A Speaker Is Born, a President Is Diminished, and a Senate Majority Leader Has Gone Into Hiding: Eric Levine

Last week the country witnessed the birth of a Speaker of the House, the continuing diminishment of a President, and the disappearance of a Senate Majority Leader.

 In the same week Mike Johnson stared down Marjorie Taylor Greene and her merry band of ignorant buffoons to pass the much needed and overdue foreign-aid package, he travelled to Columbia University in New York City — ground zero for the antisemitic protests exploding on our college campuses – to make two simple statements: Antisemitism is unacceptable and America stands with Israel. If only President Biden and Chuck Schumer had Johnson’s courage and moral clarity.

 While the Speaker was giving a lesson in leadership, President Biden continued to embarrass himself and diminish his Presidency by putting the politics of his reelection ahead of America’s national security interests and Chuck Schumer has gone into hiding. 

 The Biden campaign has determined that for him to win in November, the President must win both Michigan and the votes of a significant majority of 18- to 24-year-olds. There is no better example of this strategy than how he is dealing with the explosion of antisemitism on our nation’s college campuses.

Iran Mullahs Speeding Up Nuclear Weapons Program: Anyone Interested? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20602/iran-speeding-up-nuclear-weapons

By backing, arming and training Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iran launched a proxy war against Israel, leveraging the conflict in part to divert attention from its nuclear ambitions.

The calculated move not only serves Iran’s immediate interests in destabilizing its adversaries – the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and most of all the United States, which it would like to see out of the region, so Iran could presumably have the Middle East all to itself. The diversion of the Gaza war also aligns with its goal of eradicating Israel.

These barbaric perversions [by Hamas on October 7, 2023] underscore Iran’s leaders’ comfort, if not pleasure, in employing any means at hand to achieve their objectives. They most likely do not look at their devastation abroad as triggering instability, but, on the contrary, as a means to attaining its hegemony, after which there will be peace — for themselves, at least.

From Iran’s perspective, acquiring nuclear weapons is the easiest way to significantly complete its takeover of the region and “export the revolution”: “We shall export the revolution to the whole world. Until they cry, ‘there is no god but God [Allah]’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

Unfortunately, the plan poses an existential threat not just to regional stability, but to global security. Iran has been moving into Latin America, possibly to target the “Great Satan,” the United States.

In the midst of the Hamas-Israel conflict — while the world’s attention is fixed on the war Iran and Hamas began — Iran’s ruling mullahs have seized the opportunity to advance their nuclear program.

As Hamas Loses Its Grip, Gazans Speak Out against the Terrorist Sect Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/as-hamas-loses-its-grip-gazans-speak-out-against-the-terrorist-sect/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=third

The unrest on America’s college campuses took a noticeable turn for the worse shortly after Iran entered the war that erupted with Hamas’s 10/7 massacre, and it got worse still after Israel retaliated in response to that 350-plus missile and drone attack on its territory. But even as the country’s most outspoken college students lean into their conclusion that the problem in the Gaza Strip is Israel, Gazans themselves are growing bolder in their condemnations of the terrorist sect that consigned them to this war.

“Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly willing to voice their anger against Hamas,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. Although “Hamas rules Gaza with a tight grip” and reliably visits retribution on the Gazans who speak out against its misrule, Palestinian civilians are increasingly “speaking out against the Islamist group.”

One Gazan who spoke with FT’s reporters criticized the terrorist outfit for failing to foresee the consequences Israel would mete out in response to the 10/7 massacre — or, if they did, to ignore them. “They [Hamas] should have restricted themselves to military targets,” he said. Another castigated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “I pray every day for God to punish the one who brought us to this situation,” that Palestinian civilian exclaimed. “I pray every day for the death of Sinwar.”

According to pollsters with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, these sentiments may be indicative of broader trends in the opinion landscape.

Khalil Shikaki, director of the centre, said that support for Hamas fell by almost a quarter to 34 per cent, according to a poll taken during the first week of March. The movement also lost popularity in the West Bank, where support fell from 44 per cent to 35 per cent. “There is no doubt support for Hamas is declining in Gaza because more and more people feel it has some responsibility for the pain they are enduring,” said Shikaki.

And the liberty Palestinian civilians now feel to voice their hostility toward Hamas’s regime freely is almost certainly a direct result of Israel’s efforts to degrade and, ultimately, disperse the terrorist organization. “Critics have been emboldened because there’s no one now to fear,” said one Gaza analyst. One former resident of the Strip, a professor at the Gaza-based al-Azhar University, put it most succinctly: “People are no longer afraid.”

Heroic Doubling and Supporting Hamas Once again, young people who have nothing important or valuable in their lives and who believe in nothing substantive or enduring are demonstrating their desperate need for belonging and purpose. By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/27/heroic-doubling-and-supporting-hamas/

Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists.  Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men—especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media—tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave but do so in heroic fashion.

For more than a decade now, the journalist and editor Robert Beckhusen has noted that the ties that bind spree shooters and self-radicalized terrorists are both numerous and consistent.  Young men confronted by the social and spiritual emptiness of their lives and society default to what is often called “heroic modeling” or “heroic doubling,” which is to say that they take on a symbolic cause and kill not just to slake their own bloodlust but to exact revenge for a whole class of people with whom they believe they find common cause.

Almost exactly ten years ago, just after the spree shooting in Isla Vista, California, Beckhusen interviewed Roger Griffin, a professor of Modern History at Oxford-Brookes University in the UK and the author of Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning.  Griffin explained the phenomenon of “heroic doubling” as follows:

[I]n the mind of the killer, they’re not just killing someone as the sole purpose of the destruction. They’re killing someone symbolic of something more general, which is also meant to send a message to the survivors….

…what happens psychologically—the person has undergone a process whereby a rather confused, pained, ordinary self puts on a sort of mask, which turns them into an actor—or a protagonist—in a personal narrative drama. . . .

In his avatar double, he achieves the ability to run and fight.  I believe that’s a very powerful metaphor for what happens in the process of heroic doubling.  Because the person who’s previously felt impotent and had no agency . . . is made to feel potent and have agency returned to him by adopting this mission.  So in that moment, he becomes a heroic version, or avatar, of himself.

Although the parallels are hardly perfect, over the years, I’ve found this concept of heroic doubling to be a useful heuristic for assessing the otherwise seemingly pointless embrace by American young men—and, increasingly, young women—of foolish, intellectually abhorrent, and often violent ideologies and practices.

Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab by Gary Gindler

Left Imperialism is an exercise in a novel field: ideology archaeology.

Is the United States Constitution conservative or liberal? Where does the conservative-liberal dichotomy originate? Are American conservatives related to British conservatives or not? Who are the anarchists―left-wingers or right-wingers?

Left Imperialism offers the answers to these questions and many more, taking on a spectrum of ideologies from a brand-new evolutionary perspective. For example, the book traces the origin of many standard political terms―like “left-wing” and “right-wing”―from their inception to the present through all their perturbations. It also examines in distinctive detail political movements like Conservatism, Fascism, Liberalism, Marxism, Anarchism, and many more, from as far away as Cardinal Richelieu’s epoch through World War II and into the present.

The book’s narrative has one overriding theme: the evolution of freedom.

Left Imperialism presents a novel concept in political philosophy called the “individual-state paradigm,” which generalizes and extrapolates the Right-Left distinction.

Deroy Murdock: It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938 “The environment at Columbia University is absolutely dreadful.”

https://spectator.org/its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-1938/

If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?

NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.

Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.

However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.

Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.

At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.

VIDEO: MUST WATCH 2004 “COLUMBIA UNBECOMING”

In 2004: Jewish students described on film Arab professors at Columbia U harassing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLzfegav40U

One-Tenth of One Percent by Judd Garrett

https://www.objectivityistheobjective.com/post/one-tenth-of-one-percent

College campuses across America, especially Columbia. Yale, NYU, USC, are being overrun by anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrators. USC has even canceled its graduation ceremony due to security concerns relating to anti-Israel protests. These protesters are responding to Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack on Israel where 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians were targeted and murdered by Hamas terrorists, and somehow, these moral geniuses are protesting Israel. They are protesting the country that had their elderly shot in cold blood, their women brutally raped and murdered, and their babies beheaded. The country that suffered those atrocities is being vilified and protested. But this is what Islam does. It twists and vilifies the justified actions of their enemies to their own gain. So, Islamic terrorists attack Israel, Israel fights back, and Israel is painted as the bad guy.

The Muslims completely memory hole the fact that they drew first blood because in their mind, they can do whatever they want with impunity. No one’s speaking about all of the vicious murdering that the Islamic terrorists did. We’re supposed to forget about that, or ignore it, or write it off because those are just extremists, and they don’t represent all of Islam. But where are the Islamic leaders who are denouncing what happened on October 7 in the name of Islam? Why do they refuse to distance their religion from the terrorists? Where is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Where is Kyrie Irving? Where is Barack Obama? They are imitating crickets. Every time there is an Islamic terrorist attack, the Muslims in America are not required to stand up and denounce the attack. Only the non-Muslims are warned about Islamophobia. We haven’t even processed the terrorist attack, and we’re being accused of Islamophobia because Muslims targeted another group of people because of their religion. Every white person in America has to denounce white supremacy over and over and over again. We have to denounce slavery that ended 160 years ago, but Muslims are never required to denounce Islamic terrorism that happened the day before. And they never do because many tacitly approve.

This is the way it always works with Islam. Between the 6th century AD and the 10th century AD, the Muslims invaded and took over all of Byzantine Christianity, sacking city after city, town after town, murdering and raping, and giving the people a choice – convert to Islam or die. The Muslims took over all the Holy Lands, and pushed into Southern France and Southern Italy, leaving a river of blood in their wake. We never hear about that, but when the Pope organizes the Crusades to take back the Holy Lands and southern Europe which had been stolen from the Western world by Muslims, the Crusaders are painted as the bad guys. Most of the ancient mosques in the Middle East used to be Christian churches that the Muslims turned into mosques after they conquered that city by force. They never mention all the murdering brutality that the Muslims did which created the need for the Crusaders. But the Crusaders are always framed as the bad guys and Islam is always portrayed as the innocent victims.

The Ottoman Empire is the only empire in the history of the world, that is never taken to task for the mass atrocities that they committed in building their empire.

How to Defund the Leftist Non-Profit Empire Behind the Campus Riots It’s time to enforce the law. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-defund-the-leftist-non-profit-empire-behind-the-campus-riots/

There are some very well-researched articles making the rounds connecting the dots when it comes to who’s funding the pro-Hamas campus riots.

Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium secured documents showing that the Columbia occupiers were getting advice from Palestine Legal which is funded by the Ford Foundation.

The New York Post had a widely circulated piece connecting the dots to George Soros. I had my own article on the Soros links last week.

Other organizations in play include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has extensively backed the anti-Israel movement.

This is not an either/or situation. Most pro-terror orgs benefit from multiple funding sources.

The bigger issue beyond Soros or the Ford Foundation is the work that the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been doing in looking at the rise of radical nonprofits.

The nonprofits involved are casually violating tax regulations with no response from the IRS (which has been persecuting the Freedom Center for 5 years). Some of the worst abuses involve WESPAC, a fiscal sponsor for some of the ugliest players around. (The same incidentally is true of the nonprofits behind the ecoterrorism including the attacks on classical art museums around the world.)

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group at the core of the pro-Hamas protests, has local chapters who are funded by student activity fees while its national group is fiscally sponsored by WESPAC.

Reihan Salam Embrace Pluralism over Racialism All of us, Jewish or not, have an interest in defeating the racialist ideology that enables anti-Semitism to flourish.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/embrace-pluralism-over-racialism

Jews feel less safe in America than they did a generation ago, and for good reason. As my colleagues have documented, we are living through a disturbing surge in anti-Semitic violence. The reason, I suspect, is a change in the ideological climate, one that represents a grave threat to the American experiment.

Other nations, throughout their histories, have scorned the Jewish people. But it was George Washington who asked that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Since then, America has welcomed the Jewish people. In return, it has reaped enormous rewards, as the extraordinary achievements of Jewish scientists, doctors, lawyers, artists, businesspeople, and statesmen have helped make America the most dynamic, productive, and creative nation in the world.

America’s relationship with Jews is special but not entirely unique. The U.S. welcomed them for the same reason it welcomed my immigrant parents and countless others: a sense of confidence that America’s founding values were so compelling that we need not fear difference. If newcomers embraced the nation’s commitment to hard work and self-reliance, the presence of thriving communities of different religious and ethnic stripes would enrich the American experiment, not endanger it. This balance between an expectation of assimilation to shared norms of personal responsibility and active citizenship, on the one hand, and warm tolerance for the preservation of inherited traditions, on the other—call it meritocratic pluralism—has worked exceedingly well for countless minority ethnic groups, American Jews included.

Today, a new form of adversarial identity politics threatens to throw this balance askew. This “racialism”—a belief that race-consciousness and group-based conflict are and will forever remain central to American public life—scorns meritocratic pluralism, offering in its place a noxious brand of leveling-down egalitarianism. If racial groups are always at odds and assimilation is impossible or undesirable, a given group’s prosperity is no longer worthy of celebration and emulation. Wealth instead becomes a zero-sum pie to divvy up. Groups like the Jews—who turn the blessings of liberty into economic and intellectual achievement through hard work and sacrifice—are regarded with envy.