RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-supporters-probably-arent-fit-to-practice-law-1b42128d?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Dozens of law firms have signed an open letter to law-school deans warning that “anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms.” Earlier, Davis Polk & Wardwell had said it was reconsidering job offers to three Ivy League students who held leadership positions with organizations that signed letters supporting Hamas’s assault on Israel, and Winston & Strawn withdrew an offer to a New York University student who called the atrocities “necessary.”

The letter calls on the schools to affirm “the values we all hold dear” and reject “unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values.” It asserts that “there is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.” Weeks earlier the president of the University of Pennsylvania, jostled by donors into saying something emphatic, picked up the same script and said that “hateful speech that denigrates others” is “contrary to our values.”

But are the “values” of Sullivan & Cromwell the same as the “values” of Kirkland & Ellis, or of the University of Pennsylvania? Is there nothing in the distinct character of these institutions that can produce a moral response with edge and substance? The term “value judgment” came to us through Nietzsche and Max Weber, when people lost their confidence in speaking of moral truths and began to speak rather of the things they happened to “value,” which may not be what others “value.”

It was hardly controversial for the law firms to denounce “hatred or bigotry.” But what is it exactly that the law firms are enjoining the universities to do? The firms would doubtless assure the schools that they are against interfering with the freedom of the demonstrators to assemble and to speak.

https://barenakedislam.com/2023/11/09/caliphornia-to-absolutely-no-ones-surprise-at-all-the-pro-hamas-activist-who-killed-a-69-year-old-pro-israel-jewish-man-turns-out-to-be-a-muslim-after-all/

Muslim college professor, Loay Alnaji, has been identified as the pro-Hamas activist ‘who killed Jewish protestor Paul Kessler’ with a megaphone that knocked him to the ground when rival rallies clashed in Thousand Oaks, California.
Daily Mail (h/t Charlotte)  The man who police have questioned in relation to the death of a Jewish man during a clash with pro-Palestinian protestors is 50-year-old college professor,  Loay Alnaji, who teaches computer science at Ventura Community College in California allegedly hit Paul Kessler with a megaphone knocking him to the ground, resulting in a fatal blow to the head.
Records show that Alnaji came to the United States in the 1990s – he had previously taught in the United Arab Emirates. He married Palestinian economics professor Nada Al Hammouri on Christmas Eve 2015. They have three children.
On his Facebook page he has posted several messages in Arabic supporting the Palestinian cause. In his most recent from three weeks ago, he wrote: ‘O Allah, release the captivity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque… Sooner than later……..Oh Allah, don’t deprive us of praying in it before we die… ‘Oh God, give victory to your weak servants in Palestine, and everywhere…O Allah, bind their hearts with the bond of patience and faith..’
Tensions have been growing between supporters of Israel and the Palestinians since Hamas’s October 7 surprise raid on the Jewish state in which some 1,400 people were killed. Alnaji’s stand against Israel’s actions took him to the streets of Thousand Oaks on Sunday afternoon, where the pro-Palestinian group was confronted by another supporting Israel.

https://www.thefp.com/p/end-dei-woke-capture?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a PhD to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could.

I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It did not.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-marriage-made-in-hell/

In the month since the horrific jihadist attacks on Israeli civilians, worldwide protests and antisemitic rallies, replete with Nazi-era slogans and tropes, began even before Israel launched its war against Hamas. In the U.S., these demonstrations include unprecedented coalitions of Muslims and “woke” leftists, a seemingly oxymoronic alliance, given that everything else Islam and leftism stand for are mutually exclusive.

Yet there is a deeper connection between Islam and the left, one that goes beyond tactical alliances––an inveterate hatred of the modern West and its defining goods like tolerance, political equality, unalienable individual rights, separation of church and state, and especially freedom as the birthright of every human being. And, most troubling, both Islam and the communist left endorse and have practiced brutal, indiscriminate violence in order to punish infidels and apostates.

Even before the rise of communism, its precursors, the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution, bespoke a “passionate intensity” redolent of Islam. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution described the revolution as  “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without religion, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.”  Moreover, the French Revolution legitimized violence as the tool for regenerating mankind, as does Islam today.

Nor did it take long for Marxism also to be recognized as a political religion, a secular substitute for Christianity, which since the Enlightenment has been weakened among the Western cognitive and cultural elites. Historian Michael Burleigh has catalogued communism’s “cultural appropriations” of Christianity: ‘“consciousness’ (soul), ‘comrades’ (faithful), ‘capitalist’ (sinner), ‘devil’ (counterrevolutionary), ‘proletarian’ (chosen people), and ‘classless society’ (paradise),” to name a few.

Likewise, the memoirs of former communists collected in The God That Failed (1949) contain striking resemblances to Christian descriptions of the experience of conversion. French novelist André Gide said that his “conversion is like a faith,” one he would gladly become a martyr to. Arthur Koestler describes his conversion to Marxism as a reprise of St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus: “the new light seemed to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern . . . There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/staring-into-the-abyss/

The absurdist play The Arsonists, written by Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch and staged in 1958, opens with the middle-class protagonist, a businessman named Biedermann, commenting in exasperation on a wave of arson attacks in the community. The perpetrators reportedly manage to talk their way into people’s homes, take up residence in their attics, then proceed to carry out the destruction of the houses from within. Biedermann doesn’t understand how people can be so trusting and agreeable as to let this happen. “They should hang the lot of them!” he fumes about the firebombers.

No sooner are those words out of his mouth than his maidservant announces that there is a stranger in the hall who came in to get out of the rain and refuses to leave. The maidservant is too intimidated by the hulking stranger to send him away, and Beidermann himself is reluctant to seem insensitive or inhospitable. He offers the stranger, Schmitz, a little bread and wine; soon they are having dinner and cigars together. Schmitz compliments Beidermann both for his “humanity” in taking him in and for his “civic courage” in speaking out against the firebombers.

Through a deft combination of intimidation and persuasion, Schmitz talks his way into spending the night in the attic. Beidermann becomes defensive when his wife is alarmed to learn about the stranger upstairs. “How do you know he’s not an arsonist?” she demands.

“I asked him,” explains Beidermann who, in his concern to avoid seeming like a distrustful or possibly even bigoted person, has rendered himself helpless to address what he senses is a growing threat. As a Greek-style chorus in the play proclaims, “We fail to see clearly / What’s happening right now / Under our noses / Under our roofs.”

As the play unfolds, Biedermann is taken aback to discover a second uninvited stranger in his home, an associate of Schmitz, who is storing oil drums full of petrol in the attic. “Why… why are there suddenly two of you?” sputters Beidermann. He blusters and objects but eventually even helps the interlopers measure a detonating fuse and gives them matches. Though he is well-informed about the plague of firebombings in his community, he simply cannot fathom that this evil has wormed its way into his own home – and the safety and comfort of his prosperous free society has left him neither mentally, physically, nor spiritually equipped to confront it and prevent the inevitable conflagration.

The chorus chants, “The timid are blind, more blind than the blind. / Hoping the evil is not really evil / They welcome the evil. / Defenseless, exhausted by fear, they hope for the best… / Until it’s too late.”

The success of The Arsonists, also known as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers, established Frisch as a world-class dramatist. In 1965 he was awarded the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, among other awards. Early drafts of the piece had been produced as far back as 1948, in the wake of the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, and so Swiss audiences understood the play as a warning against Communism, but it also has been seen as a metaphor for Nazism and fascism.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-george-soros-partner-who-disrupted-right-wing-publishing

Americans are used to their country’s cultural and political life reflecting the beliefs and personal whims of a hyperwealthy class that’s beyond public scrutiny. A few levels below Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch there are so many astronomically rich attention entrepreneurs trying to manipulate the content and structure of the country’s information channels that it’s possible to stumble across a new one entirely by accident. One such surprise encounter with an infinitely moneyed, would-be media visionary explains why the publication of South Carolina-based writer and Tablet columnist Lee Smith’s next book was tied up in court for nearly a year.

In October of 2022, Smith filed a lawsuit against a publisher called All Seasons Press (ASP), to whom he had sold the rights to a book proposal based on a February 2021 essay he had written for Tablet. “The Thirty Tyrants” argued that Americans at the top of the financial, entertainment, and political industries had sold their country out to communist China. Unsurprisingly, according to an outline Smith submitted to an editor at ASP in July of 2022, one of the book’s targets would be George Soros, who in the 2010s lauded China’s “doctrine of harmonious development,” hailed the Chinese government as “better functioning” than its American counterpart, and advocated “partnership with China to avoid world war.”

Upon the launch of All Seasons Press in early 2021, The New York Times reported that the new publisher was “pitching itself as an alternative to mainstream houses” for pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent conservatives who the Manhattan-based “big five” now refused to publish. ASP appeared to be a natural home for Smith, whose 2019 book The Plot Against the President had presented a favorable look at Congressman Devin Nunes’ campaign to expose the origins of the investigation into President Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia. Under the leadership of Louise Burke and Kate Hartson, two former big-five editors—the latter of them Smith’s editor for The Plot—ASP would “publish the best writers, politicians and pundits in the conservative movement,” according to the June 2021 press release announcing the company’s founding.

In his October 2022 complaint, filed in the federal court system’s Eastern District of Virginia, Smith claimed that contrary to its right-wing, pro-Trump presentation, ASP is secretly owned and controlled by a longtime Soros associate named Scott Bessent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5uccoidgBY

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/08/shock-one-in-five-democrats-side-with-hamas-ii-tipp-poll/

When it comes to the Israel-Hamas war, Americans have made a clear choice: a significant majority support Israel, not Hamas, while an even larger majority now call antisemitism a “serious” problem, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll reveals.

But a shockingly high 20% of Democrats say they support Hamas in the current conflict, despite reports of blood-curdling barbarism committed against innocent Israeli men, women, and children. Just over half of Democrats say they support Israel.

Amid the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, I&I/TIPP asked Americans this question: “Generally speaking, in the Israel-Hamas conflict, do you side more with Israel or Hamas?” The national online poll of 1,400 adults was taken from Nov. 1-3, with a margin-of-error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

Of those responding, 58% sided with Israel, while just 11% supported Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip on Israel’s southern border. But there was a big unknown, given the polarizing effect the attack by Hamas (which killed 1,400 mostly civilian noncombatants, including women, children, and babies) had on public opinion: 31% “weren’t sure.”

The political split was fairly wide, though all three major political groupings in the U.S. supported Israel by 50% or higher. The results include Democrats (54% Israel support, 20% Hamas support, 26% not sure), Republicans (71% Israel support, 7% Hamas support, 22% not sure), and independents (50% Israel support, 6% Hamas support, 44% not sure).

https://www.aol.com/news/mike-johnson-accused-biden-bribery-110000012.html

House Republicans are approaching their Biden impeachment inquiry with renewed vigor following the election of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has cautioned against rushing an investigation even as he’s previously accused the president of bribery.

As Speaker, Johnson has stressed a reserved approach to impeachment, invoking the founders in calling it the “heaviest power that we have,” while saying he has no predetermined outcome.

But as a prominent voice of the House Judiciary Committee, he was vocal in criticizing President Biden, at one point saying bribery is “what happened here.”

House Republicans have failed to demonstrate that Biden took a bribe — an allegation that surfaced as a result of a conversation with a Ukrainian oligarch that came to the FBI in a tip the bureau was unable to verify.

The White House has vigorously denied any wrongdoing by Biden and noted that even as Republicans have pored over the business dealings of his brother and son, they’ve failed to connect the president to their work overseas.

But as Johnson takes the helm from a former Speaker who at times seemed reluctant to pursue the matter, he said last week the House would soon have to determine how to move forward with an investigation shared across three committees.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/prominent-democrats-turn-on-rashida-tlaib-as-she-escalates-anti-israel-vitriol/

Prominent Democrats have turned on “Squad” member Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) over her hostility to Israel and her embrace of genocidal language.

The radical progressive first faced condemnation from Democrats in Congress and her home state of Michigan after she posted a video accusing the Biden administration of being complicit in Israel’s alleged genocide against Palestinians.

Tlaib said, “We will remember in 2024,” followed by the text, “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Instead of reversing course, Tlaib has leaned further into her anti-Israel commitments in recent days, even going so far as to defend a genocidal chant popular among pro-Palestinian protesters.

“From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” Tlaib wrote in an X post on Friday. “My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”

Democratic Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel responded by saying Tlaib’s defense of the hateful slogan crossed the line.

“@RashidaTlaib, I have supported and defended you countless times, even when you have said the indefensible, because I believed you to be a good person whose heart was in the right place,” Nessel wrote on X.

“But this is so hurtful to so many,” she said. “Please retract this cruel and hateful remark.”

Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada agreed that the phrase has violent connotations targeting the Jewish people.