World Today 2025-10-17

GAZA / INTERNATIONAL:  PAKISTAN, INDONESIA, AZERBAIJAN WEIGH JOINING GAZA SECURITY FORCE.

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-870690

'So far, Indonesia is the only country to publicly offer troops, saying it could deploy 20,000 soldiers under a United Nations (UN) mandated peacekeeping mission, something not outlined in Trump’s Gaza peace deal.'

UK / ISRAEL:  TOMMY ROBINSON IN ISRAEL.

https://www.rebelnews.com/the_west_must_wake_up_tommy_robinson_stands_at_israel_s_frontline

The Rebel's Avi Yemini talks with Tommy Robinson during Tommy's visit to Israel.

RUSSIA / INTERNATIONAL:  COUNTRIES WEIGH RUSSIAN OIL SANCTIONS.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew418r5rxdo

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/some-indian-refiners-prepare-cut-russian-oil-imports-sources-say-2025-10-16/

The UK is sanctioning Russia's two biggest oil companies, Lukoil and Rosneft, according to Chancellor Rachel Reeves.  Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump said India would stop buying Russian oil.

COMMENTS.

I'm surprised but pleased to see that Israel did not cave to pressure from some establishment groups and cancel Tommy's visit, and that the UK - where he's facing yet another batch of criminal charges - allowed him to go.

World today 2025-10-13

 ISRAEL:  ALL LIVING HOSTAGES FREED FROM HAMAS CAPTIVITY IN GAZA.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/416200

'After 738 days, Hamas is no longer holding any living hostages; the 13 last living hostages have been handed over to the Red Cross, and the other seven are already in Israel. Some of the deceased hostages will be returned to Israel in the afternoon.'

Commentary.  Like many supporters of Israel and of President Donald Trump, I've had serious questions about the direction of Trump's Middle East policy.  But none of that takes away from the fact that all 20 living hostages have been freed and returned to Israeli care, and as of this hour the Gaza ceasefire appears to be holding.

I am still not sure what to think about Trump's 20-point peace plan, or about his vision for peace accords spanning the greater Muslim world.  

One thing I do think is significant, though, is the name of one country that keeps cropping up in these discussions:  the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, which isn't in the Mideast at all but in the Pacific.  That's Indonesia, with almost the same population as the United States.

And in the wider world of global politics and security, Indonesia could be a key player in any future confrontation with China.  I remember reading analyses over the past year, saying that DJT's main focus is not the Mideast but the Pacific; and if there's a sense of urgency to his Mideast policy, it is in the context of a drive to tie up all the loose ends and to remove the unresolved conflicts in the Mideast (and elsewhere) as distractions, in order to position the playing pieces so as to confront China from a position of strength.

Notes.

 The left's playbook:
1.  Identify an activity that most people do not engage in, but most do not object to.
2.  Do the activity in such a manner, and to such a degree, so that it becomes objectionable.
3.  When people do object, scream "BIGOT!" and play the victim to garner sympathy, protections, and special privileges.
4.  Repeat.

--

Leftists are committed to a worldview where they see everyone else as ignorant, hate-filled racists.  This flatters their own self-regard (because you can always look good by comparison to the other guy if you set the bar low enough) and rationalizes their sense of authoritarian entitlement.

--

If you really care about making life better - for one person, or for many people, or for the world - what you care about is results.  You care that the person is actually better off after you have helped them, and you do everything in your power to make sure that your help is really helping.  If you're not doing that, then you are just pursuing the feeling of "doing good".

People say "but they have good intentions!" I say BS. If you care about helping people, then you care about the outcome, and if you care about the outcome, you are constantly, obsessively, checking to see whether what you're doing is making people's lives better. And if you're not doing that, then I say it's questionable how good your intentions were in the first place.

Humility means being willing to learn from others - specifically, to learn what you could be doing better.

The make-believe battle against made-up nazis.

Everybody wants to be a hero.  Everybody wants to be that one guy in the picture who's not giving the nazi salute.

Most recently, we've seen this in the case of the literal nazi salute that was supposedly given by Elon Musk.  

And that's the appeal of modern left-liberalism.  It's an appeal to vanity.  If you convince yourself that the other guy is a nazi, then you only have to be one percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.  If the other guy is Hitler, then you can be Stalin.

The left only pretends to care about anti-Semitism when it wants to smear its enemies as anti-Semites.  They will make great noises of outrage, and pose and posture and portray themselves as "fighting nazis", just so long as those "nazis" can be connected to the people they don't like anyway - conservative, largely Christian and European-descended people.

The enlightened intelligentsia, the laptop liberals and timid technocrats who form the governing class and who deem themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, fancy themselves akin to the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy; when in fact they are fighting imaginary nazis in a fantasy battle that is about as dangerous as playing Call Of Duty.

Ask these folks to stand up for Israel - or stand against the keffiyeh-clad nazis who stage rallies daily in Europe, Britain, and North America, extolling Hamas and Hezbollah and calling for the massacre of Jews and the conquest of the West -  and they'll pee their panties and bleat about "islamophobia".

The same people who cheered the global lockdowns and the forced medical experimentation on billions of humans; who praised censorship of social media and called for mass surveillance and suppression of dissenters; who support the jackbooted black-shirts of antifa and the islamo-fascists of Hezbollah and Hamas; who look forward to the glorious day when the world will bend the knee to the dictatorship of the UN and the WEF - these are the people who want to tell me who I'm supposed to be scared of because they're a "nazi"?  Yeah, no.  [353]

2025-01-26

USA:  KRISTI NOEM CONFIRMED AS DHS SECRETARY.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-kristi-noem-confirmed-as-department-of-homeland-security-secretary
Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem was confirmed as President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security Secretary on Saturday morning with a vote of 59 to 34 in the Senate.

LOS ANGELES:  PALISADES RESIDENTS VISIT HOMES AFTER TRUMP VISIT.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/01/25/trump-effect-some-palisades-residents-visit-homes-for-first-time-since-fire-after-presidents-visit/
Residents of the Pacific Palisades flocked home on Saturday after President Donald Trump’s visit the day before, with many gaining access to their property for the first time since the Palisades Fire more than two weeks ago.

ISRAEL:  LIRI, NAAMA, DANIELA, AND KARINA RETURN HOME.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402842
Four of the five IDF lookouts kidnapped from the Nahal Oz military post during the October 7 massacre are returned to Israel.

ISRAEL:  HOSTAGES RETURN HOME (VIDEO).
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/402843
Daniella Gilboa, Liri Albag, Naama Levy, and Karina Ariev are re-united with their parents.

TIM BLACK AT SPIKED:  THE SINISTER RISE OF THE ISLAMO-LEFT.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/19/the-sinister-rise-of-the-islamo-left/
How the Western Left allied with the islamo-fascists.

Jeremy Corbyn's reluctance to denounce Hamas is only the latest manifestation of a process that has been in the works at least since the 1990s, when the collapse of Communism forced the Western Left to find new allies.  While Tim Black's article deals mainly with events in Britain, the same dynamics were at work in Europe and North America.