LIFE DURING WARTIME: As Hamas war rages, personal firearm activists see surge in interest.

Gun control in Israel is relatively strict, and firearm licenses are generally only granted to those who can show a need for extra security in their line of work or daily life. Meaning, one of the key criteria for a private citizen to receive permission to own a gun is where they live.

That could now change, says Rabbi Raz Blizovsky, 32, of Katzrin, an activist who has been part of grassroots discussions around personal arms.

“People are changing their opinion, and now there is more awareness,” he told The Times of Israel. It doesn’t make sense, he said, that someone in Tel Aviv cannot get a pistol, but someone in the Golan can. “There are terror attacks in both places,” he stressed.

The best time for a government to recognize the individual’s right to protect life, liberty, and property with firearms is before the stuff hits the fan. The second-best time is right now.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA SANITIZES HAMAS TERROR ATTACKS:

The tone of the coverage thus far has been so blatantly one-sided that Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt ripped MSNBC while appearing on the network’s flagship program Morning Joe, while Al Sharpton of all people looked on. “Who is writing the scripts?… The people who did this are not fighters… they are not militants… they are terrorists.” Greenblatt asserted. Later on that same network, a guest suggested Israel make concessions by redrawing its borders to receive hostages back.

This is how the national media coverage of this attack will proceed. The nature of the original terror attack, the innocent music festival goers massacred and sexually assaulted, the hostages — will all be sterilized out of the coverage, and the onus will then be put on Israel’s response. This, of course, only empowers Hamas to continue their attacks and threats on civilians. It will be the fault, in the eyes of the news media, of Israel for escalating a response, and not for Hamas terrorists perpetrating the conflict to begin with.

Earlier: The Worst of the Media’s Decades-Long, Antisemitic Hamas PR Campaign (Video).

BECAUSE IT’S ALL GRIFT: Scholars to study why $365M DEI investment into STEM failed to diversify engineering.

NOT SURPRISING BUT SHAMEFUL NONETHELESS: Just The News’ John Solomon published a sweeping look at the history of how Biden’s denunciation of grisly terror attacks can’t mask the left’s years of coddling of Tehran and Gaza. Notably, the report says:

“Security experts said the weekend attacks exposed the peril of a decade-long Democrat pursuit of an elusive deal to end Iran’s nuclear and terrorist activities combined with a romanticism in liberal academic and political circles of a Palestinian “struggle.””

As the Good Professor often says, “Read the Whole Thing.” ™

BIDENOMICS WORKING AS WELL AS CARTERNOMICS: 1970s-style stagflation may be at risk of repeating itself, Deutsche Bank warns.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: WTAF Was Hamas Thinking? IDF Warns Gaza ‘Will Soon Be a Tent City.’ “Hamas wanted an Old Testament war and now they’re going to get one.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: It’s not hyperbole, it’s real. Your professors and classmates hate Jews. Hamas terrorists rape Jewish women next to civilian carcasses, lock Jewish children in cages, and threaten to behead Jewish Holocaust survivors, and yet far-left academics and students do not care.

Higher education is productive of so much bigotry and ignorance that we really need to reconsider whether it deserves such a prominent and well-funded place in our society.

THIS IS CNN? ‘Blood’s on the Wall’; Emotional CNN Reporter Details Horrifying Site of Hamas Terror.

Having been with CNN for over two decades and a foreign journalist for more than three decades, CNN international diplomatic editor Nic Robertson has seen plenty covering natural disasters, terror attacks, and war zones. But on Monday’s The Lead, he was repeatedly on the verge of breaking down in tears describing what he called “callous, cruel, cold-blooded killing” of Israelis and other innocents by Hamas terrorists at a Re’im music festival.

Robertson went into graphic detail describing what he saw at the now-eerie site, including evidence of Hamas hunting attendees down into bomb shelters as they fled both the terrorists and incoming rockets, leaving blood splattered “on the ceiling and…bullet holes…in the concrete wall.”

Robertson was moved by a conversation host Jake Tapper had with Biden National Security Council official John Kirby, who was similarly choked up. Tapper said he’s “never seen anything like this” with “the images of children kidnapped, of — of young women who have been abducted, who have blood in their pants because they’ve been repeatedly raped.”

This moved Kirby: “I — I — it — I’m sorry. It’s very — excuse me. It’s very difficult to look at these images, Jake. It is — the human cost and these are human beings. They’re family members. Their friends and loved ones and cousins and brothers and sisters. Yeah, it is difficult and I apologize.”

“Nothing to say sorry for,” Tapper replied.

Read the whole thing.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ‘The Squad’ Idiots Should Be Sent to a Country They Actually Like. “For the longest time, the Democrats at least managed to keep the most virulent anti-Semitic voices among them out of national office. When Minnesota sent Keith Ellison to Congress in 2007, he would at least try to be coy about his true feelings. Then Ellison was succeeded by Ilhan Omar, and all Squad hell broke loose.”

ARNOLD KLING: “Many Israel supporters wish to frame the Hamas assault as “Israel’s 9/11.” I do not like that analogy. I think that a better analogy is with Pearl Harbor.”

Let me add a caution. Hamas planned a war. They must have known that the Israeli response would be crushing. It’s safe to bet that they have prepared a very ugly urban-warfare defensive plan against just the sort of straight-in assault that everyone is talking about. It might be wise to respond somewhat differently.

ANOTHER JEWISH HOMELAND:  I found I couldn’t read any more about the events in Israel.  It was just too gut wrenching.  I therefore started thinking about a different (though related) topic:

Before there was a modern Israel (and before modern Zionism), there was  … South Carolina.  Two wealthy Sephardic families living in London—the DaCostas and the Salvadors—purchased 200,000 acres in what was then South Carolina’s frontier sometime in the 1730s or so.  Their intent was for the land to become a refuge for poor Sephardic families then living in England.  (The land was located in what is now the town of Ninety Six in Greenwood County.)

It wasn’t a crazy an idea—not too crazy anyway.  Evidently, a small group of Sephardic Jews had settled in Savannah, Georgia in 1733, but had fled to Charleston when it looked like the Spaniards in Florida had designs on Georgia.  The Spanish Inquisition was still in business then, so this was a prudent move.  For most of the 18^th as well as the early 19^th century, South Carolina was the destination of choice for Jewish immigrants to America.

(more…)

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: ATF Pistol Brace Regulations Blocked. “This ruling is also another example of why the black-pilled ‘Republicans are useless’ mutterings are wrong. Without Reagan, Bush41, Bush43 and Trump judicial appointments, it’s overwhelmingly likely that none of the landmark Second Amendment cases (Heller, Bruen) go our way, and ruling Democrats would be busy working on complete disarmament of American citizens.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I always assume that most of the black-pilled crowd are actually just plants paid by some lefty organization to post depressing stuff to demoralize their enemies. I mean, can there really be that many actual idiots out there?

DISPATCHES FROM AL SHARPTON’S NETWORK: MSNBC Continues to Embarrass Itself With Biased Hamas Coverage, Israeli Mom Claps Back at Andrea Mitchell.

SCOTT JOHNSON: “Here and around the world, however, we see public displays of support for Hamas. Current events have flushed out the many Nazis in our midst.”

Just a few years ago, all the best people were informing me that it’s okay — nay, virtuous — to punch Nazis.

HMM: Trump wins generic vote big, 30% Democrats back him.

RUSH LIMBAUGH IN 2007: Unleash Israel and win peace.

OUR DANGEROUS, CORRUPT, AND INCOMPETENT RULING CLASS: Trump killed funding for Palestinian-“relief” organizations; Biden reinstated it. “It is impossible to overstate just how destructive Joe Biden’s foreign policy decisions have been, and how immeasurably worse they have made the world. There are too many examples to cite, but given recent events let’s look at just a couple of decisions he made that empowered Iran and Hamas to commit the atrocities this weekend in Israel.”

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: Ilhan Omar Doubles Down on Hamas.

SIGH:  Fox News 23 (Tulsa) believes that ending the special subminimum wage for individuals with severe disabilities will “eliminate a hurdle to fair pay for people with disabilities.”  And so apparently do some Oklahoma legislators.  But it’s nonsense.  Eliminating the subminimum wage will eliminate jobs, not hurdles to fair pay.

When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights did a report on this topic in 2020, we were inundated with public comments from family members of individuals with Down Syndrome.  I’m told it was more comments than we’d ever received for a single report in our history.  Overwhelmingly, the commenters wanted the subminimum wage program kept.  They knew their loved one would not have a job at all without it.  You’d think that would be obvious to more people.  But I guess the world’s gone mad.

ACADEMIA IS NOT COVERING ITSELF WITH GLORY: Columbia Law Dean Does Damage Control After Mealy-Mouthed Israel Statement.

HMM: How Israel’s Feared Security Services Failed to Stop Hamas’s Attack: Israel’s military and espionage services are considered among the world’s best, but on Saturday, operational and intelligence failures led to the worst breach of Israeli defenses in half a century.

Missing from this account: The politicization of those services by the left over recent years.

NOT ANTI-WAR, MERELY ON THE OTHER SIDE: Worst of the Media’s Decades-Long, Antisemitic Hamas PR Campaign (Video).

MAYORKAS LIED TO CONGRESS? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly told Congress the border is secure. In fact, as Issues & Insights points out, Mayorkas has made that claim during congressional testimony seven times since March 17, 2021.

There are laws against lying to Congress. Will Congress demand that Attorney General Merrick Garland enforce them? And then do something concrete — say, just for starters, eliminate every tenth position in the Department of Justice — when he declines to do so?

IF HE KNOWS EVERYTHING: Why are there verses in scripture that say God doesn’t know something?

CDR SALAMANDER: Prelude to Slaughter.

Glenn already linked to Sal’s latest but I wanted to break out this part:

The fact Gaza became a terrorist run safe space didn’t stop the “International Community (IC),” the internationalist left, and useful idiots from turning it in to a global welfare state that never had to earn support through constructive behavior. Humanitarian aid came in from all over the place, and with each passing year it became a stronger and more effective proxy for Iran. There was never a popular uprising against Hamas by the residents of Gaza, just the opposite. They own this. They are “this.”

The attacks from Gaza last weekend did not happen in a vacuum, nor did they happen overnight. As with almost all frozen conflicts, they eventually thaw out under the right conditions.

In the case of the latest – and most deadly events – the latent causes that enabled the Gazans (as I prefer call them if you haven’t noticed) to think now was the time to send the death squads out of their enclave ultimately belong to the Gazans themselves. As I said above, they own this. However, it could not have happened without outside help.

Gaza is one of the planet’s most concentrated areas of misery and poverty. They don’t have the economic surplus to afford any of this on their own. Gaza was intellectually and financially underwritten from the outside through active sustainment, willful neglect, and outright encouragement.

The Gazans will get their due courtesy of the IDF. But what of their enablers here in the West?