Americans Killed in Haiti--But Only Kenya Helps, ISIS Still Holding 2,700 Sex Slaves--The World is Silent, IL Raises Taxes to Cover Migrant Crisis Expenses (The Five for 05/29/24)
Plus, Nikki Haley autographs bombs for some reason. Harvard gets staunchly a-political.
Welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter.
Quick reminder, The Idea Podcast is up and running (although I’m having some issues with the audio distribution at the moment). You can catch the first episode, featuring Harvard alumna and writer for the American Conservative Coalition and ConservAmerica discussing the politically Conservative case for conservation.
Each week, The Idea Podcast will dive into the kinds of topics covered in The Five, in long form audio and video format. Episode 2 drops a week from today.
With that being said, let’s get into the news.
[one]
Two Americans, who refused to leave the orphanage in Haiti where they served, despite increasing danger, have been murdered by the gangs that now rule the island nation.
Three missionaries, including a married couple from the US, were killed in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Thursday evening.
Davy and Natalie Lloyd “were attacked by gangs this evening and were both killed,” Natalie Lloyd’s father, Missouri state Rep. Ben Baker, said in a Facebook post. “They went to Heaven together.”
“Please pray for my family we desperately need strength. And please pray for the Lloyd family as well,” Baker said.
“Davy was taken to the house tied up and beat. The gang then took our trucks and loaded everything up they wanted and left,” a post on Missions in Haiti’s Facebook page said.
Three hours later, the organization posted that the three missionaries “were shot and killed by the gang about 9 o’clock this evening. We all are devastated.”
It’s still unclear how exactly the missionaries were killed. The investigation into the killings is ongoing, and Haitian police have not yet released any details on them.
Local emergency response service Haitian Emergency Response Operations (HERO) assisted in coordinating and managing the operation to retrieve the bodies and transport the remains of the American couple to a hospital morgue.
Haiti remains in the functional control of Jimmy Chérizier Babekyou, also known as “Barbeque,” for his habit of burning his victims alive, and possibly eating them. Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry stepped down in March, and since then the Wesetern Hemisphere’s poorest nation has been under gang control.
Despite the U.S. sending $175 billion to Ukraine, the Biden Adminstration has so far ignored the plight one of America’s closest neighbors. So far, only Kenya has offered aid, sending in 2,500 troops. Half the Navy SEAL teams are based in Virginia, a quick flight from Haiti, who could be dropped in to beat back the disorganized gangs and clear the way for democracy to be restored.
Or, hey, if we were better at accounting, we could send that $6.2 billion we lost track of (read: somebody stole it) that was meant for Ukraine to help a nation where the average family lives on $1,800 a year.
What upsets me most is not the foreign policy incompetence of the Biden administration once again causing the deaths of innocents. That is, sadly, old news, with the 46th President leaving behind 78,000 Afghan allies to be slaughtered at the hands of the Taliban.
The worst part, in my opinion, is how the American political left, whom I once allied with, don’t seem to give a damn about international human rights, and now spend all their time policing pronouns and microaggressions.
[two]
A religious minority in Iraq, nearly wiped off the face of the earth by ISIS, struggles to rebuild, even as the rest of the world has forgotten them.
Every time Bassem Eido stands before the door of his house in his almost deserted village, he is astonished by the size of the rubble around him, a scene that has become familiar in the Yazidi-majority Sinjar region years after the end of the war.
In the courtyard of his house in Solagh—Eastern Caves, located 400 kilometers northwest of Baghdad—20-year-old Eido sighs, “Out of eighty families, only ten have returned.” He adds, "There are no homes for them to live in. Why would they return? They do not want to leave the tents (of the displaced) to live in tents over the ruins of their homes."
The ISIS terrorist organization invaded the region in 2014, specifically targeting minorities, especially the Yazidis, killing them, displacing them, and kidnapping many of their women as “slaves.”
In November 2015, Kurdish forces from the Kurdistan region, with support from international coalition forces led by Washington, expelled the jihadists from Sinjar.
In August 2017, the Iraqi government announced the expulsion of ISIS from all of Nineveh Governorate, where Sinjar is located, before declaring “victory” over the jihadists at the end of the same year.
Despite these victories, entire villages and neighborhoods remain destroyed, while political conflicts hamper the reconstruction process in an area that has witnessed many tragedies.
In Solagh, the scene still resembles war: destroyed houses, rusty water pipes and tanks, and wild grasses between the cracks in the walls.
Eido says sadly, “How can my heart be at peace... when there is no one here to be with so that we can forget what happened?” Only a few families were able to rebuild their homes, while others chose to pitch tents over the rubble.
In some issues of The Five, I come down hard on the Political Right, but the left has earned their beating today. In my college and young adult years, advocating against war in Iraq and speaking out for the citizens caught in the crossfire was THE issue, with celebrities and campus activists alike taking up the cause.
Instead, we now have Robert Downey Jr. and Nicole Kidman telling you to eat the bugs and like it, and Charleze Theron telling us to put three year olds on hormone blockers, despite the practice being banned in parts of Europe over medical harm.
Meanwhile, 2,700 Yazidi women and girls are still missing, presumably dead or in sex slavery to Muslim terrorists, but the most popular “Women’s Rights” issue of 2024 is Robert Kennedy Jr. insisting on legal, late-term abortion up to seconds before natural birth, before walking it back due to how unpopular late term abortions are was with the vast majority of Americans.
[three]
The citizens of Illinois will be paying a LOT more out of pockets due to the migrant crisis.
Breitbart reports:
Illinois has passed its largest tax hikes in state history with nearly one billion in new taxes in a $53 billion budget. But the state has also dispersed nearly as much as the tax hike on migrant spending alone.
The tax hike disgusted Republican State Senator Dan McConchie. He noted almost the entirety of the tax hike is going to more spending on Joe Biden’s migrant problem in Illinois, and he told his constituents that the legislature “raised your taxes just to spend on migrants.”
After hours of closed-door discussions not open to the public or the media on Sunday, the state’s Democrat-dominated senate hammered out a budget that total in at $53.1 billion for fiscal 2025 that will begin on July 1.
Illinois has lost more than 300,000 residents to inter-state migration since 2020…including me. In addition to the migrant crisis, the state is facing a funding crisis due to a lower number of taxpayers contributing to the system.
The crime crisis in Canada has gained international attention after Toronto police told citizens to just hand over their cars to avoid being hurt or killed by home invaders.
Toronto police have backed away from a statement on how to prevent auto theft motivated home invasions following social media backlash.
At a town hall meeting in Etobicoke last month, Const. Marco Ricciardi told residents to leave their keys by the door, especially if they’re in a Faraday bag that prevents would-be thieves from stealing the signal needed to unlock the car and start it.
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door,” he said. “Because they’re breaking into your home to steal your car. They don’t want anything else.”
Canada banned handguns in 2022, leaving “give the robbers whatever they want so maybe they won’t kill you” as one of the only available means of self defense.
[four]
In one of the more befuddling political moves in recent memory, Nikki Haley…autographed bombs in a foreign nation.
Former US presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has been photographed writing "Finish Them" on an Israeli shell as she toured sites near the northern border with Lebanon.
The photograph was posted on X on Tuesday by Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli parliament and former ambassador to the United Nations, who was accompanying Haley on her visit.
"'Finish Them'. This is what my friend the former ambassador Nikki Haley wrote," Danon said in his post that showed a kneeling Haley writing on a shell with a purple marker pen.
Haley was a hawkish UN envoy under Donald Trump, and her term overlapped with Danon.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,189 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on the latest Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed at least 36,096 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the territory's health ministry.
This is pretty terrible reporting on the part of Yahoo, as the bombs are presumably to deter Hezbollah, not Hamas…but either way, Ambassadors are supposed to help prevent wars, not help start them (specifically, a war between Israel and Lebanon, due to Hezbollah operating there).
[five]
The nation’s top university is taking a surprisingly apolitical stance moving forward.
Harvard University announced that it will no longer be speaking out on political or social issues that don't impact the institution's "core function," after months of unrest on college campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war.
The move follows guidance and recommendations from the Institutional Voice Working Group, which Harvard established in April to consider if and how the Ivy League university should address "publicly salient" issues.
According to the group, it gathered input from each school at the university, as well as from more than 1,000 faculty, students, staff, and alumni via 31 focus groups, an online poll, and an email address to which people could submit their thoughts, to come to its conclusion.
The group recommended that the university and institutional leaders should not "issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university's core function."
The statement noted that the report found "such statements risk compromising the 'integrity and credibility' of our academic mission and may undermine open inquiry and academic freedom by making it 'more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university's official position.'"
This is a significant turn by the Ivy League institution after former President Claudine Gay refused to condemn students calling for genocide of Jews.
Until the next one,
-sth