January 17: Iran’s Proxy War
More from Hunter Biden’s art dealer; PA steps up martyrdom payments; Court blocks JetBlue-Spirit merger
The Big Story
Iran’s proxy war against Israel and the West is heating up. On Tuesday, the Houthis hit another commercial vessel, this one Greek, with a ballistic missile, while the United States destroyed four Houthi anti-ship missiles in a preemptive strike. The United States also released further details on last week’s raid in which two Navy SEALs went missing. The raid, U.S. officials said, seized “missile parts and other weaponry” from a ship bound for Yemen—the first time the U.S. Navy has seized Iranian missiles since 2019. According to even the most optimistic U.S. assessments, however, the Houthis retain at least 70% to 80% of their offensive capabilities, and so far the group shows no signs of taking American “deterrence” signals seriously.
That’s likely because the Houthis aren’t calling the shots. As we also reported in yesterday’s edition, the Houthi attacks are being personally directed by Abdul Reza Shahlai, deputy commander of the Quds Force, the external operations wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC has also stationed “missile and drone trainers and operators in Yemen, as well as personnel providing tactical intelligence to support the Houthis,” according to a Monday report in Semafor. That’s the same IRGC that immediately claimed responsibility for a ballistic missile attack on Erbil, Iraq, on Monday evening, which killed four Iraqis and struck close to the U.S. consulate. The Iranians seem to believe that as long as they stop short of blowing up an embassy, Washington won’t do anything. So far, they’ve been right.
As Michael Hochberg and Leonard Hochberg explain in a recent essay for RealClearDefense, Iranian aggression is likely to continue as long as the United States refuses to impose consequences—on Iran. Iran is currently succeeding in its aims of encircling Israel and driving a wedge between Israel and friendly Arab countries, both by directly threatening the economic interests of countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia and by demonstrating to everyone in the region that the United States, at least under its current leadership, is an unreliable ally. The purpose of Iran’s “strategy of proxy encirclement,” they write, is:
… to dominate the Persian Gulf, at the Strait of Hormuz, and the Red Sea and Suez Canal, at the Bab al-Mandeb. … Prior to October 7, the Iranian war in Yemen was fought primarily, but not exclusively, by Iranian proxies against Saudi proxies, with some incidents of direct attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia. However, since mid-October, Iranian proxies have launched a campaign of repeated attacks on American outposts in Iraq and Syria. Iran is using the occasion of the Hamas-Israel war to attempt to dislodge the U.S. military presence from the area.
The authors go on to argue:
Reestablishing deterrence is an existential issue for the allies of the United States in the Middle East. The only practical way for this to occur is through punishment—not just for Iranian proxies, which we presume are operating to advance Iran’s geostrategy of encirclement, but also for the source of these many attacks: There need to be direct and dire consequences for Iran.
Those consequences don’t appear to be forthcoming. “We’re not looking to escalate,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Tuesday. “The Houthis have a choice to make and they still have time to make the right choice, which is to stop these attacks.” The problem with that message—or one of the problems, at least—is that it’s addressed to the Houthis, and the Houthis aren’t the ones in charge.
Read the rest of Hochberg and Hochberg here: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/01/10/irans_strategy_of_proxy_encirclement_1003937.html#:~:text=Overall%2C%20the%20Iranian%20strategy%20appears,of%20the%20war%20in%20Gaza.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Chicago pastor Corey Brooks explains that DEI is “soul-destroying poison” for poor Black communities
The Rest
→The Palestinian Authority is expanding its martyrdom payments to cover the more than 23,000 Gazans killed since Oct. 7, including at least 9,000 Hamas militants, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal citing Palestinian media sources. The PA’s so-called pay-for-slay program awards a lump sum and lifetime monthly stipend to the families of any Palestinians killed by Israel, whether they are civilians or terrorists. According to a recent report in Axios, Israel’s refusal to release tax revenues to the PA and to countenance its return to Gaza are among the White House’s chief complaints about Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. That the PA continues to subsidize the families of Hamas fighters, even amid a budget crisis, may offer a hint as to why Israel is digging in its heels.
→The Scroll reported last Wednesday on testimony from Hunter Biden’s art dealer, George Bergès, who told House investigators that Hunter knew the identities of some of the buyers of his art—contrary to White House claims—and that two of those buyers were major Democratic donors. Now, John Solomon of Just the News reports on new details from Bergès’ testimony. The art dealer claimed that while he spoke with President Joe Biden in person and over the phone, he never had any contact with the White House over a supposed “ethics agreement,” which the administration publicly claimed had been put in place to prevent Hunter from learning who had bought his art. Indeed, Bergès testified that his first contract with Hunter, in 2020, required him to inform Hunter about the identity of the buyers—an arrangement Bergès said was unique among his clients. Bergès also said he had initially been connected to Hunter by Biden fundraiser Lanette Phillips.
→A federal judge on Tuesday blocked JetBlue’s bid to acquire fellow low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines for $3.8 billion. The Department of Justice sued last year to block the merger, which would have been the largest in the U.S. airline industry in more than a decade, on antitrust grounds, arguing that Spirit, renowned for its ultra-low ticket prices and sometimes rowdy customer behavior, put pressure on other airlines to keep their prices low. JetBlue and Spirit argued that their merger, which would have made them the fifth-largest airline in the country, would allow them to compete with larger national carriers such as Delta and United Airlines, but Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts sided with the DoJ. Whether the decision will actually do much for customers, however, is an open question. According to TD Cowen analysts cited in The Wall Street Journal, the likely next step for Spirit, which has not turned a profit since before the COVID-19 pandemic, is “a Chapter 11 [bankruptcy] filing followed by liquidation.”
→Anti-Israel protesters marched and chanted outside of Memorial Sloan Kettering Center in New York City on Monday, one of the country’s top cancer hospitals, to protest its acceptance of a $400 million donation from a Jewish—sorry, a “Zionist”—billionaire. The “Flood Manhattan for Gaza: MLK Day March for Healthcare,” named (obviously) after Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation, was organized by Nerdeen Kiswani and Within Our Lifetime. WOL, like the Palestinian Youth Movement (which we wrote about on Monday), is a fiscal sponsorship of the Westchester County, New York-based WESPAC Foundation, which receives money from Soros- and Rockefeller-funded Tides Center. Kiswani herself is an interesting case, as her radicalism appears to have alarmed even some of her anti-Israel comrades in the past. An otherwise fawning 2022 profile of Kiswani on the anti-Israel website Mondoweiss noted that in 2015, when Kiswani called her organization NYC Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), National SJP sent an email to all SJP chapters across the country accusing Kiswani’s group of being “part of a communist political party ‘striving to gain hegemony’ of SJPs on the East Coast.”
→As part of its legal battle with the state of Texas over border enforcement, a White House spokesman on Sunday blamed the recent drowning of a migrant woman and her two children in the Rio Grande on “Texas officials” who “blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance”—an account that was repeated in several news stories about the incident. However, as Fox News’ Bill Melugin reports, the Department of Justice admitted in a Tuesday court filing that the migrants had died an hour before Texas officials were ever alerted about the emergency. This wasn’t the first time the White House has spread false and inflammatory narratives about border enforcement: In 2021, after photos emerged of Border Patrol agents “whipping” Haitian migrants, Vice President Kamala Harris said the incident evoked images of “slavery,” while Biden called it “outrageous” and promised “those people”—meaning the agents—“will pay.” It later turned out that no migrants had been whipped and that the alleged whips were in fact reins the agents were using to control their horses.
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America Works. DEI Doesn’t.
My community may be on the bottom of society, but the power of American principles and America’s promise are equally ours
By Corey Brooks
When I step out of my church on Chicago’s South Side onto King Drive, I can see the infamous and massive Parkway Gardens—Michelle Obama’s first home before it became a dilapidated housing project. Behind the projects is an elementary school where only 4% of the kids are proficient in math and 6% in English. The nearby Walgreens and McDonald's fled not too long ago, leaving us with no pharmacy, fewer jobs, and two boarded-up, graffitied buildings. Few people own their homes. Gangs control the streets. And nearly everybody I see on the street has had a family member shot.
My community is so far behind that I no longer look at the data showing how we’re on the bottom of every education and socioeconomic chart. I see the evidence every day. That’s why it sickens me whenever I read news of our culture war over DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), most recently during the public trial of Claudine Gay. What struck me was that several DEI advocates, in their defense of Gay, claimed to be fighting for communities like mine. They talked of how not everybody is born equal, how systemic racism is in the DNA of America, how white supremacy keeps us down at every turn, and the absurd oppressor-oppressed binary that leaves no gray area for nuance.
This experience was disembodying. It was like listening to people who don’t know you talk about you as if they knew you from way back when. Sometimes this disconnect between this DEI ideology and the realities of my community was so deep that it was laughable.
For instance, while DEI ideologues and beneficiaries like Gay may share the same skin color with us, there is very little, if anything, that my community had in common with a woman born to a wealthy Haitian family and schooled at the best of America’s schools. These DEI advocates were exploiting the pain of my community to gaslight their opponents and this troubled me the most because it hurts and hinders our efforts to truly make lasting progress.
The reality is that DEI is an ideology for the privileged. It helps people like Claudine Gay who exploit race for power and prestige and it hurts communities like mine by exploiting them for poverty-porn.
Let me give you an example of what my life as a pastor to my struggling community is actually like. One late night several years ago, I remember looking out my office window across the street at the empty lot where I had dreams of building a community center when I heard footsteps in the hallway. One never knows what to expect in this neighborhood and the last person I expected to see was Jonathan Watkins. I knew him around as a gang member and had tried to talk to him several times.
He stepped into my office, looked at me, and said, “Pastor, I just had my first kid and I lost her today.”
That morning he had strapped his 6-month-old baby girl, Jonylah, into the car seat. He was about to drive her to day care when a bullet entered through the car window and killed her instantly. Jonathan was shot badly, too. He belonged to a gang, and the shooting was gang related.
The pain on Jonathan’s face was terrible. I knew retaliation was on his mind since so few murders around here are ever solved. I feared losing him back to the streets.
Over the next several months, I counseled him in the ways of Christ and how to live on the legal side of the world. He went through job trainings, learned how to build credit and opened his first bank account. I got him a job working for Pat Milligan at Metro Ford.
Then one day he quit and disappeared. He told Pat that he could make more money in the streets than washing and buffing these cars. I also knew that he had bought a gun in the days after his baby’s death and that he knew the identity of the killer. I feared losing him to prison or worse.
I feared that I had failed to help Jonathan. I knew the struggles he faced, inside and outside. God can be a powerful help in a troubled man’s life. So can regular work. So can having a mentor who knows your situation and can help you understand your responsibilities to yourself and to your community. But in that moment, I feared that the forces arrayed against Jonathan, and within Jonathan, were simply too great for him to overcome. As someone who lives and works on the South Side of Chicago, I understood what he was up against.
DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.
***
When I was younger, I used to believe in the power of race. I thought there was meaning in it. When I first arrived in Chicago from the Indiana countryside where I’m originally from, I was amazed by how many diversity type of programs there were in Chicago to help my new congregation. In my youthful earnestness, I attended these workshops where I heard a variation of the same message: We will help uplift you so you can diversify the world. But whatever hopeful energy that was stirred up within these workshops was often deflated not too long after we walked out the door.
It took me a while to understand that these trainings failed because they were grounded in race and the only way to get ahead was to play the race game. Another thing I noticed about these diversity meetings was that, as time went on, there was an increasingly totalitarian focus on race that made me uncomfortable, as a pastor and as a human being. It eventually reached the point where race and racism became the only acceptable explanations within the context of diversity language for whatever happened out in the world.
But what truly bothered me was that these diversity initiatives, especially the latest DEI version, blamed the failures of my neighborhood on white supremacy. Red-lining and block-busting certainly played a role in defining our neighborhood—a negative role. But the reality is that my community has been bombarded with one liberal policy after another since the 1960s.
We were encouraged to move out of our homes—many admittedly not in good condition, but which we owned—and into housing projects where we had zero equity. Man-in-the-house rules broke apart too many families. Our schools produced far too many illiterates. For decades, our culture celebrated and rewarded Black deviancy, as shown on countless rap videos. The only way too many of our children know how to buy food is with Uncle Sam’s dollar. All the while, government officials and nonprofit overseers whispered sweet nothings into our ears while getting paid.
I saw this coming as far back as 2011. One night that year, I remember staring out my church office’s window at the garishly ugly motel across the street. For too long, I watched kids pass by the ungodly scenes of drugs, prostitution, and murder at the motel on their way to school. I pleaded for help from everyone and received nothing. I realized there was no true interest in ending the decline, and that my community was on its own.
The very government that ran our community down to the ground and seduced those coming out of four centuries of oppression with policies of dependency, would not help us.
It was at that moment that I became free. The act of looking beyond race freed me up to see real solutions to my community’s problems.
***
Not too long after that 2011 night, I walked across the street from my church, placed a ladder against the motel, and climbed to the roof where I stayed for 94 days until I raised enough money to buy and tear down the building that had become a blight on our community.
In doing so, I behaved not as a Black man but as an American citizen. It was when I used America’s own principles as my guiding light that I made progress. My community could see it, and they could feel it. The motel was gone. Prostitution, drugs, and murders all went down.
That is why when I hear DEI advocates describe the American principles of merit, freedom, and agency as white supremacist values, I know that this language is toxic for my community and for the lives we are trying to save. The rhetoric of victimization isn’t truthful. It only weakens our ability to solve our own problems and deepens the damage done to our communities by post-1960s liberalism.
That is why the recent decision of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to eliminate some of Chicago’s top schools in the name of equity was so devastating to our communities. What equity means for these DEI folks is achieving parity with Blacks on the bottom, instead of strengthening our ability to lift ourselves up. The framework of negative achievement that DEI offers is truly insulting. After 60 years of failing to end intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, and intergenerational illiteracy in my community, the DEI folks have decided to lower America down to our level—right at the moment when we’re trying to get out of it.
Ever since I came down from that motel rooftop, I have preached American principles to the kids in the streets of Chicago’s South Side. I never focus on race, the violence, or the poverty around them—they know all about that already. Instead, I tell them what they never hear in the streets: that they are worthy, that they are somebody, that they have a purpose in life, and that they have the tools and the ability to create positive change for themselves and for their community.
The tools I give them are timeless and universal: Respect your parents, be on time, study hard, work hard, pray, be responsible, be accountable, don’t blame the white man, save money, build credit, plan for the future, get married, be a parent. You fall—get back up. Just do it.
I drilled those words into Jonathan in the months before he lost his daughter, and which was why I was particularly despondent when he disappeared. Then, one day, he came up to me. We hugged, and he told me he had, as I feared, found out the name of the shooter, and had been debating taking vengeance for his daughter’s death for some time. “I wanted to,” he told me. “But you showed me my better self, and that’s what kept pulling me away from doing it.”
What I tried to explain to him was that hope lies in American principles. Despair and further generations of poverty, disease, and hopelessness lie in the DEI principles. We may be on the bottom of America, but the power of American principles and America’s promise are equally ours. The tragedy is that false promises of uplift from outsiders have blinded us to our greatest power for so long: ourselves.
Recently, I found myself standing next to Jonathan in front of the office window. He now works for my community center, Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny), as a core member of our violence-impact team. He is also a father to three beautiful children. Across the street, we watched workers, cranes, and lifts working together to build the community center of our dreams. It was not the tomfoolery of DEI, which is a modern form of blackface, but our belief in ourselves and our own dignity, belief in the power of our community, and belief in America that is making the reversal of decades of decay possible.
Pastor Corey B. Brooks, a dedicated leader in community transformation, is the founder of New Beginnings Church and CEO of Project H.O.O.D. in Chicago. Follow him on X: @CoreyBBrooks
Pastor Brooks has written a devastating and must read critique of DEI and CRT