by Daniel Stefanski | Dec 14, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
Last month, Treasurer Kimberly Yee shared that her office had “increased Israel bond holdings by $5 million.” The announcement from the Arizona Treasurer’s Office came about a month after Yee promised the increased commitment in the days following the horrific terrorist attack from Hamas in southern Israel on October 7.
“As Arizona’s Treasurer, I remain committed to supporting the State of Israel not only through my words, but through my actions. This $5 million investment in Israel supports Israel’s economic recovery while providing our taxpayers reliable returns,” said Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee. “Israel has been a longtime friend and ally of Arizona and the United States. We must stand resolute with Israel.”
According to the Arizona Treasurer’s Office, “Israel bonds serve as an investment option for individuals, institutions and nations worldwide to support the economic growth and stability of the State of Israel. Investments in Israeli bonds offer both reliable financial returns and contribute to Israel’s economic and strategic well-being.”
“The State of Arizona’s support for Israel is remarkable, and it aligns with the immediate response to the war in Israel across many U.S. states during this crucial period for the Jewish state,” said Israel Bonds President and CEO Dani Naveh. “At a time when Israel is under attack, investments in Israel bonds represent the most powerful and direct way to stand with the State of Israel and its people. This message from the people of Arizona to the people of Israel is unmistakable: You are not alone.”
The second-term Republican Treasurer has been a staunch supporter of Israel throughout her time in public service, using her platform and her office to stand with the American ally to the full extent of her authority. During her first term, Yee led the efforts to become “the first state in the country to enforce Anti-BDS laws (Boycotts of Israel) by divesting $143 million from Unilever, the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s, in response to the company ending distribution of its products in parts of Israel.”
In 2022, Treasurer Yee also notified Morningstar Inc. that they were at risk of being placed on the Arizona Treasury’s prohibited investment list for violating Arizona law by actively boycotting the State of Israel. Yee said, “It is my duty to defend Arizona’s anti-BDS law and I will ensure that Arizona does not do business with companies that are attempting to undermine Israel’s economy.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
by Dr. Thomas Patterson | Dec 12, 2023 | Opinion
By Dr. Thomas Patterson |
The Chinese general Sun Tzu 2,500 years ago wrote, “If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles.”
That’s good advice. Unfortunately, America’s media and military leadership feign ignorance of their current enemies. They never use the words “Muslim” or “Islamist” to identity our foes, terms which actually denote who they are and what inspires them. Instead, they use descriptions like “insurgents,” “militants,” or other euphemisms to avoid hurting the feelings of the enemy.
Hamas, who our leaders would like to believe is their ultimate enemy, is nothing more than the representative-du-jour of a vast network established 1,300 years ago with the never relinquished mission of subjugating the West.
Israel, after decades of repeated atrocities, has no choice but to exterminate Hamas if they ever hope to live in relative security. Even if Hamas is destroyed, there are legions of other terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, a more formidable foe than Hamas, ready and willing to step in and carry on the fight.
For the West, knowing our enemy means recognizing how savage and implacable Islamists are, how outside the mainstream of modern humanity. For many Americans it was shocking to read of terrorists laughing as their October 7 victims were raped, burned, or beheaded, often in front of their families.
Yet the same incomprehensible behavior is common in the hundreds of lightly reported Islamist attacks perpetrated annually worldwide. School children in the madrasas are taught Allah is pleased by fanatical hatred and brutality directed at infidels.
It’s hard for Westerners to comprehend this medieval mindset. Negotiations are fruitless because lying to the enemy is explicitly condoned in traditional Islam. Wars of containment are futile, and appeasement is seen only as weakness. Their ultimate goal is conquest, not peace.
Yet the oblivious Biden administration dodders on as if our relations with the terrorists were governed by the Treaty of Utrecht. Our naïveté was on full display in the recent cease-fire/hostage swap which we foisted upon our Israeli allies.
Mentally sound humans feel deep sympathy for the loved ones of a hostage held by Islamists. Because we value human life more than they do, hostage exchanges are vastly one-sided, typically involving from three up to as many as 1,000 Muslim terrorists exchanged for each civilian.
One of those thousand terrorists recently exchanged for one Israeli is now a Hamas leader who warned that “October 7 was just a rehearsal.” Fifty-five percent of the first 117 terrorists released during the current swaps had been held for murder and other violent crimes, while 21 percent were confirmed jihadists.
The hostages we see are quite visible pictures of utter despair. But for each one we can visualize, there are more at risk of being captured when terrorists realize gains from hostage taking. Each of these potential hostages is also a human being with families and lives of their own. They’re just not visible and don’t know who they are yet.
The hard fact is that when we lavishly reward hostage takers, we are condemning others to the same fate. There is no great solution to the hostage conundrum. It’s worth considering, though, that if we had a policy of not negotiating but instead consistently killing or capturing all hostage takers, the practice would eventually cease.
The Biden administration isn’t into hard choices. Sometimes they even seem confused about which side they are on.
In 2021, for example, the Biden administration restarted funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Hundreds of millions of dollars, which had been frozen by the Trump administration, were distributed to Palestinians in spite of State Department concerns that the funds would almost certainly be used for terrorism.
More broadly, Biden has worked assiduously to appease the Iranian regime and its proxies with billions of dollars. This makes as much sense as slipping money to Nazis during World War II.
The cycle of Islamist violence will never end if we continue to subsidize it and prop it up. Instead of timidity and vacillation toward those who want to kill us, knowing our enemy means understanding that we must focus on destroying and defeating this mortal foe.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
by Yale Wishnick | Dec 8, 2023 | Opinion
By Yale S. Wishnick, Ed.D. |
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the potential to find an effective resolution by considering the two-state option of relocating Palestinians to Jordan. This relocation would allow for their assimilation without hindrance, as there is already a significant number of Palestinians residing in Jordan, with 70% of the Jordanian population being Palestinian by ethnicity.
This proposed solution offers a viable pathway toward achieving peace, a goal that has been elusive for too long. Israel has consistently sought peaceful relations with its Muslim neighbors over the course of 75 years. However, these efforts have been met with horrifying acts of violence committed by Muslim terrorists on October 7, 2023. These acts have included heinous crimes such as rape, murder, and the mutilation of Israeli citizens. Such incidents not only caused outrage and shock but also demonstrated that Israel can no longer tolerate individuals who seek to eliminate the Jewish people from their biblical homeland.
Therefore, it is time for Palestinians to move toward the only two-state solution that makes sense. By designating Jordan as the Palestinian State, Palestinians will have the opportunity to create a prosperous society, which they have been deprived of under the oppressive rule of Muslim dictators and terrorists for decades.
The international community must now act as an honest broker to promote peace in the Middle East by acknowledging the historical importance of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza to the Jewish people. By accepting this historical context as undeniable truth and acknowledging Jordan as the legitimate homeland for the Palestinian people, it will pave the way for future generations of Jews and Muslims to coexist peacefully and permanently.
Yale S. Wishnick, Ed.D. is the President & Founder of the Republican Party Network, LLC.
by Daniel Stefanski | Nov 13, 2023 | News
By Daniel Stefanski |
An Arizona leader has traveled to Israel to show his support of its people as they continue to recover from one of the worst terrorist attacks in their nation’s history.
Peoria Mayor Jason Beck revealed on his Facebook platform this week that he had visited Israel “to meet with and support IDF soldiers, political and religious leaders around the country.”
The first-year mayor surmised he might have been “the first American to visit (the Kibbutz Be’eri) due to the continued threats in the area. This community of approximately 1,100 men, women, and children lost over 120 individuals in the October 7 terrorist attack from Hamas – more than ten percent of its population.
Beck shared he “felt it was extremely important to tour Be’eri and provide an accurate accounting of the horror and the intensity of what took place at this location.” He added that “the lives that were taken, the extreme brutality of Hamas of how men, women and children were tortured, executed and slain is important for someone to take in and carry forward for others to experience and hopefully recognize these heinous acts that took place on these beautiful people.”
As Mayor Beck concluded his post, he challenged readers to stand with this American ally in their fight against their terrorist enemies, writing, “To not support Israel’s ability to defend their people, home and lands from Hamas is to support terrorism and weakness that will surely spread across this world if it is not destroyed.”
According to his account, Beck met with the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eli Cohen; Rabbi Rabinovich of the Western Wall, and other rabbis and pastors in the country.
Though the west valley mayor has less than one year of time in the political world, he has decades of military and foreign affairs experience through his work in the private sector. Beck is the Founder and CEO of TYR Tactical, which is a “leading global manufacturer of tactical gear and equipment for military and law enforcement.” He also served the United States in the Marine Corps before he veered into his business ventures.
Days after the horrific terrorist attack in Israel, Beck vowed to “send body armor to Israel for the protection of the brave soldiers who will defend their homeland and our Western values.” That promise was fulfilled with an estimate of 2,000 protective vests being shipped to Israel.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
by Dr. Thomas Patterson | Nov 11, 2023 | Opinion
By Dr. Thomas Patterson |
In a speech following 9/11, President Bush assured us that in spite of this terrorist attack, all humans deep in their hearts long for freedom and brotherhood. It’s a comforting sentiment, but it’s not true.
Radical Islamists openly proclaim their disdain for freedom as another decadent Western value. Iranian street crowds commonly chant “Death to America.” They are deadly serious. Radicalized Muslims think and behave so radically different than we do that we keep dangerously misjudging them and making massive blunders in our adversarial dealings with them (think Iran nuclear deal).
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a leading Muslim reformer, recently explained in the pages of the Arizona Republic that not all Muslims are Islamists. Some are moderate, even members of secular political movements such as the Iranian Women’s Revolution. But Islamists are the dominant side of the House of Islam, in part due to their massive financing by oil-rich Persian Gulf tribes. This allows them to control Islamic propaganda and education.
For Islamists, the sole purpose of life is complete submission to the will of Allah, as interpreted by their imams and scholars. Unfortunately for the world, what Allah wants is nothing short of complete domination, the establishment of a hegemonic caliphate and the subjugation of all non-Muslims.
Thus, the life of an Islamist is an unceasing war or “jihad” in pursuit of this ultimate goal. No boundaries are acknowledged in this quest. Kidnapping, beheading, rape, murder of innocent civilians, including their own, torture and atrocities of all kinds are not even deemed regrettable but are applauded.
These Islamists don’t fight wars for traditional reasons. They don’t battle for independence, territory, resources, or national pride. Their single goal is annihilation or subjugation of their enemies, which the Quran defines as all non-believers, especially Jews.
The problematic response of America and the West to this religion-based violence is appeasement and accommodation. We can solve our differences with talks! Surely if they understood how much we are willing to concede to bring matters to a peaceful conclusion, they would work with us.
Bad idea. To the Islamist warlords, appeasement is merely a sign of weakness. It’s a green light to ramp up the aggression.
Anthony Blinken’s trip to the Middle East to beg for a cease-fire was a telling fool’s errand. It undercut our ally Israel, which is in a bilateral existential war with radical Islamists. It gives Hamas a chance to rest, recruit, and rearm. Moreover, it has zero chance of bringing about a more immediate or favorable resolution of hostilities.
Our current American leadership appears incapable of comprehending the potential mortal danger we are in. They want to believe the “bad” Muslims are only a tiny minority. They think that if we can only defeat Hamas or Al-Qaeda or whatever terrorist organization is currently rampaging, they will surrender and all will be well.
It’s not just Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran we are fighting, but an entire global mindset, a medieval anti-western ideology of evil. For each specific foe we defeat, there are always others to replace them. Jihadists actually welcome martyrdom because it assures hero status and a better afterlife.
Americans need to understand also that an important part of jihad – the imperative to eventually kill or convert – is subversion from within. Millions of immigrant Muslims worldwide have no intention of assimilating. They are taught that their duty is not to learn the ways of their new country but to infiltrate their culture and demand accommodation.
They are seeing some success. Young Americans who are the product of our inept educational system deny that Israel has the right to defend itself. Nearly half agree that the horrific war crimes of Hamas were justified. Tens of thousands fill the streets chanting for the elimination of the Jewish state. The students weren’t born with this mindset. They learned it from radicalized authority figures.
We Americans deserve to be proud of our history as a fair, compassionate member of the international community. But being a good neighbor shouldn’t require suicide.
We may not wish to be at war with Islamism, but they’re waging deadly war against us. Meanwhile, Americans fret about climate change and Islamophobia. Time to wake up.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
