“Europe should take in the one million people trying to flee Gaza if it cares “about human rights so much”, a senior Egyptian official reportedly told a European counterpart.
“You want us to take one million people? Well, I am going to send them to Europe. You care about human rights so much – well, you take them,” the unidentified official said.
The rebuke, first reported by the Financial Times, came as media reports suggested that the Egyptian government was categorically refusing to accept the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in northern Sinai.
To avoid a mass exodus from the Gaza Strip into Egypt, the Egyptian army has begun setting up new positions close to the border, reinforcing the wall with barbed wire, expanding patrols in the area, and installing a concrete wall at the Rafah crossing with Gaza.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/egyptian-official-says-europe-1-143224123.html
“two Swedish fans were shot dead. The alleged gunman, named as Abdesalem Lassoued, posted two videos online, in which he claimed to be a “fighter for Allah” and that he was a supporter of Islamic State.
Here the script is depressingly familiar. Reports in the English and Belgian media state the gunman was Tunisian, had been in the country since 2016, and was “known to the police”. His asylum application had been rejected in 2020, but a request to leave Belgium had not been enacted as Lassoued had moved house. A subsequent arrest for making threats on social media was working its way through the Belgian legal system.
It would be easy to blame some of these problems on Belgium itself. Districts of Brussels have long been allowed to opt out from the rule of law, and the nation’s multiple police forces are hardly a by-word for competence. But the situation is little better elsewhere. On Friday, France witnessed its second murder of a school teacher by an Islamist. Here the suspect was again ‘known to the police’ as an alleged extremist and has a brother in prison for terrorist offences.
Britain is no better. In November 2021, an asylum seeker in Liverpool died while attempting to blow up the city’s women’s hospital. Emad Al-Swealmeen had originally entered Britain on a tourist visa, claiming he wanted to see Britain’s Got Talent be recorded in Belfast. Al-Swealmeen was still in the UK six years after his asylum claim was rejected.
Huge numbers of primarily young men, have crossed Europe’s leaky borders since 2015. Research for Policy Exchange earlier this year found 83% of those crossing the channel on small boats in 2022, were male. We know next to nothing about who they are or what they believe. In many cases they move to communities where levels of integration is already poor, and extremist ideals have currency.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/facts-now-clear-mass-illegal-140725533.html
“The airfields that have reportedly been targeted are deep behind the front-line, supposedly safe from attack. But the ATACMS system can strike targets with pinpoint accuracy at a range of up to 300kms. Not so safe after all.
We’ve already seen the havoc wreaked by the British Storm Shadow precision missile. Its range of 180kms has made the Black Sea fleet all but irrelevant, as it has had to scuttle back to ports deep in Russia. ATACMS now means that Russia will have to move its key air assets far back from the front lines. Its attack helicopters, which have done so much damage to the Ukrainian armoured forces, may now be out of range entirely.
Likewise, command posts will have to move so far back from the front-lines that they may become entirely ineffective in controlling the close battle. If the untrained, poorly armed and underfed conscripts in the trenches felt isolated before, their leaders will now be so far away that – to use the British army adage for absent commanders – they will have to send their washing forward.
Soldiers without leaders are rabbles, and these Russian rabbles don’t even want to fight. Without their leaders forcing them at gun point, they may not – particularly if they don’t have air cover and artillery support.
It won’t just be helicopters and jets receiving gifts this Christmas courtesy of ATACMS. Russian artillery and its precision guided missile systems may all now be in range. If the flow of battlefield intelligence from the US, UK and Nato continues, we can expect a long string of successful attacks on high value Russian targets.
This won’t just be a morale boost for the Ukrainian military. It could well take the brakes off the counter-offensive. If the Ukrainian tanks don’t have to worry about attacks from the air, they can push on with greater urgency, break through the remaining Russian lines, and steam into Crimea.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-american-missiles-may-devastated-133556823.html
“Immigrants seeking to come to the U.S. to live and work are absolutely not terrorists conducting a paramilitary operation. Mexico and the U.S. are not Israel and Palestine. And, as Saturday’s attack makes obviously clear, even the most extreme measures designed to “shut down” a border can be defeated.
Conflating these issues only serves to make the debate over U.S. immigration policy more toxic and stupid than it already is.
Unfortunately, DeSantis is not the only one doing this. Former President Donald Trump, never one to care much about accurately describing the status of U.S. immigration policy, claimed in a TruthSocial post on Monday that “the same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers.”
Meanwhile, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—who has at times seemed like the metaphorical adult in the room during this GOP presidential primary contest—made a similar claim during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday. “We have to remember that what happened to Israel could happen here in America,” Haley said. “We have an open border. People are coming through; they’re not being vetted.””
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“There are not many borders in the world more heavily militarized than the one between Israel and the Gaza Strip. It should stand in stark contrast to how these Republican politicians are describing America’s southern border.
In fact, the Gaza border wall went far beyond anything that would be feasible or affordable for the U.S./Mexico border. As Amir Tibon, a journalist who survived Saturday’s attack in Israel, described to The Atlantic on Monday, the structure included an “underground wall” meant to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels.
And guess what? The wall didn’t work.”
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“Thankfully, the U.S. has not been in a decades-long, slow-simmering conflict with our neighbor to the south—though some Republicans now seem eager to start one. There is no terrorist organization in Mexico motivated by centuries-old religious and cultural hatred that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the American state or the rights of the people who live in it.
Most importantly, there is little evidence that any terrorists seeking to harm Americans are passing through the southern border.”
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“the best way to focus on whatever actual threats might exist would be to allow more immigrants into the country legally—leaving only those who cannot clear background checks to be sneaking over the fence illegally. That’s the opposite of shutting down the border.”
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“If a politician can’t tell the difference between migrants coming to the U.S. for jobs and terrorists hell-bent on murder and mayhem, they shouldn’t be trusted with making federal policy in either arena.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/10/heres-what-the-hamas-attack-tells-us-about-u-s-immigration-policy-nothing/
“The restrictions have mostly been about security concerns in North Sinai where the Egyptian authorities have long been involved in a deadly conflict with jihadists linked to Al Qaeda.
But Egypt’s current reluctance to open the crossing without clear conditions and guarantees may be more about trying to avoid a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, says the Egyptian authorities fear a great influx of Gazans – for whom they would then be responsible, for an indefinite period.
In addition, Egypt does not want to play any role in what could amount to a permanent resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-egypt-remains-reluctant-open-103715598.html
“Biden’s administration sold off more than 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last year to help limit rising fuel prices after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaving the stockpile at its lowest levels since the early 1980s. That’s fueling Republican accusations that Biden has left the U.S. vulnerable to a disruption of global oil supplies — at a time when Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel are stoking fears of a wider regional war disrupting fuel shipments from the Middle East.”
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the reserve still holds 351 million barrels — equivalent to nearly 56 days of total U.S. oil imports last year — though well below the peak of 727 million barrels it held during the Obama administration. That’s on top of 424 million barrels that private companies were storing in the U.S. as of early October.
The administration has defended its handling of the reserve, saying it still holds ample crude to protect the nation’s strategic needs and offer a cushion against price shocks. “I am not worried about the reserve levels at all,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told a House committee in September, adding: “It is the largest strategic reserve in the world.”
And the U.S. is no longer the energy beggar it was in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War prompted an Arab oil embargo against the United States that sent prices spiraling and left Americans waiting in hours-long lines at gas pumps. Back then, U.S. oil production was dropping while its thirst for the fuel was rising — prompting Congress to pass a law in 1975 to create the reserve.”
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” the United States is the world’s biggest oil producer, which exports more crude and petroleum products than it imports. Its output is at record highs and is climbing, even as demand has flattened.
Over the years, some conservatives have even called for abolishing the reserve, complaining — as the Heritage Foundation did eight years ago — that “Presidents have used the SPR as a political tool.”
Still, the reserves’ diminished volumes limit Biden’s options to respond to a future shock to the oil markets, including those that could result from a widening of the war in the Middle East.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-half-empty-oil-fuels-090000833.html
“Before the declaration of Israel as a state in May 1948, the apron of land surrounding Gaza contained dozens of Palestinian Arab towns and villages, the largest of which was al-Majdal—what is now the entirely Jewish city of Ashkelon.
When, on Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state, this whole area—including Gaza, its surrounding areas, and parts of the Negev Desert—was designated to be included within the Arab state. But the U.N. failed to provide money, troops, or administrators to implement its decision. Abandoning Palestine to chaos, the British, who had ruled the territory for more than 20 years, pulled their forces out of city after city, region after region. As they did so, Jews and Arabs plunged into an atrocity-filled civil war over which areas would fall under Jewish or Arab rule.
The result of this civil war, of battles between Israel and the expeditionary forces of Arab states that invaded Palestine in May 1948, and of increasingly systematic Israeli campaigns to expel Arab civilians from territories that were to have been the Arab state, was the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians; 200,000 of them found shelter in a narrow wedge of coastal Palestine occupied by Egyptian troops—what became known as the Gaza Strip. Israel’s refusal to allow those who fled or were expelled to return to their homes, and its subsequent destruction of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods, turned these displaced persons into refugees.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gaza-became-open-air-prison-165951249.html