Many of the officials managing the Palestinian Authority (PA) are the same ones who helped establish it in 1994 and were responsible for its rampant corruption. This corruption is one of the main reasons why Hamas won the PA parliamentary election in 2006, when the Islamist movement ran under the banner of "Change and Reform."

Mahmoud Abbas and senior PA officials have been stirring up bloodlust for Israel both before and after Hamas's October 7 massacre. Palestinians hear these messages and vote for Hamas when given the opportunity, as we saw in the recent student council elections at a number of Palestinian universities in the West Bank. This is exactly what Abbas feared when he cancelled the PA's presidential and parliamentary elections that were slated to take place in 2021.

The assumption that, three decades later, the Palestinian Authority is going to embark on any serious reforms is a mirage. Abbas and the PA leadership will not change unless they are pressured to do so... One thing is clear: the Palestinian Authority is in no way, shape or form up to this job.

To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip...

"The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what's going on... They all knew Hamas' terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn't attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil." — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, November 16, 2023.

[T]he UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.

When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, [UN Secretary-General António] Guterres expressed that he was "horrified" with Israel's action, while ignoring Hamas's war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.

Above all, the UN's transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.

In the case of a "Palestinian State", there is no territory on which even the Palestinians agree. Indeed, the charter of Hamas -- designated as a terrorist organization by many countries in the West, and which has reigned unchallenged in the Gaza Strip since 2007 when it forcibly expelled the Palestinian Authority, in part by throwing its members off 15-storey buildings -- calls for the "liberation" of "every inch of Palestine" through jihad.

The Palestinian Authority also lays claim over all of the territory, including all of Israel...

In addition, the Palestinian Authority is counting on the Palestine Liberation Organization's 1974 "Ten Point Plan" (also known as the "phased plan") for the "comprehensive liberation" of all the land stretching "from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea" -- a euphemism for the elimination of Israel. The plan calls for the PLO to use whatever territory it is offered as a base of operations to get the rest.

Belgium's possible recognition of a "Palestinian State" makes no sense in terms of international law. It comes, in reality, less as the result of a desire to help the Palestinians -- whose lives will not be improved by it -- than of a fierce and increasingly undisguised hostility towards the State of Israel, and most likely also Jews.

Recognizing a Palestinian state with no authority, no realistic territorial demands and no acceptable leadership -- and with a long-term, outspoken desire to militarize and destroy its neighbor Israel -- right after a jihadist pogrom against Jews, will not add to the happiness of any of the parties involved, or, for that matter, anyone else.

[B]oth Russia and Ukraine have passed what military theoreticians call the "decimation point" when you see that you have lost at least 10% of your fighting manpower.

In the West, public opinion saw the war as a means of keeping the Russian giant in chains, while anti-West forces admired Putin for challenging the American big bad wolf.

The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Iran's regime has frequently threatened to wipe a whole country -- Israel -- off the map, and is also increasing military cooperation with Venezuela and Cuba to threaten the US. Europe, too, remains a rich target for nuclear blackmail. Iran would not even have to use its nuclear bombs; the threat would be enough.

It is high time for the Biden administration and the European Union at least to stop Iran from selling its oil. If not, much of the planet will soon see itself either in World War III or a surrender.

It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he sent the German army across the Rhine in 1936. Perhaps US President Joe Biden is trying to bribe the mullahs not to create any more mayhem before next year's US presidential election – but the only result of such timidity is that the price goes up – with a worse war to follow. Biden would not have won WWII.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, has already attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria at least 74 times since October 17. US retaliation – against the proxies, not Iran – apparently could not impress Iran's regime less. Someone else takes the bullet: that is why Iran has proxies in the first place... The Biden administration is not only allowing to Iran's mullahs to create a war cost-free, it is paying them to do it.

Two major revelations have ripped away the curtain from HRW's moral facade, and revealed a thoroughly corrupt organization.

A week later, a second earthquake ripped through HRW's carefully manicured curtain of secrecy.

In 2009, Roth and HRW started hiding the full list of donors – an early red flag for an NGO claiming a moral agenda.

[A]n independent investigation of all financial activities covering the past 25 years is required, accompanied by the examination of possible violations by Roth, Whitson and others of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The damage done to the moral core of human rights and to Israeli victims of Hamas terrorism is incalculable and irreversible. But an internship or work experience at HRW is no longer an asset, and being listed as a donor in HRW's glossy PR publications is worse than embarrassing.

Awad Darawshe, 23, an Arab-Israeli paramedic, remained behind, refusing [on October 7] to abandon the wounded. "I speak Arabic. I think I can manage," Darawshe said, supposing that he could reason with the terrorists. Perhaps he thought they would not harm a fellow Muslim Arab. He was wrong.

"I never felt that I'm deprived in any way.... Stop the nonsense. It is empty whining. I don't believe in that. Everyone here can get where they want. What – the country doesn't let them study? Y'allah, be a lawyer, be a teacher. Does anyone stop you? Even in prayer. Does anyone stop you praying? We pray five times a day, five times no one stops us. Whoever wants to be successful can be successful. Whoever doesn't want to be successful blames the country, the government." — Ibrahim, an Arab-Israeli citizen, YouTube, February 23, 2014.

Where in the Middle East are Arabs thriving throughout society, not just in a privileged world of favors and nepotism? Israel.

"We are very proud of his actions... This is what we would expect from him and what we expect from everyone in our family — to be human, to stay human and to die human." — The family of the paramedic Awad Darawshe, apnews.com, October 15, 2023.

"People from all over the country come to hug and support the family. The entire nation is one family now." — Ali Alziadna, an Arab-Israeli whose four family members are currently held hostage by Hamas, haaretz.com, November 13, 2023.

Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated that it cares nothing for the well-being of Arabs and Muslims. From their luxury homes and hotel rooms in the safety of Qatar and Turkey, Hamas leaders give the orders to attack Israel and then sit back and let the world weep over the destruction they wrought upon their own people.

Perhaps the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip should look at the Arab citizens of Israel and note how they enjoy equal rights, democracy, freedom of speech and a free media. If Palestinians wish to live well, like the Arab-Israelis, this is the time for them to get rid of Hamas and all the terror leaders who, for seven decades, have brought them nothing but one disaster after another.

Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.

In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union wanted to gain more influence in the Arab Muslim world, its leaders decided to support what was at the time a sacred cause for Arab leaders: the attempt to destroy Israel. They... chose to invent a "national liberation struggle".... The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with the task of "liberating Palestine," and the borders of "Palestine" on the maps used by the PLO showed that the goal was to erase Israel from the face of the earth.

Western leftists started vocally to express hatred of "imperialist Israel" and, ironically, the hard-won democratic freedoms they were at that moment enjoying to the fullest: freedom of speech, assembly, education, sexuality, and supposedly equal justice under the law.

The Oslo Accords only made everything worse. By signing them, Israel's then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized... that a terrorist organization was somehow the legitimate representative of a people invented fewer than three decades earlier, and that this invented "people" had "rights" and deserved to have territory and self-government.

In reality, it was Israel that decolonized the land from the grip of the British, who governed it from 1917 until Israel's war of independence in 1948.

The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere.... These demonstrations also show that support for the "Palestinian cause" sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.

[I]f nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of "democracy" of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups -- the worst is bound to come.

The new index does not include Chinese and Hong Kong stocks, so to match the assets of the I Fund to the new index, the Thrift Board will have to sell Chinese and Hong Kong stocks and not buy them in the future.

Investors have noticed. More than three-quarters of the foreign cash invested in Chinese stocks in the first seven months of this year has already been withdrawn from China. In excess of $25 billion has exited the country.

Chinese stocks listed in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and New York have lost about $955 billion of market capitalization this year.... The plunge in the renminbi against the dollar this year has further eroded returns.

Chinese economic news has become downright scary, and, unfortunately for China, there is no such thing as a brave money manager.

China's companies for decades essentially had a free ride: As a practical matter, they did not have to meet U.S. disclosure requirements, which applied to companies from all other countries. This unjustified preferential treatment was reduced somewhat in August of last year when the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board surprisingly clinched an agreement with Chinese regulators to give the U.S. access in Hong Kong to the audit papers of Chinese companies.

So why should companies continue to get special access to American equity markets just because they come from China? Or why should they have any access at all?

The Chinese economy and financial markets are fragile. It is time to cut off all the blood supply to the Nazis of the 21st century.

The stance of the Arabs and Muslims is yet another indication of their disillusionment with the Palestinians in general and Iran's proxies -- Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis -- in particular.

Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan are as opposed to Hamas as they are to Israel. Hamas is another branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which has long posed a threat to their national security.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar after accusing it of providing support for Islamist terrorists, including Hamas and the Taliban, as well as Iran.

Now that their eyes have been once again forced open, the Palestinians should distance themselves from Hamas and other terrorist groups and join forces with those Arabs and Muslims who recognize that to create a better future for their people, it would benefit them immeasurably to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

Seven weeks into Israel's military offensive to destroy Hamas as a military and political entity, the Biden administration now seems to be adopting a very different stance, one where it appears ready to scale down its commitment to supporting Israel's right to self-defence, and destroying Hamas, in favour of a ceasefire deal that would essentially gift victory to Hamas.

Netanyahu has made no secret of his personal reservations about the hostage deal, arguing that any pause in Israel's military offensive would simply allow Hamas to regroup. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), in particular, had been opposed to the deal because they wanted to maintain the pressure against Hamas on the ground in Gaza.

Indeed, Washington's willingness to impose ceasefires on Israel when its forces have clearly established a military advantage on the battlefield against their enemies has been a constant feature throughout Israel's 75-year existence.

The Israelis will certainly be concerned at the role played by Qatar, which is one of Hamas's main military backers, in the negotiations. While the Qataris like to claim that they are simply using their contacts with Hamas to defuse tensions, the fact that Ismail Haniyeh, who masterminded the massacres, directed the attacks from his five-star hotel in Qatar, where he has been granted a safe haven, means the Israelis have every reason to be wary of Qatar's motives.

Judging by what advisers are preparing on the Middle East, Trump II will focus on "closer ties" with allies, including Israel, and no more "favors" to the Islamic Republic in Iran and Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey unless he is back in line.

Trump thinks that Marxists and other "crazy leftists" have seized control of US universities and are brainwashing whole generations thanks to tax-exempt private donations and public funding.

So far the Democrats continue to mock Trump and refuse to take him seriously. This could cost the Democrats dearly. For even if the solutions that Trump suggests appear weird the problems he raises are real.

Germany is the top European trade partner buying oil and non-oil commodities from Iran.

"UANI [United Against Nuclear Iran] said that research had led to the identification of 2,500 businesses around the world, suspected of having involvement with Iran, with hundreds in Europe. They will publish their names if they do not receive satisfactory answers." — The National, September 22, 2023.

The EU's trade with Iran, increasing the Iranian regime's revenue, is doubtless making it easier for the theocratic establishment to provide weapons to Russia, repress its own people even further, strengthen its military presence in Venezuela and Cuba, help its proxies escalate their goals of trying to annihilate Israel and the Jews, and above all, top off its nuclear weapons program with which to blackmail everyone.

If this is the damage the Iranian is doing without nuclear weapons, just think what it will do with them.

The Europeans' continuing business with Iran repeats the same mistake they made with Nazi Germany: feeding a war machine that will ultimately turn on them. Appeasing anyone will only encourage him to become an even greater threat. Although Europe and the US most probably will not do it, the time has come to stop.

"These rapes are unfortunately customary and serve a specific purpose. It is believed that once no longer a virgin, a girl would become unsuitable for marriage, even if she belongs to a religious minority, and her only choice would be to marry one of her captors. Mishal was then forcibly converted to Islam and married to one of the kidnappers." – bitterwinter.org, October 24, 2023, Pakistan.

"Some cases do land in courts. But it is not easy for the victims to win them. Sometimes, the victims are treated as if they were the perpetrators...." -- bitterwinter.org, October 24, 2023, Pakistan.

"As we returned back to our grass-thatched roof house, we found some of the debris around the house. On entering the house, we found there was a threatening message, 'Today if we find you around, we shall destroy you with the house. You have become an embarrassment to our Muslim family by joining a wrong religion.'" – morningstarnews.org, October 4, 2023, Uganda.

Regrettably, this scenario—a fire claims Christian lives, only for Muslim authorities to say it was "accidental"—has played out many times in the Middle East.

To many on the so-called "Left", it sometimes appears as if there is no insurmountable conflict between Islam and the West, or between any differing cultures, just old bits of conflict inherited from an obscure past, which will eventually be overcome by greater material equality.

This thesis, which is in fact Marxist — wherein any conflict is always caused by unequal material situations — also is based more on wishful thinking than on historical evidence. Muslims do not massacre Christians, Jews and Hindus because they are richer, but because they are non-Muslims. At least, that is what many mass murderers have been stating for more than ten centuries...

The "clash of civilizations" seems to be about religion, a topic that many in the West thought had been put to bed ages ago.

The "no-go" Islamic zones in Europe, the attacks on 9/11, London's 7/7 attacks... the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the massacre at the Bataclan, the constant censorship (blasphemy laws), and more: a brief look at recent history of the immigrants bears witness to what seems a pervasive inability, or lack of desire, to adapt to the values of their new host countries.

That, sadly, may be one of the reasons multiculturalism in the West has been such a failure -- a failure of the West. When westerners stopped having children, they started importing people en masse, indiscriminately, as if people were all the same. People are not all the same. Many Muslims, or at least a significant proportion of them, seem to have no intention of integrating, or of discarding the values they brought with them, which they appear to prefer to Western values.