ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Harps, Shamrocks and Anti-Semitism

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/11/nazis/

“Two days after neo-Nazi terrorists from Gaza slaughtered, raped and burnt 1400 Israeli Jews, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Israel Embassy in Dublin to denounce Israel.” Now that is the kind of absurd sentence that once upon a very distant time would have got students at journalism class into dire trouble. “It doesn’t make sense,” would scold the dried-out old veteran of two hundred bars, half a dozen newsrooms and three and half wives. “You clearly mean the protesters had gathered outside the Palestinian Embassy in Dublin to protest at the murder of Jews, so please don’t dress up the hideous truth with these misbegotten attempts at satire.”

Ah, but that was once upon a distant time. In the woeful here and now, this is surreal, a bad dream, a very bad dream. This after all had occurred on October 7, 2023, not October 7, 1943. The latter date was when Hitler met his Gauleiters at his Wolf’s Lair to discuss the remaining details of the Final Solution, to be concluded that year. But since that terrible day in 1943, and up until its eightieth anniversary in 2023, no government could publicly mass-murder Jews anywhere. Even Himmler, Hitler’s executioner of the Jewish people, that October had written of the extermination program, “This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

That was the point about that Final Solution: even by the utterly debased standards of the Nazis, it was such a shameful business that it had to be kept secret. “The Jews must be exterminated,” said Himmler privately. “I do not consider myself justified murdering the menfolk … while leaving their children to grow up and to take their vengeance on our sons and grandsons.”

Whereas the Final Solution of October 7, 2023, was to be a very public affair, and the first target would be the fun-loving liberal Jews attending an all-night rave, to be videoed and celebrated on social media. All previous genocides had been secret, and covered up, as in the Nazi execution pits at Babi Yar, the gas chambers of Belzec, or the death camps of the Khmer Rouge, Stalin’s NKVD and Mao’s Red China.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

72 Columbia Student Groups Issue Anti-Israel, Terrorist-Empathizing Manifesto Catherine Salgado

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/11/24/72-columbia-student-groups-issue-anti-israel-terrorist-empathizing-manifesto-n4924201

One disturbing outcome of the current Israel-Hamas conflict is the exposure of radical anti-Semitism at American universities. Over 70 student groups at Columbia University just issued a manifesto against Israel that would have made the Nazis proud.

Two student groups at Columbia were suspended recently for repeatedly threatening and intimidating Jewish students, as PJ Media’s Rick Moran reported. Dozens of Israel-hating, terrorist-empathizing Columbia student groups want them reinstated. Perhaps it’s not surprising at a school funded by globalist anti-Israel billionaire George Soros…

The heinous Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack left hundreds of Israelis dead and forced Israeli authorities to come to grips with the reality that Arabs, who have no right at all to Israeli land, have been refusing peace in favor of trying to destroy Israel for decades, and they’re not going to change their minds now. The majority of Gazans support jihad against Israel, and the Gaza Strip is controlled by the terrorist group Hamas and the terrorist-funding Palestinian Authority (PA), which use civilians as human shields. Yet Columbia student groups issued a perverted Nov. 14 manifesto based entirely off anti-Semitic terrorist propaganda!

The manifesto even had the audacity to accuse Columbia of anti-Semitism for shutting down Jewish Voice for Peace, which openly intimidated other Jews! While explicitly spreading Hamas propaganda and vilifying Israel with hideous lies, these woke student groups saw no hypocrisy in mentioning anti-Semitism. “We know that antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism—in particular racism against Arabs and Palestinians—are all cut from the same cloth: Western colonization, imperialism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness,” the manifesto screeched. Jews are always framed as white colonialist oppressors in academia, and the students are apparently unaware that Arabs have a long history of racism against black people.

Ironically, the manifesto signers included Columbia Queer and Asian, Columbia Queer Alliance, Proud Colors, and GSAS Queer Graduate Collective. Yet if these LGBTQ radicals went to Palestinian-controlled areas, because the Palestinians are Muslim, these Columbia activists  would “risk summary execution” and face harsh persecution. Ultimately, Hamas would be happy to kill every single one of these woke Columbia students, except possibly some of the Muslims, but the students probably couldn’t be brought to realize that until and unless they were actually being killed. This is the level of willful ignorance and self-delusion at Columbia:

We are committed to creating a multi-generational, intersectional, and accessible space dedicated to fighting for abolition, transnational feminism, anticapitalism, and decolonization, and also to combating anti-Blackness, queerphobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Greatest American Western Novel of All Elmer Kelton’s ‘The Time It Never Rained’ is an overlooked classic.Kevin Mims

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/the-greatest-american-western-novel-of-all/

When Cormac McCarthy died in June of this year, much was written about his 1985 western novel Blood Meridian, which many literary highbrows over the years (Harold Bloom, Saul Bellow, George Steiner, etc.) have claimed is not just a great western but one of the great masterpieces in all of American literature. Likewise, when Larry McMurtry died in 2021, many of the appreciations that appeared in print made similar claims for his western novel Lonesome Dove, published exactly three months after Blood Meridian, on June 1st, 1985. But, in the opinion of many ordinary readers of western fiction, the greatest cowboy novel of them all is Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained, published 50 years ago this month, and a full 15 years before Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian.

Unlike McCarthy and McMurtry, Kelton never received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. But he won seven Spur Awards for Best Western Novel from the Western Writers of America. Four of his books won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In 1995, the Western Writers of America voted Kelton “the greatest western writer of all time.” In 1998, he won the inaugural Lone Star Award For Lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. And, as Houston Public Media noted in 2014, “The Time It Never Rained is now recognized as his finest work, and a lasting contribution to Texas literary history.”

Elmer Kelton was born in 1926, the son of a Texas rancher. “I grew up in a cowboy world,” Elmer once wrote. “My father, Buck Kelton, was foreman of the large McElroy Ranch, in Crane and Upton counties. He never went to the movies, and he never read western novels to find out what cowboys were supposed to be like. They had been part of his heritage since his grandfather brought a string of horses out of East Texas in 1878 and settled in Callahan County, east of Abilene.” He realised at a young age, however, that he wasn’t cut out for a cowboy’s life. His eyesight was weak and he preferred reading books to riding broncs.

Kelton enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and was matriculated there from 1942 to 1944, and then again from 1946 to 1948, earning a BA in journalism. The two-year interruption in his education was the result of his service in the US Army near the end of World War II. After graduation, Kelton spent 15 years covering the farm-and-ranch beat for the San Angelo Standard Times. Later, he spent five years as the editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser magazine, and then 22 years as an editor at Livestock magazine, retiring in 1990. During those years, he also churned out 30 western novels. He continued writing and publishing novels right up until 2009, the year of his death. His official bibliography lists 48 novels, six story collections, and more than a dozen non-fiction books.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Holocaust Historians, the Genocide Charge, and Gaza The accusation is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity. Norman J.W. Goda Jeffrey Herf

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/

Following the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7th, accusations of genocide can be heard from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. These accusations, however, are not being made against the massacre’s Palestinian perpetrators. They are intended to indict the prosecution of Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza and the consequent death toll there. From countries like Iran and Iraq, this kind of perversity was predictable. The virulent antisemitic reaction to the October 7th attacks in the West—which began before Israel attacked Hamas targets in Gaza—is more shocking. In the US alone, those who have taken the opportunity to accuse Israel of genocide include congressional staffers, a congressional representative, numerous university students, and a significant number of university professors.

This is not the first time that Israel has faced accusations of genocide. During the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel acted to neutralize the bases from which Palestinian guerillas were attacking the country’s north. An Israeli-backed Christian militia was ordered to clear the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, from which Israeli soldiers had taken fire during the campaign. In response to the recent assassination of Lebanon’s Christian president Bashir Gemayel, the militiamen killed a number of fighters and a still-unsettled number of Palestinian civilians. To this day, there is no agreement on how many were killed. The Red Cross said 460. Palestinian scholar Maher Sharif insists that the figure might have been as high as 4,500. Such is the politicization of casualty figures.

These events provoked global outrage, but it is important to note that they also provoked outrage within Israel itself. The 1983 report of the Israeli government’s Kahan Commission held the IDF indirectly responsible for the massacre and led to the resignation of defence minister Ariel Sharon. The UN General Assembly, however, went further than this, voting in 1982 to condemn the killing at Sabra and Shatila as an act of genocide, even though the UN had not investigated the crime. As the Soviets put it during the UN debate, Israel’s purpose “is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation.”

But “genocide” isn’t simply a word for reprehensible conduct in war. The term is defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as the demonstrable intent to destroy a national, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. Not only was the UNGA’s claim of genocidal intent and practice inconsistent with Israel’s own self-critical investigation of wrongdoing, but up to 300,000 Palestinian refugees still live in Lebanon today. The accusation of genocide, international-law expert William Schabas later wrote, was simply used by the UNGA “to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Time to take a stand against the new Jew hatred Join the March Against Anti-Semitism in London this Sunday. Tom Slater

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/

Following the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7th, accusations of genocide can be heard from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. These accusations, however, are not being made against the massacre’s Palestinian perpetrators. They are intended to indict the prosecution of Israel’s military retaliation in Gaza and the consequent death toll there. From countries like Iran and Iraq, this kind of perversity was predictable. The virulent antisemitic reaction to the October 7th attacks in the West—which began before Israel attacked Hamas targets in Gaza—is more shocking. In the US alone, those who have taken the opportunity to accuse Israel of genocide include congressional staffers, a congressional representative, numerous university students, and a significant number of university professors.

This is not the first time that Israel has faced accusations of genocide. During the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israel acted to neutralize the bases from which Palestinian guerillas were attacking the country’s north. An Israeli-backed Christian militia was ordered to clear the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, from which Israeli soldiers had taken fire during the campaign. In response to the recent assassination of Lebanon’s Christian president Bashir Gemayel, the militiamen killed a number of fighters and a still-unsettled number of Palestinian civilians. To this day, there is no agreement on how many were killed. The Red Cross said 460. Palestinian scholar Maher Sharif insists that the figure might have been as high as 4,500. Such is the politicization of casualty figures.

These events provoked global outrage, but it is important to note that they also provoked outrage within Israel itself. The 1983 report of the Israeli government’s Kahan Commission held the IDF indirectly responsible for the massacre and led to the resignation of defence minister Ariel Sharon. The UN General Assembly, however, went further than this, voting in 1982 to condemn the killing at Sabra and Shatila as an act of genocide, even though the UN had not investigated the crime. As the Soviets put it during the UN debate, Israel’s purpose “is to destroy the Palestinians as a nation.”

But “genocide” isn’t simply a word for reprehensible conduct in war. The term is defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as the demonstrable intent to destroy a national, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. Not only was the UNGA’s claim of genocidal intent and practice inconsistent with Israel’s own self-critical investigation of wrongdoing, but up to 300,000 Palestinian refugees still live in Lebanon today. The accusation of genocide, international-law expert William Schabas later wrote, was simply used by the UNGA “to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The humiliation of the Dutch establishment The victory of Geert Wilders shows voters are desperate to hit back against the elites. Fraser Myers

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/23/the-humiliation-of-the-dutch-establishment/

To say the victory of Geert Wilders in yesterday’s Dutch elections came as a shock might be the understatement of the century. Not even his aides in the PVV (Party for Freedom) were fully prepared for the earthquake to come. The tiny, cramped venue where it held its election party last night was booked just four days ago, after Wilders enjoyed a last-minute surge in the polls.

With almost all the votes now counted, Wilders’s PVV has won 37 of the 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, with 24 per cent of the vote, trouncing his nearest rivals, a coalition of the Labour and Green parties. Make no mistake: this is a humiliation for the Dutch establishment and another political earthquake in Europe.

Before yesterday’s elections, European elites would have told you that a ‘sensible’ country like the Netherlands was immune to populism. The 2017 elections were heralded across Europe as the death of Dutch populism, when the PVV lost to long-serving centrist prime minister Mark Rutte. Wilders’s party slumped further in 2021, scoring just 11 per cent of the vote. With the peroxide-haired right-winger seemingly sent packing, moderation and centrism had apparently prevailed. Anti-establishment anger had been quelled. Or so they thought.

Even in recent days, the prospect of a ballot-box rebellion had been written off by European media. On the day the Netherlands went to the polls, a BBC News feature on the elections mentioned Wilders only in passing. Its two tips for the next Dutch PM came in third and fourth place. And just last week the Financial Times declared that these ‘elections are tapping into a mood for dry moderation’. ‘The Dutch don’t do wild political leaps’, it insisted. Such complacency has now been shattered.

These elections are as much a win for Wilders as they are a loss for the centrist establishment. The centre-right VVD, which has held power under premier Mark Rutte for 13 years, was knocked back into third place. Perhaps more significant has been the failure of Frans Timmermans, former vice-president of the European Commision, who led a newly formed Labour-Green alliance to defeat.

The failure of Timmermans is a stinging blow to the EU (Wilders is a staunch Eurosceptic who has promised an in-out ‘Nexit’ referendum). It also shows that opposition to climate policy is now a significant driver of European populism. After all, as Commission vice-president, Timmermans was the face of Brussels’s stringent climate policies, including the so-called European Green Deal.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Wilders Message From the Netherlands Dutch voters take a turn to the right, and why is anyone surprised?

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wilders-message-from-the-netherlands-9224c43d?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Dutch elections rarely stir much excitement abroad, but the voting in the Netherlands Wednesday marks an exception. The big winner was Geert Wilders, a veteran right-wing campaigner, and the freakout his victory has triggered across Europe is something to behold.

Mr. Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) won a plurality of 37 seats in the 150-seat legislature. His next nearest competitor, a Labor-Green coalition led by Frans Timmermans, won 25 seats. Politicians will now negotiate to form a governing coalition, a process that often takes months in the Netherlands’ highly fragmented electoral system, and Mr. Wilders may not emerge as prime minister. But voters have sent a clear message.

To wit: Voters are fed up with a stale consensus on issues such as immigration and climate policy. The PVV’s biggest campaign issue for two decades has been immigration. Some 400,000 immigrants arrived last year in a country with a total population of nearly 18 million. While last year’s number may have been skewed by refugees from Ukraine, immigration has exceeded 200,000 every year since 2016.

This creates a substantial fiscal burden under the generous Dutch welfare state and strains the housing market. It’s also becoming a culture-war issue as voters worry the country isn’t properly assimilating Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Wilders can present himself as a tribune of these fears, having lived under police protection since an Islamist murdered film director Theo van Gogh in 2004.

Centrist politicians heap scorn on Mr. Wilders’s proposed solution, which is to ban the Quran, new mosques and Islamic schools. This is extreme, and Mr. Wilders had to walk back those proposals to achieve the vote totals he did Wednesday. But if any other Dutch politician has better ideas for achieving assimilation, voters would be all ears.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Martha’s Vineyard once again allowed to boot out the illegals that we commoners are not By Olivia Murray

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/_marthas_vineyard_once_again_allowed_to_boot_out_the_illegals_that_we_commoners_are_not.html

The snobbery and pseudo-elitism that goes hand-in-hand with the elevated status of a Martha’s Vineyard leftist makes it easy to pity their position instead of envy it, with one exception: their ability to swiftly and decisively eject illegal invaders.

On Monday, agents from Boston’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) apprehended and arrested a Brazilian national living in the elite enclave, because he was a “predator” whose presence was “threaten[ing] to residents.” You don’t say.

From a press release on the matter:

The Brazilian national received multiple criminal convictions for raping a child and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. After his convictions and before sentencing, the Brazilian citizen fled the country.

…

The undocumented noncitizen unlawfully entered the United States on an unknown date at an unknown location without being inspected or admitted by an immigration official.

Per the same source, ERO acts as the “principal federal law enforcement authority” in charge of rounding up individuals who “undermine the safety” of American communities and the “integrity of U.S. immigration laws.”

A hardened criminal exploiting an open border and the U.S. welfare system? Impossible! Karine Jean-Pierre has repeatedly assured us that the border is totally secure, and any “undocumented” persons who do happen to slip through are not a detriment—any insistence otherwise is xenophobic.

But wait, why does the Martha’s Vineyard aristocracy get zero-tolerance agents who protect their communities? Oh, that’s right, because they’re rich leftists, and they’re allowed to have nice things while we little people buckle under the weight of the illegal invasion they manufactured and invited, all so they could fancy themselves as virtuous and morally-superior progressives.

Rules for thee, but not for me.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Negotiating for Hostages By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/negotiating_for_hostages.html

Prisoner exchange is not a new event in Jewish history.  From the 1940s on, Israel exchanged Palestinian prisoners and POWs from Arab armies in exchange for Israeli soldiers and civilians taken captive during the war.

In the ancient world, in Numbers 21:1, Israel did not negotiate with the enemy but went to battle against her respective enemies in order to save prisoners.

A seminal case occurred in the early 13th century. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg (1215–1293) was taken captive when he was 70 years old by Emperor Rudolf I, who demanded an exorbitant sum for the rabbi’s release.  This act was done in peacetime, and the rabbis and leaders of the Jewish communities in that generation were the rabbi’s students.  They were absolutely prepared to raise the sum necessary to free their teacher, even though it would spell financial disaster for the community.

Notwithstanding,  the renowned rabbi would not permit the ransom to be paid, for he understood that such an act would only encourage the enemies of Israel to imprison other rabbis in the future and demand huge sums for their release.

Fast-forward, and Israel continually faces the intractable issue regarding Israeli hostages.  Since its inception in 1988, Hamas is absolutely clear about its total opposition to Zionism and Israel.  Hamas constantly celebrates the killing of Jews.

According to Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, the “rule is that in times of war one does not submit to any of the enemies’ demands.”  For as soon as one gives in to them, they will gain confidence and increase their efforts to strike again and again. 

In fact, “[a]ny concession is seen as a sign of weakness and merely leads to more attacks and more attempts to take hostages.”

What’s more, as a result of [Israel’s] willingness to free large numbers of prisoners for one or two Israeli hostages, the terrorists … figure that even if they do get caught, they most likely will be freed eventually in a prisoner exchange deal.

It should also be noted that many of the terrorists who have been released by Israel in the past simply returned to their terrorist activities, murdering more Israelis. Therefore, as a result of our receiving one Israeli hostage, scores of other innocent Israelis have been murdered.

Presently, the chair of the Israeli Otzma Yehudit party has “stated that that any such swap ‘will bring us to disaster,’ pointing to the 2011 deal to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners — including Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, thought to be the mastermind of the October 7 massacre [emphasis mine] — in exchange for captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Inside Story of How Palestinians Took Over the World The brilliant plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students. by Gary Wexler

Posted By on November 24th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-inside-story-of-how-palestinians-took-over-the-world/

The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel.

It was around the time of the Oslo Accords. I had been hired by the Ford Foundation to create a marketing institute for their grantees in the country. Ford was funding the operations of both Jewish and Arab organizations within the Israeli green line, in an effort to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.

Ford put me in partnership with a young Israeli woman, Debra London. (Debra, now one of my closest friends, has just been selected to head up fundraising for the rebuilding of Kibbutz Be’eri.) She and I drew up a plan to interview each of the grantees, as well as Israeli ad agencies and media firms. While we wanted to learn about the grantees, we also planned to secure free marketing work and media to be an essential part of the institute.

When we interviewed the Jewish organizations, the atmosphere was almost giddy with hope, possibility and belief in Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. Each organization we interviewed talked excitedly about peace and co-existence, a flourishing economy among both the Jews and the Palestinians, collaborative projects and interchanges.

But when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

I tried to explain to my fellow Jewish liberals that we — the Jews and the Arabs — were having two very separate conversations. We were talking “peace.” They were talking “independence.” But as the weeks of interviews progressed, I found the Arab organizations were talking about a whole lot more.

I asked hard questions of both the Jews and Arabs in the interviewing process. With the Arab organizations, when I brought up any  sensitive, and not-so-sensitive, issues—like terrorism, cooperation and even budget—the interviewee would slam on the brakes.

And then from each organization, the same words were spoken: “When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to.

Finally, Debra and I arrived at the offices of Itijaa. Skinny, bespectacled, young Ameer Makhoul emerged from his office, took a look at me and said, “So this is the Gary Wexler who has been asking all the questions.” And then he ticked off every question I had asked along with the name of each person I had posed the question to.