FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration’s ‘Pathway’ to a Palestinian Terror State by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on January 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20317/biden-administration-palestinian-terror-state

By continuing to obsessively stick to the creation of a Palestinian state, the Biden administration is actually sending a message to Iran and its terror proxies that terrorism pays – that if they inflict more pain and casualties on Israel, the Americans will reward them with a state of their own next to Israel to facilitate their mission of continuing their Jihadist murder spree against Jews and finally obliterate Israel.

The poll further showed that if presidential elections were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would receive 78% of the vote, as opposed to only 16% for Abbas.

The poll found that 64% of the Palestinians oppose the idea of a two-state solution, while 53% support a return to the “armed struggle” against Israel.

All polls conducted by the same center have consistently shown that a majority of the Palestinians believe that Hamas is more deserving of representing them than the PA. This means that if and when a Palestinian state is established, as the Biden administration is hoping, it will be ruled by Hamas and its masters in Iran… overlooking the few miles from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.

The idea that creating another Arab state alongside Israel would “isolate” or “marginalize” Iran and its proxies is as wrong as it is dangerous. In reality, the establishment of a Palestinian state on any part of the West Bank or Gaza Strip would incentivize Iran and its clients to escalate their Jihad against Israel: it would send them the message that the more Jews you murder, the more land you get.

[T]his conflict is not about a settlement or a checkpoint or Jerusalem, but about Israel’s right to exist in any form in the Middle East. What Blinken and the Biden administration seem unable to grasp is that there are still too many people among the Palestinians, and many other Arabs and Muslims, who have yet to come to terms with the right of a nation that is not Islamic to remain in its home in the Middle East.

Blinken is suggesting not a pathway to peace, but a prize to Hamas and the Palestinians for committing genocide.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Argentina’s New President, Javier Milei, Stuns Davos With Attack on Secret ‘Socialist’ Agenda of Moneyed Western Elites

Posted By on January 18th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/argentinas-feisty-president-javier-milei-stuns-davos-with-attack-on-secret-socialist-agenda-of-moneyed-western-elites?lctg=1

Just when you thought it was safe to write off Davos as irremediably dull — think Antony Blinken with a side order of Tom Friedman — along comes the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” president of Argentina, Javier Milei, to shake up the Swiss town with a one-two punch to what he perceives to be the “socialist agenda” of various elites.

The tirade came in the form of a half-hour long speech to a full house of policy wonks and boldfaced names in the business world who were advised by Mr. Milei to choose freedom over socialist-style state control, “dammit.”

With a late-career Elvis-style haircut that makes Boris Johnson’s unruly locks look tame, and his dim view of taxes — Jesus didn’t pay them, he says — Mr. Milei had all of Davos buzzing even before he touched down in Switzerland on Tuesday. 

His mission, he said before departing Argentina, was to “plant the idea of ​​freedom in a forum polluted by the socialist 2030 agenda.” He elaborated on that to a packed conference room Wednesday afternoon, declaring that “socialism is an impoverishing phenomenon and a failure whenever it has been attempted.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Antisemitism From the Left “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”by Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on January 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/antisemitism-from-the-left/

Jews are feeling increasingly afraid and unwelcome. Last week, girls on the basketball team of a Jewish private school in suburban Hartsdale, New York, were jabbed and hit with antisemitic slurs by players from Yonkers’ Roosevelt High School. “I support Hamas, you f—-ing Jew,” a Roosevelt player snarled. The game had to be called off in the third quarter, and the Jewish girls needed school security to help them leave.

Antisemitic incidents were already on the rise in 2021 and 2022. Now they are up nearly 400% year over year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explains, “I am not talking about, you know, stores producing IDF T-shirts. I’m talking about a coffee shop on Long Island, an ice cream parlor in the Bay Area, a restaurant in Chicago.” It reminds him of his grandparents’ barbershop, which was vandalized by the Nazis in Germany. “I can’t believe this is happening in our country today.”

Believe it.

The mainstream media choose to downplay it and the Democratic Party is, at best, divided. Antisemitism has often come from the Right, but it appears now to be coming from the Left.

When the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania caused outrage by saying at a congressional hearing in December that calls for Jewish genocide don’t necessarily violate campus policy — “it depends on the context” — Democrats’ reactions were mixed.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

First Plagiarism, Now Lying: What’s Happening to America’s Universities? Those who claim to be “marginalized” have all the power – and use it ruthlessly. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on January 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/first-plagiarism-now-lying-whats-happening-to-americas-universities/

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as she is.

In this, of course, Rutgers is like virtually every other university in America today. First, there was the remarkable public self-immolation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania during a congressional hearing; then Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign after her repeated plagiarism was revealed, although she claimed that her resignation was due to “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” and many in the academic establishment and elsewhere bought her nonsense.

These incidents, however, were just the latest and highest-profile manifestations of an intellectual and spiritual rot that is everywhere. One small example of it came in a recent pseudo-scholarly study from Rutgers University Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights, entitled “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes In the Palestine–Israel Discourse.”

This “study” is 65 pages of Marxist agitprop, woke psychobabble, and pure fantasy, all thrown together in a thick propaganda stew that’s designed to show “how race and racism infect foreign policy and the treatment of minority communities who espouse unpopular views or dissent from the political orthodoxy, including the defense of human rights for all.” If the authors of this twaddle, Mitchell Plitnick, President of ReThinking Foreign Policy, and Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, were remotely honest, they would say that “race and racism” affect the treatment of minority communities by getting them coddled, treated with kid gloves, and accorded all manner of special perks.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Has ‘Delivered For The American People’ All Right, And They Want A Refund

Posted By on January 18th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/18/biden-has-delivered-for-the-american-people-all-right-and-they-want-a-refund/

Rep. James Clyburn, who is a co-chairman of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, recently tried to explain the president’s predicament by saying that he’s “delivered for the American people in such a way that nobody seems to grasp.”

As campaign slogans go, that’s not exactly “Morning in America.” But the truth is that everybody grasps what Biden has delivered. It’s what he’s delivered that they don’t like.

Clyburn, talking on MSNBC, said the public just needs to “look at the facts and stop listening to all of this tweeting and stuff that’s going on out there that’s not good for the American people.”

We took the South Carolina Democrat’s word for it, and here’s what we found that Biden has delivered, at home and abroad.

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Prices have climbed by almost 17% since Biden took office three years ago. Food prices are up 20%. Gasoline is up 26%. Electricity up 24%. Car insurance up 30%.

Real wages are down. Because wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, even workers who’ve been getting raises have been falling behind.

Poverty is up. Last fall, the Census Bureau pegged the poverty rate in 2022 at 12.4%, up from 7.8% in 2021.

The national debt has exploded. Gross federal debt now tops $34 trillion, which is $6 trillion higher than when Biden got the keys to the White House.

Deficits are on the rise. As we reported here last week, deficits in the current fiscal year are running 21% higher than they were last year, setting the stage for a $2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2024 – nearly double what it was in 2022.

Illegals are flooding across the border. December set a new record for illegal border crossings, bringing the total to 6.8 million under Biden’s open-border policies. Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admits that most of them are simply released into the country. These numbers, mind you, don’t count the “gotaways” – the criminals, cartel members, terrorists, and other undesirables who avoided border patrol agents.

Attacks on the U.S. are up. America is coming under increasing attack since Biden took office. Iranian-backed proxies have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria at least 150 times, most of them since Tehran-supported Hamas terrorists invaded Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The DEI Ruse Is Imploding. Part Four Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 17th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/the-dei-ruse-is-imploding-part-four/

DEI is racist. After lying before Congress that she had to consider “context” and “free speech” before considering discipling anti-Jewish behavior and speech on her Harvard campus, and after being caught plagiarizing in some 60 percent of her meager scholarly output, Claudine Gay pulled out all the racist stops to save her job.

She enlisted Harvard, its attorneys, and 700 of its faculty to lie that her plagiarism was not really serious because—the plagiarized did not always complain; because the whistleblowers were anonymous in many cases; because the New York Post had no right to run the story; because Gay claimed she adhered to the highest standards in her scholarship; and because her critics were inordinately conservative.

Consider, it was supposedly anti-black to force her removal from the leftwing Harvard Corporation. Ok, but not so when Stanford forced white male president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign for far lesser scholarly misconduct? What about the University of Pennsylvania that coerced its white president Liz Magill to quit for ethically challenged testimony, similar to Gay’s but without any hint of scholarly plagiarism in Magill’s resume? Does DEI mean lifetime tenure on the rationale that once standards are no longer purely meritocratic in hiring, they must similarly remain nonmeritocratic for lifelong tenure?

Note how most of the current architects of the woke/DEI movement cut their teeth in their youth with overt racist diatribes and racial stereotyping—in far more academic and sophisticated forms than the old anti-Semitic blasts of Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), Jesse Jackson (“That’s all Hymie wants to talk about is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that’s all they want to talk about”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s “personal pastor” (“Them Jews ain’t going to let him [Barak Obama] talk to me), Malcolm X (“bloodsuckers”), or Rep. Ilhan Omar (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”).

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli left pushing PA control of Gaza and future Palestinian state David Isaac

Posted By on January 17th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/israeli-left-pushing-pa-control-of-gaza-and-future-palestinian-state/

While for most Israelis, Oct. 7 was a wake-up call to the dangers of a Palestinian state (a Jan. 10 poll found 74% opposed to the idea), within weeks of the massacre a New Israel Fund (NIF)-supported think tank started working to shape Israeli policy for the “day after.”

In their vision, the “day after” means a two-state solution in which the Palestinian Authority would become the government of the new country.

Mitvim (its full title is The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies) partnered in October with the Berl Katznelson Foundation, another NIF-funded organization, to form a working group composed of “Israel-Palestinian experts from various disciplines, research institutes, academia and civil society organizations.”

Aware that public opinion has soured on a Palestinian state, the Mitvim-Katznelson task force nevertheless argued that it would be missing a “historic” opportunity if matters were to be swept along by public opinion rather than trying to shape them.  

Documents on Mitvim’s website, first brought to light by Israeli news site HaKol HaYehudi, describe the working group’s main goal as the creation of “a stable political-regional order, based on the two-state solution, and on a regional defense alliance, led by the United States with inter-Arab involvement.” This would lead to what Mitvim terms “deep security.”

To achieve this goal, the group will present the Palestinian Authority as the “only alternative” to Hamas. According to the documents, the group will work to create a distinction in the minds of Israelis between Hamas—pro-terrorist and against any kind of settlement with Israel—and the P.A., portrayed as opposing terrorism and in favor of agreement.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Carole Hooven: Why I Left Harvard After I stated banal facts about human biology, I found myself caught in a DEI web, without the support to do the job I loved. The only way out was to leave…

Posted By on January 17th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard

Since early December, the end of my 20-year career teaching at Harvard has been the subject of articles, op-eds, tweets from a billionaire, and even a congressional hearing. I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—bureaucracies strangle free speech. My ordeal has been used to illustrate the hypocrisy of the assertions by Harvard’s leaders that they honor the robust exchange of challenging ideas. 

What happened to me, and others, strongly suggests that these assertions aren’t true—at least, if those ideas oppose campus orthodoxy. 

To be a central example of what has gone wrong in higher education feels surreal. If there is any silver lining to losing the career that I found so fulfilling, perhaps it’s that my story will help explain the fear that stalks campuses, a fear that spreads every time someone is punished for their speech.

The December 5, 2023, congressional hearing on the rise of antisemitism at colleges did not go well for the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. They were accused of failing to condemn the public antisemitic statements made on their campuses. Their defense, as asserted by then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, was that their administrations were “deeply committed to free expression.” 

That’s where I came in. 

As Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said at the hearing, “Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, was forced to resign, because she stated that a person’s sex is biological and binary. . . . and so, President Gay, in what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald A Jarring Opera on Jarring Themes On the Met’s recent production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X

Posted By on January 17th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-jarring-opera-on-jarring-themes

EXCERPTS:

Peter Gelb hired the company’s first chief diversity officer, even as the Met was warning of imminent financial collapse. This new position was based on the idea that the present-day Met discriminated against qualified black artists and needed a high-priced overseer to combat its reflexive racism.

Anthony Davis is arguably the most militant of today’s black composers. (Daniel Bernard Roumain would vie for that title, but he is younger and less well known.) Davis favors tales of black victimhood, whether the alleged railroading of five black teenagers for the brutal 1989 rape of a white jogger in Central Park (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five) or the struggles of blacks and homosexuals in the McCarthy era (Shimmer, still in development).

He has been showered with almost every honor that can grace a contemporary composer—from fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and the MacDowell Colony to awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, OPERA America, and other institutions. He has taught at prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Yale. Malcolm X premiered to sold-out audiences at New York City Opera, then the second-most prestigious American venue for operas. The current production received a rare Ford Foundation grant (Ford stopped underwriting anything “white” long ago) as well as a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

By a stroke of good fortune, the libretto for X contains the line: “You have your foot on me, always pressing.” Cue the George Floyd comparisons. The aria containing the line, sung by Malcolm in prison, “captures the relation of our community to the police and the power structure and the pain that comes out of that,” Davis said. Davis’s brother, Christopher, who wrote X’s book, described the reaction of Detroit school students to the aria: “They were like, ‘YES!’ and unfortunately, considering the way things are going, there will always be that reaction.” (For the record, there are counterarguments to the idea that the police and other representatives of the white “power structure” are the main threat in the black community today.)

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Get Ready for the NeverTrump Follies on Steroids If you think 2016-23 was bad, this year the Democrats are desperate for many reasons. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on January 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/get-ready-for-the-nevertrump-follies-on-steroids/

This election year marks the eighth anniversary of unhinged NeverTrump invective, and Trump Derangement Syndrome swamp-fevers. Just as mothers in England during the Napoleonic Wars frightened their wayward children with threats of “Boney” coming to get them, the Dems are revving up Trump’s “threats to our democracy,” “autocratic” ambitions, and schemes to take away our freedom and unalienable rights. Arguments ad Hitlerum soon will be flying fast and thick, and the slavish corporate media have loaded up on “big lies” and sharpened their poison pens.

If you think 2016-23 was bad, this year the Democrats are desperate for many reasons: their catatonic candidate, his son Hunter’s white-trash sleazy vices and international grifting, multiple policy failures at home and abroad, and underwater polls numbers––for 76% of voters Biden is “too old to effectively serve another term.” All these problems will abet the Democrats’ patent lies, suborning of federal agencies and courts, fake horror stories about the January 6 “insurrection,” and shameless projections of their own autocratic inclinations and lust for power onto their political opponents.

This last Dem bad habit is particularly mendacious and dripping with hypocrisy. In last week’s January 6 anniversary speech at Valley Forge, Biden read, “Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind.” But Donald Trump is “willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”

What better example of the brazen shamelessness that Adolf Hitler said typifies the “big lie”? The “grossly impudent lie” and “colossal untruths” are so preposterous that listeners “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” We all know which faction censors speech, shouts down speakers, punishes dissidents with personal and professional “cancellation” and smears, and keeps an index librorum prohibitorum cataloguing which thoughts, ideas, persons, and words cannot be written or spoken.