Day: October 10, 2023

Have you ever read the Hamas charter?

It’s worth taking a break from the unrelenting, tragic news to better understand the founding document of the group whose attack plunged Israelis and Palestinians into their current hell. 

Founding documents are aspirational. It took well over 100 years for the United States to begin to live up to “All men are created equal.” And Israel, even within its pre-1967 borders, is still lurching toward upholding “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex” promised in its Declaration of Independence. 

Similarly, a close reading of Hamas’s charter, which was created in 1987 and revised in 2017, explains a lot about its decision to slaughter innocent Jewish civilians, and unleash a reaction that has inevitably claimed innocent Palestinian lives as well.

Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamic fundamentalist party — an offshoot, really, of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006, a year after Israel withdrew its armed forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in what is widely known as the disengagement, Hamas won legislative elections, beating the rival Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, 74 seats to 45. A year later, it launched a bloody military campaign against Fatah, and took complete control of Gaza. 

After Hamas’s takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling travel and trade in and out of the coastal enclave. Hamas, which the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan designate as a terrorist organization, had by 2006 conducted terror attacks in Israel that killed 506 and wounded thousands. After the blockade, the number of attacks plummeted. 

But Hamas has never changed its aspirations to wrest control of all of Israel by killing its Jews— a goal you will see clearly when you read the Hamas charter, as I did on Tuesday. 

The first version of the charter, adopted in 1988, begins with a preamble. Only instead of “We-the-People,” it reads: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The 36 articles that follow are buttressed by quotes from the Quran and lessons of the Prophet Muhammed … as interpreted by the militant Islamists of Hamas. 

After establishing the primacy of Islam, the charter pivots to removing Jews from historic Palestine. “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land,” states Article 12. 

The charter’s description of Jews echoes millennia of antisemitic tropes.

“With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.”

The 9000-word document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “ to enable them to rule the world through them.”

“There is no war going on anywhere,” it reads, “without having their finger in it.”

The charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on a hadith, or prophetic saying: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised charter, which softens its Islamist rhetoric somewhat. While maintaining the right to Palestine “from the river to the sea,” this new version accepts the idea of a Palestinian state in territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 War — the so-called two state solution. 

Analysts say the group’s continued loss of popularity among Gazans — even in 2006 it won only a plurality of the total votes cast, 44% — forced the changes.

The new charter states that Hamas’s conflict is with Zionism, not Jews.

The post The truth of Hamas is in its charter appeared first on The Forward.

PHOENIX (AP) — Kari Lake asked for a show of hands.

Who’s been canceled? Who’s lost friends? Has strained relations with family? Been indicted? Sued for defamation?

“If your hand did not go up in any of that, then I do think you need to work a little harder. I really do,” Lake told an adoring crowd of Michigan Republicans gathering last month on Mackinac Island.

Lake launched a U.S. Senate campaign for an Arizona seat in a splashy Scottsdale rally Tuesday, having never conceded that she lost last year’s race for Arizona governor. She is trying out new messages and courting the support of national Republicans she’s insulted in the past. But the former television news host isn’t backing down on the things that made her a star on the far right — her combativeness with perceived enemies, her fealty to Donald Trump and her willingness to defend his election lies.

That worries some Republicans who fear she will cost them a race that could decide control of the Senate.

“Kari Lake can win, but she’s going to have to run a different campaign than she ran two years ago, and she’s going to have to become a serious candidate who talks about serious issues that everyday Republican and independent voters care about,” said Chris Baker, an Arizona-based Republican political consultant. “And she hasn’t done a lot of that this year.”

At her rally Tuesday, Lake didn’t concede she lost the last election, but didn’t say it was stolen and made only a brief mention of it during a nearly 50-minute-long speech. She said she’s “never going to walk away from the fight to restore honest elections.”

“We did everything right, and we saw the disaster of election day in Arizona,” Lake said. “Sometimes when things don’t go the way we expect, we find ourselves questioning and asking why … I think God has bigger plans for us.”

She heaped praise on Trump, who recorded a video endorsement that was played at the rally, and repeatedly attacked the media, calling journalists covering her event “fake news fools.”

“When I’m back in the White House, I need strong fighters like Kari in the Senate,” Trump said.

Lake also offered conciliatory words for voters who disagree with her, a sharp contrast with her last campaign, when she didn’t want support from establishment Republicans, even after she defeated them in the GOP primary.

“I may disagree with Arizonans who voted for Joe Biden,” Lake said. “But I don’t think you’re a threat to democracy. You are a citizen just like me.”

After once calling Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell an “old bat” and saying he needed to be replaced as Republican leader, Lake now says she would support him if she’s elected. Last year, she called abortion “the ultimate sin” and supported a near-total ban on abortion in Arizona. Now, she says she wouldn’t endorse a federal abortion ban.

National Republican leaders think a GOP candidate could take advantage of what could be a three-way race if Sen. Kyrsten Sinema seeks reelection. Sinema, a former Democrat who became an independent last year, is preparing for a campaign but has not said whether she will seek a second term. U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego is likely to have the Democratic nomination locked up.

Lake met recently with Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who leads the GOP’s Senate campaign work as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and saw several other GOP senators during a trip to Washington. Daines has publicly urged Lake to focus on the future instead of relitigating past elections.

A former television news anchor for nearly three decades in the Phoenix market, Lake was already known locally but had no national profile when she walked away from her career in 2021, declared “journalism is dead,” and took a sledgehammer to televisions showing cable newscasts.

Right up to Election Day, she embraced Trump, appeared with right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and blasted establishment Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain.

She lost the governor’s race by less than 1 point. About four in 10 Arizona voters in the 2022 election said they were “very concerned” that Lake’s views were too extreme, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of U.S. voters. She lost 11% of Republicans. About 63% of independents and 96% of Democrats backed the winner, Democrat Katie Hobbs.

But Lake became a national figure on the far right with her television appearances and her defense of Trump’s election falsehoods.

In the months since, Lake has traveled extensively to speak to Republican groups around the country, her remarks focused largely on her fraudulent election claims. Her frequent trips to Iowa, the state where she was born but also the host of the leadoff presidential caucuses, have raised eyebrows in political circles. Some have floated her as a running mate for Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

She sued Maricopa County, claiming election officials deliberately created printer malfunctions to cause her to lose. She lost, and her unsuccessful appeals have bounced through the court system, all the way up to the Arizona Supreme Court.

She also was sued for defamation by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican official who says he has faced death threats because she lied about how he conducted the election.

Last month she was back in court for her third election-related case, where she watched as her lawyer argued that Arizona’s public records law entitles her to see copies of signed vote-by-mail envelopes. She claims reviewing the signatures would allow her to prove that ballots were counted that should not have been, drawing parallels to an unprecedented partisan recount of ballots conducted by Trump supporters on behalf of state Senate Republicans following the 2020 election.

Her fights over the 2020 and 2022 elections have only further endeared her to Arizona Republicans, who nominated a slate of Trump-backed candidates who spread election lies and went on to lose in the midterms. She enters the Senate race as an immediate front-runner in the GOP primary, where she’ll face Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Stung by unexpected Senate losses last year, Republicans in Washington have vowed to take an active role in primaries to help more electable candidates earn the GOP nomination. Lake so far has received a warm, if tentative, reception in the nation’s capital, where influential officials who control the party’s money and priorities are signaling that they’re open to embracing her if she’s willing to broaden her base of support.

“We have had productive conversations with Kari Lake and her team,” Daines said in a statement. “She is a talented campaigner with an impressive ability to fire up the grassroots. We have a clear path to victory with two Democrats on the ballot in Arizona.”

The NRSC has not ruled out endorsing Lake in the primary, according to a person familiar with the organization’s strategy who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Support from the NRSC would potentially open up a lucrative funding stream and signal to donors that Lake has the support of key GOP senators.

After harshly criticizing McConnell during her gubernatorial campaign, she now says she would support the Republican leader in Congress because he would be preferable to Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

“If the choice is between McConnell and Schumer, who are you going to vote for? It’s not going to be Schumer,” Lake told the AP.

That’s a change of tone from a year ago, when she called McConnell an “old bat” at a campaign rally and said it was time to replace him as the GOP leader with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Even as recently as August, she appeared to poke fun at McConnell freezing up during a press conference.

“I don’t even think he can control what comes out of his mouth anymore,” Lake said on Bannon’s podcast. “I mean there’s something going on right now with him.”

___

Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in New York and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

(NewsNation) — The state of Utah has filed a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company deliberately misled young users and parents about its dangers and used “addictive features” to keep users on the app.

“My top priority is protecting our children in Utah. I’m tired of TikTok lying to Utah parents. I’m tired of our kids losing their innocence and even their lives addicted to the dark side of social media,” Attorney General Sean Reyes said in a statement Tuesday announcing the lawsuit.

Lawmakers across the country and in Washington have been aggressively pushing for restrictions on TikTok over concerns about data privacy, health effects on users and the social media company’s links to the Chinese Communist Party.

After grilling TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew earlier this year, lawmakers made a bipartisan push for legislation to ban the popular social media app. But that ban is now stalled due to legal trouble.

The Utah lawsuit, which brings claims under the Utah Consumer Sales Practices Act, claims prolonged use of the app is detrimental to children’s mental health and well-being.

“Social media companies must be held responsible for the harms they are causing,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement. “The experts — from the U.S. Surgeon General and behavioral science researchers to parents and teens — all agree that social media is affecting our children’s mental health and it’s time to intervene.”

Margaret Woolley Busse, executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, called the lawsuit the “next step in holding TikTok accountable” for it’s alleged failure to safeguard children.

“However, we will not let up the pressure on TikTok as we continue our investigation,” Busse said in a statement.

In addition, the lawsuit alleges TikTok misled its users about its connection to its Chinese parent company ByteDance.

At a March congressional hearing, Chew said TikTok provides tools to protect youth, including limits on direct messages, limiting time spent on the app for users under 18 and offering family pairing tools to help parents control what their kids are exposed to.

NewsNation digital producer Stephanie Whiteside contributed to this report.

Inmates at Paraguay’s largest prison rioted on Tuesday, taking 11 guards hostage and setting fire to facilities in the crowded Tacumbu penitentiary on the outskirts of the capital.

Two hostages were later released as government and military forces responded to the revolt, according to Interior Minister Enrique Riera. He said two police officers were injured in the clashes.

Tacumbu houses nearly 4,000 inmates in a ramshackle, tin-roof building and, according to local security experts, gangs exert near-total influence over life inside.

Images from a Reuters photographer showed a shirtless inmate standing on top of a prison wall, throwing a rock at security personnel while protecting himself with a wooden board.

Police braced behind riot shields while the entrance to the prison was in flames, though authorities said later that firefighters had brought the blaze under control.

Meanwhile, prisoners’ families gathered outside as they awaited news on their loved ones.

Interior Minister Riera said Paraguay would push for prison reform once the riot was quelled.

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President Biden reaffirms U.S. support for Israel and pledges to send aid. VOA is in Gaza and Israel, we speak with Palestinians and Israelis. There’s more military aid headed for Ukraine, and an election in Liberia. Plus, a look at China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the associated debt in Africa.

Utah sued Chinese-owned app TikTok on Tuesday, accusing it of harming children by intentionally keeping young users spending unhealthy amounts of time on the short-video sharing platform.

The Utah suit is the latest action challenging the popular app in the United States, with Indiana and Arkansas bringing similar suits.

Last month, a federal judge blocked California from enforcing a law meant to protect children when they use the Internet.

“What these children (and their parents) do not know

is that TikTok is lying to them about the safety of its app and exploiting them into checking and watching the app compulsively, no matter the terrible effects it has on their mental health, their physical development, their family, and their social life,” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes in a filing.

Utah’s suit filed in state court said the videos leverage “highly powerful algorithms and manipulative design features — many of which mimic features of slot machines” and the result “of these manipulative tactics is that young consumers become hooked.”

ByteDance-owned TikTok, which has more than 150 million U.S. users, said in response to the suit it “has industry-leading safeguards for young people, including an automatic 60-minute time limit for users under 18 and parental controls for teen accounts.”

Reyes said the state’s investigation is ongoing and he will ask a court next week to compel TikTok’s compliance with investigative subpoenas.

Utah is seeking civil penalties as well as an injunction prohibiting TikTok from violating state law that protects consumers from deceptive business practices.

Indiana’s lawsuit against TikTok, brought in December, is pending in state court.

Arkansas also sued both TikTok and Facebook-parent Meta (META.O) in March “for pushing addictive platforms.”

Last year, a group of Republican lawmakers said “many children are exposed to non-stop offerings of inappropriate content that TikTok’s algorithm force-feeds to them.”

On Thursday, a judge will hear arguments in TikTok’s lawsuit seeking to block Montana’s first-of-its kind state ban on the use of TikTok before it takes effect Jan. 1. Montana’s legislature approved legislation to ban TikTok citing spying concerns.

Congress has been considering legislation for months that would enable the Biden administration to restrict or ban TikTok over concerns of potential spying. TikTok has said it has spent more than $1.5 billion on rigorous data security efforts and rejects spying allegations.

President Joe Biden said on Monday that at least 11 American citizens were among those killed in Israel following the weekend’s attacks by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

Washington believes it is likely U.S. citizens are also among those being held hostage by Hamas, Biden said in a statement.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby later added it was not yet confirmed if Americans were taken hostage.

“I can’t say definitively that we know Americans are being held hostage. That said, we have to accept the grim possibility that some are,” Kirby told reporters late on Monday.

Biden said the United States was working with Israeli officials to obtain more information as to the whereabouts of U.S. citizens who are still unaccounted for.

“For American citizens who are currently in Israel, the State Department is providing consular assistance as well as updated security alerts,” Biden said.

“For those who desire to leave, commercial flights and ground options are still available,” he said, adding that they should take precautions and follow the guidance of local authorities.

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Saturday killing hundreds of Israelis and seizing dozens of hostages. Israeli TV channels said the death toll from the Hamas attack had climbed to 900, with at least 2,600 injured.

Israel subsequently battered Palestinians with air strikes in Gaza. Gaza’s health ministry said at least 687 Palestinians have been killed and 3,726 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the blockaded enclave since Saturday.

Biden said he has directed his team to work with Israeli counterparts on every aspect of the hostage situation, including sharing intelligence and deploying experts from the U.S. government.

Police departments across the United States have stepped up security around centers of Jewish life, Biden said.

(Reporting by Jasper Ward and Kanishka Singh; editing by Dan Whitcomb, Rosalba O’Brien, and Jamie Freed)

The post US Citizens ‘Likely’ Among Palestinian Hostages, Biden Says appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Donald Trump’s actual net worth has always been highly suspect, given that he’s been caught lying to finance magazines about his net worth for decades. In fact he’s now on trial in New York for having falsified his net worth in order to obtain loans and such. Accordingly, Forbes has now removed Trump from its list of the wealthiest people.

Trump isn’t taking the news well, to put it mildly. Trump is erupting on social media, asserting that “Failing Forbes Magazine is controlled by Communist China. No wonder they go out of their way to write badly about me, and work with the CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT RACIST ATTORNEY GENERAL OF NEW YORK.”

Wait, what? Now Trump has decided that the New York Attorney General is conspiring to take him down with a magazine? Trump added that he “could never figure it out until now.” Yeah, that’s because he had to become senile enough to actually believe this kind of incoherent nonsense.

But Trump just keeps going: “Despite it all, I don’t think that President Xi will be very happy with them, they’re bad news.” No one has any idea what Trump is even talking about at this point, least of all him. He’s now living entirely in an incoherent fantasy land. There’s nothing left of this guy.

The post Donald Trump has complete meltdown after Forbes removes him from list of wealthy people appeared first on Palmer Report.

President Biden is faced with the thorny reality that American citizens are among the hostages Hamas terrorists kidnapped and took into Gaza over the weekend, but the U.S. government doesn’t know exactly how many of its citizens are in that situation or where they are.

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“We now know that American citizens are among those being held by Hamas,” Biden told reporters in the White House State Dining Room on Tuesday. He said the U.S. military would be helping Israeli forces in the planning and intelligence collection for efforts to rescue hostages and that he had “no higher priority” as President than the safety of Americans held hostage around the world.

Speaking forcefully in front of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Biden called Hamas’s rampage through towns and farms in southern Israel and the slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis “pure, unadulterated evil” and confirmed that those killed include 14 Americans. “At this moment, we must be crystal clear,” Biden said. “We stand with Israel.”

Beyond confirming that some of the hostages are US citizens, White House officials had few other details about them or what options for their rescue are available to Biden.

“We do not know about their condition and we cannot confirm a precise number of American hostages,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House. More than 20 American citizens who were in Israel are missing, Sullivan said, but it is unclear how many among those are being held captive by Hamas. 

The lack of clarity was especially upsetting for some of the family members of American citizens caught up in the crisis. Nahar Neta doesn’t know whether his 66-year-old mother, Adrienne Neta, is still alive after she was kidnapped on Saturday by Hamas from her home on Kibbutz Be’eri. “It is a little bit ridiculous at this stage to say that the optimistic scenario is that she is held hostage in Gaza and not dead on the street of the kibbutz where we grew up,” he said during an event in Jerusalem where family members of kidnapped Americans called on Biden to take action to bring their loved ones home.

Nahar described how Adrienne was on the phone with him and her daughter during the assault when they heard her scream. Neta said that his mom, who had worked as a nurse and midwife, spoke in Arabic to try to calm down the attackers. 

If the U.S. is able to locate any of the Americans being held by Hamas, a U.S. rescue mission would be incredibly complex and dangerous for U.S. military personnel and any civilians on the ground in the densely populated Gaza Strip, which is currently under regular barrage by Israeli missiles.  Also, the kidnappers may be holding U.S. citizens alongside Israeli captives, leaving open the question of which country would lead such an operation.

Hamas is believed to have more than 100 hostages in Gaza, including children and the elderly, making the Israeli offensive into Gaza that much more challenging and complex, says Uzi Arad, who served as national security advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2009 to 2011. “This is a complicating factor to an incredible degree, because the hostages may be now used as a card in the management of the war,” says Arad, who was part of the 1976 Israeli commando raid to rescue hostages at the Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. Arad praised Biden’s statement of support for Israel on Tuesday. “The effect this has on Israeli morale and attitude is galvanizing,” he says.

Biden ordered U.S. military aircraft to Israel loaded with additional weapons, equipment and supplies, and a U.S. carrier strike group armed with guided missiles is loitering in the Eastern Mediterranean to deter other Iran-backed militants based in Syria and Lebanon from taking advantage of the moment to step up their own attacks.

The U.S. Navy strike group, led by the USS Gerald R. Ford—the newest, most sophisticated carrier in the U.S. fleet—is manned by more than 5,000 sailors and Marines and places additional US special operations forces, intelligence collection equipment, and attack planes closer to Gaza. Those could be used in potential hostage rescue operations, if the U.S. can learn more about their fate.

The families of the missing Americans who spoke to reporters in Jerusalem on Tuesday were frustrated that they hadn’t been told anything by the US State Department or Israeli government about what may have happened to their loved ones. Neta wanted to hear what US and Israelis officials know about his mother at this point. “I think that after three days—more than three days now—it is more than a reasonable request to have somebody from the Israeli government or the U.S. administration approach us with any type of information they may have on our family members,” Neta said.

—WITH REPORTING BY ERIC CORTELLESSA

Hurricane Lidia reached Category 4 strength on Tuesday afternoon as it barreled towards Mexico’s Pacific coast, where major beach and tourist resorts were bracing for significant downpours, likely flooding as well as imminent hurricane-force winds.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned that Hurricane Lidia was of “extremely dangerous” strength and could strengthen further before making landfall on Tuesday night.

The hurricane was about 110 miles (177 km) southwest of major beach destination Puerto Vallarta, the Miami-based NHC reported in its latest bulletin at 5:30 p.m. ET (2130 GMT).

The center estimated that Lidia was moving east-northeast at 16 miles-per-hour (26 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph).

The Puerto Vallarta airport announced on social media it was closing from 4 p.m. (2200 GMT) until 8 a.m. on Wednesday.

The hurricane’s rainfall was estimated at between 4-8 inches (10-20 cm), though some areas could see up to 12 inches through Wednesday, according to an earlier bulletin.

A large swath of western and central Mexico will likely see the brunt of the expected downpour, including Nayarit state, southern portions of Sinaloa state, plus coastal areas in Jalisco state.

“These rains will likely produce flash and urban flooding, along with possible mudslides in areas of higher terrain near the coast,” the NHC predicted.

The strength of Lidia’s winds, however, are expected to weaken rapidly after it moves inland.

Further south, Tropical Storm Max left two dead and at least two injured in the state of Guerrero following heavy rains, according to local media reports.

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