NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What The Latest Attacks On Musk Are Really All About

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/21/what-the-latest-attacks-on-musk-are-really-all-about/

Just as Democrats were trying to downplay the rampant antisemitism in their ranks, what happens? Elon Musk, who has lately become something of a darling on the right, suddenly becomes the poster boy for antisemitism. This is how the left works.

This latest twist started when Media Matters — the George Soros-backed media “watchdog” — released a report claiming that ads for major corporations were appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content.

This is a two-fer for the left. It both attacks Musk — whom the left now hates because he stopped Twitter’s side hustle as the federal government censor — and it takes the spotlight off the left’s virulent antisemitism on display after the Hamas attacks.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter and promised to live up to the company’s “free speech wing of the free speech party” mantra, the left went into fits of hysterics.

Media Matters puts it, “Musk has opened the floodgates to hateful content.” Really? Because Twitter was pure as the driven snow before Musk?

We seem to recall that “blue check” leftists had free reign to say whatever they wanted about conservatives on Twitter, up to and including calls for their assassination. After Donald Trump took office, to cite just one example, “assassinate Trump” was showing up all over Twitter. When Twitter banned Trump before Musk bought the company, it let Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continue to incite hate and violence on its platform. Etc., etc.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism And we are happy to work with donors who are tired of giving to colleges that do. By James S. Robbins

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-school-doesnt-tolerate-anti-semitism-hamas-ivy-league-jewish-students-protest-1a5b4d97?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

America’s elite colleges and universities are soft on terrorism and strong on anti-Semitism. Who knew?

Weak-kneed responses by academic leaders to Hamas’s attack on Israel, coupled with soaring anti-Semitism on campuses, have created a crisis. Jewish students are increasingly unsafe, while major donors are alarmed by the harmful ideas promoted by the institutions they support.

The implicit bargain in higher education is that donors support schools as an expression of good citizenship, and it’s up to the schools to produce good citizens. This bargain has frayed in recent years as schools aren’t holding up their end of the deal.

Many campuses have become echo chambers that lack intellectual diversity and promote a climate of intolerance. To avoid being “canceled” by progressives, moderate and conservative students and faculty practice self-censorship rather than discuss controversial ideas.

The response to the Oct. 7 attack exposed how schools have become incubators of radicalism. Protests, vandalism, intimidation, and assaults—mostly targeting Jewish students—are the fruits of the critical-theory educational model that stigmatizes Jews as “white oppressors” and Israelis as “Zionist colonizers.” In response to anti-Semitism, university administrators have either done nothing or issued anodyne statements deploring violence in general terms, until some were badgered into reacting more explicitly.

Many donors saw the jarring response from the academy as a betrayal of their generosity and deeply held values. Now they are voting with their feet and wallets: withdrawing or canceling donations, resigning from boards, and encouraging alumni to boycott their alma maters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War Many young people grew up believing war was passé and peace was normal. Walter Russell Mead By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-is-gen-zs-first-real-war-hamas-israel-social-media-world-war-ii-3111692f?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?

I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.

As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of about 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Many of the expulsions took place in winter amid terrible scenes of hunger and deprivation, all while mass rapes of German women slowly subsided across the Soviet zone of Germany.

Lawyers and legislators can debate whether these actions constitute war crimes, but as Cicero put it more than two thousand years ago, “inter arma enim silent leges.” Roughly, that translates as the “laws go silent when armies clash.” Or as William Tecumseh Sherman put it more succinctly, “War is hell.”

One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. The war in Gaza hasn’t merely introduced young Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also has shown them the face of war.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Media, lies and videotape Western journalists will never reset the lethal prism through which they refract the Palestinian war against the Jews Melanie Phillips

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/media-lies-and-videotape-1a5?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

There seems to be no limit to the mainstream media’s malevolence against Israel in reporting the war in Gaza.

Until yesterday, media outlets were sneering at Israeli claims that below Gaza’s al Shifa hospital was an infrastructure of tunnels containing a Hamas command centre. When the IDF found a huge stash of guns and ammunition in the hospital’s MRI room, and revealed they had also found the bodies of two hostages one of whom had been murdered in the hospital, media outlets continued to sneer. The BBC’s World Editor, Jeremy Bowen, waved the discovery aside and said he didn’t find it convincing. He declared:

In the Middle East, you see an awful lot of Kalashnikovs … and it’s not inconceivable that perhaps the security department of a hospital might have had them. 

Yesterday, the IDF revealed that it had uncovered a 55-metre long tunnel down a shaft underneath the hospital, ending at a blast-proof door. It also released CCTV footage from al Shifa of a Nepalese and a Thai hostage being brought in, one of them clearly wounded lying on a hospital gurney and the other being roughly dragged through the hospital corridors with staff looking on. 

One might think all this was proof positive that al Shifa was indeed used as a Hamas command centre, just as Israel had always said. But not for the western media, for whom believing that the Palestinian “victims” of Israeli “oppression” are actually bloodthirsty and manipulative liars while the despised Israelis are their truth-telling victims would entail the world spinning off its axis and shattering into a million virtue-signalling fragments along with these journalists’ entire moral personality.

So there was yet another hallucinatory exchange this morning on BBC Radio’s Today programme (about 2 hours 15 minutes in). Presenter Mishal Husain (whose approach to this issue one week ago I wrote about here) insisted to Israel’s spokesman, Eylon Levy, that maybe the hostages in the video … were being brought in for treatment. 

Yes, she really did ask that. Had the Israelis seen footage of them being treated, she inquired? Eh? Since one of them was on a hospital gurney and was clearly injured, she persisted, did the Israelis have footage of him being treated?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

US and China: Difficult Coups and Institutions di: Francesco Sisci

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/us-and-china-difficult-coups-and-institutions/

American newspapers are voicing growing concern that Donald Trump, who is running for president, is sounding more like Mussolini and Hitler.[1] Also, following the 2020 January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, something like a preview of an attempted coup, some fear Trump may be tempted to repeat the game, only this time better organized.

However, there are substantial differences between Trump and Hitler, Mussolini, or Lenin, the master of it all. In all these cases, the tricks worked because they had the backing of the army and the national police, who thought they had been wronged; one way or another, they had no voice, and they were ready to support whoever gave them that representation.

With Lenin, the army was tired of fighting a war they deemed unwinnable against Germany, and the German command, who aided his return to Russia, saw clearly that he was the man to deliver on it.

With Mussolini, the army and many veterans felt deprived of better results from the victory in World War I. They wanted to topple a political system they thought was giving in to dangerous communist revolutionaries. With Hitler, the army felt stabbed in the back because the terms of surrender were too harsh and chafed under a civilian government ready to give in, again, to socialists and communists.

To stage a coup

Presently, the situation in the US, like in Israel at the time of the protests against the constitutional reforms, looks pretty different. The army and the security apparently do not side with Trump; they are neutral, if not hostile to him.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to implement reforms that would remove some powers from the judiciary and concentrate them on the executive. The reform was bitterly opposed by large parts of the population and most of the army and the security bodies.

The long Israeli struggle between the government and part of the military — and the ensuing mutual distrust — was certainly the breeding ground for the intelligence failure leading to the October 7 Hamas attack.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Can We Save our Universities? Stop giving money to elite institutions By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/20/can-we-save-our-universities/

It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe.

Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.

College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of a four-year idealized respite from adult employment. It once was intended to be a place where youth learned to be open-minded, tolerant, skilled, and eager to learn the nature and traditions of Western civilization, art, literature, languages, philosophy, and history.

Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.

Students, especially at the elite campuses, learn to mouth monotonously accusations of “genocide.” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” or “imperialism.” But they lack the ability to define these nouns. As a result, they so often name drop empty slogans in the context of supposed Western sins.

Again, October 7 brought these sorry facts to national attention. Adolescent screamers on video showed no awareness that dropping leaflets and sending texts to avoid collateral deaths is not “genocide.” Most chant the “river to the sea” with no clue that it resonates the very ethos of mass murdering, mutilation, and dehumanization of Jewish elderly, women, children, and infants in the most savage fashion on October 7.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: ‘Extreme’ Support for Terrorist Group Hamas, Israel’s Destruction by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20155/palestinians-support-hamas

A public opinion poll published on November 14 showed that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas’s murder spree, including rape and beheadings, as opposed to only 13% who disapprove.

Surprisingly, the poll found that support for Hamas and its “military operation” is even higher in the West Bank, where Abbas’s Palestinian Authority is based, than in the Gaza Strip.

If such a large number of Palestinians in the West Bank support the murder of Israelis and Hamas, it is safe to assume that a new “Palestinian state” would be controlled by Hamas or another genocidal, antisemitic terror group.

Another, but less-surprising, result of the poll is that 80% of the Palestinians reject both the “one-state” and “two-state” solutions, and instead demand all the territory, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – in short, the entire State of Israel within any borders.

That a majority of Palestinians want to replace Israel with an Iran-backed terror state also shows that the Biden administration and most European governments are engaging in extreme self-deception when they talk about the need to promote the concept of a “two-state solution.”

How can any rational person talk about a “two-state solution” when a majority of Palestinians believe there is nothing wrong with burning, beheading and raping Jews, or baking a Jewish baby to death in an oven?

The results of the poll confirm what most Arabs and Muslims already know: that the only solution most Palestinians are willing to accept is one that leads to the murder of all Jews and the destruction of Israel. It remains to be seen whether the latest Palestinian slaughter of Jews serves to awaken the Biden administration and the Europeans to this inconvenient, uncomfortable fact.

One of the reasons why Palestinian leaders refuse to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis is because they know that many Palestinians support the atrocities committed by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group.

Unlike the Biden administration and many Europeans, these leaders, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, are fully aware of the widespread support among their people for any group whose goal is to murder Israelis and destroy Israel. The Palestinian leaders, in addition, are also aware that a majority of the Palestinians are opposed to the deluded Western fantasy of a “two-state solution.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Why Governments Have Replaced God with Global Warming By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

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

For millennia, monarchs ruled by some form of divine right.  If not asserting god-like powers, they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth.  You can imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith.  How could the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired orders?  This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those they ruled.

The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law, religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual liberty.  Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence of God.  First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then they convinced new generations to question God altogether.  

Unsurprisingly, both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority upon which governments relied.  Stripped of any divine pretense for exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to justify their existence ever since.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why those with power today have gone all-in on “global warming” fearmongering.  By replacing God with the apocalyptic threat of “climate change,” governments have effectively created a “higher power” that they exclusively control.  Instead of beseeching citizens to follow God’s will here on Earth, governments beseech them to “follow the science.”  The “science,” for its part, is treated as some kind of infallible religious scripture that can never be questioned.  It doesn’t matter that climate models have been wildly incorrect, that research has been fabricated, that sea levels are not rising, or that the proposed “solutions” for manipulating naturally dynamic climates will accomplish nothing.  Governments have decreed, “The science is settled,” and once the “science” has spoken, no lowly heretic may disagree.

In truth, the “global warming” con is about three things: gods, money, and control.  

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

IT’S ALL ABOUT HATING THE JEWS; ISRAEL IS JUST THE EXCUSE ERIC LEVINE

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

NO URL: Eric Levine is a lawyer/writer.

At a recent pro-Hamas rally in New York City, a mob of advocates for destroying Israel tried to occupy News Corp.’s Manhattan headquarters. Addressing the mob, actress Susan Sarandon told us what we have known all along about these types of protesters: They are about nothing other than hating and destroying Jews. For folks like Sarandon, it does not matter whether the Jews live in Israel or on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. According to those folks, every day should be October 7.

As she so eloquently put it:

“There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country…[.] It’s important to have facts…you don’t have to go through the entire history of that region, you just have to show the babies that are dying in incubators.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

For Sarandon and her fellow antisemites, the ONLY fact that matters is that Palestinian babies have died in incubators in hospitals that are being used by Hamas as bases for their terrorist operations.

There appears to be no concern for the Jewish babies who were decapitated, cooked alive in ovens, or cut out of their mother’s bellies and then murdered in front of their screaming mothers by Hamas terrorists on October 7. For Sarandon, those dead babies simply do not matter.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference Francis Menton

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-11-18-at-the-new-york-krazy-klimate-konference

On Thursday (November 16) a publication called City & State (specializing in covering New York state and local government) put on a conference they called the “2023 Clean Energy in New York Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” Let’s call this the New York Krazy Klimate Konference. I showed up to observe and report on the festivities, along with another prominent skeptic, Roger Caiazza of the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog.

The Krazy Klimate Konference featured a gaggle of high-ranking New York bureaucrats and legislators, there to report on New York’s exciting progress toward Net Zero nirvana; plus an even larger gaggle of grifters and parasites looking to cash in on the big piles of government loot sure to get passed out along the way. The co-Chair of New York’s Climate Action Council — Doreen Harris — gave the Keynote address. Other presenters included several members of the State Assembly, as well as bureaucrats in charge of the so-called “energy transition” on the Governor’s staff, at the State Energy Research & Development Agency (NYSERDA), at the City Department of Environmental Protection, at the City Department of Buildings, and so forth. Wind and solar energy grifters were also prominently featured.

As readers here likely know, the first big step in New York’s transition to carbon-free energy is supposed to be the construction of some 9000 MW nameplate capacity of off-shore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. Contracts for about half of that have been issued after a competitive bidding process. Unfortunately, between July and October, nearly all of the contractors for the off-shore wind announced that they were walking away from the deals, absent massive price increases. The Public Service Commission thereupon rejected the price increases, but as of the time of the Konference nobody had figured out the next step. Thus, as we listened to the speakers, New York’s headline initiative to move toward carbon-free energy was literally dead in the water.

You might think that the focus of a Konference like this would be addressing the very serious obstacles that stand in the way of the hoped-for energy transition.