media. The school’s locale will guarantee maximum publicity as the school’s reputation crumbles, brick by brick.
THIRD: The offenses at Columbia have been especially egregious. Even by today’s standards, the number of offenses at Columbia (some violent and threatening, some merely hateful) are breathtaking. The examples reported on a single day (April 20) illustrate the lie that “anti-Zionism” is anything other than rebranded Jew-hatred:
- A protestor holding a sign saying “Al-Qasam’s [sic] next target” who stood in front of a group of Jewish students holding Israeli flags and singing
- A Jewish student wearing a yarmulke being shoved and screamed at by protestors, “you’ve got blood on your hands!” when he attempted to recover an Israeli flag stolen by a protestor, who then ran to a cheering crowd of anti-Israel protestors that attempted to burn the flag. (The student additionally claims a rock was thrown at his face and protestors screamed, “Kill the Zionist”)
- Protestors screaming “go back to Poland!” and “yehudim, yehudim [which translates to Jews, Jews]” at Jewish Columbia students trying to leave campus
- Protestors circling around the main gates and entrance to campus, with one stating, “I am Hamas”, which was documented in video
- Crowds screaming “tear down the gates” and various hateful chants in English and Arabic as individuals unaffiliated with the university climbed the University’s gates
- A Jewish Columbia student being splashed with water by a protestor
- Protestors chanting, “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!”, “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”, and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!”
- A protestor delivering a speech on campus that exclaimed, “We are here today because on October 7 the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke through the walls of their open air prison, shattering the illusion of the invincibility of their occupiers. [Cheers from the crowd.] By setting up this encampment in the heart of the Zionist stronghold of Columbia University, we intend to do the same”
- A protestor standing immediately outside Columbia’s gates leading a crowd in Arabic chants glorifying terrorism and encouraging students to become terrorist “martyrs” after which he explained in English that the chant translated to “mother of the shahid, mother of the martyr, I wish my mother was in your place”.
Columbia has allowed the mobs and tents to linger, rather than speedily removing them and restoring order and safety to campus. Professors have endorsed and participated in the encampment, as have legions of students. The university chose to shut down in-person classes rather than taking steps to assure the safety of Jewish students. Recognizing this, a rabbi associated with the university urged Jewish students to leave for the sake of their safety.
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