Terror beat: Hamas’ Intricate Web of Finances
“Hamas’s global financial footprint and use of the regulated international financial system means that its facilitators likely have access to the US financial system,” thunders National Review’s Jim Geraghty.
Hamas isn’t “designated as a terrorist group in Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or Turkey,” which “gives the group quite a few banking and financial options.”
And a bombshell from The Economist “noted last November that one of the key countries for financing Hamas’s operations is our NATO ally, Turkey,” whose “banking system helps Hamas dodge American sanctions by conducting complex transactions across the world.”
Hamas’s $1 billion “financial empire has been painstakingly crafted to avoid Western sanctions.”
This makes it “out of reach for Israel and its allies.”
Media watch: Kamala Will Censor
“The chances that a President Kamala Harris” would avoid “arm-twisting social media companies into censorship” are “not great,” laments The Free Press’ Abigail Shrier.
And “thanks to a recent Supreme Court ruling,” there’d be “little to stop” her.
Even before the Jan. 6 riot, Harris demanded Twitter ban President Donald Trump: Social-media companies, she fumed, speak “directly” to “millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.”
Now, notes Shrier, Harris has tapped Rob Flaherty, the Biden official who pressured Facebook to suppress Post reports on the COVID vaccine, as her deputy campaign manager.
The problem? The court ruled only social-media companies, not users, can sue the government for censorship — and “what company will take the risk” of government retaliation?
Legal take: Musk’s Media Matters Suit . . . Matters
“A federal judge ruled that a lawsuit by Elon Musk against Media Matters can move forward in what could prove a significant case not just for the liberal outlet but the entire media industry,” reports Jonathan Turley at The Hill.
The suit centers on a MM “report suggesting that advertisements of major corporations were being posted next to pro-Nazi posts or otherwise hateful content on the platform”; it accuses MM of “manipulating the algorithms to produce the pairing alleged.”
Most media “are overwhelmingly hostile toward” the suit because it “directly challenges the ability of media outlets to create false narratives to advance a political agenda.”
Iconoclast: Harris-Walz v. Free Speech
To claims that “Brazil’s banning and blocking of the social media platform X is far more extreme than anything being proposed in the United States,” Michael Shellenberger counters at X that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have “both repeatedly endorsed the three main censorship tactics used by the Brazilian government: censorship of election ‘misinformation,’ de-platforming political opponents, and cross-platform bans.”
“His Twitter account should be shut down,” said Harris of then-President Donald Trump in 2019.
Walz has claimed “that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech and misinformation.”
While “neither Harris nor Walz called for completely banning and blocking social media platforms,” Shellenberger notes, “the severity of their calls” for “government regulation” of social-media platforms comes all too close.
Eye on elex: US Voting System Breeds Mistrust
“In California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, it is now possible to vote in person without any form of identification,” warns Tablet’s Armin Rosen.
Even “poor and faraway” Somaliland Africa requires its citizens “obtain an identification card from the electoral commission months in advance of the vote.”
Unlike Somaliland, “most Americans no longer have to physically show up at a polling place to vote.”
US voting systems allow the “choice of filling out and submitting their ballots beyond the observation of election officials,” which offers “no assurance that the people in whose names ballots are cast actually signed — or saw — their ballots.”
All of this is “practically calibrated to produce mistrust, and to create broad segments of public opinion that believe the whole thing is fake — regardless of who wins.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
