This is an excerpt from Victoria Coates’ new book, “The Battle for the Jewish State: How Israel—and America—Can Win.” President Ronald Reagan’s rationale for launching SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative] in his 1983 speech could have been written by any Israeli Prime Minister: “I’ve become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence. Feeling this way, I believe we must thoroughly examine every opportunity for reducing tensions and for introducing greater stability into the strategic calculus on both sides.” The year after Reagan announced SDI, the United States and Israel signed another MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] regarding missile defense cooperation. Given Israel’s location and threat profile, any such defensive capability was going to be tremendously appealing to the IDF. This MOU initiated an extraordinary period of joint research and development that was of great benefit to both countries. Philosophically, the inherently defensive nature of the endeavor was perfectly aligned with the strategy of both the United States and Israel. The trick was how to make it work. The good news is that the systems that were developed through this cooperation over some four decades do indeed work. The bad news is that they have had to—some for the first time in the attacks on Israel that followed October 7. The most famous component of the multilayered missile defense system that has been developed for Israel is the Iron Dome. Named in honor of Jabotinsky’s impenetrable “Iron Wall,” this mobile system protects against the kind of short- and medium-range projectiles that are typically used by the Iranian proxy groups Hezbollah and Hamas, both of which emerged as deadly threats to Israel and the United States in the 1980s. The radical Shi’a Islamist Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, was formed during the long and torturous Lebanese civil war, which coincided with the revolution in Iran. In 1982, after the PLO launched a series of attacks on northern Israel from Lebanese territory, the IDF launched Operation Peace for Galilee. This invasion of southern Lebanon played out against an increasingly violent series of terrorist attacks on U.S. interests in Beirut, culminating in the October 23, 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks, which took the lives of 241 servicemen in what was then the worst terrorist attack in history against Americans. As intended, the attacks shook U.S. support for the Israeli invasion as the Reagan administration tried to chart a way out of an intractable situation. The radical Sunni Islamist Hamas, which has murky origins in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is based in Gaza and carried out its first significant attack on Israel in 1989 when it abducted and murdered two Israeli soldiers. Hamas’s attacks quickly escalated, fueled by arms flowing into the Strip from Egypt and its growing partnership with Hezbollah, which shared the goal of eradicating Israel. It might seem incongruous for Sunni and Shi’a terrorist organizations to be making common cause, and Hezbollah and Hamas do have different priorities as well as interpretations of Islam. Hezbollah focuses on weakening Israel by projecting Iranian power on its borders as well as by carrying out international terrorist attacks on Iran’s behalf, while Hamas’s purpose is to directly destroy Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state. But they had two powerful motives to coordinate: their hatred for both the United States and Israel, and their mutual patronage by the new regime in Tehran. Through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iranian military funneled increasingly sophisticated weapons to both groups, while their intelligence services and even diplomatic corps provided information and financial support. Over time, both Hezbollah and Hamas developed political as well as paramilitary elements and burrowed into all aspects of Lebanese and Gazan civil society, expanding both their resources and their power base. Hezbollah has had an elected presence in the Lebanese parliament for years and even held the majority from 2018 to 2022. As we have seen, Hamas won the local elections in Gaza in 2006, part of the George W. Bush administration’s attempt to democratize the Middle East, and has governed the strip ever since. Hezbollah and Hamas are both designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) by the United States. They deal regularly in abductions, torture, and assassinations, but they have recently used missile attacks on Israel to spread terror on a larger scale. During the Second Intifada, or “uprising,” which began in 2001, Hamas indiscriminately fired rockets at civilian areas, hoping to inflict maximum casualties on soft targets. In 2006, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel that hit the Jezreel Valley, close to the house of Chanoch Levin. Born in Tel Aviv in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, Levin was an engineer for Rafael, one of Israel’s largest defense companies. After this harrowing experience, he went to his senior leadership with some ideas of how Rafael might develop a system to neutralize the projectiles before they struck. Levin later recalled the general skepticism that greeted his proposal: “What were the difficulties at the start of the Iron Dome project? There was not a single person or group who did not oppose it. The entire defense establishment: chief of staff, the defense minister, many senior officers all claimed it is a fantasy, it cannot be done. A waste of money. I’ll let you in on a secret. At the beginning, I also thought it was impossible. But we had to do it!” With a small team and modest budget, Levin went to work. Despite all the misgivings, they developed an autonomized system of an interceptor known as Tamir, software and radar that could identify a missile and trace its trajectory to gauge if it might hit a populated area. If so, an IDF monitor could fire the interceptor to destroy it. It was something of a pick-up game, with parts taken from electronic toys, as well as from Israel’s most sophisticated technology producers. To make it mobile, Levin copied the design of the transport from industrial garbage trucks with their hydraulic lifts. This system became Iron Dome. The United States was briefed on Iron Dome’s progress, but it was developed exclusively with Israeli resources, making it proprietary intellectual property. The first successful test of the system was in 2009, and it was deployed in the field in 2011. Going from conception to deployment in only five years, Iron Dome was the embodiment of necessity being the mother of invention. The successful system also embodied President Reagan’s vision of saving lives instead of avenging them—on both sides of the conflict. As Iron Dome was being developed, Levin informed the Knesset that preventing Hamas’s missiles from striking Israeli targets would alleviate the pressure on the IDF to invade Gaza to destroy the missiles before they were fired. Hamas’s predilection for shielding their weapons with Palestinian citizens guaranteed disproportionate civilian casualties should such invasions be necessary. The Iron Dome “Tamir” interceptors were designed to leave a prominent smoke trail behind them as they pursued their targets, giving the system a strange aerial beauty. In 2012 when the system was activated to neutralize a barrage of rockets launched towards Beersheba, rather than scattering to bomb shelters the revelers at a local wedding continued to dance under the flashes of the interceptions as if they were fireworks. The Iron Dome became the darling of the U.S. Congress, which started pouring resources into the program in 2011, and an agreement for technology sharing was signed in 2014. The system was followed by joint programs between Rafael and the U.S. defense contractor Raytheon to protect against longer-range missiles, such as David’s Sling and Arrow 2 & 3. An additional system, Arrow 4, is now in development. While the U.S. Army has purchased some Iron Dome interceptors, there are problems with interoperability because the system was developed independently. Systems recently developed jointly by the United States and Israel should not have such problems. The reliable protection provided by this multilayered missile-defense system may, in some ways, have made Israel the victim of its own success. When Hamas fired more than two thousand rockets at Israel during the eleven-day Gaza war in 2021, for example, Iron Dome had a more than 90% success rate intercepting them, with press photographs capturing the gracefully spiraling interceptors destroying the rockets. The Biden administration quickly demanded a ceasefire, and the Israeli government complied, judging that its reliable defenses made an incursion into Gaza unnecessary. In hindsight, that was the moment when Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar, realizing that the Iron Dome had rendered its missiles and rockets largely useless, started planning for a very different sort of attack on Israel. The post Building The Iron Dome appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The free world is in a fight against terrorism, according to Yarden Gonen, the big sister of Romi Gonen who has been held hostage in Gaza for over 14 months.   If action is not taken soon to release her sister and all the hostages still in Gaza, “maybe they won’t stay alive, and then it means … the free world let the terrorists win,” Yarden Gonen said.   Yarden Gonen was asleep the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, when her sister called her on the phone. At first, she didn’t answer. She knew her little sister was attending the Nova Music Festival along Israel’s border with Gaza and figured she was only calling to share the experience with her. But it was unusual for Romi Gonen to call so early. Fearing something might be wrong, the elder sister picked up the phone.   “I answered with my eyes closed underneath the blanket and asked her if everything is OK because I’m sleeping,” Yarden Gonen recalled. “And then another weird thing happened, because she said, ‘No. I need your help.’”  Yarden Gonen spent the next four and a half hours on and off phone calls with her sister, trying from afar to understand what was happening and guide her sister to safety as Hamas terrorists attacked the festival and surrounding communities.   For a brief 10 minutes, Yarden Gonen and her parents thought that the nightmare had ended. A friend of Romi Gonen’s had returned to the festival area to rescue her and others, but the relief ended abruptly when terrorists intercepted the vehicle, killed the driver, shot and killed Romi Gonen’s best friend and shot her in the arm.   “I’ll bleed to death,” Romi Gonen told her mother over the phone after being shot, Yarden Gonen recalled during an interview with The Daily Signal.   “I think that is the sentence that keeps on repeating in my head that my mom heard,” the sister said. “No mom should hear that sentence from her daughter.”   Romi Gonen, who is now 24, is one of 10 female hostages who are believed to still be alive and held hostage in Gaza.   Speaking alongside Yarden Gonen during a trip to Washington, D.C., to advocate for his sibling’s freedom as well, Amit Levy said his little sister had begun serving in the Israel Defense Forces only two days before the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.   He found out that his sister, Naama Levy, now 20, was taken hostage that Saturday after a video surfaced of a terrorist pulling a young woman from the back of a vehicle in Gaza, her hands bound behind her back and her sweatpants bloodied.   One of the most horrifying videos from October 7. A terrified and bloodied Naama Levy is pulled by her hair from back of a jeep as crowds of Gazans celebrate and jeer.Do not for one moment forget how this war started.#BringThemHomeNow pic.twitter.com/kN3161ID7R— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) April 18, 2024 “I know that many families, including Yarden’s [Gonen] family, thought maybe it’s their family member, and I wish I would be able to lie to myself when I saw that video and say, ‘Maybe it’s not Naama,’ but when we saw it … it was very, very obvious, to whoever knows Naama that it’s her,” the brother said.   “My little sister, from our understanding, was injured in her leg, Romi [Gonen] in her arm, and … they probably didn’t get any medical care,” Amit Levy said.   In addition to Romi Gonen and Naama Levy, eight other women are being held hostage in Gaza, including Arbel Yehoud, Doron Steinbrecher, Liri Albag, Daniela Gilboa, Shiri Bibas, Karina Ariev, Agam Berger, and Emily Tehila Damari.    More than 50 men and two children are also believed to be alive and still being held hostage in Gaza.   “I feel like sometimes maybe in America people tend to forget what terrorism looks like,” since there has not been a major attack since 9/11, Yarden Gonen said. “But as long as we’re letting this situation continue, we’re letting other terrorist groups to do whatever they want, wherever they want.”  Freedom for the hostages, according to her, will be a symbol for the world of “saying ‘no’ to terrorism.”  The post Their Little Sisters Are Among Last Women Held Hostage in Gaza appeared first on The Daily Signal.

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—A notable critic of President-elect Donald Trump appears to be gearing up to oppose key parts of the incoming administration’s foreign policy agenda, despite the electoral mandate of Trump’s “America First” slogan. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is going on offense against Trump’s foreign policy worldview, calling on him Monday in a published essay to reject America First’s “flirtation with isolation and decline.” McConnell, the longtime Senate Republican leader, is also urging the incoming second Trump administration to embrace many foreign policy positions that Trump notably rejected during the campaign, including support for additional foreign aid and free trade agreements, solidarity with NATO, and more weapons transfers to Ukraine. “The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote in the essay for Foreign Affairs. “It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.” “The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” McConnell added. [Fellow GOP senators have chosen Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to become Senate majority leader when the new Congress convenes Jan. 3.] McConnell’s remarks advocating an interventionist foreign policy reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration and a larger defense budget to deter multiple adversaries raise questions over how far the Kentucky Republican is willing to go in opposing the president-elect’s nominees and agenda. “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” McConnell told the Financial Times in an interview published Dec. 11. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.” The former Senate Republican leader appears to be most at odds with Trump over the Ukraine issue. McConnell claims that Trump’s deterrence of aggression by China cannot be achieved without preventing a Russian victory in Ukraine. “Standing up to China will require Trump to reject the myopic advice that he prioritize that challenge by abandoning Ukraine,” McConnell wrote in Foreign Affairs. “A Russian victory would not only damage the United States’ interest in European security and increase U.S. military requirements in Europe; it would also compound the threats from China, Iran, and North Korea.” Trump, who has promised to bring a quick end to the Russia-Ukraine war, has criticized President Joe Biden’s decision to escalate tensions with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the final months of his presidency. “It’s crazy what’s taking place. It’s crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” Trump told Time magazine during his interview as its 2024 Person of the Year, published Thursday. “Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. Now they’re doing not only missiles, but they’re doing other types of weapons. And I think that’s a very big mistake.” McConnell’s critique of Trump’s foreign policy record and worldview follows the president-elect’s decisive electoral victory against Democrats’ presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, which marked the first time a Republican candidate won the so-called popular vote since 2004. McConnell was reportedly one of four senators who tanked Trump’s nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., as attorney general and has yet to meet with Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard, his nominees for defense secretary and director of national intelligence. Though McConnell has stepped down from Senate GOP leadership, he has pledged to spend the remainder of his time in the Senate pushing back against Trump’s foreign policy worldview. The Kentucky Republican will be the incoming chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, giving him a high profile to advocate a larger defense budget and additional military aid for Ukraine. “Members of my own party now contend that, somehow, the stability of markets and the deterrence of adversaries are achievable without tending to the requirements of American hard power,” McConnell said during a keynote speech Nov. 12 at an American Enterprise Institute event celebrating the Kentucky Republican’s foreign policy views. “Confronting this particular challenge is where I now place my focus,” McConnell said. “Shoring up American primacy, combatting the dangerous tendency toward isolationism, and urgently restoring America’s hard power: This is how I will spend a great deal of the time I have left in public life.” McConnell, who is up for reelection in 2026, has not commented on whether he plans to seek an eighth term. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Mitch McConnell Attacks Trump’s ‘America First’ Approach Despite Electoral Mandate appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Biden administration is pressuring Sierra Leone to pass an unpopular pro-abortion bill before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a former senior U.S. government official who has worked in the West African region told The Daily Signal. It is common knowledge among nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Sierra Leone that a U.S. foreign aid agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation is threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from a U.S. agreement with Sierra Leone unless the West African country’s parliament passes the bill decriminalizing abortion, the former government official said. The Sierra Leone Compact is a five-year, $480 million agreement between the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC, and Sierra Leone aimed at providing affordable electricity. The MCC didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. “It is deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, that we are hearing reports that the Biden administration is threatening to withhold foreign assistance to Sierra Leone unless legislators there pass the deceptively named ‘Safe Motherhood Act’ legislation that would legalize abortion in Sierra Leone, a country that currently protects unborn life,” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said in a statement first shared with The Daily Signal. The so-called Safe Motherhood Act would legalize abortion up to 14 weeks for any reason and up to birth to protect the “mental health of the woman.” Abortion to save a woman’s life is already legal in Sierra Leone. Smith decried what he called the Biden administration’s “pro-abortion bullying tactics and raw attempt at ideological colonialism” in Sierra Leone. “Pro-life countries should be celebrated and respected for protecting unborn children and their mothers—not penalized by a pro-abortion, lame-duck Biden administration,” he said. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration is 35 days away, and the Biden administration’s Millennium Challenge Corporation wants to finalize abortion on demand before a second Trump administration with different priorities takes over, the former senior official said. An informed NGO leader in Sierra Leone told the official that the country’s parliament plans to vote on the bill this week under pressure from the Biden administration to pass it as soon as possible. The first Trump administration introduced the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which established that there isn’t an international right to abortion. The Biden administration removed the U.S. from the accord designed to promote women’s health and strengthen the family, but Trump has promised to rejoin the declaration. “Under my leadership, the United States will also rejoin the Geneva Consensus Declaration, created by my administration and signed by 36 nations, to reject the globalist claim of an international right to abortion.” pic.twitter.com/1r4R4l23Pg— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) September 20, 2023 Not only did the Biden administration remove the U.S. from the accord, but his State Department also recommended other countries remove themselves. Also under the Biden administration, the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, planned to increase contraception usage among Sierra Leonean women by 2027. “Let me be clear, abortion is not health care, nor is it an internationally recognized human ‘right,'” Smith said. Smith, co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, said he plans to work with the incoming Trump administration “to conduct a thorough review of actions by all U.S. agencies, from USAID to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, to determine whether U.S. laws were violated by U.S. government staff through misallocation—or threat of misallocation—of U.S. funding in order to pressure countries to change their pro-life laws,” he said. “Forcing a pro-abortion and woke agenda on financially vulnerable and democratic sovereign nations harms both the U.S. and our allies and is bad diplomacy,” Smith said. “It must end.” Religious leaders in Sierra Leone oppose the abortion law, as do the majority of Sierra Leoneans, according to the former U.S. official, who said he remains close to citizens there. Sierra Leone’s population is 77% Muslim and 22% Christian, according to a 2022 State Department report. In August, President Julius Maada Bio announced that his government unanimously backed the bill. The Ministry of Information and Civic Education held a panel discussion Thursday promoting the bill. The Biden administration has a history of pushing left-wing special interests such as abortion on demand and the LGBTQ agenda on African countries. U.S. tax dollars in South Africa fund “comprehensive sexuality education” curricula that teach fourth graders about being “born in the wrong body,” and describe gender as being “socially constructed.” Smith sounded the alarm last year on a Biden administration plan that he said would “hijack” President George W. Bush’s 2002 program of delivering AIDS relief to Africa to promote its abortion agenda.  “President Biden has hijacked PEPFAR, the $6 billion a year foreign aid program designed to mitigate HIV/AIDS in many targeted—mostly Africa —countries in order to promote abortion on demand,” Smith wrote in a letter to fellow lawmakers. Valerie Huber, founder and president of the Institute for Women’s Health and former special representative for Global Women’s Health under the Trump administration, said she has heard many such stories about the Biden administration’s pressuring countries to adopt or change laws and policies that are high priority for the Biden administration but “antithetical to the values and laws of those countries.” “Unfortunately, whenever I meet with other countries that are either members of the GCD or are considering membership, without exception they say 100% of our foreign policy has been ideological, and as a result, anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high in their countries over this ideological pressure,” Huber told The Daily Signal. Huber said the Biden administration forces countries to choose between compromising their values and constitutions and receiving the U.S. funding they need.  “U.S. foreign policy has been transformed into an ideological puzzle to really force countries to make a very difficult decision,” Huber said.  The State Department didn’t immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The post ABORTION COLONIALISM? Sources Say Biden Pushes Anti-Life Agenda on Sierra Leone appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The team behind the Scripps National Spelling Bee whacked a hornet’s nest when it identified specific words for potential competitors to ponder. Its list of “50 challenging third grade words” includes giraffe, groceries, and jigsaw. So far, so good. But beneath the “preferred spelling” of women, a permitted option appears: “womyn.” Naturally, this feminist twist on “women” avoids the reference to those pesky purveyors of patriarchy: men. And what better place than third grade to pound the woke feminist drums? “All of the words used in the Scripps National Spelling Bee program are pulled from our official dictionary, Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary,” a spokesman spokesbee told Fox News Digital. “During competition, our policy is to accept any correct spelling listed in our official dictionary that isn’t marked archaic or obsolete. The alternate spelling ‘womyn’ is therefore included on our study list because it is listed as an alternate spelling for ‘women’ in Merriam-Webster.” Those who made this decision might consider it a triumph for women’s rights, girl power, etc. But, at best, this low-grade symbolism signifies nothing. Instead, these folks should take whatever energy they poured into this stunt and redirect it to finding and liberating some of the 323,000 unaccompanied minors whom Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have lost over these last four years. Some of these children are little girls. Thousands or even tens of thousands of them are being held against their will and forced into prostitution at the hands of pedophiles who repeatedly rape them—day and night. They are not paid for these atrocities, nor are they free to leave. Thus, ipso facto, they are slaves. That’s right: We have sex slaves in America. This is one of the ugliest consequences of the Biden-Harris policy of border obliteration and rampant illegal immigration. Girls and women—as well as some boys and perhaps some men—are being held as SLAVES in America in 2024. They are compelled to perform sexual favors, which is its own type of torture. (Other slaves are trapped in lives of relentless, uncompensated, mandatory menial labor.) “Traffickers prey on individuals and families that are traveling, hungry, homeless, and sick. They may offer a job only to get the migrant away from their area of safety and force them into labor,” explains DeliverFund, which stirs outrage about this unbridled evil. “A trafficker may spark up a phony relationship with a person to get them to cross the border in search of a better life, only to trap them in sexual exploitation.” Last year’s gripping thriller “The Sound of Freedom” dramatized this horror. This motion picture from Angel Studios was a surprise hit. Its $250 million worldwide gross included $184 million in U.S. ticket sales. Nonetheless, the fact that slavery is alive and well in the United States of America today somehow remains a boutique concern rather than a 12-alarm national emergency. January’s change of management in Washington, D.C., should give this carnage the urgent attention that it demands. For now, the Scripps National Spelling Bee people and their ilk do little to battle this human rights catastrophe. Anything of substance—a searing documentary (documyntary?), an educational seminar, or a protest at Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ office—would help. Instead, the Left signals its virtue by encouraging children to misspell a word that billions of women accept around the globe. This could not be more vacuous, especially compared to the desperation that these brutalized females confront every morning. Meanwhile, if the “men” in “women” make these feminists so nervous, why not change these words, too? —Mention to myntion. —Menial to mynial. —Mennonites to Mynnonites. —Mentor to myntor. —Menthol to mynthol. The Scripps National Spelling Bee itself suggests that third graders contemplate the word “mansion.” How sexist! Apparently, a mynsion is where one will find a wealthy household of the future. Remember that 1980s boy band, Menudo? Its members were young, male Puerto Ricans—not least Marc Anthony and Ricky Martin, who achieved even greater glory as solo artists. The feminist Left surely would not want Menudo’s female fans to be uncomfortable. So, don’t be surprised if the Left insists on calling the band Mynudo. All of this should be diagnosed as myntal illness. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Latest Woke Triumph: Feminist Spelling for Third Graders appeared first on The Daily Signal.