Gaza, the Holocaust, and the Math

 

Gaza, the Holocaust, and the Math

Mike Walker, Col USMC ret

All across campuses today we hear the word "holocaust" used to define the Hamas War.

It is hard to imagine a more unethical and immoral utterance.

During the height of the Holocaust (May 1942-November 1943) when the concentration camps in Germany along with the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau were augmented by Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, the SS Totenkopf were slaughtering about 230,000 Jews per month.

The Hamas War will reach its 7-month point in a few days.

If the Israelis were indeed carrying out a holocaust akin to what the Nationalist Socialists did to the Jewish people then the toll in Gaza now would sit at about one million six hundred thousand (1,600,000) deaths.

So even if we are so naive and/or blinded by prejudice to accept unquestioningly the 33,000 deaths in Gaza foisted by Hamas then no honest person would equate the Hamas War with the Holocaust.

To conflate the vast discrepancy over the brutality and monstrosity that occurred during the two events beggars belief.

Yet the word "holocaust" to describe the Hamas War is on the lips and in the minds of thousands if not tens of thousands of our post-secondary students.

Such is the tragic ignorance besetting 21st century American colleges and universities.

Future generations will look back the current record of these dismal institutions of higher learning with a combination of shame and contempt.

More on Palestine and Israel...

Here is some of the history of the partition and its rejection by Palestinian revolutionaries.

Mike Walker, Col USMC, ret

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Jewish state in Palestine. It goes back to 1935, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam (Qassam) and his brethren fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It became part of another chain that included the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

 

Here is the story of Qassam: He tried to fight against the Italians in Libya 1912 but was prevented by Turkish authorities. He then fought with the Ottomans in WWI in his native home of Syria and after the French arrived he fought them. Defeated by the French, he fled to Haifa in 1920 and became a radical imam and ally of the Mufti of Jerusalem. By 1931, he was organizing armed resistance, the Black Hand, against the British (who governed Mandatory Palestine) and Zionists. In reaction to the discovery of a secret weapons shipment bound for the Jewish Haganah, Qassam killed a policeman on 8 November 1935. The British then began to hunt him and his group down. He was killed on 20 November and immediately became a martyr and the Black Hand was renamed the Qassamites. 

 

The failed Arab Revolt in Palestine followed from 1936-1939. In trying to deal with the Arab Revolt, the British Royal Peel Commission (headed by Lord William Peel) was created in 1936. In 1937, it proposed for the first time a two-state partition solution. 

 

But Peel died that year and the British abandoned partition in 1938 then let the issue rest in early 1939 by issuing a white paper proposing joint Arab-Jewish rule. The change in policy stemmed from a number of interrelated factors: Its success in crushing the uprising in 1939 combined with the looming Second World War motivated the British to calm the waters as Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies gained wide appeal in the Arab world and opened it to an alliance with Germany.

 

In 1937, Nazi Germany had concluded “the formation of a Jewish state … is not in Germany’s interest” because it would “create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counterweight against such possible power growth of the Jew.”[i]

 

And at that time German operatives in Mandatory Palestine actively used Jewish immigration to turn the Arab population away the Britain and towards Germany. They were quickly rounded up by the British as soon as the Second World War began.

 

Similarly, Germany’s Axis partner Italy was a clear threat. The large Italian army in Libya on Egypt’s frontier and its conquest of East Africa that concluded in May 1936, made the British even more eager to defuse potential troubles in the Middle East.

 

Whatever policy strengthened Britain’s position in the region and further secured the vital Suez Canal would take precedence and to shore up Arab support, Britain walked away from partition and limited Jewish immigration in 1939.

 

Notably, the mandates were overseen by the League of Nations and it rejected the British white paper and continued to support more immigration and the formation on a Jewish state in Palestine. Facing the exigency of a world war, the British ignored the League’s decision but partition would be a legacy policy when the League was dissolved and replaced by the new United Nations.

 

With the Second World War over, the British again returned to their support of partition and sought to end Mandate Palestine. 

 

In 1947, the United Nations adopted a two-state Palestine-Israel solution for the region with Jerusalem as an open city under international administration. 

 

The Jewish side accepted the UN’s two-state solution while the Palestinian side rejected it in its entirety. The founding fathers of Hamas in their 1988 covenant continued to reject the two-state solution. In the covenant’s opening preamble, Hamas exhorts its followers to destroy Israel:

 

“Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam obliterates it just as it obliterated others before it.”

 

That led to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War where the followers who later formed Hamas were defeated and the State of Israel was created. This extremism is further explained in the Covenant’s Article 13:

 

“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

 

How can two states negotiate a peaceful resolution when one side has utterly rejected a two-state solution?

[i] PRO: GFM 33/799 Telegram from Von Bulow–Schewante to German embassies in London, Baghdad, Jerusalem, 11.6.37.

The Big Lie

             

Partition Map 1947

                                                       

The Big Lie

 Don Jaffa, 

The current spate of ‘protests’ at Columbia, NYU, the Ivy League, etc., East Coast, West Coast, all around the town, is nothing but a charade, funded by Soros and the Woke, about something that does not exist. When the United Nations created Israel in 1948, it did so out of the British Mandate over Palestine. At the end of the vote, when Israel was established under international law, Palestine ceased to exist.

The new Israeli government offered the resident Arabs Israeli citizenship if they acknowledged Israeli law, and retained their right of ownership to the land and villages under Israeli law.  The majority of Arabs living in Israeli heeded the Arab call to flee to refugee camps, to wait out the Arab war against Israel. And in 1949, when Israel and the Arabs agreed to a cease fire, Egypt occupied the area of Israel which is called Gaza. The Egyptian government declared it the Egyptian Protectorate of Gaza. Every subsequent ‘Palestinian’ Arab political organization had charters that call for the destruction of the state of Israel, and the killing of the Jews in it and around the world, wherever found.

“The Egypt–Israel peace treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., United States, on 26 March 1979, following the 1978 Camp David Accords. The Egypt–Israel treaty was signed by Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, and witnessed by Jimmy Carter, President of the United States.” Wikipedia

In practical terms the Egyptian ‘Protectorate of Gaza’ was ceded to Israel, and the Israeli ‘Protectorate of Sinai’ was returned to Egypt. The sovereignty of Gaza was returned to Israel, as was the sovereignty of Sinai was returned to Egypt. Under the peace treaty Israel was required to agree to the ‘autonomy’ of the Arabs living in Gaza. It did not entitle the Arabs in Gaza to any status except ‘Stateless Persons.’ Egypt and all the other Arab countries refused to take them as either refugees, or asylum seekers. Their example in Jordan, where they attempted a coup, and to kill the King of Jordan, made them unacceptable as either refugees or asylum seekers.

In point of fact, the political organizations within their ‘autonomy’ are nothing but domestic terrorist organizations whose charters’ first principle is the destruction of the state of Israel, and the killing of Jews. The claim of the civilian population being innocent, is anything but. For two generations Arab women in Gaza bore sons and daughters to serve as ‘Martyrs.’ During Saddam Hussein’s reign in Iraq, he provided a $25,000 bounty to each family of a ‘Martyr.’ 

For those generations, first Arafat’s PLO, Fatah, and now HAMAS, have been relying on those ‘innocent’ civilians, in hospitals, schools, housing areas, to protect the terrorists from either reprisals, or eradication. So it is not unexpected that the sacrifice of some 34,000 women and children is being used to elicit crocodile tears.

Such superficial sympathy, is a false, insincere display of emotion such as a hypocrite crying fake tears of grief. The current protests here in the USA use placards, banners, Palestinian Flags, and chants such as “From the River to the Sea,” or “I am HAMAS!”  Their bespoke protests serve as propaganda for the domestic terrorism of HAMAS, and all the other prior ‘Palestinian Arab’ terrorist groups and actions. The era of FATAH and Black September was both internecine war with Jordan, and the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympiad.

Seventy-five years of unceasing attempts to kill Jews and destroy Israel serve to illustrate that there is no political compromise with terrorists, and that as long as they occupy Gaza the terrorism will continue no matter how many Arabs in Gaza are killed. The Secretary of State designated HAMAS as an international terrorist organization in October 1997.

“For the purpose of the Order, “terrorism” is defined to be an activity that (1) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and (2) appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.” Executive Order 13268 of July 2, 2002

The October 7th mass murder of 1200 Israelis, along with the kidnapping and hostage taking of both Americans and Israelis clearly meets the criteria of the Executive Order. The bespoke HAMAS protests on college campuses around the country clearly meet the criteria in paragraph (2) above. In a real world scenario the Attorney General would order the FBI to arrest any HAMAS demonstrators. Under the authority of the Federal statutes on prosecuting terrorists, and enhanced by the Executive Order, they would be charged as domestic terrorists, and held without bail, until formerly charged, or indicted, and then remain incarcerated until trial in federal district court. The number of such domestic terrorists would be in the thousands, as they would run to replace those arrested to continue the HAMAS protests.

It would end up being 3-5 years of incarceration before enough trials and plea bargains could be arranged. And no doubt each would result in a felony conviction and result in keeping each of these brain dead idiots from any significant career future.

These protestors flogging the HAMAS ‘From the river to the Sea’ holocaust renewal are, like the Arab women and children in Gaza, victims without value. The 34,000 ‘innocent’ victims in Gaza are an amorphous mass. Only the number has value. There are no singular victims who can be memorialized.  Only the NGO civilians killed in the line of fire have any storylines.

The IDF press releases suggest that the four HAMAS battalions have been reduced to one. Now the Biden administration has been requesting Israel not to enter Gaza and exact ethnic cleaning of Rafah, with the elimination of the last HAMAS battalion. The HAMAS leadership long ago relocated to Dubai. Even if Rafah is cleansed of HAMAS, it will recruit, rearm and return to kill Jews and work to destroy Israel. Under the guise of humanitarian air, US Air Force C-17s have been air dropping tons of prepared meals in northern Gaza, in effect resupplying HAMAS with food and water, to continue their fight with Israel and the United States, without any turnover of either Israeli or American hostages. This is not any real demonstration of support for Israel.

A real demonstration of support for Israel would require the State Department brokering an agreement between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, to offer humanitarian permanent relocation of all the Arabs in Gaza to the two islands ceded to Saudi Arabia by Egypt, Sanafil and Tiran Islands in the Strait of Tiran. Both are uninhabited and easily reachable by ferry with Sharm El-Sheikh, at the southern tip of Sinai. Or, to the area north of Sharm El-Sheikh, which the Egyptians could provide as well. The whole point is that neither HAMAS, the PLO, Fatah or any anti- Israeli factions of the Arab world would remain in Gaza.

Israel’s northern border with Egypt would be secure, and the IDF would only be focused on Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, and Iran.  It would be easier for Saudi Arabia to grant use of these two islands for permanent relocation of the Arabs from Gaza, as they would be isolated, and dis-armed, at the outset. It would take at least a decade to construct permanent housing for all these relocated, but, like Sharm El-Sheikh, it provides an opportunity to develop ideal vacation spas for scuba diving, fishing, and water sports.

On the other hand, the thousands of bobble-heads doing the bidding of Woke liberals who chant ‘From the river to the sea’ and who have no idea that they are the second wave of the Hitler Jugend, willingly donning the brown shirts of the NSDAP, or the Black shirts of the Fascisti!

“During a rousing speech in Iowa, Biden's second gaffe went when he said "we choose about truth, not facts." 

The practical politics aside, the revealed truth is that all these activities, from the Biden demand to not go into Rafah, to the pro HAMAS protestors chanting “From the River to the Sea,’ is to fully engage the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Israel. The original ‘revealed’ truth was the opinion of Emir Feisal, the first King of Saudi Arabia, whose comments were published on the front page of the London Times in 1918: “The grumblings of Arab peasants in Palestine is of no consequence!” 

The Travesties of the Trump Trials

 

The Travesties of the Trump Trials

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.

Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading presidential candidate, he would have never been indicted.

Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.

Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously transformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.

Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.

James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s votes had been fully counted.

Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg transmogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the COVID lockdowns.

In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump hater passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.

Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.

Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading presidential candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.

Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.

Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In truth, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a fake anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a presidential campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.

In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.

Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump ballots, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of ballots he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 votes. She sued to overturn the election and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.

For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the electors to renounce their states’ popular vote tallies and thus become “faithless electors.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of electors to throw the election to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.

In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the election year 2024 to do what Democrat voters likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.

Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.

If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?

Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?

Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?

Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?

Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouflaged to avoid income taxes?

Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the electors and flip them to Hillary Clinton?

In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?

And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the ballot?

Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.

A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”

Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

Coming soon to a Campus Near You: Nazi Germany Redux!

Coming soon to a campus near you: Nazi German Redux!

Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

If you think this is hyperbole then think again.

What is happening on university campuses in America today -- save the attire and some of the rhetoric -- is identic to what happened with the nationalist socialists in Germany during the early 1930s.

For as in Nazi Germany, the goal is to intimidate and, if necessary, terrorize Jews so as to purge them from the campus.

And as in Nazi Germany, all the university leadership has to do is nothing. They do not need to either participate or support this sickness. They can even bemoan the hatred in public.

They just need to let the militant "storm troopers" run their course and the Jewish problem on campus will be solved.

Same outcome, different format.

And another "smashing" victory for the advocates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion!  

China must pay for its mass murder

China must pay for its mass murder by fueling America’s fentanyl overdose epidemic

William Barr, New York Post 

A report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that China has been directly fueling the US fentanyl crisis.

The mass importation of Chinese fentanyl is slaughtering Americans at an annual rate equal to that of our bloodiest year in World War II.

China is actively encouraging and facilitating this campaign of mass murder — as the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed Tuesday in a bombshell bipartisan report.

It is a euphemism to call the mass distribution of fentanyl “drug trafficking.”

Fentanyl is a deadly poison. The tiniest amount is lethal.

It is typically distributed in disguised form so people who take it think they’re taking prescription drugs, such as Percocet, Xanax or Adderall.

Even when a drug is taken as an opioid, its victims have no idea it contains a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl.

Trafficking fentanyl is outright murder.

It is like shooting randomly into a crowd.

Those who ply and enable this trade know with moral certainty they are killing people on a mass scale.

The scale of carnage is intolerable and getting worse.

Drug overdose deaths stand at 112,000 a year and continue to climb — the vast majority attributable to fentanyl.

And this is not the only damage done.

A congressional report found the opioid crisis, largely fentanyl-fueled, cost America nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020 — 7% of gross domestic product.

The United States has long known China is the source of the fentanyl slaughtering Americans.

It produces 97% of the illicit fentanyl precursors essential to making it.

There’s no practical alternative source for the volume of precursors necessary.

Simply put, without China’s production and export of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, there would be no fentanyl crisis.

But there has been a question about the government’s and party’s precise role.

Has this been an illicit business carried on by Chinese organized crime and corrupt businessmen, with the government simply reluctant to help stop what it sees as primarily an American problem?

Or is this effectively an intentional program to wreak havoc in the United States, given impetus, support and encouragement by China and the CCP?

Thanks to the select committee’s trailblazing work, we have a much clearer picture.

Its meticulous report presents detailed and convincing evidence that Beijing and the CCP are not just bystanders — they are the prime movers behind fentanyl’s mass importation into America.

Committee investigators found a hidden Chinese-government website that offers complete tax rebates incentivizing the export of all fentanyl analogues and precursors, as well as other synthetic narcotics — drugs illegal in China and America and without any legitimate purpose.

These rebates allow Chinese drug companies to effectively operate tax free when they make and export fentanyl precursors.

What conceivable basis could there be for the Chinese government to incentivize the production and export of these illegal drugs, knowing they are bound for the United States, where they will kill more than 200 Americans a day?

The committee also learned Beijing provides grants and awards to companies engaging in open and notorious synthetic-narcotics manufacturing and drug-trafficking.

And it discovered the government has ownership stakes in certain Chinese chemical companies exporting significant amounts of illicit fentanyl products, as well as publicly traded Chinese companies that openly and notoriously host on their websites illicit drugs for sale to Americans.

Tellingly, in contrast to China’s aggressive prosecution of domestic drug-traffickers — Chinese media regularly cover executions of such traffickers — the committee found no sign it’s pursued cases involving illegal export of narcotics.

This, despite Western law enforcement supplying compelling evidence of violations and despite China’s notorious system of intense social surveillance and control.

Beijing’s role in producing and exporting illicit drugs dovetails with the emergence of Chinese organized crime as the principal financiers and money-launderers for the drug cartels.

The CCP has been tightening its alliance with Chinese organized crime to gain influence outside China, and US law enforcement investigating Chinese money-laundering have found evidence indicating some schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite, per the committee report.

Some may find it hard to believe a modern state would be so complicit in the campaign of mass murder against another country’s citizens.

But the committee’s work provides powerful evidence it is.

As we try to defend our country against the deadly drug onslaught — not just fentanyl but now new generations of hideous Chinese drugs like nitazenesand xylazine (“tranqs”) — we must understand what we’re dealing with.

The Chinese have not been acting in good faith.

The idea they’re willing to cooperate with us in combating drug-trafficking is delusional.

China is one of the most pervasive police states on the planet.

It has the capacity to shut down the production and export of illicit narcotics.

But Beijing will not move to do so unless it understands there will be severe economic consequences — including sanctions — if it continues its complicity in the mass poisoning of American citizens.

William Barr is a Hudson Institute distinguished fellow and author of the memoir “One Damn Thing After Another.” He served as US attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20. 

California can’t account for $24B spent on homeless

 

Go Steve... 

California GOP leaders call for accountability after state can’t account for $24B spent on homeless crisis

The state auditor found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities

Bradford Betz, Fox News

California GOP leaders are calling for more accountability after an audit released earlier this week indicated that the state spent around $24 billion to tackle the homeless crisis over the past five years but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money did anything to actually improve the problem. 

The state auditor’s report found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to the state auditor’s report.

Among other things, the report found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), which is responsible for coordinating agencies and allocating resources for the homelessness programs, stopped tracking whether the programs were working in 2021. 

It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method, the audit found. 

California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher laid the blame squarely on the Newsom administration. 

"This is standard Gavin Newsom – make a splashy announcement, waste a bunch of taxpayer money, and completely fail to deliver," Gallagher said in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

"Californians are tired of the homeless crisis, and they’re even more tired of Gavin’s excuses. We need results – period, full stop." 

Republican state Sen. Roger Niello has called the audit "troubling" but told Fox News Digital he "wasn't terribly surprised. 

"The one issue I had with the audit was that the focus was mostly on housing and shelter issues, which is certainly important, but really very little about actual results, getting people out of homelessness, not just into shelter," he said. "That's sort of half the job, maybe not even quite half the job. And, so that was a little bit of a disappointment." 

Democratic state Sen. Dave Cortese, who requested the audit last year after touring a large homeless encampment in San Jose, said the audit "highlights the need for improved data and greater transparency at both the state and local levels." 

"Unfortunately, there is a balkanized approach to data collection and outcomes, with no centralized system for tracking our investments," he said. "This audit underscores the urgent need to establish best practices and create a blueprint for how the State of California and our cities can address our most visible challenge." 

Former MLB All-Star Steve Garvey, who is running against Rep. Adam Schiff in California’s U.S. Senate race as a Republican, said it would take "real political courage to make necessary changes." 

"Since day one, I’ve advocated for a federal audit of California’s homelessness crisis," he said. "I’m glad that the state has done this, but now we need real political courage to make necessary changes. Our unhoused people and our taxpayers deserve real results, not more failed policies." 

Despite the audit’s findings, Cal ICH said it has made improvements in data collection after AB 977 took effect on January 1, 2023. The law requires that grantees of state-funded homelessness programs to enter specific data elements related to individuals and families into their local Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). 

Still, Cal ICH is shifting blame to local governments, saying these municipalities must be held more accountable as they are the ones "primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness." 

"The Council continues to improve its ability to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent judiciously and effectively, including by providing technical support to local jurisdictions to help align data standards and reporting," Cal ICH said.