Traveling to Europe? It’s getting more “interesting”

The New Neo Posted on by

Even if you’re not Pavel Durov, you may get a surprise if you’re planning a trip to Europe. Beginning November 10, there will be mandatory biometrics applied to visitors:

Europe’s new Entry/Exit System is intended to replace passport stamping by electronically registering the arrival and departure of international visitors to and from most EU member states.

Upon arrival in Europe, passport control officers will scan your face, record a digital scan of your fingerprints—these scans will be mandatory—and not stamp your passport.

When visitors leave Europe, they’ll scan face and fingers once again to register their departure.

Visitors will be able to speed their first arrival at a European border by pre-registering using a mobile app (not yet available) or the automated kiosks (which the EU calls “self-service systems”) installed at major border entry ports such as airports.

Once you’re registered with EES, the next time you cross an external European border, you’ll only have to scan your face and fingers for reentry. …

One system (ETIAS) will validate approval to travel; the other (EES) is for registering a person’s arrival once travel begins and, later, departure once the visit is over. …

Every person crossing an external European border who is not also an EU national—which by definition includes every tourist staying for a maximum of 90 days in any 180-day period—will be required to register with the new EES. In other words, pretty much everyone who goes to Europe on vacation.

Travelers who carry biometric passports (all U.S. passports issued since 2007 are biometric) can also speed through the automated “self-service system” kiosks (a prototype is pictured above) once those travelers’ details have been registered in the database for the first time.

… The United States began requiring non-Americans between the ages of 14 and 79 to submit fingerprint scans and facial images nearly 20 years ago.

That’s a lot to digest. One tidbit that surprised me was the claim that since 2007 all US passports are biometric. I have a passport issued in 2015 and I was unaware of any biometrics involved in the document itself. But I do recall that, when I went to Italy in 2017, my face was scanned at the Rome airport coming and going. I also think my photo is sometimes taken at US airports, but I’m a bit hazy on that detail. But what’s in my actual passport that qualifies as biometrics? It doesn’t have my fingerprints, and I don’t ever recall giving fingerprints.

The larger picture, and what I’ve thought about many times before, is that these days there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide – that is, if the state wants to find you. Funny thing is that the people they most want to find seem to be those on the right, and this involves Western Europe, too. The emphasis on getting the right in the US has already been proven – as though we needed more proof – by the incredible dragnet that hauled in J6 attendees whose “offenses” were limited to walking through open doors and entering the Capitol, and then peacefully exiting. I seem to recall that the mechanism for identifying most of them was facial recognition techniques through surveillance photos and videos.

I take all news about Sinwar with a grain of salt

The New Neo Posted on by

But anyway, for what it’s worth:

Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip are mulling staging a coup against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to a report on the UK new site The Jewish Chronicle.

This comes amid deep divides over the terms of a ceasefire deal with Israel to end the fighting, the report said.

Sinwar is also reportedly surrounded with 22 living Israeli hostages, who are handcuffed and used as human shields against assassination attempts. Israel, it is claimed, has had several opportunities to eliminate him, but has restrained itself due to the risk of harming its captives. The report also mentioned that the rest of the hostages are held by smaller Palestinian terrorist factions.

Something of the sort may indeed be true. Or not. And “the rest of the hostages” – the living ones – constitutes an unknown number.

We did get a report from newly-rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi:

Aryeh Zalmanovich, 86, was named Thursday as the Israeli hostage who died beside Farhan al-Qadi, the hostage who was rescued alive on Tuesday, while the two were held captive together in Gaza.

Zalmanovich, who was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught, died about five weeks into his captivity, according to al-Qadi.

Zalmanovich, a father of two and grandfather of five, was already known to have died in captivity, with Kibbutz Nir Oz announcing his death on December 1, 2023. The terror group had previously published a video in mid-November in which it showed Zalmanovich looking ill.

Following his rescue on Tuesday, al-Qadi asked to connect with Boaz Zalmanovich, the late hostage’s son, Boaz told Kan radio on Thursday. “It was very important” to al-Qadi to speak with the family, Boaz said, and they spoke briefly even as al-Qadi was being welcomed back to Rahat on Wednesday. “I hope we’ll have a more organized conversation” in the future, he said.

Al-Qadi told Boaz that he and Zalmanovich were taken to a hospital in southern Gaza, where they were kept for the first few weeks of the war. In captivity, Zalmanovich told al-Qadi about his family and community. …

Boaz said al-Qadi told him that there was a special connection between the two hostages.

“Dad was in a hospital the whole time, he wasn’t moved, and Farhan was with him for certain stages,” Boaz said.

“I understand from Farhan that they had a special bond. [Farhan] was also wounded, but he still helped take care of Dad — not in a medical way, more in terms of giving him support.” Boaz said that learning of al-Qadi’s support for Zalmanovich in captivity was “very important to us.” …

The conditions in which the hostages are being held are clearly not tenable “for a man of 86, or a man aged 20, or a baby…,” he said. “There is no [proper] care… Even if some of the hostages have had wounds bandaged or had surgery, that does not prevent their murder in captivity… in the tunnels or wherever they are. (Zalmanovich was beaten during his abduction, and was taken to Gaza without his glasses or his hearing aid, according to Channel 12.)

When you beat and then kidnap a man of 86 and he dies in captivity you have murdered him. But I believe Hamas is responsible for any deaths of hostages. It strikes me that it’s been almost a year now, which is mind-boggling.

I’m very happy for al-Qadi and his family. And here are a few details of the story of al-Qadi’s rescue:

Israeli special forces, acting on intelligence, were combing a network of tunnels in southern Gaza when they found Al-Qadi, two Israeli military officials told CNN. Al-Qadi was alone, without his Hamas captors, when Israeli forces found him, one of the officials said.

Al-Qadi is the eighth hostage to be rescued alive in Gaza by the Israeli military since the beginning of the war, in four separate operations – but he is the first to have been reclaimed alive from inside Hamas’ tunnel network underneath Gaza, the IDF told CNN.

“He was dead and is now brought back to life,” Al-Qadi’s brother, Juma’a, told CNN after Al-Qadi met family members at the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, where he is being cared for following his rescue. He added that his brother had not expected to come back alive.

“It was all tears. Tears of joy. What matters is that we saw him,” Juma’a said during an interview in the Bedouin village of Tarabin, in Israel’s Negev desert. …

Al-Qadi was discharged from hospital on Wednesday afternoon, the Soroka Medical Center said. In a press briefing, Al-Qadi expressed his gratitude to the soldiers who rescued him and the medical team at Soroka, the same hospital where he was born. Already making use of his new freedom, he said “I got shawarma at 2 a.m.” …

“It is hard for him to erase the things he saw there,” Juma’a said, adding that he too would never fully recover from losing his brother for nearly a year.

I can well believe it.

One of the things this story underlines is that yes, there are plenty of Arab citizens of Israel. They are Israelis, too:

[From the former mayor of Tarabin]: He told me that captivity was brutal. Constant darkness, did not see the light of day. He was treated like the rest of the hostages, like an Israeli in every way.

Like an Israeli in every way.

The article also says that al-Qadi’s captors may have fled at the approach of the Israeli soldiers in the tunnel. If so, the minders apparently weren’t so keen to martyr themselves:

Another one of Al-Qadi’s brothers, Abu Mohammad, suggested to CNN that his captors had fled when they heard Israeli troops approaching the tunnels, saying his brother had heard Hebrew voices and shouted out to communicate his whereabouts.

Asked by CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Tuesday if he believes Al-Qadi’s captors abandoned him, IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said that was “one of the options that are being looked at.”

It seems – and again, there’s no way to know if the details are true – that al-Qadi may have been found during a tunnel-clearing operation and that the troops had not already been aware of his presence through previous intelligence. But we don’t know – and may never know.

Walz will be present with Harris in her first major interview …

The New Neo Posted on by

… which will also be by a very friendly interviewer, Dana Bash, and it will be recorded rather than live.

The friendly interviewer part was pretty much a given. After all, there are few Harris-hostile potential interviewers in the MSM, and why would Harris ever purposely seek one out?

The non-live aspect of it makes sense, too, for the same reason. If the interviewer and the news outlet is friendly, airing a recorded interview gives them time to edit out any errors Harris might make. And many viewers won’t even realize it’s been done. On the other hand, politicians on the right would prefer live interviews because the same time lag gives the news outlet time to edit the interview in order to make the conservative look as bad as possible.

But what of Walz’s presence? I’ve noticed that, so far, quite a bit of the Harris social media presence features back-and-forth schtick with Walz. I saw someone online call Walz her “emotional support animal” – which is not only pretty humorous but may be fastening on a truth, which is that this woman portrayed as mega-strong is bothered by a feeling of insecurity about her ability to weather interviews or press conferences and would like her running mate to be by her side.

That may be true, but I also think that Harris may feel that presenting Harris/Walz as a team as often as possible reassures voters reluctant to vote for a female president that Walz will be a big part of the administration if they win. His supposedly avuncular – or Dad-like – teddy bear quality is apparently what the left believes to be his big selling point. So I think in this interview we have some sort of attempt at the message that Mom and Dad will take care of us, the dependent but beloved children.

The defamation lawsuit against Raffensperger of Georgia

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I’d previously missed this news, but it’s worth paying attention to: it involves our old friend Brad Raffensperger (see previous posts of mine about him, for example this one). He’s presently being sued for defamation concerning the following:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing a powerful defamation lawsuit arising from false claims he made about a Republican election volunteer in his 2021 book “Integrity Counts.” He wrote and published that a video presentation of unsupervised ballot counting at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had been “doctored,” “chopped up,” “cut,” “sliced up,” and “deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality,” allegedly including a “slice of video that had removed the clear evidence” that the law had been followed.

None of that was true. Jacki Pick, a Republican volunteer on the Trump legal team, was the sole presenter of the video to Georgia legislators to show that Republican election observers’ claims about unsupervised ballot counting in Georgia’s largest county were true. While she did not show the entire 20 hours of the video in her 12-minute presentation, nothing she showed was edited, chopped up, sliced, or diced, in any way.

Raffensperger published the self-promotional book in November 2021 as part of his campaign for re-election. It came a year after he oversaw one of the most controversial state elections of 2020. He had faced a deluge of criticism from election integrity advocates over various decisions he and his office made in the run up to and aftermath of the 2020 election. …

In August of 2024, Raffensperger ran to his allies at left-wing propaganda outlets The New York Times and CNN to have them mischaracterize the defamation lawsuit and help him personally raise money to fight it. “Defying Trump Over Election Costs a Republican, Literally,” blared the front page headline of the New York Times, which claimed that he had spent $500,000 to fight the lawsuit.

In fact, the lawsuit has nothing to do with “defying Trump” in 2020. Rather it deals with the words Raffensperger published one year later in his book about Pick’s video presentation.

There’s much more at the link.

In that old post of mine I linked earlier, I speculated on what’s going on with Raffensperger, who is a Republican. Here’s something I think was the motive for his behavior in 2020, and which I think is still operating with him:

This seems to be an example of a Republican SOS pushing for extreme liberalization of voting laws due to COVID fear, and a GOP legislature trying to fight him but failing to succeed. I also wouldn’t discount the influence on Raffensperger of fear of Stacey Abrams and her leftist money and her ability to win in court by accusing the GOP opposition of racism, and I suspect that’s a partial explanation for Raffensperger’s cave. …

… this is another example of GOP infighting, in which it seems to me that Raffensperger’s main concern (even perhaps his sole concern) is protecting himself against accusations that he had any role in the [2020] debacle.

On Israel’s choices

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a tweet I saw that refers to the Arab Bedouin Israeli hostage who was held by Hamas and recently rescued by the IDF:

I wonder if the Jew-haters will pause for a moment to realize the effort Israel put into liberating a single Arab Muslim.

It’s rhetorical, because the person writing that clearly doesn’t wonder at all. The answer is clear: if Jew-haters/Israel-haters do realize the magnitude of that effort, their goal will be to ignore, deny, bury, minimize, and/or lie about the news. Because Israel is an “apartheid” state, don’t you know? And they also will continue to ignore the fact that on October 7 Hamas killed Israeli Arabs and also took Israeli Arabs hostage, as well as the same for citizens from other countries who happened to be working in Israel at the time.

Hamas does not care in the least about these things, nor do its legions of supporters. And of course, Hamas cares just as little about its own citizens, except as pawns to be deliberately put in harm’s way and die when Israel tries to defend itself or fight Hamas. To Hamas, Palestinian deaths at Israel’s hands – or deaths that can be falsely portrayed as being at Israel’s hands, as happens time and again – are a big bonus.

I’ve already discussed that phenomenon time and again, as regular readers here are well aware. And I’m just one small voice among so many who have been saying it over and over for years. But the lies of the left seem louder, even in the face of incidents like this hostage rescue which dramatically point out the difference, which is that Hamas values death and Israel values life – even the lives of Arabs. That was pointed out so long ago that it was Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir who said: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

Meir was Israel’s prime minister from 1969 to 1974. That’s fifty years ago. And she was Israel’s foreign minister from 1956 to 1966. As best I can determine, she started saying something to that effect in the 1950s and said it several times after. It’s still true of the majority of the people who call themselves Palestinians.

Meir said something else I noticed on that page of quotes, a 1973 statement of hers I’d never seen before but which remains very true today (not of Egypt and some of the Gulf states, or of Jordan, but of many of the rest including non-Arab Iran, and of enormous numbers of supporters in Western countries). Here it is:

I guess we have no choice. Either we do everything that is possible, and may seem to others as impossible, and just give up. Or we do everything that is really impossible and we remain alive. There’s one more basic thing that I think that people outside of Israel must realize, and if they understand and accept that, maybe other things will fall into place.

For instance, we’re not the only people in the world who’ve had difficulties with neighbors; that has happened to many. We are the only country in the world whose neighbors do not say, “We are going to war because we want a certain piece of land from Israel,” or waterways or anything of that kind. We’re the only people in the world where our neighbors openly announce they just won’t have us here. And they will not give up fighting and they will not give up war as long as we remain alive. Here.

So this is the crux of the problem: it isn’t anything concrete that they want from us. That’s why it doesn’t make sense when people say, “Give up this and give up the other place. Give up the Golan Heights,” for instance. What happened when we were not on the Golan Heights? We were not on the Golan Heights before ’67, and for 19 years, Syria had guns up there and shot at our agricultural settlements below. We were not on the Golan Heights! So what, if we give up the Golan Heights, they will stop shooting? We were not in the Suez Canal when the war started.

It’s because Egypt and Syria and the other Arab countries refuse to acquiesce to our existence. Therefore there can be no compromise. They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise. And that’s why we have no choice.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The rocket launchers Hezbollah planned to use in this past weekend’s attack were located in civilian areas:

The Hezbollah terrorist organization places its terrorist infrastructure in the middle of the civilian population while using Lebanese civilians as human shields. 90% of the launches were from the heart of a civilian area, near civilian facilities such as mosques, schools, UN sites, etc

This is typical of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest. It is a deliberate trap that sacrifices its own citizens in order to demonize Israel for protecting itself.

(2) Some good news – an Israeli hostage has been rescued by the IDF in an operation the details of which are being kept secret:

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said on social media: “I am overjoyed by the successful rescue of the hostage Qaid Farhan al-Qadi. Qaid, a Muslim resident of the Bedouin Israeli community in the Negev, who was kidnapped on October 7th from where he worked in Kibbutz Magen when Hamas terrorists came to indiscriminately abduct, murder, and rape — without distinction between race or religion.

“I congratulate the IDF, the Shin Bet, and all the security services, and send my blessings to his family on his return – which is a moment of joy for the State of Israel and Israeli society as a whole.

Hamas didn’t discriminate when it captured hostages. Quite a few were Israeli Arabs.

(3) One of the hostages who was freed last fall explains how she and her family were treated:

“Almost daily one of them would enter the room, saying, ‘Would be better for you to be a Muslim woman,’ and once the terrorist sent one of his comrades to get a head covering to put on me, and show me what it means to be a Muslim woman,” Yanai said.

“As a woman, my biggest fear is being sold. That someone would forcefully marry me and that I will have to convert to Islam.” …

At one point, she said, the Hamas brutes interrogated her about her father for an entire day — including how much he earned and what price he would be willing to pay to have her released.

Yanai learned later that they had sent her father a photo of her and threatened to murder her if he didn’t cough up ransom money.

(4) Mark Zuckerberg has some admissions and some regrets:

“Big win for free speech”? I think not. It happened, and the suppression of the Hunter laptop story was part of the reason that Biden became president.

(5) Trump announced that Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are now part of his transition team.

Question authority, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting comment from “Cary Kembla.” It’s an attempt to explain Democrat voters who continue to believe the biased MSM and authorities who’ve been wrong so many times:

I think the dimension that is lacking in these people is skepticism of authority. I’ve thought about this quite a lot trying to come up with the answer to the exact same question you are. I think the answer lies in part at least with childhood experience of authority. Was early Authority (parents, teachers etc) *good* to the child? Sure, it might have made honest mistakes here and there, but was it basically loving and life affirming? If so, the child grows up to believe that Authority in the adult world (politicians, mainstream media, bureaucracy etc) is also basically good and honest, and has its best interests at heart.

That may indeed represent a certain proportion of people on the left. But it doesn’t represent the generation of leftists with which I’m most intimately familiar: my cohorts.

They are generally the people who were the rebels back in the day. They were the ones with the “question authority” bumper stickers. But it turns out they were only questioning authority when they believed that authority was on the side of the political right. When the authority came from the left it was and is sacrosanct.

I wrote a post on the subject in 2021, and I reproduce a portion of it here as follows:

If you’re of a certain age, like I am, you probably remember those bumper stickers that exhorted us all to Question Authority. It was the mark of a thinking person not to take everything at face value, in particular the words of the government or government agencies.

I remember once going to an SDS meeting when I was in college. I was never a leftist but I suppose I was toying with it a bit at the time (this was during the Vietnam War). But what I saw and heard at that meeting repelled me on a gut level and I never went back. That one meeting cured me of any interest in taking the left as an authority on anything, except their angry, ranting, incoherent, narcissistic selves.

I wish I could remember what was said, but I don’t. I only remember the sense I had of dangerous people who were also stupid, and yet very very arrogant. That just about summed it up.

And now we have those same people, grown old, but they’re not running social media. It’s a younger crowd, and they have decided not only that they’re not going to Question Authority when the Democrats are in charge, but they’re not going to let anyone else Question Authority either.

And so we have this sort of thing:

…[I]n April Facebook blackballed a mother for daring to criticize the radical Marxist and racist policies of her school board.

Since then, Facebook has shut down a pro-Israel Christian site with 77 million followers and blocked the viewing of reviews of a climate book by former Obama science advisor Steve Koonin that raised doubts about the theory of human-caused climate change.

… This isn’t just Facebook; it’s everywhere. The left wants freedom of speech when the left is not in control. But once it does take control, the left wants to shut up anyone who disagrees or questions the authority of the left.

And now Tulsi climbs onboard

The New Neo Posted on by

She explains here why she got on the Trump train:

I thought this deserved its own thread.

In addition, I note that the RFK Jr. endorsement and this from Gabbard didn’t just happen totally organically. Trump was reaching out to these people, which I think was smart. I’m going to assume that, as the author of The Art of the Deal, he promised both of them some kind of future role. But one has to get elected in order to fulfill such promises, and I believe they both will help any chances Trump has of winning. What’s more, as RFK Jr. said, they actually do have some things on which they agree. The first of those things is the danger of a Harris presidency that would enable Democrats to further institutionalize and solidify the power of the left, perhaps for many generations to come.

RFK Jr. burned his bridges and goes all in

The New Neo Posted on by

RFK Jr.’s family has been issuing statements disavowing him before, so this sort of thing is really nothing new for him.

Now RFK has said something quite eloquent about MAGA, that slogan that has been practically considered the equivalent of Heil Hitler by the Democrats. Here it is:

The phrase has troubled liberals who think it is a call for a return to an America before civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights. But I have a more generous interpretation, one that is truer to my experience of Donald Trump as he is today. “Make America Great Again” recalls a nation brimming with vitality, with a can-do spirit, with hope and a belief in itself. It was an America that was beginning to confront its darker shadows, could acknowledge the injustice in its past and present, yet at the same time could celebrate its successes. It was a nation of broad prosperity, the world’s most vibrant middle class, and a idealistic belief (though not consistently applied) in freedom, justice, and democracy. It was a nation that led the world in innovation, productivity, and technology. And it was the healthiest country in the world. I have talked to many Trump supporters. I have talked with his inner circle. I have talked to the man himself. This is the America they want to restore.

Kennedy is also suggesting that more Democrats will be coming into the fold of what he calls Trump’s Unity Government:

Perhaps Tulsi Gabbard? This is getting even more interesting. I’ll take any good news I can get.