“We love Jews. But only the ones that are socialists, hate Israel, and are completely disconnected from their history. The other kind needs to not exist.”
[IsraelTimes] New report exposing Mamdani campaigner’s posts supporting Hamas and propagating anti-Israel conspiracies is only the latest controversy surrounding political operatives in the city
In December, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani named Catherine Almonte Da Costa to a top post in his incoming administration.
The appointment was short-lived. Mamdani accepted Da Costa’s resignation a day later, after antisemitic comments she made more than a decade earlier surfaced on social media.
Similar incidents have continued to pile up since, reflecting hardline views among some New York political staffers, who play a key role in shaping city policy.
Da Costa’s posts that led to her resignation, dated to 2011 and 2012, referred to "money hungry Jews," "rich Jewish peeps," and called a subway line to a Jewish area as "the Jew train."
She apologized immediately after the statements came to light.
”So sorry you found out what I really think.”
Mamdani accepted her resignation, said he would not have hired her if he had known about the comments, and vowed to change his administration’s vetting process.
Days later, though, the Anti-Defamation League reported that other Mamdani appointees had made comments that supported Paleostinian "resistance," backed the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, said that "Zionism is racism," called Zionism a "genocidal ideology," said "Zionists are never Jews," and stated that Zionists are worse than Nazis.
Another Mamdani appointee, Mamdani’s Brooklyn borough director, referred to women tearing down posters of Israeli hostages as "heroes."
Mayoral appointees began deleting their X accounts before coming into office, apparently to head off any controversies.
The controversies didn’t stop, though, including in the past week.
Jewish Insider reported on Wednesday that a founder of the popular "Hot Girls for Zohran" campaign, Kaif Gilani, shared posts on X that supported Hamas ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,... , downplayed antisemitism, and propagated conspiracies about Israeli involvement in the September 11, 2001, terror attack, the liquidation of former US president John F. Kennedy and Jeffrey Want Some Candy, Little Girl? Epstein ...A high class pimp financier who was alleged to maintain a stable of underage whoressex slaves who were paid big bucks to entertain the rich and/or famous. He was really surprised when he commited suiciede in jail... Gilani was the highest-paid consultant for US Congressional candidate Brad Lander when the posts surfaced. Lander’s team said it had been unaware of the posts, cut ties with Gilani and condemned the statements.
"Hot Girls for Zohran" was a volunteer effort that was independent of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, although Mamdani appeared in at least one photo with Gilani. The initiative received widespread media coverage and celebrity endorsements.
Other inflammatory comments from political staffers did not involve Israel, but focused on other targets, including homeowners, white people, police and women.
The extreme comments from wardheelers are not confined to the left.
Late last year, New York State’s Young Republicans organization disbanded after leaked group chats showed members joking about gas chambers, praising Adolf Hitler ...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like... , and using racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs.
The incidents reflect a normalization of hardline anti-Zionist rhetoric among some mid-level political staffers, who implement much of the city government’s goals through actions like conducting outreach, drafting policy proposals and making hiring decisions, but are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as elected representatives.
Gilani shared his posts to around 60,000 followers on X, for example, but the statements did not raise any red flags until they were exposed by Jewish Insider.
The old guard of New York’s Democratic party, like Governor Kathy Hochul, are largely in step with the Jewish mainstream — supporting Jewish self-determination in Israel and the Israeli people, while often criticizing the Israeli government. Mamdani and many of his staffers are more in line with the anti-Zionist activist left, positions that are made evident by their social media history.
Responses to the statements have also been telling. A co-founder of Hot Girls for Zohran defended Gilani and said he would remain with the group, which has rebranded as Hot Girls Organize.
Other prominent anti-Israel voices also defended Gilani and the news hound who exposed his comments said he had received antisemitic death threats.
While Mamdani spoke out against Da Costa’s remarks, he refrained from condemning Gilani’s statements, in line with his pattern of condemning classical expressions of antisemitism as discriminatory, such as tropes about Jewish greed and swastikas, but not inflammatory rhetoric related to Israel.
#1
Anti-Zionism IS a form of anti-Semitism: anybody willing to invest a couple of weeks of research can convince themselves that "Palestinians" are a completely artificial creation.
[HotAir] I'm not going to whitewash the Tories' failure to hold people accountable for the betrayal of Britannia's young women in the decades-long rape gang scandal.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of British girls were...it's impossible to describe the horrors they faced, or the betrayal by the governments involved. If many of us had our way, the wood chippers could be kept busy for years as they dispensed justice to everybody involved.
But the current malefactors are the Labour government, which has been doing everything it can to slow-walk the inquiry into what happened and who was responsible for the betrayals. No doubt one of the main reasons is that Labour politicians are deeply implicated, as is Keir Starmer himself.
Starmer, you see, was head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the height of the abuses, and it isn't really clear that all the abuses have stopped yet. He opposed the idea of conducting any inquiry, calling it "far-right," and reversed course only because the political pressure was too intense to ignore.
When I say that Labour is slow-walking the process, I am not exaggerating. The official report will not be released until 2029, five years after it was initially authorized under great pressure.
Britain needs to understand the sophisticated level of coordination between the rape gangs - it goes far deeper than anybody realises.
A national crime network, of the most depraved kind.
Our inquiry is finding evidence of advanced links between dozens and dozens of towns and…
Rupert Lowe, a newly elected Reform UK MP, has done something the British government has not: gotten to work getting the facts out and helping the victims find a voice. He crowdfunded an "unofficial" but highly credible inquiry that gathered as much government data as could be gotten from freedom of information requests, and began taking testimony in public.
And the scandal is SO MUCH WORSE than any of us could imagine. It's not so much that it was impossible to cobble together a picture of the horrors and betrayals of the young British women who were abused for years; it's that laying it all out on the table, and hearing from one victim after another about how they suffered and how government officials betrayed them, is absolutely heartbreaking in a way that having the information dispensed over years in dribs and drabs cannot communicate.
Government officials didn't just look away. Some actually profited from selling girls to their abusers. Police would arrest girls, return them to their abusers, or call them prostitutes to dismiss their complaints.
Rapists walked into group homes and got to choose which girls they wanted. Not only did the authorities do nothing about it, but they also punished the girls for reporting the abuse.
Some of these girls were abducted and taken to Pakistan, and many of those are still missing to this day.
Is it any wonder that the British establishment has done everything it could to bury this? For decades, they knew what was going on and buried it, either because they were complicit themselves or to maintain the fiction that "diversity is our strength."
Much more heartbreaking stuff at the link. May MP Rupert Lowe actually be effective this time. It’s enough to make a girl want to spit on her hands, take up an axe, and run berserk in the holy precincts of the law.
#1
It’s like watching doctors try to shock a body back into life, but the heart monitor keeps flat lining. The society in that country has corroded beyond belief.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
02/14/2026 8:11 Comments ||
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If you're not on Substack you should be. Lots of this before-it-hits-the news and will never be on the news stuff. Independent journalists you can support with your own money. Nobody can fire them and they can do real journalism, which is astounding to see after so long. The Keir Starmer-aligned group Labour Together had former Racket editor Matt Taibbi and contributor Paul Holden investigated, then passed details to an office in the GCHQ, their NSA analog
Of course they did. The police are arresting girls for complaining about being prostituted by Muslim groomer gangs and old men for demanding the shop clerk speaks English. Compared to that, this is picayune stuff.
British reporters were shown a statement Wednesday in which a cabinet official claimed to be "distressed" and "furious" that Pogrund was targeted, and claimed "no other journalists" were investigated or featured. (Apparently Holden and the rest of us don’t count.) The Labour Together work was commissioned by future MP and current Parliamentary Secretary Josh Simons, who told the Sunday Times last weekend: "Those who know me know I think the work of journalists is vital to our democracy." Simons added it was "nonsense" that APCO was charged with investigating journalists, and that Labour Together was merely interested in investigating a "suspected illegal hack."
This story was first broken by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan at the Substack site Democracy for Sale a week ago, but there have been developments. Not only did Labour Together hire APCO to investigate Holden, me, and others after we published internal emails and financial information, but Labour Together told journalists the APCO reports were passed to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ, the British analog to the NSA. This trick has apparently come into increasing use in recent years, with Britain’s passage of the draconian National Security Act, in addition to more aggressive use of old laws like the Official Secrets Act, which shares "Basically, Everyone is Guilty" qualities with America’s Espionage Act.
#1
I'll pass on the sign-in. To anyone that's surprised? Welcome to the Steele Dossier, 5-Eyes Obama Deep State, and so on.
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/14/2026 0:03 Comments ||
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#2
Sign up, it's worth it. Really exciting things going on on Substack. It's where all those laid-off Washington Post people ran away to saying they don't need jobs any more, they can get supported by Substack.
It's wonderful ridiculing them and telling them to learn to code.
Remember when Twitter banned people for telling laid-off journalists to learn to code despite Biden told laid-off coal miners the same thing?
Besides you can post Rantburg articles there and probably get more of an audience than here. Yesterday's top article was 203 views. You gotta get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
[JustTheNews] "Assessments" were created in 2008 as a special investigative tool for the FBI that require no factual predicate to launch and permit agents to use a wide range of investigative techniques.
The basis for scrutiny of Catholics, Zionists, TEA partiers, and PTA moms, one assumes.
The FBI opened 1,200 probes related to politicians, journalists, religious leaders, academics and others tied to “sensitive investigative matters,” using a special investigative tool that requires no factual predicate to launch, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
The GAO report, which was obtained by Just the News, was published last month but not made public, and it was titled FBI Investigative Activities: Oversight Efforts of Opening and Conducting Assessments Should be Strengthened.
The report, which assists in congressional oversight of the executive branch, provided details on the roughly 127,000 FBI "assessments" in all opened from 2018 to 2024, the vast majority of which were eventually closed without accusations of wrongdoing or criminal charges against those targets being scrutinized.
The 57-page report did not include any names of those targeted for assessment.
Among the total assessments, 1,200 were related to "sensitive investigative matters" that target public officials, news organizations, houses of worship or members of academia, which the bureau views as more sensitive in nature.
So-called "assessments" were established by Justice Department guidelines in 2008, providing the FBI with an investigative tool short of opening a full-fledged investigation requiring a factual predicate.
The probes are used by the bureau to "address a potential threat to national security or potential violation of federal criminal law," the congressional watchdog said. They allow FBI agents to open probes on authorized matters but without a factual basis and allow them to employ investigative such techniques as physical surveillance on subjects.
If sufficient basis is found, assessments can turn into preliminary investigations, full investigations or enterprise investigations. But most assessments are closed without meeting the standards for a full inquiry by the bureau, the GAO said.
The revelations were detailed in the GAO's January 2026 report, which was designated "For Official Use Only" because of the sensitive information it contains. GAO noted that the report should be "safeguarded when not being used and destroyed when no longer needed."
Copies were sent only to the appropriate congressional committees, the U.S. attorney general and the FBI director on a need-to-know basis. The report was first reported on by Racket News and is being made public by Just the News.
You can read the report below:
POLITICIANS, JOURNALISTS, RELIGIOUS LEADERS AND ACADEMICS SCRUTINIZED
Though over 100,000 special probes were produced during the timeframe of GAO's review, a special subset of assessments was designated as dealing with "Sensitive Investigative Matters" – or SIMs – which involve special categories of targets that could present additional challenges. These special assessments made up roughly 1,200 of the total number of assessments conducted from 2018 to 2024.
The categories include “domestic public officials or domestic political candidates (involving corruption or a threat to national security), religious or domestic political organizations or an individual prominent in such organizations, the news media, an investigative matter with an academic nexus, or any other matter which, in the judgment of the official authorizing the assessment, should be brought to the attention of FBI headquarters and other DOJ officials.”
Assessments designated as a SIM have additional review and approval requirements before they can be opened or continued, the GAO said.
Over 500 SIM assessments in that roughly seven-year period were aimed at “public officials,” over 150 targeted religious organizations or prominent members thereof, over 100 targeted political organizations or members thereof, and over 50 targeted news media organizations or journalists, the data compiled by the GAO shows.
The watchdog review focused on two main categories of FBI assessments, titled “Type I/II” assessments and “Type III” assessments. Type I/II assessments typically “seek information, proactively or in response to investigative leads, relating to activities – or the involvement or role of individuals, groups or organizations relating to those activities – constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security.”
The duration of those types of assessments is allegedly expected to be “relatively short.”
The special Type I/II probes targeting potentially politically and constitutionally sensitive targets were also unique. The watchdog found that assessments targeting these categories of individuals or groups were converted into actual, predicated investigation at a higher rate than the average assessment. About half, 48%, were converted to an investigation.
The congressional watchdog said that Type III assessments generally “identify, obtain, and utilize information about actual or potential national security threats or federal criminal activities, or the vulnerability to such threats or activities.” This assessment type is allowed to last “as long as necessary to achieve its authorized purpose and clearly defined objective(s).”
Type III assessments were unique in a different way. For these, the FBI only converted 4% of the roughly 100 Type III SIM assessments into full investigations.
Each type of probe could last on average 60 to 180 days, the files show.
Yet the vast majority of the roughly 127,000 assessments did not lead to a follow-on investigation by the bureau, the GAO said, noting that “of the approximate 124,000 Type I/II and 3,000 Type III assessments the FBI opened and subsequently closed, the agency closed roughly 86 percent of Type I/II and 94 percent of Type III assessments without referring them for further investigations.”
FBI officials told the GAO that “many investigative leads that prompt assessments are determined to not be credible, resulting in staff often closing assessments without opening a subsequent investigation.”
[Federalist] Just like the last time Democrats threw the government into a shutdown, they have no leverage but are now withholding votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security while making ridiculous demands that the Trump administration is entertaining.
If Congress doesn’t push more money to DHS by Saturday, funding to TSA and FEMA will be cut off this weekend. Democrat leaders say they won’t agree to any deal that doesn’t reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is to say, make it effectively impossible to deport illegal aliens.
But everyone in Washington knows Democrats are in no position to force concessions, given that even without more money for DHS, ICE remains funded with billions in cash by way of the "One Big Beautiful Bill" law passed last year. In short, the hand Democrats are playing is: Neuter immigration law enforcement or they’re going to clog up air travel and federal emergency response assistance.
This would be like needing a last-minute babysitter and telling the only person available that if she can’t watch your kids, you’re not only going to stay home, but you’ll also send them to bed without any dinner.
[IsraelTimes] A prolonged impasse between US lawmakers over immigration enforcement threatens to ensnare the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in a partial government shutdown beginning Saturday, following two fatal shootings in Minneapolis.
“For weeks, we’ve been pushing commonsense reforms,” Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Republican-controlled Senate, said ahead of a partial shutdown that would go into effect after midnight on Friday night.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put the blame on the opposition, telling Fox News that “Democrats are barreling our government towards another shutdown for political and partisan reasons.”
The Democrats oppose any new funding for DHS until major changes are implemented in the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the powerful agency working to carry out President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown — conducts its operations.
In particular, they demand curtailed patrols, a ban on ICE agents wearing facemasks during operations, and the use of a judicial warrant to enter private property.
If no deal is reached, thousands of civil servants could be furloughed, while thousands more will be required to work without pay — until a budget deal is finalized.
But ICE would be able to maintain operations because of funds already approved by Congress last year.
The primary impact would land on other agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which oversees emergency response to natural disasters.
The Transportation Security Administration, which runs airport safety, warns on X that a prolonged shutdown could result in longer wait times and cancelled flights.
The shutdown would be the third of Trump’s second term, including a record 43-day government closure last October and November.
#1
Chuck Schumer and common sense does not belong in the same sentence.
Posted by: chris ||
02/14/2026 3:23 Comments ||
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#2
Naturally, the Liberal Socialist Democrat (LSD) party will fight immigration enforcement efforts.
Stop an imagine Level Of Effort, and the $$$ Millions in costs to the (LSD) party, if they have to fake 3 to 5 million votes at election time, and don't have a $$$$ pot to skim from?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...late Fuehrer of Germany, founder of the Third Reich, currently communing with his pals Himmler and Heydrich. He is reincarnated every few days, sometimes every few hour if it's an election year, as a politician somebody doesn't like...
