The Sick Alliance between the Left and Muslim Extremists Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/15/the_sick_alliance_between_the_left_and_muslim_extremists_149901.html

The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims. That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.

What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and Muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs.

The left supports women’s rights and full equality in the workplace and public sphere. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports gay rights and gay marriage. Militant Muslims toss gays off buildings. None would dare hold a public march in Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

The left supports abortion rights. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports religious freedom, including the right to reject religion altogether. Militant Muslims believe heretics should be executed.

The left rallies against book banning. Militant Muslims embrace it for any book they believe insults Islam or supports Israel.

The left opposes the death penalty. Militant Muslims endorse it and praise their governments for using it.

These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other. Still, the two groups have formed a long-standing alliance. How do they deal with these profound differences? And why are they allied?

Why the Woke Support Hamas By Richard Samuelson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/14/why_the_woke_support_hamas_149903.html

In the wake of the barbaric attack on Israel, many Americans have been shocked, angered, and disgusted to see woke organizations express anything other than condemnation for Hamas. On campuses and in our communities, students and organizations like Black Lives Matter have expressed support for the butchers of Jews. Meanwhile, all too many campus leaders, formerly so quick to condemn even the hint of racism, can barely muster even weak condemnation of such savagery. Many Americans find themselves shaking their heads in dismay.

Where does this blindness come from? Why are so many people who think of themselves as crusaders for justice so misguided?

It is a complicated story. But one key part of that story is the way that civil rights, which began as a cause, became an ideology. Eventually that ideology metastasized into “anti-racism,” a radical legal doctrine that scholar John McWhorter suggests is nothing less than a secular “religion.” The once-noble cause of civil rights changed. No longer merely about ending specific acts of discrimination in voting, employment, and public accommodations, it became a crusade to rectify the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and the lingering legacy of institutional racism. In the view of 21st century progressives this entailed transforming America and the world. It is a reminder that even good things if done in the wrong way, or carried to excess, can turn bad.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” In subsequent decades we have added more categories, notably sexuality, disability, and gender identity. Those categories are “protected classes” in law. But it didn’t take long for the legal category to be transformed into a moral category. Certain people were regarded as having special protections. In the decades since 1964 we have created an ever-expanding and ever more influential bureaucracy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) workers dedicated to this task.

But there is a problem, especially as the number of protected classes grows, and as the number of non-white Americans grows. (When the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, whites were roughly 88% of the population. They are roughly 60% today.) What to do when a member of one protected class mistreats or discriminates against another? To cite one infamous example, early civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael said that “the only position for women in the SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee] is prone.” So Carmichael was both a fighter against segregation and a sexist pig.

Majority Of Voters ‘Not Satisfied’ With Biden’s Efforts On Russia-Ukraine War: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/16/majority-of-voters-not-satisfied-with-bidens-efforts-on-russia-ukraine-war-ii-tipp-poll/
With the world’s attention still riveted by Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel, the death and destruction of the Russia-Ukraine war, now in its 21st month, goes on. During the conflict, President Joe Biden has put the U.S. forward as a potential peace broker. Do average Americans believe his plan is working?
To find the answer, the October I&I/TIPP Poll asked voters: “How satisfied are you with the Biden administration’s efforts to find a settlement to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?”
The response, after more than $113 billion in U.S. military and humanitarian aid, is not much. Among those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll, conducted from Sept. 27-29 among 1,378 adults, just 34% said they were either “very satisfied” (11%) or “somewhat satisfied” (23%).
More than half of respondents — 53% — described themselves as either “not very satisfied” (22%) or “not at all satisfied” (31%). Another 12% said they were “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

As is usually the case in these days of highly partisan politics, the major parties and independents show sharp differences over Biden’s efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Democrats (61% “satisfied,” 27% “not satisfied”) strongly support Biden, while Republicans (12% “satisfied,” 83% “not satisfied) overwhelmingly reject Biden’s efforts so far.
Independents again represented a kind of middle ground between the two parties, with 29% “satisfied,” but 53% calling themselves “not satisfied.”
Indeed, among all possible responses, “not at all satisfied” was No. 1 at 31%.

Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students Would your clients want an attorney who condones hatred and monstrous crimes? By Steven Davidoff Solomon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-hire-my-anti-semitic-law-students-protests-colleges-universities-jews-palestine-6ad86ad5?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I teach corporate law at the University of California, Berkeley, and I’m an adviser to the Jewish law students association. My students are largely engaged and well-prepared, and I regularly recommend them to legal employers.

But if you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students. Anti-Semitic conduct is nothing new on university campuses, including here at Berkeley.

Last year, Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine asked other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events. It excluded any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” Nine student groups adopted the bylaw. Signers included the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus and the Women of Berkeley Law.

The bylaw caused an uproar. It was rightly criticized for creating “Jew-free” zones. Our dean—a diehard liberal—admirably condemned it but said free-speech principles tied his hands. The campus groups had the legal right to pick or exclude speakers based on their views. The bylaw remains, and 11 other groups subsequently adopted it.

You don’t need an advanced degree to see why this bylaw is wrong. For millennia, Jews have prayed, “next year in Jerusalem,” capturing how central the idea of a homeland is to Jewish identity. By excluding Jews from their homeland—after Jews have already endured thousands of years of persecution—these organizations are engaging in anti-Semitism and dehumanizing Jews. They didn’t include Jewish law students in the conversation when circulating the bylaw. They also singled out Jews for wanting what we all should have—a homeland and haven from persecution.

The student conduct at Berkeley is part of the broader attitude against Jews on university campuses that made last week’s massacre possible. It is shameful and has been tolerated for too long.

Hamas’s Enablers Should Take Gaza Refugees Instead of flooding into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the displaced should go to Iran, Turkey and Qatar. By Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Schanzer

https://www.wsj.com/articles/enablers-of-hamas-should-take-gaza-refugees-c7c4b44c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Thousands of civilians in Gaza are about to endure another nightmare brought on by Hamas’s mass slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis and foreign nationals. Now that the border between Israel and Gaza is mostly under control, Israeli forces are preparing for a ground invasion to end Hamas’s brutal rule. The battle isn’t likely to end quickly.

Civilians are seeking to flee in advance of the fighting, and we shouldn’t expect Israel to take them in. With nowhere else to go, Egypt is the only possible escape route for Palestinians hoping to find refuge by land.

The U.S. has already started to discuss this with the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to recent reports. An Israeli military spokesman, when asked by reporters where displaced persons might go, suggested Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is the logical location. He added, “Anyone who can get out, I would advise them to get out.” In an interview with Army Radio, Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch also said that Palestinians seeking to flee Gaza should look to Egypt.

The Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border is open. The Israeli military issued a statement on Oct. 10 indicating that it was briefly closed. Egyptian officials later told Reuters that operations at Rafah had been disrupted by a nearby Israeli airstrike but had reopened shortly afterward, at least for humanitarian purposes. On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Hamas has been preventing people from leaving through the Rafah crossing.

Egypt may not be thrilled about the role it is being asked to play. Egyptian security sources have said it wouldn’t permit a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai. Cairo is deeply skeptical of Hamas, given the terrorist organization’s roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt’s government views as a threat. Moreover, Cairo has consistently tried to distance itself from any responsibility for Gaza, which it occupied between 1948 and 1967.

Hamas Terror: Madness and Method Will Garland and the DOJ – who investigated parents as terrorists – investigate those who celebrated Hamas terrorism in American streets? By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/14/hamas-terror-madness-and-method/

The deepest forms of evil committed against another person and/or people possess both a madness and a method.

During last week’s murderous terrorist attack by Hamas, the vilest atrocities were not solely the inevitable and desired result of generations of Palestinians being indoctrinated in homes, schools, and mosques to hate Jews and deem any act to destroy Israel, however inhuman, as justified. The madness did exacerbate the terrorists’ frenzied butchery, torture, rape, kidnapping of men, women, and children, and the desecration of bodies. It further led to the expansion of Hamas’ indiscriminate slaughter to anyone in their barbarous swath who they considered supportive of Israel (who may not be Jewish), such as American, German, and Brazilian concert goers and tourists, because Hamas’ despicable terrorist screed deems anyone who supports the Jewish state in any manner as their enemies and, ergo, deserving of death.

Still, some may wish to consider Hamas’ barbarity as a case of some terrorists becoming besotted by bloodlust, which allowed a handful of atrocities to be portrayed as the rule not the exception. But this would require overlooking Hamas’ barbaric method and its triumvirate of terrorist aims:

-Deepening of the depravity of their terrorist attack to raise its intimidation factor upon Israelis and their allies, the initial goal being to drive Israelis from the immediate area and preclude their return and, ultimately, the abandonment of Israel in total;

-Cementing Hamas as the leader of the pro-Palestinian movement; and

-Raising the bar of evil for other terrorist organizations and individuals to match – both inside and outside Israel.

How else to you explain Hamas filming their atrocities and proudly displaying them to the world?  Historically, as Allied troops were closing on the Third Reich, the Nazis sought to eradicate every trace of the Holocaust. Though rapt in the antisemitic madness and bloodlust of Hitler’s terrorist Reich that sought to methodically eradicate the totality of European Jewry, claiming over six million innocents as they did, these mass murderers feared the world becoming aware of their crimes and the ultimate justice the world would – and did – pronounce and exact upon them.

Not so Hamas, who deliberately displayed their depravity to the world. For Hamas, such videos were not proof of their crimes but propaganda for their cause. Disgustingly, they are being proven correct. Many in our world did not condemn, but rather celebrated the Hamas attack and atrocities, including in many American cities. Especially in the West, some of these perverse celebrations endeavored to portray themselves as supporting Palestine but not Hamas. Yet, these particular gatherings in support of Palestine have happened only after the terrorist attack and during Israel’s inevitable and justified defensive response in Gaza. In these world-wide “shows of Palestinian solidarity,” there is a paucity of denunciations of Hamas and its atrocities.

Hamas’s Deception – and Our Self-Deception by Caroline Glick

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20051/hamas-deception

The US and Israel continue to base their policies on the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is willing to coexist with the Jewish state.

“We made [the Israelis] think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.” — Ali Baraka, senior Hamas terrorist, RT.

“We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law.” — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Reuters, October 12, 2023.

Abbas’s statement is notable for many reasons. It doesn’t name Hamas. It draws a moral equivalence between Israel’s counterattack in Gaza and Hamas’s orgiastic rape, torture, murder, immolation and kidnapping of babies, children, women and men. And it came after five days in which Abbas and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas’s atrocities.

The subtext was clear. Hamas is the bad guy. The Palestinian Authority is the good guy. And if that weren’t apparent as Biden spoke, Blinken’s decision to meet with Abbas made the point explicit.

Fatah also called for all Palestinians to join Hamas’s jihad against Israel.

The fakery of Abbas’s milquetoast condemnation of Hamas’s atrocities is self-evident when seen in the context of his actions and statements and those of the PA, PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian public. But it was clearly sufficient to convince Blinken that it is reasonable to meet with him and continue to base US policy on the fiction that the PA represents a moderate force within Palestinian society that is willing to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state.

Israel and the US have refused to acknowledge that they have been played by the PA the same way they were played by Hamas for the past two years, and Hamas was able to deceive Israel and the US for two years because they wanted to be deceived. Israel’s generals wanted to believe that the Palestinians writ large aren’t implacable foes. They can be appeased. We don’t have to defeat them.

And the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, wanted to believe the deception — and to still believe it in the PA’s case — because they want to believe that Israel is to blame for the violence waged against it. The lie of Israeli culpability is the foundation of 50 years of US Middle East peacemaking efforts. The lie of Palestinian moderation is the rationale for 50 years of near-continuous US pressure on Israel to concede territory to the Palestinians. It has been the justification and rationale for the US opposition to any effort by Israel to defeat the PLO on the battlefield.

The constant assertion “There is no military solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel” is predicated on the notion that there is a political solution.

But the slaughter of October 7 made clear — and not for the first or the hundredth time — that this isn’t a political conflict. It is an existential one.

Should We Help the Palestinians in Gaza? by Alain Destexhe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20052/should-we-help-gaza-palestinians

The countries of the European Union are divided over whether to continue aid to Gaza. However, the question of whether it is possible to help the civilian population without strengthening Hamas is not part of the current debate.

Most international aid to Gaza is channeled through UNRWA, a UN agency dedicated exclusively to Palestinian refugees and their descendants… Unfortunately, UNRWA’s very existence and modus operandi directly reinforce Hamas. For this international organization, though there are only a handful of surviving refugees from 1948, supposed “refugee status” is passed down from father to son, so there are now around five times as many “refugees” in Gaza as there were originally.

It appears intended as political thorn to be administered for the purpose of maligning Israel for a war that was started by five Arab armies… which they then lost. Perhaps they should have thought of that before they started the war.

Meanwhile, roughly the same number of Jewish refugees, about 650,000, were fleeing for their lives from Arab countries to Israel. The newly created Jewish state, about the size of New Jersey or two-thirds of Belgium, and with no funds, managed to absorb everyone.

Given Palestinian demographics, return to the places deserted in 1948 would mean the end of the Jewish state of Israel, and is just as utopian as the idea of the returning German refugees from 1945 to areas of pre-war Germany, Poland or the Czech Republic.

[A]id, even humanitarian aid, to dictatorial countries inevitably strengthens that power, even more so with an Islamist totalitarian power such as Hamas, which does not care about the well-being of its citizen as Western countries do.

The US and the EU, if they want to continue officially supporting an increasingly unrealistic “two-state solution”, should first stop funding UNRWA, whose tasks could eventually be taken over by other organizations unrelated to refugee status.

UNRWA, which is inordinately active in education, has been criticized for helping to indoctrinate children with radical Hamas rhetoric through school textbooks and extremist teachers…. UNRWA does not have the reputation of being accountable. A recent report discloses that “UN Teachers Call To Murder Jews.”

The problem is therefore not, as we hear today in European circles, to avoid supporting organizations linked to Hamas. All aid benefits Hamas, which can then concentrate on war and terrorism, since it is largely exempt from the tasks normally devolved to those who control a territory.

No one will dispute that it is useful to teach Gaza’s children to read and write, but it is legitimate to question whether literacy training is actually being used to indoctrinate students and ignite a terrorist drift…

Sometimes, refraining from assisting people is the least bad solution when there is no good one… [O]ne wonders why the United States and the European Union want to help in Gaza and thus help Hamas… It is also usually not clear how much aid actually gets to its intended recipients and how much ends up in Hamas’s coffers.

Hamas and Israel: What Next? by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20048/hamas-israel-what-next

They [the Israelis] ignored one of the advice of the Florentine clerk that “Don’t wound a deadly enemy and let him live to recover. Either turn him into a friend or kill him!”

Israeli leaders tried to apply to Hamas the strategy they had used against hostile Arab neighbors since 1948: “Taking them to the dentist every 10 years to defang them.”

The error the Israelis made was not to see the difference between classical state structures that have to run a country and respond to the minimum needs of their society and a non-state actor that has little concern about the people under its rule.

Hamas has been in a position to totally ignore the needs of people living in the enclave. Essential needs as food, education and health care are covered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), over 100 NGOs from some 30 countries and frequent donations from countries wishing to show solidarity with Palestinians. In some cases foreign, donors even pay the salaries of the personnel in the local administration.

Thanks to “gifts” from “certain friendly powers”, Hamas and its junior partner, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even don’t have to buy their arms.

Hamas, as its charter clearly states, is not in the business of nation-building: what it seeks is the elimination of Israel, something that Israelis are unlikely to offer.

The threat of executing hostages, that include citizens of several countries other than Israel, could sap much of the sympathy that there is for the Palestinian “cause” especially in the West.

The current showdown also shows the inability or unwillingness of the Biden administration to discard then President Barack Obama’s disastrous Middle East policy of cold-shouldering friends in the hope of getting warmth from foes.

“EVIL” SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Three days after the dastardly and cowardly attack by Hamas on Israel, President Biden responded. For the most part his words resonated well. In fact, given the chance of escalation by Iran or their surrogate Hezbollah, he said simply, “Don’t.” But he added, unnecessarily in my opinion:

“I just got off the phone with – the third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming. We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law. Terrorists purpo – purposefully target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war – the law of war. It matters. There’s a difference.”

Sadly, in war, there are no Marquess of Queensbury rules. The only law is victory. To eliminate the enemy. To eradicate the scourge of Nazism and Fascism during World War II, were “laws of war” a consideration? No. The Allies called for unconditional surrender. Approximately, half a million German civilians were killed in Allied bombing raids, including the fire-bombing of Dresden. Over 200,000 Japanese civilians died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Could those deaths have been prevented? Perhaps, but at what cost to Allied and Axis lives. With Hamas terrorists having paraglided into the Tribe of Nova music festival and killed 260 attendees, beheaded children, raped and burned women, and concealed hostages within Hamas headquarters and military installations, Israelis are not combatting an enemy who complies with the 1949 Geneva Conventions, or international humanitarian laws. They were brutally attacked in an act of pure evil. The Israelis job is to rid the enemy, to demand unconditional surrender, just as the U.S. and its Allies did in World War II. And Iran, Hamas’ supporter and financier, must be confronted. In a speech to the students at Harrow School on October 29, 1941, Winston Churchill spoke words that have pertinence to Israelis today:

“This is the lesson: never give in, never, never, never, never – in nothing great or

small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Between Iran, Russia and China, an axis of evil exists today, just as it did in 1938.