ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia Versus Civilization The antisemitism of campus leftism may be incidental. The barbarism is the point. Tal Fortgang / Jonathan Deluty

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/03/25/antisemitism-campus-harvard-leftism-tal-fortgang-jonathan-deluty/

Not one week after the October 7 massacres, as America’s most prestigious institutions revealed themselves to be thoroughly embedded with pro-Hamas revolutionaries, we wrote: “Campus administrators should consider making significant changes before the American people realize what they are condoning.” Unfortunately, those administrators didn’t get the message.

On December 5, in what must surely rank among the most shameful moments in the history of academia, the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testified before a Congressional committee at a hearing about the surge of antisemitism on their campuses and refused to say that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate institutional policies. They opted instead for consultant-style newspeak, a whiplash-inducing rediscovery of the value of free expression, and contemptuous smirks. Their tone and coordination indicated that they stood not just for themselves but for the academy—a rarefied, insular, self-important world of its own—and they jolted Americans from their state of benign neglect towards our universities. In doing so, they revealed the acute need for a wholesale renovation of American universities to restore them as institutions that serve a socially useful function. We have subsidized and excused universities’ descent into factories of anti-social people and ideas. A band-aid will not suffice.

Many have responded to this moral collapse by demanding scalps. As of this writing, two of the three presidents who testified have resigned. Firings and resignations of leaders (and expulsions of students who vandalize property or occupy buildings) are necessary proximate goals, but cannot be the ultimate goal of the backlash. Rather, we must address the deeper problem of institutional capture by an ideology hostile to its host nation. What do we do when our finest schools have been overrun by students eager to cheer genocidal antisemitism, faculty and administrators who broadly agree, and a culture that could produce credentialed people so smugly disdainful of the West? 

Precisely diagnosing the disease is the first step towards offering effective prescriptions. The renovation of the American academy must be tailored to its problems, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 

One threshold observation is that a focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Mohamed Abdou, Deep Admirer of Hamas, Now Teaching at Columbia The self-described “Muslim anarchist” is “really proud” of his anti-Israel students. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mohamed-abdou-deep-admirer-of-hamas-now-teaching-at-columbia/

Mohamed Abdou is an “Islamic scholar” who is lost in admiration for Hamas, and how it managed to launch its “stealth” attack on October 7. What most of the world sees as unspeakable atrocities, with Hamas operatives beheading babies, burning children alive, raping, torturing, mutilating, and murdering Israeli girls, cutting the breasts off women and using them to play catch, cutting off the genitalia and gouging out the eyes of men, murdering children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, Mohamed Abdou sees as glorious deeds of derring-do, by a greatly outnumbered force of brave Muslim warriors, and he wants the whole world to know it.

Abdou is now teaching at Columbia, where he was appointed as that appetizing thing, a visiting professor, for the Spring Term. He’s already in his third month of teaching, no doubt singing the praises of Hamas in a lecture hall on Morningside Heights to a captive audience of entranced undergraduates. Why, if he performs to the satisfaction of Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Dabashi, three other admirers of Hamas on the permanent faculty at Columbia, he may even be made an offer for a permanent appointment to the Middle East Institute.

Robert Spencer wrote briefly about Abdou here, and more on this man, the latest moral monster to slither through the underbrush on Morningside Heights can be found here: “He Endorsed Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Then He Landed a Professorship at Columbia University.” By Jessica Costescu, Washington Free Beacon, February 27, 2024:

During a Jan. 5 interview with socialist podcast Revolutionary Left Radio, Islamic scholar Mohamed Abdou declared his support for Hamas and “the resistance.” The terror group’s “dedicated few,” he said admiringly, worked in “stealth mode” on Oct. 7 to defeat a “larger enemy” in Israel….

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Potemkin Feminism Imposters betraying women. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/potemkin-feminism/

Remember Christine Blasey-Ford? She is the psychologist whom former California Senator Dianne Feinstein discovered and groomed to be a hostile witness in the 2018 Supreme Court hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Her appearance was carefully timed for the end of the hearings for more impact. But her story describing Kavanagh’s alleged sexual assault of her at a high school party decades earlier was full holes and lacked credible evidence.

Now, just in time for the November election, she’s on a book-tour, garnering screen-time and specious praise for her “bravery.” So far, all the tour has accomplished is to publicize one of her own witnesses, Mark Judge, who she claimed was also at the party. But Judge told Fox News that he wasn’t there. And at the time of the hearings, in a letter to Senators he also said, “I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”

These tactics, replete with hoaxes lacking confirmable empirical evidence, are sadly all too familiar. For example, in 2006, the Duke University lacrosse team, three of whom were charged by an incompetent or unscrupulous District Attorney with kidnapping, rape, and first-degree sexual offenses against an exotic dancer. Many corporate media outlets rushed to judgement, wielding stale politically correct clichés that libeled the team––“The Real Face of Duke University,” “Spoiled Sports,” “Jocks and Prejudice,” “Wolves in Blazers and Khakis,” and “Will Duke Take a Look at Itself?” are a few.

By the way, does anyone believe that in this age of radical “woke” prosecutors, those Duke students would have been exculpated because the state bar filed ethics charges against the District Attorney for “withholding exculpatory evidence and making inflammatory statements about the case”?

These politically weaponized tactics have sprung from the hijacking of feminism that was obvious in the Nineties. A movement that had begun in order to ensure the integrity of women’s Constitutional rights, has now become a political weapon for pushing progressivism’s technocratic ambitions for expanding the reach and power both of the government, and of the factions sharing that aim to “fundamentally transform” the United States.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No One Is Above the Law. That Means a Trump DOJ Must Indict Joe: Biden Rich Lowry

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/no-one-is-above-the-law-that-means-a-trump-doj-must-indict-joe-biden/

Let’s apply the new Trump standard.

Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.

As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.

If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.

The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?

After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.

After getting her fraud judgment against Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James said, “No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Have We Reached Peak Climate Nuttery?

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/28/have-we-reached-peak-climate-nuttery/

A new report tells us that man-made global warming is driving up prices. Please tell us this is parody. It’s far too risible not to be.

Oh, but no. We’ve been assured that it’s a serious paper. “Global warming and heat extremes to enhance inflationary pressures,” was published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Communications: Earth and Environment. Axios tells us the study “​​incorporated more than 27,000 observations of monthly price indices across 121 countries in the developed and developing worlds during the 1996 to 2021 period, along with high-resolution weather observations.”

From that, the authors were able to determine that “human-caused climate change” is likely to worsening inflation. But it seems as if they had one eye closed as they reached that conclusion. Had they had both open throughout, they’d have to agree with H. Sterling Burnett, director of climate and environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, who said “climate change has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t print money, nor create new programs and policies spending it.”

Our friends at the Committee To Unleash Prosperity noted that “what’s especially pathetic about this story is first you have a bunch of nitwit academics writing the study.” It’s a fair point. But we also wonder just who were the peers who reviewed it.

Scientist-activist James Hansen, who is more the latter than the former? Insufferable hypocrite John Kerry? Maybe King Charles III, who told us 56 months ago that we had only 18 months to “decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels“? Or maybe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who must wonder why Miami isn’t under water and wants to weaponize the global warming scare to change the entire economy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

David Goldman:Two Adams, Two Foundings

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The New Racism is Poisoning America By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_new_racism_is_poisoning_america.html

The idea that past racism can be undone with more racism is ludicrous.  Affirmative action, established in the 1960s, emphasized equality of opportunity.  But it has transmogrified — through the politics of DEI, sexual orientation, and gender identity — into a new form of racism emphasizing equality of outcome.

Unconstitutional quotas deny college admissions and government jobs to whites and non-black, non-Latino, non-Native groups.  The worst is the recent invasion of healthcare by DEI-driven policies.  Belonging to a DEI-privileged group outweighs need.  White patients may have to wait longer than blacks or Hispanics for cardiac care or kidney transplants.  All in the name of “health equity” and righting past wrongs done to those groups.

This column will examine four recent lawsuits—among the many—against such policies. It will also show how a retribution-focused movement to embed racial preferences in medical treatment has gained traction over the last few years in the healthcare industry.

The first case is from Montana, where in 1991, the 52nd legislature enacted and codified House Bill 424 (originally House Joint Resolution 28) as Montana § 2-15-108, MCA. The law aimed to “take positive action to attain gender balance and proportional representation of minorities” in state boards, commissions, committees, and councils. Bias was alleged to cause the imbalance.

In September 2023, two vacancies opened for the 12-member Board of Medical Examiners, but the governor has been unable to make appointments since the appointments must adhere to DEI.  Do No Harm, an organization representing physicians and healthcare workers countering DEI in medicine, has filed a suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana (Helena Division), saying Montana § 2-15-108 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration’s Terrorist Pier in Gaza: The Trojan Horse For Terrorists to Take Over the Region by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20520/gaza-pier-qatar

Placing Qatar — rather than, say, the United Arab Emirates — in charge of the Gaza pier entrenches a terrorist-sponsoring Trojan Horse at Hamas’s beck and call. Qatar will use the pier to supply Hamas with more money and more powerful weapons. The port will also undoubtedly be used to smuggle Islamist jihadis from all around the world into the Gaza Strip to launch more massacres against Israelis.

Qatar has a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist offshoots, but also Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Al Nusra Front.

If Qatar really wants an end to the Israel-Hamas war, all it has to do is order its Hamas puppets immediately and unconditionally to release all the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas terrorists October 7 and held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, who are based in Doha, would not be able to refuse. Qatar is their lifeline.

The Qataris, however, are evidently in no rush to pressure Hamas: Qatar is clearly facing no pressure from the Biden administration. On the contrary, the Biden administration just agreed to extended Qatar’s ability to host America’s Al-Udeid Air Base, the headquarters of CENTCOM, for another ten years – for nothing in return.

“Congress must weigh in and cancel the 10-year extension of the military base in Qatar… The U.S. should seize assets tied to individuals and entities in Qatar for supporting terrorist groups, especially those tied to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism…. It’s time to put Doha on notice that they are jeopardizing their relationship with the U.S. by providing material support to designated terrorist groups. Qatar is clearly acting like a state sponsor of terror and should not be allowed to use the U.S. banking system to bypass existing, though not enforced, sanctions on funding Iran and its terrorist proxies.” — Former US intelligence officer Michael Pregent, The Hill, January 22, 2024.

The US should definitely start withdrawing from Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thanks to the Biden administration — which is also pressuring Israel not to eliminate the remaining Hamas terrorist battalions in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah — Qatar and its Hamas pawns are having the last laugh. In light of the Biden administration’s decision to turn itself into an ally of terrorists and their supporters, such as Hamas and Qatar – instead of strengthening US relations with Israel and its allies in the Gulf who are fighting terrorism — it is a very long last laugh, indeed.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made, Part 2 Noah Rothman

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/

I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.

“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”

With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Coming Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil, Part III Peter Kirsanow

Posted By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-coming-terrorist-attack-on-u-s-soil-part-iii/

The disaster at the southern border continues to grow. Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 250,000 encounters with illegal immigrants in December. This figure includes thousands of single, military-age men from China, Russia, and Iran.

The number of individuals on the terror watch list crossing the border has increased 2,500 percent during the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2023 more than 35,000 individuals with criminal records were arrested at the southern border, a tenfold increase since the beginning of Biden’s term (the actual figures are likely far larger since the reported numbers don’t include “gotaways,” conventionally estimated to constitute 50 percent of the total number of individuals entering the country illegally).

NORAD recently reported detecting more than a thousand unmanned-aerial-vehicle incursions along the border per month.

These alarming figures seem to have little impact on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who regularly appears bored or distracted at congressional hearings concerning the border. His nonchalance is shared by many open-borders advocates, some of whom casually note that none of the individuals on the terror watch list who’ve crossed the border have committed a terrorist act on U.S. soil. Yet. This is what passes for reasoned analysis from open-borders elites.

Perhaps they calculate (or hope) that a terrorist attack won’t occur in their city; terrorists, after all, traditionally prefer high-profile targets. But not always. The terror might be magnified if the attack occurred in a place where people feel relatively safe — a minor-league baseball game in Wichita, a parade in Dubuque, a fair in Salem.

Or perhaps the elites calculate that terrorists entering the country today won’t execute their plans until the next administration. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would exclusively blame a Trump administration for anything that occurs on or after 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2025, even if the attack were planned and executed solely by individuals who crossed the border during the Biden administration.