BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Censorship Competition Heats Up Can upstart Bookshop.com outdo mighty Amazon in suppressing ideas that may cause discomfort? Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/censorship-competition-heats-up-11618416448?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

By now it is clear that wokeness is a contagious malady. Amazon.com made headlines in February when it suddenly delisted Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment,” a thoughtful, humane and deeply researched investigation of a controverted subject of public debate.

As the publisher of that 2018 bestseller, I was taken aback by reports that Mr. Anderson’s book was unavailable at “the world’s largest bookstore.” At first, I wondered whether there was some mistake.

But no. It was a deliberate act of censorship. Moreover, like the earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” They didn’t just stop selling the book. They pushed it into the digital oubliette, erasing all trace of it from the Amazon website. They did the same thing at their subsidiaries Audible, which sells audiobooks, and AbeBooks, which sells secondhand books.

Now it turns out that Bookshop.org, which bills itself a scrappy alternative to the Bezos Behemoth, is up to the same game. A couple of weeks ago, a reader alerted us that Mr. Anderson’s book had gone missing from the Bookshop.org website.

The organization never responded to our queries. But on Friday we learned from our distributor that Bookshop had deep-sixed the book. “We did remove this title based on our policies,” Bookshop wrote to our distributor—without, however, explaining what those “policies” might be. “We had multiple complaints and concerns from customers, affiliates, and employees about the title.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Radicalized Political Ingratitude David Lewis Schaefer

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://lawliberty.org/radicalized-political-ingratitude/

“Gratitude for the privileges that American citizenship bestows, and for those who made those privileges and their extension possible is in short supply.”

On February 25, a New York Times front-page story exposed a specious incident of alleged racial harassment at Smith College. In July 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student who had grown up in Manhattan but whose parents came from Mali, claimed to have experienced a near-“meltdown” because both a janitor and a campus police officer asked what she was doing in a dormitory lounge as she lunched there. She viewed their interruption of her meal as an “outrageous” sign that some Smith personnel questioned her presence at the College, and indeed her very “existence overall as a woman of color.” She also disclosed her terror at the possibility that the police officer might have been carrying “a lethal weapon.”

Not surprisingly, given the recent political environment on American campuses, Smith’s president Kathleen McCartney immediately issued an apology for the incident and put the janitor on paid leave, remarking—prior to any investigation—that the incident served as a painful reminder of “the ongoing legacy of racism and bias … in which people of color are targeted while simply going about their daily business.”

As the Times recounts, a report issued three months later by a law firm hired by Smith to investigate the episode drew little attention. This report found no evidence of bias, and instead determined that Ms. Kanoute had been eating in a dorm that was closed for the summer. The janitor had been encouraged to notify campus security if he saw any unauthorized people there, and the security officer who followed up on the report was (like all Smith College police) unarmed.

In the meantime, Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee who had reminded Kanoute that students weren’t allowed to be eating in the vacant room, was targeted by Kanoute on Facebook as a “racist,” along with a janitor who’d been employed at Smith for 21 years and wasn’t even on campus at the time of the incident. Blair, who received threatening notes and phone calls as a consequence of the accusation, had to be hospitalized when the threats generated an outbreak of her lupus. The janitor resigned his position after Kanoute posted his photo on social media, charging him with “racist cowardly behavior.”

The 2018 incident recently returned to the headlines thanks to a letter of resignation issued by Jodi Shaw, a former student support coordinator at Smith, in response to the lasting effect that the College administration’s treatment of the Kanoute affair and its offshoots had on the Smith community, and on her job in particular.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Press Is Infrastructure for Biden Tim Graham

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://townhall.com/columnists/timgraham/2021/04/14/the-press-is-infrastructure-for-biden-n258786

Sen. John Cornyn came under blistering attack from Washington Post scribe Aaron Blake for having wondered whether President Joe Biden is really in charge, since he’s kept an extremely low profile with the press. Blake took after the senator for implying the Trump spin that old Joe has lost a few mental gears and is something of a “Manchurian Candidate.” “It’s a baseless and ugly bit of innuendo,” Blake wrote.

On Twitter, Cornyn linked to a Politico story in which writer Eugene Daniels noted: “The president is not doing cable news interviews. Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional. The public comments are largely scripted. Biden has opted for fewer sit down interviews with mainstream outlets and reporters.” He’s had one press conference during his 84 days in office.

One obvious explanation for the Biden strategy is his tendency to insert his foot in his mouth. But it’s also obvious that he has zero fear of his low availability to the press being a problem with “mainstream” reporters, since about 99.96% of them surely voted for him in November.

Most Americans are relieved that the president’s tweets are “unimaginably conventional.” But the press slid back to its Obama-era tone, championing sappy Biden tweets about his love for his wife, “Jilly,” and Jilly’s buying treats at black-owned bakeries. White House chief of staff Ron Klain routinely retweets the “mainstream” reporters, implying that he endorses their helpful pro-Biden spin.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Lost Liberties Cal Thomas

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/04/13/our-lost-liberties/?u

If one can say the pandemic has had any positive side effect, it has been to help us focus on what the loss of liberties looks like. Such losses do not occur immediately but erode over time as people become increasingly comfortable with government claiming to know what is best for us.

The Biden administration is proceeding on a downward spiral that has ended in lost liberties in nations of the past by seizing increasing amounts of power for itself through a slew of executive orders, without the consent of the people, or Congress.

When announcing his gun control executive orders last week, President Joe Biden referenced the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. He claimed his orders do not infringe on that right, but added, “No amendment is absolute.” That is concerning.

He also announced the appointment of a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A White House press release sought to obscure its real goal—court-packing:

The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Georgetown Affair: New Levels Of Progressive Reality Denial  Francis Menton

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-4-13-the-georgetown-affair-new-levels-of-progressive-reality-denial

Just a few months ago (December 2020) I declared that the “essence of progressivism is refusal to deal with reality.” I had some pretty good examples in that post, but none of them can top the current convulsions that are upending Georgetown Law School. At Georgetown recently, a teacher made the mistake of uttering a small dose of reality while speaking to a colleague. This occurred after a recorded class had concluded and everyone else had signed out, but while the recording of the class was still running. Needless to say, the recording of the teacher’s remarks promptly hit Twitter. Thereupon, all hell broke loose.

The subject of the reality that must not be spoken is of course the current all-consuming obsession of academia, namely race. The question I pose is, are Georgetown, and for that matter all of academia, taking this obsession so far as to fully undermine their principal mission?

Probably, you are familiar with how this started. The after-class discussion took place in early March between Georgetown teachers Sandra Sellers and David Batson. Here is video of the key portion of the discussion. The offending words came from Sellers, referring to the performance of students in her class:

“I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on. It’s some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom, it drives me crazy.” 

Before getting to the reaction to that remark, let me discuss how the reality of affirmative action plays out for a law school like Georgetown.

The Law School Admission Test is taken by nearly all aspiring law students who want to attend a high-ranked school. The LSAT is specifically designed to predict success in law school. Like all such tests, it is far from perfect, and any individual student may far over-perform or under-perform his or her LSAT results. But averaged over the full range of the test takers, the LSAT is reasonably accurate. I have found it difficult to locate LSAT results by race, but in this article last fall in the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald came up with a racial breakdown of LSAT results for the year 2004, which she sources to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Opinion: Call it the ‘Anti-Israel Prize’ By David Isaac

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://worldisraelnews.com/opinion-call-it-the-anti-israel-prize/

Israel has a bad habit of making the worst choices for its best prizes.

This goes especially for its most prestigious prize – the Israel Prize – its highest cultural honor.

The latest cringeworthy awardee is Oded Goldreich, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Israel’s Weizmann Institute.

Goldreich’s pastime appears to be signing BDS petitions. He signed one in 2019 urging Germany to scotch a resolution equating BDS with anti-Semitism. In March of this year, he signed another calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in Judea and Samaria, notably Ariel University. (There’s actually a right-left consensus in Israel not to give up Ariel University, making Goldreich a truly exceptional leftist.)

The Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement has long been recognized as an anti-Semitic movement whose goal is the destruction of Israel. Last year, the co-founder of the BDS movement said as much.

A selection committee chooses the winners of the Israel Prize. In what is usually a formality, Israel’s Education Minister signs off on its decision. Last month, the current minister, Yoav Galant, got wind of the committee’s plans to give it to Goldreich. He told the committee to revisit its decision, which is his privilege according to the prize rules.

“Someone for whom the State of Israel and its laws are not dear to their heart is not worthy of the Israel Prize,” Galant said.

The committee didn’t like being second guessed and petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court. What role does the Supreme Court have in this? Absolutely none. But in Israel everything is justiciable, so the Court jumped in. Though it leans (more like screams) left, the Court sided with Galant. This was partly thanks to the pro-Zionist group “Im Tirtzu,” which revealed that Goldreich had signed onto the recent anti-Ariel University petition, a fact that hadn’t been known.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Secretary Blinken Is Wrong on Israel’s Demography Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on April 15th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3mMyTZ8

Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps advising Israel to retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), lest it loses its Jewish majority.

Secretary Blinken is wrong, relying on highly-inflated, erroneous Palestinian Authority numbers, ignoring the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography, and overlooking the unprecedent Jewish demographic tailwind in Israel, as documented by the following data.  

Jewish demography bolstered

*The number of Israeli Jewish births in 2020 (134,866) was 68% higher than 1995 (80,400), while the number of Israeli Arab births in 2020 was 16% higher (42,435) than 1995 (36,500), as reported by the March 2021 Monthly Bulletin of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS).

* In 2020, Jewish births were 76% of total births, compared to 69% in 1995.

*The fertility rate (number of births per woman) of Israeli secular Jewish women has trended upward during the last 25 years, while ultra-orthodox women have experienced a slight decline.  

*Israeli Jewish women – who are second only to Iceland in joining the job market – are unique in experiencing a rise of fertility rate, along with expanded urbanization, education, standard of living, integration into the job market and a rise of wedding age, while these phenomena have lowered the fertility rate in all other countries.  

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Back to Iran’s Nuclear Future Israel defends itself as Biden courts Tehran to return to the flawed Obama deal.

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/back-to-irans-nuclear-future-11618354043?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

‘America is back” has been a mantra of the early Biden Presidency, and back how is the question. So far regarding Iran it seems to mean back to the future of 2015-2016 and another bad nuclear deal.

The U.S. on Wednesday will resume talks in Vienna to revive the nuclear agreement, but the bigger news is the explosion over the weekend at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. No one has taken credit, but Israel has been notably public in saying it will do whatever it must to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Unlike past cyber attacks, the U.S. was quick to say it had nothing to do with the Natanz attack. A fair conclusion is that Israel feels it must act because it sees President Biden rushing back to a deal that clearly hasn’t stopped Iran from continuing to make progress toward a nuclear breakout.

Washington and Tehran are so far speaking through European intermediaries, but the focus of the talks is also back to the Obama future. The Iranians, who outmaneuvered the same American negotiators six years ago, are demanding the removal of all sanctions as the price for a return to the deal. Donald Trump’s sanctions have increased domestic economic pressure on the mullahs, who want access to global oil markets and investment.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Have Elites Abandoned Merit?By Richard J. Shinder

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/13/why-have-elites-abandoned-merit/

If you’re just a grubby striver, firm in your conviction that you deserve to succeed or fail based upon your own abilities and efforts, know well that elite institutions are now arrayed against you.

Surveying several recent news items, one could not be faulted for believing that the notion of merit has been significantly downgraded in American life.

United Airlines tweeted last week that it “plan(s) for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” While perhaps a worthy goal, left unmentioned are the relevance of gender or race to piloting a jet safely, and any support for the assertion that such groups previously had been excluded from consideration).

In higher education, two Ivy League academic institutions, Harvard and Yale, have been in the crosshairs of legal actions for disfavoring Asian Americans in college admissions, these applicants’ credentials notwithstanding (and this during a time when hate crimes against Americans of Asian heritage are on the rise). More broadly within higher education, this past year’s “test-optional” approach to admissions due to COVID-19 may be here to stay.

While few will give direct voice to the sentiment that “merit no longer matters,” our elites and institutions appear to have moved honest achievement well down the list of what is celebrated and are increasingly hostile to its promotion—a significant reversal of past practice.

The ideals of advancing one’s station through ability and hard work, and society rewarding legitimate achievement, have been on an upward trajectory since the advent of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, which provided the brains and brawn for self-actualization and economic advancement, respectively. What caused our elites, who embraced merit after having signally failed to prevent its advance at the expense of entrenched privilege, to later turn against it with such force?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The U.S.-Israeli Honeymoon Ends A new administration places Iran and Palestinians on par with the Jewish State. Joseph Puder

Posted By on April 14th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/us-israeli-honeymoon-over-joseph-puder/

It seems that the Trump era ‘honeymoon’ in US – Israeli relations is over under the new administration of Joe Biden. The US is now prepared to go back to previous policies of so-called ‘evenhandedness’ between Israel and the Palestinians. Furthermore, the Biden administration appears to return to the Obama administration policy of appeasing the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken briefed Israel’s Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi about the Biden administration’s plan for the indirect talks with the Iranians in Vienna. He said that he did not believe the meeting would bear fruit. The New York Times reported (April 6, 2021) that, “The United States and Iran agreed through intermediaries on Tuesday to establish two working groups to try to get both countries back into compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.” At the moment there is a battle of wills. The Iranian officials claim that they can return to compliance fairly quickly, but demand that the US must first lift the sanctions. The US wants the Iranians to move first to return to compliance before sanctions are eased. The Iranians, it should be said, refused to deal directly with the Americans.

The Iranian economy is in shambles as the result of the Trump administration sanctions, and it would seem that the Iranians are in a weak position in the upcoming bargaining. In the meantime, however, US officials estimated that Iran’s ‘breakout time’ to a nuclear bomb is down to a few months. That might be the ostensible reason why the Biden administration is so eager to engage with Iran’s radical regime. The Iranian’s, on their part, know how eager Biden is to reverse Trump’s actions vis-à-vis Iran. The operative question is simply this: are US officials wrong about the ‘breakout time,’ and are the Iranians, in order to strengthen their bargaining position, are exaggerating their progress. Conversely, the Iranians may already have the bomb, and have most certainly the ‘know how’ to assemble a bomb. In whatever the case may be, it is unlikely that Iran would be flexible enough to agree to the US requests for modifications to the 2015 nuclear deal, such as extending the expiration time. The Ayatollahs have already announced that they are opposed to any change. That means that the US and the western powers would have to relent on Iran’s development of long-range missiles that could carry nuclear payloads. Tehran would certainly oppose the US demand that it ends its nefarious terrorist behavior in the Middle East region and beyond.