Illegal Alien from Lebanon Caught at Border Admits He is Hezbollah, Hoped to Make a Bomb.

An illegal alien from Lebanon was apprehended illegally crossing the southern border near El Paso, Texas by Border Patrol agents on March 9.

Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, was asked what he was doing in the United States. He said he was going to New York and hoped to make a bomb. “I’m going to make a bomb.” He admitted he is a member of Hezbollah.

During a sworn interview, Ebbadi said he trained with Hezbollah for seven years. He said he was an active member guarding weapons locations for another four years.

Thanks, Joe Biden.

Ebbadi’s trained to be a jihadi to kill people “that was not Muslim,” according to ICE documents.

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Biden’s ‘Trojan Pier’ For Gaza

Five Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas, and Biden has sent no troops to help them, but at the State of the Union address, he promised to send troops to build a pier for Gaza.

The estimated over 1,000 troops will spend as long as 2 months laboring to build a floating pier in a war zone under potential attack to help transfer aid to the Hamas supporters living in Gaza.

Nothing about this plan makes sense.

The media has taken to falsely claiming that the Arab Muslims occupying parts of Gaza are starving. Vice President Kamala Harris attacked Israel, claiming that she had “seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed.” Social media videos however show the locals gorging themselves on shawarma and other foods in preparation for the Islamic period of Ramadan.

But if the Biden administration really believed that Gazans were starving right now, what would be the purpose of spending two months building a pier to deliver aid? A program with a two month lead time will not help people who are starving right now. It would be a grim joke.

And the pier plan only gets stranger from there.

According to the administration, there will be no ‘boots on the ground’ constructing the pier and according to a Pentagon spokesman, “it will not be U.S. military personnel that are transporting the aid off of the causeway into Gaza.” So who has the trucks and capability to actually do it?

The United States will build a pier for smaller ships to transfer to a temporary causeway. According to the spokesman, the administration is “coordinating with other nations to assist with operating the causeway and distributing aid into Gaza.”

Who are those nations? They’re clearly not Israel or the United States. While the Pentagon spokesman mentions Israel as a partner nation, the Israelis are already able to deliver aid.

The Pentagon spokesman mentioned the UN and nameless “ally and partner nations”.

“Why not just use those existing ports and have Israel look at what’s going through and bring it in? It seems like this is a lot of work for 60 days out when there are people starving, frankly,” a reporter asked.

And the spokesman responded with a confusing word salad because he had no good answer.

The actual answer is that the Biden administration does not actually believe that the Arab Muslim occupiers in Gaza are starving, let alone starving to death, otherwise it would be doing more than air dropping 11,000 meals and promising to have meal delivery running in 60 days.

The temporary pier setup is about bypassing Israel to provide long term access to Gaza.

While administration officials describe the pier as “temporary”, a senior official also admitted that “we look forward to the port transitioning to a commercially operated facility over time.”

That means it’s not actually meant to be temporary, but a permanent port for the terrorists.

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Observation O’ The Day
The gratitude of the people of Gaza for the United States Armed Forces’ humanitarian efforts on their behalf will express itself just as did the gratitude of the people of Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Lebanon when we we made comparable efforts on their behalf: they will take the aid and make strenuous efforts to slaughter as many Americans as they possibly can.

Desperate Biden Signs off on U.S. Military Building Infrastructure for Hamas.

Think of this story as you watch the State of the Union address. President Biden has given his ok for the U.S. military to build a port on the Gaza coast to bring relief to the population there.

This is how desperate Joe Biden is to win the state of Michigan in November. The Uncommitted movement has taken him by surprise and a victory in Michigan is not certain for Biden. It is hard for Biden to win in November without winning Michigan.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her sister have organized the Uncommitted movement in Michigan to oppose Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Muslim Arab American voters make up an important bloc and Joe Biden is nervous. The voters in places like Dearborn are telling Team Biden they will not vote for Biden in November. They aren’t going to vote for Trump, either. They will probably skip the top of the ballot. Or they will stay home.

During his State of the Union address, Biden will announce his decision to send the U.S. military on an emergency mission for Hamas. The White House said this mission will not include putting American military boots on the ground.

‘The President will announce that he’s directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a port in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water medicine, and temporary shelters,’ a senior administration official said on a briefing call with reporters on Thursday.

‘The planning involves the presence of US military personnel on military vessels offshore but does not require US military personnel to go ashore to install the pier or causeway facility that will allow to the transportation of humanitarian assistance,’ a senior defense official said.

‘We’re not planning for this to be an operation that would require U.S. boots on the ground,’ an official noted.

Pardon my skepticism but do we trust this administration on any “planning” going on by this incompetent lot? Remember the withdrawal from Afghanistan? Since then American bases in the Middle East have been attacked by Iran and its proxies while Joe Biden twiddles his thumbs and goes for ice cream cones.

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Know your islamist enemy

 

Joe Biden Tries to Give a Massive Gift to Hamas, Israel Tells Him to Pound Sand

When conservatives were telling Democrats to “back the blue,” I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean like this. According to a new report, the Biden administration is demanding that Israel stop targeting the Hamas-controlled police forces in Gaza.

That comes as Israel continues its push into the southern part of the territory where the remnants of Hamas remain. It also comes amidst reports (including video evidence) of these “police forces” shooting civilians to facilitate the stealing of aid for the terrorists holed up there.

The Biden administration asked Israel to stop targeting members of the Hamas-run civilian police force who escort aid trucks in Gaza, warning that a “total breakdown of law and order” is significantly exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the enclave, three U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios.

Why it matters: U.S. officials say they are increasingly concerned “that Gaza is turning into Mogadishu” as a security vacuum and desperation have opened the door for armed gangs to attack and loot aid trucks, putting even more pressure on the Strip’s already strained humanitarian system.

In late December, a video emerged of a Hamas police officer shooting and killing a young boy for trying to take food from one of the aid trucks. Since then, numerous reports have emerged of civilians being shot while the trucks are escorted through starving crowds. Little if no international condemnation has followed the incidents, and apparently, Joe Biden is just fine with it.

This is akin to the Allied Powers in World War II being commanded to not kill members of the Gestapo to ensure they can “maintain order.” There is no actual “civilian police force” in Gaza. They are all supportive of Hamas. They all commit and/or allow atrocities against innocent people, and they are all facilitating the theft of aid that is only prolonging the war.

So naturally, Biden is all for doing what it takes to knee-cap Israel and help keep that status quo in place. We are talking about the worst foreign policy mind in American political history when considering the breadth of time his penchant for failure has presided over. If there’s a bad decision to be made, Biden is going to be there to make it.

Frankly, I’m a little tired of hearing about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza sans any context, as if it gets solved by leaving Hamas in power. This can all end tomorrow if the terrorist government simply agrees to go into exile and lets some kind of coalition demilitarize the territory. That’s the way to help the people in Rafah right now. The way to not help them is to preserve the “police force” that is helping exacerbate their situation.

Smartly, Israel told Biden to pound sand.

But Israel rebuffed the request because one of its goals in the war is to ensure that Hamas no longer runs Gaza, two Israeli officials said.

Israel is also looking to cooperate with those in Gaza who oppose Hamas to facilitate aid instead of relying on the very terrorists they are fighting to deliver it. That would seem like a common sense approach given the entire point of the war is to depose Hamas. Perhaps that’s too complicated for the Biden administration to understand.

Any “solution” to the war in Gaza that doesn’t include the complete removal of Hamas as a governing force is not a solution. It’s simply a massive gift to terrorists who will inevitably strike again, leading to yet another war and yet more death and destruction. The United States, Europe, and the dictators at the UN can either figure that out or get out of the way.

How Biden Allowed Iran to Save Its Terror-Supporting Officers in Syria

Following the deadly Iran-backed attack on American troops in Jordan on January 28, President Biden and his Pentagon brass pledged a “multi-tier” response for the brazen assault that killed three U.S. service members.

The retributive strikes saw at least one senior leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah — one of the handful of Iran-backed terrorist organizations that have been coordinating scores of attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East since October — in Baghdad, but there was a notable lack of punishment for the source of all the chaos in the region: the regime in Tehran. It appears that was by Biden’s design.

Instead of acting swiftly and decisively, however, the administration telegraphed its considerations and likely targets for days on end. Waiting until after the fallen heroes had returned to the United States for a dignified transfer in Dover, Delaware, the Biden administration finally began launching strikes in the region.

According to reporting from the Financial Times, “Iran pulled senior commanders of its Revolutionary Guard out of Syria days before the US launched strikes against Iranian-linked targets in the Arab state to prevent the elite force suffering further casualties.” Conveniently, the IRGC “officers had left Syria by the time Washington launched air strikes five days” after Biden promised to launch a response to the attack that killed U.S. troops.

Reminding that the Biden administration said it “directly targeted Revolutionary Guard facilities in Syria,” that means the agents of Tehran operating in support of Iran’s terror proxies were able to get away, thanks to Biden’s delays and ample warnings.

As Joe Truzman, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), noted, Iran saving its officers’ hide was “exactly what the Biden administration intended” to happen.

Even worse — and proving that Biden’s strikes in response to the killing of U.S. Army Sgts. Kennedy Sanders, William Rivers, and Breonna Moffett won’t prevent future attacks on American troops — is this nugget, also reported by the Financial Times.

Iranian officials, calling the decision to withdraw IRGC commanders merely a “change in tactics,” received notice from the U.S. “through indirect channels that it did not seek a conflict with Iran.”

That is, after Iranian patronage to terrorist organizations saw more than 170 attacks launched at U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan and took the lives of three American service members, the U.S. told Tehran we didn’t seek a conflict.

That also means, as an “Iranian analyst affiliated to the Islamic regime” told the Financial Times, “[o]nce there is relative calm, these forces will return to Syria.” And Tehran’s support of terrorist proxies in the region will resume at full strength.

The age of glorifying Greta Thunberg is over
‘We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project,’ said Thunberg with her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; twenty-four hours earlier the twenty-one-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. “We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness,” said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck.

Some French media described Thunberg as an “anti-global warming icon” and the “figurehead in the fight to protect the planet.” She might have been once.

Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant “Crush Zionism” or endorsing slogans such as “Palestine will be free” she has become — perhaps unwittingly — the figurehead for what conservative commentators in France call “the green alliance.”

Three years ago Jean Messiha, the spokesman for Éric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign, wrote of this strange coalition between Islamists and ecologists: “They share one color: green. But not only that. They also share a totalitarian approach to society.”

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Israel Rescues Two Hostages In Rafah.

We have been covering how Israel is preparing to capture the last remaining Hamas stronghold, where Hamas has four battalians, the city of Rafah on the Egyptian border. Hamas leadership surrounded by hostage human shields, is believed to have fled to Rafah, where they further could hide behind large numbers of Gazans who fled to Rafah from the north.

There is fierce international opposition to such an Israeli move, but as Vijeta covered earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to push forward to “total victory”.

Tonight there were Israeli bombardments of the outskirts of Rafah.

But those bombardments may have been cover for a more important operation, the rescue of hostages. The Times of Israel reports:

In only the second such successful operation of its kind since October 7, the IDF announces it has managed to safely rescue two hostages from Hamas captivity in Gaza.

The two, Fernando Simon Marman (60) and Norberto Louis Har (70) were extracted in a joint operation by the IDF, Shin Bet and Israel Police in Rafah.

They were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak on October 7.

Details:

• 2 hostages Louis Har and Fernando Marman rescued tonight in an operation from Rafah

• Their condition is determined to be good, they were transferred to Sheba Hospital

• Shayetet 13, Shin Bet, and other forces participated in the operation

• This was a hidden apartment in Rafah: “an operation that has been worked on for a long time, and until now the conditions were not there to carry it out”

• The hostages were kept in a hidden apartment on the second floor of the building

• The forces entered the building while the surrounding apartments full of armed terrorists. Air force stopped an attempt to attack the rescuers leaving the scene.

• An hour later: the rescue operation was over

 

Attack and Defense
Thoughts on a 10/7 style attack on America

So I just finished Kurt Schlichter’s new novel, The Attack.  It’s a fictionalized account of an October 7 style attack that takes place on a large scale in the United States.  It’s also a warning.

A person wearing a head scarf Description automatically generated

In essence, Iranian terror experts use America’s open southern border to slip in thousands of Islamist fanatics, sleeper cells who are primed to attack specified targets on command.  The terrorists don’t know their targets until the last minute, when they get guns, ammunition, and directions.  They also don’t know that they’re part of a massive effort.  This means that if they turn, or are caught, as a few do or are, they can’t give anything away.  They have minimal training, basically how to lay low, and to shoot guns and throw grenades.  They’re also equipped with web-linked cameras to stream their attacks, and the atrocities – rape, torture, etc. – that they perpetrate on their victims.  Also meth to pump them up for the attacks.

When the day comes, they attack public places, schools, the Atlanta Zoo, and so on.   The next day, with the overstretched police trying to protect public places and ordering people to shelter in their homes, they go after suburban neighborhoods, again placing torture, rape, and dismemberment videos online.  On the third day, the remaining terrorists attack infrastructure targets – substation transformers, oil refineries, etc.

The result is a six-figure civilian casualty list, massive economic disruption, and political turmoil.  The terrorists’ goal of cowing the United States into isolationism fails, however, in dramatic fashion.   The entire novel is written as an oral history from numerous viewpoints, including the terrorists and their leftist American sympathizers.

It’s a gripping story, and an unfortunately plausible cautionary tale.  How likely is it to happen?

Probably the biggest impediment to something like this happening in America is the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks on Israel.  Atrocities didn’t cow the Israelis, but angered them. Other nations, even many of those that the Palestinians of Hamas generally looked to for support, turned against them.  Hamas leaders are being targeted and killed, Hamas backers know they aren’t safe, and the Israelis simply continue to grind away, four months after the attacks happened.

And everyone knows that the consequences of an attack on the United States would likely be worse.

Or maybe not.  Our current president is senile and inept, our vice president is just inept – though neither Kamala nor Biden is named in the book, Schlichter’s version of Harris’s response to the attacks is picture perfect, an incomprehensible word salad that causes Americans to lose faith in her entirely.  The President and VP wind up being replaced by the unnamed Speaker of the House, who brings the hammer down.  (I was at a luncheon Friday with Speaker Mike Johnson and didn’t get to speak to him – we had to leave early – but I was going to tell him that his role in the line of succession is probably more important for the remainder of this year than it usually would be.  I did notice that there was a lot more security than I had seen at similar events in the past).

Okay, I said it was a cautionary tale, but once cautioned, what should we do?

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Once again, experience is the best teacher, and the best experience is someone else’s.


Once Again, The Israel-Hamas War Shows the Futility of Gun Control

Last year, I wrote an article exploring some practical lessons from the initial attack on Israel from the Gaza strip. The biggest thing was that, as usual, a country had slid into anti-gun complacency. Everyone thought that it was somebody else’s job to protect people, so targets of all kinds were left vulnerable.

But, this time, the tables have turned. An Israeli operation at a hospital in the West Bank managed to drive the point home yet again. Instead of Hamas proving that gun control is worthless, Israel waltzed right into a hospital and proved it again.

I don’t bring this raid up because I want to comment on whether it was wrong or right to do this. Some people are saying they violated international law. Others are saying this was just a police action within their own borders to take out a threat that was using the hospital as a human shield. Everyone is entitled to either of those opinions or any other.

Instead, I want to take a look at the security situation in that hospital and compare it to most any hospital in the United States. Are there metal detectors at the doors? No. Are there armed guards who would stop people from simply walking right in with a rifle? Nope. Are there police there? Also, a big no in most places. The only thing stopping people from simply walking right in and doing whatever they want with a rifle is them choosing not to.

Sure, in many places, hospitals are off-limits to guns by some legal means or other. In this case, there may be some international agreement or something prohibiting soldiers from going in. In the case of U.S. hospitals, it’s often a sign that any private property owner can post prohibiting guns. In some jurisdictions, there’s a law on the books specifically banning guns from all hospitals.

But, do those signs have some magical quality that zaps guns into oblivion as the person carrying them crosses the threshold? Definitely not. The only thing that can stop people from hiding a rifle under a coat or in a violin case is someone who both physically checks everyone for guns and has the means to stop people should they reveal a gun and use it. Clearly this hospital (like almost all others) doesn’t have either of those things.

At the end of the day, a mixture of people’s goodness and people prepared to deal with those devoid of goodness is what keeps people safe. There are very few people who would enter a hospital with a gun and the intent to harm people. The rest of us either don’t carry a gun in or don’t do anything evil with it. For the rare person who isn’t good, there needs to be a good person (or multiple good people) ready to step in and stop bad things from happening.

In this particular hospital, the opposite was true. Instead of having good guys with guns, they were hiding bad people with guns. The Israelis, like this or not, went in there and took care of the problem before these guys could hurt any more innocent people.

Drone strike in Baghdad kills high-ranking militia commander

BAGHDAD — A U.S. drone strike blew up a car in the Iraqi capital Wednesday night, killing a high-ranking commander of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia who is responsible for “directly planning and participating in attacks” on American troops in the region, the U.S. military said.

The strike came on a main thoroughfare in the Mashtal neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, attracting a crowd as emergency teams picked through the wreckage. It came amid roiling tensions in the region, and is likely to further anger Iraqi government leaders, who U.S. officials said were not notified before the strike.

Security forces closed off the heavily guarded Green Zone, where a number of diplomatic compounds are located, amid calls for protesters to storm the U.S. Embassy.

There were conflicting reports on the number killed, with U.S. officials saying the initial assessment was one, and saying there were no civilians hurt or killed. But two officials with Iran-backed militias in Iraq said that three died, including Wissam Muhammad Sabir Al-Saadi, known as Abu Baqir Al-Saadi, the commander in charge of Kataib Hezbollah’s operations in Syria. Kataib Hezbollah announced Abu Baqir’s death “following the bombing of the American occupation forces” in a statement.

Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to journalists.

In a statement, U.S. Central Command said “there are no indications of collateral damage or civilian casualties at this time.” It added that the U.S. “will not hesitate to hold responsible all those who threaten our forces’ safety.”

The strike came days after the U.S. military launched an air assault on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for a drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan in late January.

The U.S. has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a broad coalition of Iran-backed militias, for the attack in Jordan, and officials have said they suspect Kataib Hezbollah in particular of leading it.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has regularly claimed strikes on bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria against the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, saying that they are in retaliation for Washington’s support of Israel in its war in Gaza that has killed 27,707 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Kataib Hezbollah had said in a statement that it was suspending attacks on American troops to avoid “embarrassing the Iraqi government” after the strike in Jordan, but others have vowed to continue fighting.

On Sunday, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed a drone attack on a base housing U.S. troops in eastern Syria killed six fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led group allied with the United States.

The latest surge in the regional conflict came shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday rejected terms proposed by Hamas for a hostage-release agreement that would lead to a permanent cease-fire, vowing to continue the war until “absolute victory.”

Also on Wednesday, the media office of the Houthi rebels in Yemen reported two airstrikes in the Ras Issa area in Salif district in Hodeida province.

US retaliates after deadly drone attack on Jordan base

The U.S. on Friday began to carry out strikes against Iran-backed militants and Iranian military targets in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a drone strike on an American base in Jordan last Sunday that killed three U.S. service members.

Dozens of other American troops were wounded in the drone attack on the Tower 22 base near Jordan’s border with Iraq and Syria. The U.S. says Iran is responsible for funding and arming the militants while Iran has denied involvement.

President Joe Biden had quickly warned that America would respond forcefully, escalating U.S. involvement in the Middle East after months of trying to contain tensions from boiling over into a broader war in the region.

Latest Developments
Feb 2, 6:45 PM
‘We believe that the strikes were successful’: Kirby
The Department of Defense is in the early stages of battle damage assessment “but we believe that the strikes were successful,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters in a call Friday.
“The initial indications are that we hit exactly what we meant to hit, with a number of secondary explosions associated with the ammunition and logistics locations,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of the Joint Chiefs, said on the call.

Kirby said the strikes took place in the course of 30 minutes and involved over 125 precision-guided munitions. Of the seven total strike locations, three were in Iraq and four were in Syria, according to Sims.

Targeted facilities included command and control centers, intelligence centers, rocket missile and drone storage facilities, and logistics ammunition supply chain facilities, Kirby said.

Kirby noted the targets were chosen to avoid civilian casualties and because they were connected to enabling the attacks against the U.S. service members.

The administration does not know at this time if or how many militants may have been killed or wounded.

“We will take all necessary actions to defend the United States, our forces, and our interests,” he concluded.

A Lack of Deterrence Leads to More American Deaths.

President Biden, and his Secretary of Defense have announced a major change in US policy: As a result of the Iranian attack on Tower 22 that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded scores more, they are going to begin protecting US troops! Don’t believe me? Here it is from the horse’s mouth at Secretary Austin’s February 1 press conference: “The President will not tolerate attacks on American troops, and neither will I.

Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? After tolerating attacks on American troops since . . . oh, about January 20, 2021, we now have a dramatic change in policy. We have gone from “Don’t, don’t, don’t!” to “We are not going to tolerate this anymore, but we don’t want a wider war.”        

But, do they mean it, or is it more pablum to placate the masses? Read on and judge for yourself.

BIDEN’S PRIOR POLICY OF TOLERATION, WEAKNESS AND APPEASEMENT

Biden true believers may claim that this is not a change in policy, that his administration really has not been tolerating attacks on our troops. To test that, we should do as Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, advised: Look at what they have done, not what they say. What they have done is tolerate the more than 200 attacks on our troops that have occurred on Biden watch without any kind of meaningful response. And don’t fall into the trap of accepting just the lowball statistics by counting only the 160+ attacks since October 7, 2023, as the press has been doing.

In fact, there have been far more attacks on our troops than the press is now reporting. Between the time of Biden’s inauguration and up to October 7, attacks on our troops in Iraq and Syria were commonplace. General Jack Keane pegs it at 80 from published reports.  But that figure is low because during this administration, attacks on our forces became so commonplace that all of them were not reported in the press. They have included attacks by fire using 107 mm and 122 mm rockets, as well as UAV (drone)-delivered munitions. And although it is not widely known or reported, our forces also have been targeted with cluster munitions. Disgracefully, our troops on the ground enduring these attacks have not been allowed to engage in any meaningful response.

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The United States of Allah: It Happened in My Neighborhood, Yours Is Next

If you want to see what’s left of the house I grew up in, check out this brief video I shot a few years ago.

When I was a kid growing up in the Warrendale section of Detroit in the 1970s, the Polish presence was everywhere. Warren Avenue was “the Strip” of our turf, and it was littered with family businesses with difficult names like the Jarzembowski Funeral Home. There was the Kozy Korner, with Kozy being short for a name I can’t begin to spell. The houses were mostly small, two- or three-bedroom homes that began growing in the 1940s.

I grew up on Ashton Ave. The Herman Gardens projects were across the Southfield Freeway, easily viewable from my bedroom window. They were built to house servicemen returning from WWII. By the 1970s, Herman Gardens was becoming one of the most dangerous projects in Detroit. As kids, we would play outside at night in the dark (Detroit was too broke to install street lights). When a police chopper showed up over Herman Gardens, its searchlight beaming, looking for a “perp” — which happened frequently — we knew it was time to go inside.

FACT-O-RAMA! TV’s Judge Mathis grew up in Herman Gardens. He was a member of Detroit’s Eroll Flynns gang.

Kowalski sausages were sold everywhere. Most of the kids I knew at Saints Peter and Paul Elementary School had last names like Jablonski, Hejka, Szuper, Balinski, Zmuda, and  Polchlapek. I could name more, but as my school days friend Melissa stated, “It would be easier to say who didn’t have Polish names — Ballard and Downey.”

Many of the kids’ grandparents lived in a nearby Polish enclave called Hamtramck.

FACT-O-RAMA! I might be the only media person in the world who can pronounce the name Hamtramck (ham-TRAM-ick). Now you know.

As in Warrendale, bars dominated the street corners of Hamtramck. Paczki could be found everywhere around Easter time. Most of the town spoke Polish. Every Catholic went to church.

Dearborn is a largely Middle-Eastern-dominated city across the southern and western borders of Warrendale.

A  good friend I grew up with, whom I’ll call Hoppy, remained in Warrendale until 2015 and only moved after some gang-bangers took a potshot at him as he was shoveling snow. In true Detroit style, he snarled at them and returned to what he was doing, but the message was clear: it was time to go.

In the years since my family left, Warrendale has become a ghetto.

It was already dangerous in the ’70s. All the kids in my neighborhood had been robbed, beaten, or stabbed. Hoppy had a gun stuck in his face two different times at Cody High School.

McMURDER-O-RAMA! Detroit’s infamous “Murder Mac” McDonald’s is located on Joy Road and Ashton Ave., roughly an eight-minute walk down the street from my former home.

The last straw came in March of 1977. One day, as we were eating dinner, an ambulance pulled up in front of our house. The 19-year-old kid next door came out of his home wearing a white button-down shirt covered in blood. He’d been pummeled while on leave from the Air Force. My dad slammed his fork full of Hamburger Helper on his plate and declared, “That’s it. We’re moving!”

No less than 70% of the houses on my old block, including Hoppy’s, are gone. So is Melissa’s, which was just under a mile to the west. Most of the houses still standing, including mine, are empty.

The demographics of my neighborhood have changed in the 58 years since I was born. Warrendale went from mostly white, Polish people, to almost soundly black, to largely Muslim, most of whom are Yemeni. Ditto Hamtramck.

Many of the churches are gone. So are most of the bars. All of the Polish businesses have long since vacated. The once omnipotent Kowalski sausage has been replaced by halal meat. If you want to buy paczki today, you need to head to Sterling Heights.

Hamtramck, which was run by Poles for 100 years, is the first town in the United States to have a Muslim mayor as well as the entire city council.

FACT-O-RAMA! Hamtramck voted last year to allow animal sacrifices at home.

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Leave The Pews

College campuses across the country were erupting in Jew-hating outbursts, and parents were rightly worried about their Jewish college-aged kids caught up in the frenzy of hate. On Facebook, a group called Mothers Against College Antisemitism (M.A.C.A.) was founded and grew quickly to over 50,000 members. They shared information, emailed, called, and signed petitions. They stood united against the oldest hatred rearing its head again.

But just as fast, fissures formed. The cudgel of DEI – that is, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that had been used against Jewish students – was the subject of feverish debate. Sure, the policies were bad for Jews, but weren’t we all good liberals after all? Shouldn’t that take precedence here? People earnestly wondered whether other minority groups would be mad at them if they fought to end DEI instead of simply fighting to get Jews included in the special identity groups recognized by the absurd system.

It wasn’t just DEI, either. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a plan to fast-track Jewish students who were feeling unsafe in their own universities who wanted to transfer to Florida colleges where he pledged they would be protected, commenters in the group warned not to accept his kindness as he was on the wrong political side.

What became clear within that Facebook group and in so many other quarters since Oct. 7 is that much of secular Judaism, in both the Reform and Conservative branches, had become overtly political and not really religiously based at all. For many Jews, their religious identity had become so intertwined with leftist politics that they couldn’t force a separation even when they themselves were being targeted with their own bad ideas.

They pledged allyship to other groups in their tent, not to Judaism or Israel. This was evident in 2019 when daily attacks began on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Activist synagogues in places like Park Slope, which would have been at the forefront of marches had any other group come under attack, spent years staying silent about it. The attackers, often caught on video, were frequently other minorities, not MAGA hat-wearing white people as they would have hoped, so it was awkward to raise a fuss. Progressive politics was the code they followed, and Judaism was an identity umbrella like all the others in their movement. “As a Jew …” they would begin their lectures. As a Jew, they were rarely interested in Judaism.

The Oct. 7 attacks in Israel woke many in the diaspora from their comfortable slumber. Jews in America and elsewhere, traumatized already from images of Jewish children stolen from their homes and Jewish teenagers mowed down while dancing at a music festival, also had to contend with a huge outpouring of hate in their own countries.

For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities.

The political bedfellows they had slept beside were sharply opposed to Israel doing anything but simply accepting the attacks of Oct. 7.

By Oct. 8, their “allies” had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.

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