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Ruth King

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Foreign Minister Wong’s Telling Slip is Showing Peter Smith

By on November 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/11/foreign-minister-wongs-slip-is-showing/

I see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has turned to Christianity from atheism and before that Islam. From the misconceived to the muddleheaded to the way, the truth and the life. Of the three, let me pick up on the truth. Truth and God are indivisible. And as part of giving mankind the best civilisation the world has seen or will ever see, Christianity gave and gives us an appreciation of the centrality of truth. The truth is always under attack by those with an agenda (leftists, Islamists, assorted barbarians) who wish to tear down our civilisation.

Where am I going with this morality tale about truth? To Gaza, actually, and to Penny Wong. “And we call on Israel to cease attacking hospitals,” she reportedly said. The archetypal lie by insinuation. Apropos, have you stopped beating your wife? Either through ignorance or commission, truth has taken a hike. She either has not studied the rules of war and, therefore, as Foreign Minister, is recklessly derelict, or she has read them and was being duplicitous in implying that Israel was in breach of them.

Any number of reports last week described fighting around Gaza’s largest hospital al-Shifa. Ms Wong should pay attention. Exactly who were Israeli forces fighting near to the hospital? Hardly unarmed doctors, nurses and patients. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Hamas terrorists were stationed in, around and underneath the hospital in contravention of the rules of war.

Israel in conforming with the rules of war must be “proportionate.” While this civilising rule or principle is fraught with subjectivity in the heat of conflict, as I argue here, there is no circumstance which allows it to be deliberately flouted. (See, for example, Military Ethics by Stephen Coleman.) Unfortunately, most commentators, and I see that Teal MP Zoe Daniels has joined the misinformed throng, seem to have no idea what proportionality means. To be clear, it does not mean tit-for-tat. It does not proscribe Israel’s defence forces from attacking Hamas terrorists inside and near to a hospital, provided the military objective is adjudged important enough and provided that harm to doctors, nurses and patients is kept to an absolute minimum in achieving the military objective.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flirtation With Evil Will Not End Well for Leftists TikTok’s days may be numbered in the U.S. By Roger Kimball

By on November 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/19/flirtation-with-evil-will-not-end-well-for-leftists/

Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?

Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process.  Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

Those videos were watched by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Millions—millions—have searched for bin Laden’s paean to Jew-hatred, radical  Islamic theocracy, and contempt for America. The Guardian newspaper, which had published a transcript of Osama’s letter back in 2002 when it first appeared, took it down because, an editorial note explains,  it “had been widely shared on social media without the full context.” Ah, “context.” Patient readers can still avail themselves of the 4,000-word lunatic effusion here. I offer two brief snippets, chosen more or less at random (slice him where you will, as Bertie Wooster observed, a hellhound is still a hellhound), just to give readers a little taste of the surreal world we’re talking about:

The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [i.e., Americans] are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily. [My italics, but bin Laden’s emphasis.]

So what, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done? Bin Laden does not disappoint. 

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. . . . complete submission to His [Allah’s] Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). . . It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. . . 

Et very much cetera.

In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe,  by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The New Elite Learning Curve: Descent into Ignorance By Eliot Pattison

By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_new_elite_learning_curve_descent_into_ignorance.html

A generation of students have been taught that they don’t need to actually study facts or consider ethics so long as they learn how to shriek at the appropriate trigger points.

Between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, I lived for several months on kibbutz Hagoshrim, on the border of Israel with Lebanon under the shadow of the Golan Heights. Hagoshrim was referenced in a recent Wall Street Journal article about war preparations along the northern border, which reported that although the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona had been evacuated, the residents of Hagoshrim, the kibbutzniks, had decided not to evacuate but to stay in support of the army. I was not the least surprised, for I knew the kind of sturdy people who lived there.

One of my early jobs as a volunteer laborer on the kibbutz was to dig a grave. It was a Sabbath, and I was the only Gentile who could handle a shovel and pick so I worked alone. The ground was rock hard, and the job took most of the day. As visitors wandered into the cemetery, I learned that the grave was for one of the elderly kibbutzniks who had a line of tattooed numbers on his wrist, marking him as a Nazi death camp survivor. The news made my work even more somber and as I dug, I reflected on the horrors he must have endured. Eventually I became aware of a white-haired man sitting on a nearby bench, another of those battered souls bearing a wrist tattoo. When I took a break, he gestured me to rest on the bench beside him. I thought I should say something but had no idea what would be appropriate, or even if he spoke English. Finally, I just awkwardly offered “he survived all that hatred.” I didn’t think he heard, or understood, for he said nothing for a long minute. Then, forlornly staring at the grave. he just murmured “all that stupidity” and spoke no more.

I took the comment to be just a bitter offhand reply and thought no more of it as I resumed digging. But through the years the words returned to me. I had mentioned hate to one seasoned in hate, who had known it in its most savage, ruthless forms, had endured the 20th century’s vortex of death, and he had seemed to correct me. It wasn’t hatred that was the essential cause of Jewish persecution, he was saying, it was stupidity, the ignorance that allowed the hate to take root.

Any doubt I had about that conclusion has been eradicated by events on certain college campuses since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Mobs of students scream about the apartheid state of Israel without understanding Israel or what apartheid is. They shout about a history of oppression without bothering to understand the actual history. They rant about the need to return to a Palestinian state without knowing there never was such a state. They gleefully celebrate reports of unspeakable atrocities and call for more. The most extreme of these demonstrations have occurred on the campuses of our top-ranked schools. The more elite a university is, it seems, the more ignorant and intolerant its students have become. I doubt any of these protesting students at Harvard, for example, are aware that in the school’s early days graduates were required to learn Hebrew, because of the wisdom found in ancient Jewish writings.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Tenured barbarians On academic anti-Semitism. Roger Kimball

By on November 19th, 2023

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/12/tenured-barbarians

It’s been many years since we have had occasion to mention Rashid Khalidi—enthusiast for the Palestinian cause, bosom buddy of Barack Obama, and the Edward Said (!) Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University—in this space. Back in June 2005, in a column called “Faculty follies,” we quoted Khalidi’s thundering dismissal of what he called “the utterly spurious assumption that universities are strongholds of radical and liberal beliefs.”

As if to underscore the malign fatuousness of that declaration, Professor Khalidi has just put his name to an open letter, signed by more than a hundred of his Columbia colleagues, calling on the university to defend those students who publicly support Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and that, without warning, slaughtered more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel on October 7. That massacre, which also left some five thousand injured and saw more than two hundred people—including infants, toddlers, and the elderly—kidnapped and dragged back to the Gaza Strip, killed more Jews than any event since the Holocaust. Khalidi and his colleagues are incensed that the names and likenesses of some of these pro-Palestinian student protestors have been posted under the rubric “Columbia’s Leading Anti-Semites.” “As scholars,” the professors write, apparently without irony,who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students anti-Semitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on October 7th within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.

Where does one start? We’re tempted to begin with the question of whether anyone anywhere has objected to people expressing “empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians.” But let’s leave that trope, along with the needling “as scholars” gambit, to one side for a moment and concentrate on two phrases: “military action begun on October 7th” and “the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.”

In the modern world, a “military action” is understood to be an action undertaken to achieve a specific military objective and employing only those means that are in accordance with the recognized rules of combat. High up on the list of those rules is concern for noncombatants. It is an unfortunate fact that civilians are often killed in a military action. But they must not be explicitly targeted.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stephen Miran Why Americans Dislike the Economy With real wages at 2015 levels, life milestones, such as buying a home, are increasingly unachievable.

By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-americans-dislike-the-economy

“Why are the vibes so bad?” ask legions of commentators, noting the disconnect between polling on the economy and top-level economic indicators. The unemployment rate is within spitting distance of 60-year lows, and measured inflation has dropped from a punishingly high 9 percent rate to a lower, though still too high, 3.2 percent.

And yet, citizens are unhappy with the economy. According to a New York Times–Siena poll, 81 percent of registered voters described the condition of the economy as fair or poor, and only 19 percent called it good or excellent. Another poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that a majority of voters said that they are worse off under President Biden then they were before, and only 14 percent said that they are better off. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, the Times–Siena poll found voters trusting Donald Trump more than President Biden on the economy.

To reconcile voters’ discontent with the economic data, we shouldn’t consider the top-level employment and inflation indicators separately. Instead, we should combine them—and when we do, we observe workers’ real (that is, after inflation) wages have declined significantly in recent years.

Some commentators argue that real wages are rising, but these claims are based on the popular average hourly earnings measure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics. Average hourly earnings is a less useful indicator now because of large workforce-composition changes. During the pandemic, the economy shed large numbers of low-paying service jobs (for instance, in leisure and hospitality), which pushed the average wage in the economy higher. The average moved up because low-paying jobs dropped from BLS’s sample, not because individuals experienced strong wage growth. The effect reversed as the economy began adding those low-paying service jobs back, which pushed average hourly earnings down. Those composition effects linger today, as the economy is still short 560,000 leisure and hospitality jobs (adjusting for labor-force growth), relative to pre-pandemic levels, due largely to firms’ difficulty finding workers. 

More recently, labor shortages have eased, and firms have been adding back these workers. Given that leisure and hospitality wages are below those of all other major sectors tracked by BLS, these workers’ return to the labor force has dragged down average hourly earnings growth relative to other measures.

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When Neutrality is Immoral: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Moral Equivalence by André Villeneuve

By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20154/neutrality-immoral-israel-hamas

While many the world over had the integrity to condemn “the hideous crime, naming its perpetrators and acknowledging Israel’s basic right to defend itself against the atrocity,” the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches were unable to muster up such moral clarity.

While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do their utmost to maximize them — not only by indiscriminately murdering Israelis, but also by hiding among their own civilian population and using them as human shields, resulting in disproportionately high numbers of Palestinian casualties, caused — deliberately — by Hamas.

If there is an “occupation” problem in Gaza, the occupier is Hamas, not Israel.

In this war, Christians — and all of us — have a moral responsibility to support a civilized nation’s fight against barbarism. Israel must eradicate a terrorist group, Hamas, just as we confronted ISIS. Then all of us need to contain the real mastermind behind such groups, the genocidal regime of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no other viable solution if we wish to preserve the West.

October 7, 2023: Another day that will live in infamy: Israel’s Pearl Harbor. Israel’s 9/11. The quiet Shabbat morning of Simchat Torah, concluding the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, suddenly turned into a bloodbath. Under the cover of heavy rocket fire, thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked Israel’s southern communities and left behind them a path of carnage and devastation, ambushing army bases and motorists, murdering some 364 people at a music festival, slaughtering families in their beds, raping women, executing children and Holocaust survivors, burning civilians alive, and kidnapping 244 people in Israel to Gaza. With at least 1,200 people murdered, it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The barbarity of the Hamas attack was so unprecedented that even the world was brutally — if briefly — jolted out of its usual apathy and left reeling in horror.

The outrage, however, was short-lived. As soon as Israel began its military response to Hamas’s act of war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted across the world, many of them quickly turning into anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate fests. Some even denied that the October 7 slaughter had taken place, despite the many eyewitness stories of survivors.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: A Tale of Two Demos by Amir Taheri

By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20153/france-two-demos

Sunday’s march… attracted over 100,000 people, five times larger than the pro-Palestine demo.

There were also many Muslim figures [Sunday] including imams of mosques who ignored the “advice” of the Grand Mosque of Paris not to attend.

Anti-Semitism isn’t a byproduct of the Israel-Palestine conflict; it is an evil in its own right and a threat to what even the politically correct Macron says he upholds as “values of our civilization.”

Anti-Semitism challenges the fundamentals of what one may call modern civilization. It denies the existence of human beings as individuals with inalienable rights beyond religious, ethnic, racial and other backgrounds. It dissolves the concept of citizenship as the basis of the relationship between the individual and the state.

Anti-Semitism also violates the principle under which guilt by association and collective punishment could not be accepted. Worse still, it rejects the principle of innocence until proven guilty by a court of one’s peers, thus sapping the roots of civilized legal systems.

A week after Paris witnessed a march in support of the “Palestinian cause” it hosted another march on November 12, this time against anti-Semitism.

Ostensibly provoked by the ongoing war in Gaza the two marches may persuade the French to take a closer look at the messages they convey and their impact on French politics.

Despite denials by its organizers, the leftist and extreme left parties, the first march, which took part on the right bank of the River Seine, was clearly anti-Israel, at times with anti-Semitic undertones.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Anti-Semites are emboldened the world over From South Africa to Australia, the oldest hatred is making a terrifying comeback. Norman Lewis

By on November 18th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/17/anti-semites-are-emboldened-the-world-over/

The anti-Semitism that drove Hamas’s 7 October pogrom has reverberated around the world. The oldest hatred is making a grim comeback, far beyond the Middle East.

Ugly scenes of Jews being mobbed have recently blighted Australia. Last week, around 150 Jewish congregants of the Central Shule synagogue in Melbourne were forced to abandon their worship when over a hundred ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters descended on their Shabbat service. When at least 80 pro-Israel counter-protesters turned up to defend the synagogue, 30 police officers were needed to separate the two sides.

The initial protest was supposed to be peaceful. It was organised in response to a fire that broke out at a local burger bar called Burgatory, which is owned by a Palestinian Australian. Victoria Police have said that while the fire could be the result of criminal intent, they are ‘confident’ it was neither politically nor racially motivated. But that didn’t stop the Islamic Council of Victoria and various pro-Palestine groups putting out the word that the fire was ‘an intentional act, amounting to a hate crime against [the owner] as a Palestinian and a Muslim’. A protest was then organised by the Free Palestine Melbourne group.

After gathering outside the burned-out burger joint, protesters then marched down the road towards the synagogue. When they arrived, some among the crowd prayed and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’. There were also chants of ‘From the river to the sea’ – a coded call for the destruction of Israel. Others shouted anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs. This was a dark moment for Australia.

In Sydney, the next day, there was an equally disturbing incident. A pro-Palestine motorbike convoy headed towards Coogee, the suburb with Sydney’s largest Jewish community. The motorcade was led by organiser Zaky Mallah, the first Australian to ever be charged for terrorism offences. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that this [route] was chosen to intimidate’, the local MP rightly noted. Only the intervention of around 100 Israel supporters managed to stop the convoy from reaching its destination.

Not even children are safe from this rising hatred. When Masada College, an independent Jewish school in St Ives in Sydney, contacted a local business to hire some outdoor games for a staff barbecue, the owner refused the school’s custom and boasted about it on Instagram. ‘There’s no way I’m taking a Zionist booking. I don’t want your blood money. Free Palestine’, the owner wrote in an email, a screenshot of which she posted online. Most shocking of all, the business owner also published pictures of some of the school’s pupils, who were labelled as ‘Zionists’.

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The passionate intensity of the know-nothing protester Why do people with no knowledge of the Israel-Hamas conflict feel the need to join these awful marches? Simon Evans

By on November 18th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/10/the-passionate-intensity-of-the-know-nothing-protester/

“The most-quoted poem to describe the world we live in has for some years now been WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. And especially the line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Let us at least teach our children not to mistake one for the other. Especially when, on a rare occasion, the best display some conviction after all.”

A short video was shared on X this week in which two young female protesters at a pro-Palestine march were asked a pretty straightforward question about the crisis in the Middle East: ‘When Hamas invaded Israel on the 7 October, what was your initial reaction to that?’

The first one looked briefly confused. Was this a trick?, she seemed to be thinking. Her companion stepped in: ‘I don’t believe they did, did they? Hamas?’ Then something started coming back to the first one. The stirrings of something like a distant memory. ‘I think so…’, she said, trying to correct her friend who didn’t think Hamas had done anything.

Encouragingly, in the light of this, the first one then appeared to experience an awakening. ‘Honestly, I think I need to be a bit more clued up on everything that’s going on’, she said, before finally responding to the original question: ‘I feel like I’m not really qualified to answer that too well…’

Her companion, however, was having none of this. No room for doubt in her ranks. So she persisted in her Baudrillard-tier scepticism about the 7 October attack: ‘I mean, I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything that shows that that’s actually happened or that’s actually correct.’

It’s tempting to respond to this video by wondering who the fuck are these virtue-signalling halfwits and why aren’t they in a library studying? Yet even if these young women are typical of many of those attending the anti-Israel demos, a bit more understanding might be in order.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Let the Donor Revolution Begin By Michael B. Poliakoff & Steven McGuire

By on November 18th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/17/let_the_donor_revolution_begin_150070.html

The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.

In stunning irony, the leadership of so many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, initially unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery, miraculously discovered institutional neutrality and murmured effetely instead. In response to the backlash, they appeal to free expression, but their campuses have only what Penn donor and alumnus Clifford Asness has called “asymmetrical free speech where some have it and some don’t.”

While Penn Carey Law School’s eminent Professor Amy Wax is placed under investigation with serious threat of termination for alleged racial insensitivity, a professor who posted the logo of the military wing of Hamas on Facebook days after that terrorist organization’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians receives nothing more than an email.

Roger Waters, a notorious antisemite, is allowed to speak on Penn’s campus, but young women forced to share a locker room with a biological male are told, “Don’t talk to the media. You will regret it.”

At Harvard, the same President Claudine Gay who was instrumental in punishing gifted African American economist Roland Fryer, who dared to advance a data-driven challenge to the meme of racist policing, says pro-Hamas students will neither be punished nor sanctioned. Carole Hooven, who was canceled for stating a biological fact, might disagree with President Gay’s claim that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

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