America's #1 Online Cigar Auction
first, best, biggest!

There's a real Master Class breakdown highlighted in blue text.





Before diving into the overnight turmoil of violent clashes at some of America's most progressive universities, let's begin with this post from a user on X, suggesting that the woke mind virus is at work here:

I can't believe I have to explain what's happening here, but here goes. Elite students of Ivy League schools have glamorized oppression so much that they have now reached role play status to satisfy their fantasies. Here, the students have appropriated the suffering of Gazans and are cosplaying as living through humanitarian crisis. In their American make-believe story where Ivy League infrastructure sets the scene, the students play Gazans and the school administration plays Israel.

Israel (the school) is blocking their "basic humanitarian aid" in this play, and if they don't receive it soon, they will "die of thirst and starvation" (appropriating exact experiences of Gazans). They also destroy upper class buildings and claim them as "liberated" while the students repeat chants in zombie-like chorus, playing the roll of "freedom fighters" destroying Israeli infrastructure and claiming them freed. If I'm alive in a world where people don't see the levels of perversion in this, I give up.

You don't see this in lower tier schools from kids of lower socio-economic standing because they aren't plagued with the guilt of privilege that they're seeking to launder through Middle East role plays of feigned suffering. This is as first world dystopia as it gets.

Meanwhile, these Ivy League students who can have much more than a glass of water and as much food as their stomachs can take are commanding the attention of the media and the entire American audience, while actual Gazans who need humanitarian aid are ignored. I still have to pinch myself that people don't see this.

In recent weeks, student protests—some funded by George Soros—have erupted throughout some of America's wokest universities and colleges.

Students and/or possibly paid agitators have erected around-the-clock encampments at Columbia University in New York City, Yale University, New York University, Harvard University, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Southern California.

On Tuesday night, there was a nationwide effort by school administrations and local police forces to disband pro-Palestinian protesters from campuses.

Let's begin with scenes from Columbia University. Police in riot gear stormed students occupying Hamilton Hall and cleared a nearby protest encampment on the college's lawn.

At least 100 protesters were arrested Tuesday night at Columbia University and City College of New York, according to NYPD officials.

.@Columbia University — Video shows a bus full of the unmasked extremists who were arrested following a violent siege for Gaza. Far-left groups have already fundraised the money for any possible bail and legal fees to reward rioters. pic.twitter.com/yWYPCzmzx5
— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) May 1, 2024

On the US West Coast, violent clashes erupted on the University of California campus in Los Angeles between pro-Palestinian protesters and counter-protesters.

UCLA 🚨: FIGHTS continue through the night. Dozens injured , multiple bleeding, still ZERO law enforcement present. Both sides drag their wounded and fresh protestors replace them on the front. Total Anarchy. pic.twitter.com/Fl6T35zJRc
— Anthony Cabassa (@AnthonyCabassa_) May 1, 2024

UCLA 🚨 3:20 am, LAPD has successfully cleared the area separating both factions. However, overhearing police, their orders are not to arrest anyone or clear the encampment, simply to separate both opposing protest groups. pic.twitter.com/i9NtEGdG5O
— Anthony Cabassa (@AnthonyCabassa_) May 1, 2024

LA Mayor Karen Bass said early Wednesday that the LAPD "has arrived on campus" at UCLA.

The violence unfolding this evening at UCLA is absolutely abhorrent and inexcusable.

LAPD has arrived on campus.
— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) May 1, 2024

Besides Columbia and UCLA, chaos spreads across universities (list courtesy of CNN):

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill: At least 36 protesters were detained at an encampment. Police officers were seen physically pushing back protesters. Demonstrators took down the campus US flag and replaced it with a Palestinian flag.

Florida State University: Five people, among them two students, were arrested during a demonstration Tuesday, the school said.

University of Texas-Austin: Police presence on campus and arrests are "dwindling" law enforcement resources, Travis County prosecutor Delia Garza said, and called for the university to initiate a compromise with student protest organizers. Nearly 80 people were arrested on campus Monday and Garza's office is processing at least 65 criminal trespass cases, she said.

University of Southern California: President Carol Folt engaged in a second meeting with protesters on campus, but no agreement was reached

Occupied buildings and security: Portland State University President Ann Cudd asked students to voluntarily leave the library they are occupying and said the university is in touch with police about removing students.

Cleared encampments: Some universities, such as Yale and Brown, have cleared protest encampments after reaching agreements with students. Brown University student protesters have reached an agreement to disband their encampment after the university agreed to hold a vote on divestment from companies that support Israel.

And the list of schools continues to expand (courtesy of CNN):

University of Arizona police use chemical irritant as campus protests continue

Tulane University classes go remote, police in riot gear on campus amid protests

What's the biggest takeaway here? Well, as one X user wrote, "Privileged white Ivy-League people acting as Privileged white Ivy-League people."

There are mounting calls to ban destructive cultural Marxism on campuses.

Surprise, surprise

The news spokesperson for the takeover of a building at Columbia is a Marxist

How many people told me the most deadly ideology of the last century has nothing to do with the protests?

I say again: #BanMarxism in government funded entities https://t.co/454L7c45NG
— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) April 30, 2024

It's an election year. None of this is surprising. The chaos seems like an echo wave from the BLM riots several years ago. Be on watch, as this could spill over from campuses to city streets in the summer months.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/campus-chaos-spreads-across-woke-american-universities-police-respond-pro-palestinian

If only Hamas would release all hostages.

You are correct! The whole dairy infected with bird flu fell apart once the known issue of pasteurization was remembered. That disappeared quick!

Paid protesters whining about the cafeteria. Truly a spoiled and coddled lot.

😂

True, true.

Like Spey said…problem solved 😂

The remaining leadership of Hamas is apparently trying to negotiate some sort of peace before IDF forces find reach their door. For far too long they have been way behind the front lines enjoying relative peace while the foot soldiers did their bidding. Now that the end is near for them they want a stall. Why? So they can escape their just due and plan for another campaign at some later date after they rebuild their shredded organization? At this point it seems clear to me that Israel won’t stop until they finally cut the head off.

Speaking of being duped...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-changed-cease-fire-deal-to-let-them-include-bodies-of-dead-hostages-in-prisoner-swap-report/ar-BB1lVvWE


You cannot deal with terrorists.

It doesn’t include any penalties on Hamas for the terrorist activity that started this conflict. I hope Israel will maintain their resolve in rejecting this unfair proposal.

https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/05/14/watch-israel-shares-footage-of-gunmen-in-un-compound-in-rafah/

Hamas working with the UN or the UN working with Hamas...in Israel.

You cannot make this crap up.

Gee Wally, who do you suppose took it all???






No aid was delivered to the UN warehouse from the floating pier on Sunday and Monday.

Close to three-fourths of the humanitarian aid transported from a new $320 million floating pier built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast was stolen on Saturday en route to a U.N. warehouse, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Eleven trucks “were cleaned out by Palestinians” on the journey to the World Food Programme warehouse in Deir El Balah in the central Strip, with only five truckloads making it to the destination.

“They’ve not seen trucks for a while,” a U.N. official told Reuters. “They just basically mounted on the trucks and helped themselves to some of the food parcels.”

According to the United Nations, no aid was delivered to the warehouse from the U.S. military’s pier on Sunday and Monday.

Reuters is reporting that most of the aid coming into Gaza from the U.S. military's pier since Saturday was stolen by Palestinians as it made its journey to the UN's warehouse in nearby Deir El Balah.
* 11 trucks out of 16 trucks were cleaned out on Saturday
* No deliveries on…
— Phil Stewart (@phildstewart) May 20, 2024

The United Nations said that 10 truckloads of food aid from the pier arrived at the warehouse on Friday, its first day of operation. It was transported by U.N. contractors.

“We need to make sure that the necessary security and logistical arrangements are in place before we proceed,” said the U.N. official.

According to Israeli estimates, Hamas has been stealing up to 60% of the aid entering the Gaza Strip, and a Channel 12 report last week revealed that the terrorist organization has made at least $500 million in profit off humanitarian aid since the start of the war on Oct. 7.

The pier was pre-assembled at the Israeli port of Ashdod before being anchored to a beach in the coastal enclave on Thursday. No American troops went ashore during the installation of the pier, according to CENTCOM. Some 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors helped build the floating pier.

The Israel Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit announced on Saturday that “hundreds of pallets of humanitarian aid” and more than 160,000 liters of fuel had entered via the pier.

Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of CENTCOM, said that the goal is for 500 tons of humanitarian aid, or 90 trucks, to pass into Gaza through the pier daily, eventually increasing to 150 trucks a day.

CENTCOM tweeted early Tuesday that over 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance has been unloaded from the pier so far.

To date, over 569 metric tons of humanitarian assistance has been delivered across the temporary pier to Gaza for further distribution by humanitarian partners. The United States, United Kingdom, UAE, European Union, and many other partners have donated this humanitarian… pic.twitter.com/KbgXwFbfzD
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) May 21, 2024

USAID and the U.S. Department of Defense are leading the effort, alongside Cyprus, the United Nations and international donors, including the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Romania and the European Union, CENTCOM said. The aid is transported via sea from Cyprus where it is screened, and the United Nations receives the aid in Gaza and coordinates its distribution

Israel is also helping to facilitate the entry of aid via the pier.

Reuters also reported that “food and medicine for Palestinians in Gaza are piling up in Egypt because the Rafah crossing remains closed.”

Israel took operational control of the crossing weeks ago, but Cairo so far has refused to cooperate with Israeli authorities to facilitate the entry of aid through Rafah. The Israeli government wants to allow aid into Gaza through the crossing but is unable to do so without Egyptian cooperation.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz last week placed the responsibility for averting a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip squarely on the shoulders of Egypt.

Katz said he had spoken with his British and German counterparts “about the need to persuade Egypt to reopen the Rafah Crossing to allow the continued delivery of international humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

While the world places the responsibility for Gaza’s humanitarian situation on Israel, he added, “the key to preventing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is now in the hands of our Egyptian friends.”

Meanwhile, COGAT on Thursday approved the resumption of commercial trade between Israel the Strip, with truck deliveries starting the following morning, Israel’s Walla! News outlet reported on Sunday.

According to the report, 150 trucks loaded with produce from Israel—not aid—crossed into Gaza intended for merchants who purchased the produce, which is “intended for Hamas members and the civilian population.”

https://www.jns.org/nearly-70-of-gaza-aid-from-us-built-pier-stolen/

https://youtu.be/_8mduTEvnU0?si=GKEl1biodAxeqTf3

Prosecuting Netanyahu Has Risks for International Criminal Court
U.S. support for ICC, which grew with Ukraine investigation, is collapsing after prosecutor targets Israeli leaders


WSJ
The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. PHOTO: PIROSCHKA VAN DE WOUW/REUTERS
WASHINGTON—For more than 25 years, the U.S. relationship with the International Criminal Court has veered between idealistic support to outright hostility, with an arm’s length distance being the norm.

Now, with ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announcing he will seek charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the Gaza war a year after obtaining an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over Ukraine allegations, the ICC has asserted the independence its framers imagined—at the likely cost of practical support and diplomatic legitimacy that only superpower backing can bring.

Just weeks ago, the ICC, which for years had been shunned by Republicans and viewed skeptically by many Democrats, was seen in Washington as part of the international effort to hold Moscow to account over its invasion of Ukraine. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) worked together to secure U.S. funding for the ICC, something that would have been unthinkable as recently as 2020, when the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC’s then prosecutor for reviewing war-crimes allegations against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

On Monday, Graham and Coons joined President Biden in condemning Khan’s move against Netanyahu and his defense chief, Yoav Gallant, who the prosecutor alleges committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by using starvation as a tactic against civilians in Gaza. The charges don’t include genocide, although South Africa has made that allegation against Israel in a separate proceeding before a United Nations tribunal, the International Court of Justice.

Khan’s office declined to take questions or make the prosecutor available for an interview.

Israel says it has complied with the laws of war, and that it seeks to keep civilian casualties at a minimum while pursuing legitimate military objectives.

Both senators said that Khan had disregarded the ICC’s statutory obligation to act only when a nation can’t or won’t hold high ranking officials accountable, something they said Israel’s legal system had proven capable of doing.

“Prosecutor Khan is drunk with self-importance and has done a lot of damage to the peace process and to the ability to find a way forward,” Graham said on X.

Coons, who has been critical of some Israeli operations in Gaza, said “the ICC is meant to be a court of last resort only” and had stepped beyond that in targeting the Israeli leaders. “I have long supported the ICC, including in its investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, and I hope to continue working with it if it returns to its legitimate role,” he said.

Matthew Waxman, a Columbia University law professor and national-security official in the George W. Bush administration, said the odds of the U.S. eventually joining the ICC have “gone from very low to zero.”

Karim Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. PHOTO: PETER DEJONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Waxman said Khan’s charges “ignore the nature of this war and the challenges of defeating an armed force that has been embedded in densely populated areas.” Israel, he said, probably could do more to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza, but that wasn’t a legal obligation that could give rise to the extraordinary allegations of crimes against humanity that the ICC prosecutor announced.

Under ICC procedures, Khan must obtain approval from a three-judge panel to issue arrest warrants, which he also is seeking for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohammed Deif for atrocities in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. That panel could act within weeks, and observers expect it to decide on the warrants before the court’s recess in August.

Most U.S. officials had little to say regarding the charges against leaders of Hamas, which the U.S. and European Union designate as a terrorist group. “Whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas,” Biden said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders disagreed. “The ICC prosecutor is right to take these actions” against figures such as Putin, Sinwar and Netanyahu, the Vermont independent said. “These arrest warrants may or may not be carried out, but it is imperative that the global community uphold international law.”

President Biden said, “there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas.” PHOTO: SAMUEL CORUM/PRESS POOL
David Scheffer, who represented the U.S. at the 1998 conference in Rome that gave birth to the ICC, said that Khan had no choice but to pursue the case against Netanyahu.

“For the ICC there may be a risk, but at the end of the day what is the ICC supposed to do?” he said. “Israel here has a rightful exercise of self-defense, a just war,” Scheffer said. “The issue is how do you conduct that just war. Prosecutor Khan is being presented with a scale of atrocity in warfare that is somewhat unprecedented for the ICC prosecutor to be confronted with.”

More than 120 nations belong to the ICC—and provide its roughly $200 million budget—and many of them want to see action against Israeli leaders. Scheffer said: “There is an entire world here beyond the U.S.”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international-law at the University of Notre Dame, said that Khan’s move both damaged the ICC’s prospects with the U.S. and set back the odds of ending the conflict more quickly, all with almost no chance of actually putting Netanyahu or the Hamas leaders in the dock.

“I fear the indictment will cause the leaders on both sides to dig in and continue fighting,” because even a peace treaty can’t force the ICC to withdraw its arrest warrants, O’Connell said.

She said that Khan might have a distorted view of his office’s power.

“I see the prosecutor as being within this world of very enthusiastic supporters of the International Criminal Court who want to take action against obvious individuals,” she said. “If you indict Putin, you indict Bashir, how can you not indict Netanyahu and the Hamas leaders?” she said. Omar al-Bashir, the former president of Sudan, remains at large more than a decade after the ICC issued arrest warrants on allegations including genocide.

The ICC emerged from a 1998 conference in Rome backed by the U.S. as an effort to create a permanent court to succeed the United Nations tribunals that prosecuted war crimes in the Yugoslavia and Rwanda conflicts. But the Rome Statute treaty gave the court too much independence for countries seeing frequent military operations to stomach; the U.S. and Russia, along with Israel and China, India and Pakistan, all withheld ratification from a treaty giving a panel of judges in The Hague authority to second guess decisions of their own armed forces.

Still, the court came into existence in 2002, after the Rome Statute was ratified by the necessary 60 countries.

Over the intervening years, U.S. policy toward the ICC depended less on any administration’s conceptual support for international law than political and diplomatic needs of the moment, said Todd Buchwald, a former U.S. ambassador for global criminal justice who worked under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

The George W. Bush administration first treated the ICC as a threat, approving legislation some called The Hague Invasion Act for authorizing military force to free any Americans who might be held prisoner by the court. But the court’s first two prosecutors focused their attention on regional conflicts in Uganda, Congo and other places where atrocities had few implications for the broader world order.

By the second Bush term, the State Department had come to see the ICC as a useful tool to seek accountability for war crimes in Darfur in western Sudan, a crisis Bush took a personal interest in, Buchwald said.

Obama directed US funds to a group in Israel trying to oust Netanyahu (election interference anyone?). Why would anyone expect anything different now?

Obama should have been impeached for his pen and a phone crimes. 😡