ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Blaming Israel For the Stampede Deaths in Gaza The uncritical acceptance of Hamas’ claims. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/blaming-israel-for-the-stampede-deaths-in-gaza/

Rushing to judgment, many political leaders, and much of the world’s media, have uncritically accepted Hamas’ claim that the IDF is responsible for the deaths of 104 Gazans on February 29 at a site where a convoy of more on 30 aid trucks was trying to make its way to a distribution point, when thousands of Gazans swarmed over the trucks, trying to loot them and carry off their cargo of food aid. What is not in dispute is that a great many Gazans died, though the Hamas figure of 104 may be an exaggeration. What is also not in dispute is that the IDF fired some shots and that thousands of Gazans swarmed over the aid trucks, trying to loot them. The Israelis say they did not fire into the crowd. First they fired warning shots into the air, and then, when a group of Gazans failed to be dissuaded by those warning shots and continued to move menacingly toward them, the IDF shot “fewer than ten” Gazans. The IDF maintains that the vast majority of those who died did so when they were either trampled upon in the stampede to loot the trucks, or actually fell under the wheels of the trucks that continued to move, albeit slowly, forward. More on this incident can be found here: “US blocks Security Council motion blaming Israel for deadly Gaza aid convoy incident,” Times of Israel, March 1, 2024:

Amid American opposition, Arab nations failed Thursday overnight to get immediate support for a UN Security Council statement that would have blamed Israeli forces for the more than 100 reported deaths as Palestinians in northern Gaza swarmed an aid convoy.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest Three great films best seen in a theater. by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-boys-in-the-boat-the-peasants-and-the-zone-of-interest/

Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.

Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that “Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.” Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It’s fashionable to declare one’s superiority by sneering at popular culture. It’s harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important as the candidates we support with our votes.

We get something from publicly watching a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a 1942 screwball comedy. I’d watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on Rhett Butler’s handsome face (see here). Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, “Do you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?” You comfort and enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and tense. Mel Gibson’s The Passion depicts Christ’s torture, crucifixion, and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me. They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock. After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over, distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.

The loss of public movie-going erodes not just community, but also art. Ali’s well is a famous, eight-minute scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless, tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man  to arrive, we experience a fraction of the desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don’t like, like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List.

My students, trained on media that rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain’s reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali’s well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Critical Race Theory Is the New Segregation across Schools Nationwide By Wai Wah Chin

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/03/06/opinion/critical-race-theory-is-the-new-segregation-across-schools-nationwide/

Since the public became aware of critical race theory a few years ago, it’s subverted almost every aspect of America’s fabric. 

In operative terms, CRT, a neo-Marxist dogma, reduces every interaction between individuals into a collectivist conflict, between the oppressor race (the guilty villain) and oppressed race (the righteous victim). 

And the kids are not well. 

CRT is not just a war on kids — it’s actually a war on the entire Western civilization as characterized by the Enlightenment values of individual agency and freedom. 

Even at the Department of Defense’s K-12 schools for the children of US service members, CRT indoctrination was found to be so divisive and toxic that the organization responsible for it, the Education Activity Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, was shut down — though this indoctrination remains in use, and the DEI office was caught last month reincarnated as the DEI “Steering Committee.” 

The collectivist race reductionism of CRT indoctrinates kids — even young ones still “reading” picture books — to despise all whites as privileged oppressors and rally to all blacks as helpless victims.

Beginning in full force next year in California but already introduced in some locations, for example, the state’s recently mandated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum instructs kids that they belong to either the oppressor group or the victim group, due only to their individual race. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Howard Husock Jamaal Bowman’s Voting Rights Hypocrisy The vocal opponent of restrictive voting rules stands to benefit from New York’s onerous registration policies.

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jamaal-bowmans-voting-rights-hypocrisy

Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, best known for pulling a fire alarm in the Capitol, has made voting rights a signature issue. A member of the uber-progressive “Squad” led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman has even engaged in a hunger strike and been arrested while protesting the Senate’s failure to suspend the filibuster rule to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, which effectively would have federalized state voter laws. Following his arrest, Bowman insisted that he would “do it again and again and again” and promised to do “everything in my power to bring attention to the crisis we are in and ensure our democracy functions in a manner that represents the people.” For all his preening, however, Bowman stands to benefit from New York State’s especially restrictive voter-registration laws in his own hotly contested primary this June.

Bowman’s polarizing politics have drawn a serious challenger into the Democratic primary field: moderate Westchester County executive George Latimer, whose entry into the race was prompted, in part, by Bowman’s anti-Zionism. The Squad member notably supported a House resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire within days of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and conspicuously boycotted Israel president Isaac Hertzog’s address to Congress. In response, major Jewish groups, including the American Israel Political Action Committee and even the left-leaning group J Street, have supported Latimer’s campaign.

But Bowman’s opponents have had to race against time, and the constraints of New York’s voting laws, to improve Latimer’s chances by expanding the pool of primary voters, especially Jewish independents. While New York’s Democratic primary isn’t until June 25, the state set a February 14 deadline for voters to choose or change their political party—four months before the election. That’s the earliest deadline in the country, according to John Opdyke of the group Open Primaries, and it especially hurts Latimer, who had not announced his campaign until late December.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Joe Biden, An American Autocrat (According To The New York Times)

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/08/joe-biden-an-american-autocrat-according-to-the-new-york-times/

The left seems increasingly resigned to the fact that Donald Trump could defeat Joe Biden in a rematch this November. So much so that it is busy speculating about the hellscape Trump II will unleash.

He will destroy democracy. He will rule as an authoritarian. And so forth.

The New York Times took another stab at it Thursday in its daily email newsletter, The Morning.

David Leonhardt, who runs the newsletter, says that a good way to understand how Trump might govern in a second term is to look at his “affinity” for Viktor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, who has become the bête noire of the left.

So, Leonhardt does what journalists always do when they are trying to understand something: they talk to other journalists. In this case, the Times’ Central and Eastern Europe bureau chief Andrew Higgins.

Leonhardt’s first question to Higgins sets the tone for the rest of the newsletter: People often describe Orban as autocratic. But he’s not a ruler who jails or kills his opponents. Can you describe how he suppresses dissent?

The point is to scare readers about what Trump will do if he wins in November.

We can’t say whether Higgins’ portrayal of Orban is accurate — we doubt it’s even close to the mark. But we noticed something in Higgins’ answers. All his attempts to define Orban as an autocratic ruler apply to President Joe Biden, not Trump.

So, as an experiment, we swapped the names from Orban to Biden and replaced other references. We were struck by the results.

But judge for yourselves. Here is Thursday’s The Morning newsletter, updated. (All of our changes to the original are indicated in bold.)

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

International Law or Antisemitism? by Bat Ye’or

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20461/international-law-or-antisemitism

In his study on this subject, David Elber demonstrates that the UN has no possession of territorial sovereignty and therefore cannot decree the allocation of a territory over which it has no sovereignty (on the basis of the universal principle of law nemo dat quod non habet — no one can give what he does not possess), especially when this decision violates previous treaties endorsed by the UN itself. Resolution 181 only made suggestions to avoid the threat of war from the Arabs.

With the Venice Declaration, the European Economic Community demanded the creation of a Palestinian state on the territories liberated by Israel in 1967, which had been illegally occupied and rendered Judenrein [ethnically cleansed of Jews] by Arab countries since 1949. Since that time, the EEC/EU have never ceased to impose the concept of “Palestinian people” instead of Arab refugees, in order to justify its claim to a state that it has been striving to build for decades by monitoring, restricting and harassing Israelis in their own country, recognized by international treaties.

For the past 40 years, the EEC/EU, which wants to get rid of Israel at all costs, has invented a false people, the Palestinians, devoid of national particularisms and history, artificially constructed as a look-alike to Israel, even though they claims to follow the Koran, embody jihad against unbelief and adhere to Nazism.

UN Resolution 181, falsely called international law, authorizes the delegitimization of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem according to the 2,000-year-old anti-Semitic tradition, and the reduction of the Jewish state to an indefensible parcel that will soon be made to disappear. It has already created Palestinian ministries and ambassadors for a people that is not a people, but which it is determined to create in homage to the Hitler-Husseini alliance that symbolizes the jihad against Israel.

Over the last few decades, the EU’s alliance with the Palestinian jihad — a war to Islamize the planet… In its relentless fight against Israel, Europe has sacrificed its own territory and people to Palestinianism. Today, in a strange coincidence, we see the same alliances as in the 1940s: the majority of European countries, united under the government of the Third Reich, allied with Islam and at war with Russia and the Jewish people in a global anti-Semitic tsunami.

It is commonplace to hear it proclaimed everywhere and at every turn as a proven truth that the State of Israel is violating international law. Interviewed by Sonia Mabrouk on February 11, Manuel Bompard once again made this accusation, even specifying a date to a violation that dates back 70 years! This accusation, which determines all the European Union’s relations with the Jewish state, justifies, for example, discriminatory practices against Israel that are unprecedented and never applied against any other state. Thus, we can read in the Journal Officiel (24/11/2016, no. 81) under the heading “Miscellaneous,” regulations relating to:

“the indication of origin of goods from territories occupied by Israel since June 1967 published in the Official Journal of the European Union on November 12, 2015.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

AMERICAN FICTION A MOVIE WORTH WATCHING

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

This movie punctures the political correctness that heaps praise on  Black novels and films, even when they are trash.

Monk as the chief protagonist is named, devises an outlandish book of his own, under a pseudonym and false claim that he is a convict. Critics rave in hilarious scenes of White hypocrisy and condescension. rsk

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Ukrainian Verdun The only thing worse than an armistice with no clear winner or loser is an endless war with more than a million casualties. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/07/the-ukrainian-verdun-2/

Ukraine has ossified into something like the modern version of the horrific Battle of Verdun, fought 108 years ago on the 1916 Western Front of World War I. That meat grinder cost France and Germany some 700,000 dead and wounded.

The nightmare ended ten months later, after the heroic French defense stopped the final German push. But the respective armies ended up in the same position as when the battle started.

After the failed preemptive Russia attack on Kyiv in February 2022 and the subsequent collapsed Ukrainian 6-month-long “spring” counter-offensive of spring 2023, the Ukrainian war has now similarly deadlocked.

Russia has failed to annex Ukraine. It has not expanded much beyond occupied Crimea and Donbass.

Yet Ukraine seems unable to push back the Russians to where they started in February 2022, much less recover lost areas grabbed earlier in 2014.

Although neither side has published reliable and comprehensive dead and wounded statistics, the war has now likely reached a horrific Verdun-like total of 600-700,000 combined casualties.

Perhaps 10 million of Ukraine’s prewar population have fled the country. Due to the massive refugee exodus, the country may have shrunk below 35 million.

In other words, Russia now has a population seven times larger, a gross national product ten times greater, and an area over 30 times the size of current Ukraine.

Still, if NATO and the United States can continue to arm Ukraine, it is as unlikely that Russia can annex Ukraine, even as it is doubtful that Ukraine can ever regain territory lost prior to 2014.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NY Sends National Guard into Subways The subways are officially a war zone. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ny-sends-national-guard-into-subways/

The official media messaging is that crime is at “record lows”. New York City media types smugly post selfies while denying that there’s any violence in the city.

And then the governor sends the National Guard to the subway. The subways are officially a war zone.

Nearly 1,000 New York National Guardsmen, state police and MTA cops are being deployed to carry out bag checks in the Big Apple’s crime-ridden subway system, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday.

The additional forces — made up of 750 guardsmen and 250 law enforcement officers — will work alongside the NYPD to patrol “the city’s busiest transit stations” amid a recent surge in underground violence, Hochul said.

“These brazen, heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated,” Hochul said as she announced a five-point plan to crack down on the city’s burgeoning underground crime wave.

It’s historic… in the worst possible way.

This is the sort of thing Mexico has been doing.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Is A New Biden Scandal About To Erupt?

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/07/is-a-new-biden-scandal-about-to-erupt/

The Joe Biden presidency has had its share of missteps, maybe more than any other administration before it. But the latest scandalous behavior is not an error in the eyes of this White House. In pursuit of cultural and political engineering that only the Democrats would ever consider, the administration has flown 320,000 illegal immigrants into the country directly from foreign airports.

According to the ​​Center for Immigration Studies, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.”

This was not disclosed at a news conference or at the daily White House press briefing but learned through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that pried the information from an administration that clearly wanted to hide it.

It’s anyone’s guess as to where these aliens have landed. The CBP has withheld the names of the airports that “received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023.” It is also refusing to reveal which foreign airports the immigrants departed from.

Worse, the “passengers” are apparently unvetted, which suggests “it is highly probable the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11,” says Elon Musk.