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October 2023

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Blood Libel against Jews: Back with a Vengeance by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20096/blood-libel-israel-gaza-hospital

This conflict is not about occupation or settlements. The chants of anti-Israel protesters, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” means that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — all of Israel — must be free of Jews.

The truth does not matter to bigots.

A document from the end of the 15th century features an illustration of a bearded Jew extracting the blood of a Christian child. The adjoining text explains that Jewish law requires that Passover matzoh be baked with the blood of Christian children.

Such documents were widely circulated through Europe during the Easter season and led to frequent pogroms — murder, rape, and destruction — against Jewish children, women and men in revenge for allegedly killing Christian children for their blood to make matzoh.

There was never any actual evidence of such cannibalism. In fact, Jewish law explicitly prohibits the consumption of any blood or its use in cooking.

The total lack of evidence, however, did not matter to those who were taught and believed what has come to be known as the “blood libel.” Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many believed that this falsehood was “true.”

This blood libel persisted throughout Europe into the early 20th century. Jews were put on trial and executed for supposedly killing Christian children for their blood.

Other libels against Jews formed the basis for classic antisemitism, culminating in the Nazi lies that dehumanized Jews to an extent that made the Holocaust possible. Following the murder of 6 million innocent Jews, including babies, the world said, “Never again” and antisemitism abated in many parts of the world.

Now it is back with a vengeance, accompanied by blood libels and other systematic lies about the Jewish people and their nation state, Israel.

It is against this sordid historical background that the current blood libel — that Israel targeted a Gaza hospital deliberately causing the death of 500 Muslim children, women and men — can best be understood and assessed.

There is absolutely no evidence that Israel struck the hospital, whether deliberately or accidentally. Evidence from videos, photographs and telephone intercepts have proved to intelligence agencies worldwide that a barrage of rockets was launched toward Israel from near the hospital, almost certainly by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and that one of the rockets malfunctioned mid-flight, landing not directly on the hospital but in its outdoor parking lot, and that the explosion killed far fewer than 500 people.

The claim of 500 people killed came, within minutes of the PIJ rocket strike, from the “Gaza Ministry of Health” – in other words from Hamas. They lie. No facts or numbers are ever verifiable. Moreover, Hamas claims that no rocket parts survived – another self-serving lie. Yet, their blood libel is widely believed by Israel’s enemies – perhaps because they want to believe it. It is too good a story to be ruined by the facts. As the journalist Becket Adams wrote in National Review:

“The Media Will Never Forgive Israel for Not Bombing That Hospital…. Reporters and pundits mishandled the Gaza hospital story because they wanted so badly for it to be true.”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote:

“As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket ‘than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.'”

The “Muslim street” has been indoctrinated by its leaders to believe anything negative about Jews or Israel. And the Arab media generally reports Hamas lies and exaggerations — such as the claim that 500 civilians were killed at the hospital — as unvarnished truth.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Alarm on Energy Robert Bryce and Joel Kotkin

By on October 25th, 2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/alarm-on-energy/

The Second October War should wake America up to crucial geopolitical realities.

Fifty years ago, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of OPEC initiated an oil embargo against the United States. The boycott was retribution for America’s support of Israel during its brief war against Egypt and Syria.

What was true in 1973 remains true in the wake of Hamas’s brutal terror attack on Israel on October 7: America’s national strength depends on the availability of cheap, abundant, reliable energy.

Our national security, and that of our allies, depends on energy security. Energy is the economy. We forget these realities at our extreme peril.

Fortunately, some things that were true a half-century ago are no longer so. Over the past decade or so, the geopolitics of energy have shifted dramatically in favor of the U.S., due mainly to the shale revolution. Instead of relying on oil imports, the U.S. has become a huge exporter of both oil and natural gas. We are now exporting about four million barrels of crude oil per day and record amounts of natural gas (about 20 billion cubic feet per day).

Even more remarkably, the U.S. is leading the world in energy efficiency and CO2 reductions. According to the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, per-capita energy consumption in the U.S. fell by about 20 percent between 1973 and 2022. In addition, U.S. CO2 emissions have dropped by about 915 million tons since 2000, the biggest reduction of any country on the planet.

But this progress is being threatened by climate-focused NGOs who are relentlessly promoting “net-zero” schemes that will bankrupt our economy and spell disaster for low- and middle-income Americans, as author Ruy Texeira explains in a trenchant essay, “The working class Isn’t Down with the Green Transition.” Indeed, the grassroots opposition of farmers, factory workers, truck drivers, and construction workers in North America, Europe, and Oceania is already leading to a reassessment of alt-energy policies, most notably in the United Kingdom and Germany.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

The aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel has exposed the West’s moral collapse The protests we are seeing have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with problems here at home Douglas Murray

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/20/israel-palestine-hamas-london-protests-anti-semitism/

There is a good rule about anti-Semitism. One reason it isn’t better known is because its best expression comes at the mid-point of the 20th century’s towering work of historical fiction: Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.

That novel, which takes the reader from the Battle of Stalingrad to the Nazi death camps, traverses the entire dark heart of the 20th century. Yet in the very middle of its 900 pages, the great Russian writer examines the question of anti-Semitism. He says almost everything.

Anti-Semitism is something which, as Grossman writes, can be met “in the marketplace and in the Academy, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard”. He describes it as always a means rather than an end, “a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved”.

And here is the key point. “It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have seen this. And never more than in the past fortnight.

Look at the protests against Israel that have erupted across Europe since the Hamas massacres two weeks ago today. There were no mass rallies in solidarity with the Jews who had been gunned down at a music festival, shot in the head at a bus stop, or decapitated in front of their parents.

Weirdly enough across Britain, Europe and the wider West, almost nobody had time for any such public expressions of sympathy. We did at the highest political levels. But on the streets? No.

The Jewish people of this country were effectively left alone, to try to mourn and suffer however they could. But wider sympathy of the kind we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests? Nope. Nowhere to be seen.

I happen to have been travelling across America and Europe this week, and everywhere I have been I have seen the same thing.

Mass pro-Palestinian protests in New York’s Times Square. Major protests in every European capital. In Lisbon, people waving Palestinian flags. In Norway, a protest of people showing their support for the Palestinians and their opposition to Israel.

In each place, I think the same thing. What are you doing? What has any of this got to do with you? Why are you silent about so much in the world and produce such noise on this?

There is an explanation for what, at the deepest level, is going on.

The Jews are – as Grossman says – attacked by anti-Semites whatever they do. If they are poor, they are criticised for being poor. If they are rich, they are suspected for being rich. If they are ultra-religious, they are accused of being outsiders. If they are secular, they are accused of being seditious.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Case for Foreign National Deportation Conditional citizenship is the only way to keep our Republic safe. by Jason D. Hill

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-case-for-foreign-national-deportation/

Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he will rescind student visas of foreign nationals in the U.S. and deport them to their home countries if they expressed support for Hamas terrorists’ attack against Israel.

In unequivocal terms, the presidential hopeful made it clear that the United States had no place for terrorist-supporting foreign nationals attending U.S. colleges and universities, as many pro-Palestinian student groups at various institutions across the nation release statements and organize demonstrations endorsing Hamas’ largest attack against Israel in decades.

“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”

DeSantis told them he will be “canceling your visa, and I’m sending you home” if he wins the presidency in 2024.

DeSantis’ statement comes against the backdrop of hundreds of pro-Hamas and Pro-Palestinian student rallies across the United States.

After the attack against Israel by Hamas on October 7, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement signed by about 30 student organizations that read, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and other pro-Palestinian student groups at many other universities, including George Washington University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Berkley, also released similar statements on the weekend of Hamas’ attack.

Many other pro-Palestinian student groups at institutions across the U.S. still have their statements posted online and continue to participate in protests celebrating Hamas’ attack.

This is all reminiscent of Britain in 2019. In that year Britain stripped ISIS terrorist Jack Letts (known as Jihad Jack) of his British citizenship. Letts also possessed Canadian citizenship. Since the Islamic State fell in March of 2019, Britain faced the horrific possibility of scores of ISIS terrorists returning to the UK. Letts had travelled to Syria when ISIS declared its “caliphate” in 2014; there he admitted to fighting on the frontline with SIS and offered himself as a suicide bomber. After being wounded, he grew disillusioned with ISIS.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Threats to ‘Zionist Journalists’ and Their ‘Kids in School’ From UC Davis professor Jemma Decristo, still on the faculty.Lloyd Billingsley

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/threats-to-zionist-journalists-and-their-kids-in-school/

“One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misiniformation. They have houses w addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.”

That was an October 10 post on X by Jemma Decristo, an assistant professor of “American studies” at the University of California at Davis. The “trans” professor added emojis of a knife, axe and drops of blood. The story went viral, drawing widespread condemnation, and UCD bosses played defense. They took down Decristo’s bio on the UCD faculty page and as the Davis Enterprise reported, emails to the professor’s UCD address bounced back.

A statement from UCD chancellor Gary S. May, obtained by Newsweek, called the post “revolting in every way” and “antithetical to the values of our university.” UC Davis, the chancellor claimed, “rejects all forms of violence and discrimination, as they are. We strive to foster a climate of equity and justice built on mutual understanding and respect for all members of the community.” As Newsweek noted, the chancellor did not name the faculty member who posted the threats to “Zionist journalists” and their families.

According to the Enterprise, UC Davis hired Decristo in 2017. A May 23, 2023 report in the Nation cites Decristo as an “organizer” in a protest over Banko Brown, a homeless person shot by a security guard, without noting the organizer’s UC Davis connection. Decristo complained that San Francisco mayor London Breed, “continues to give millions and millions more to the SFPD, and equally violent proto-police security forces.”

The call for violence against Jewish journalists and their families caught the attention of Ken Kurson of the California Globe. “I happen to be a Zionist journalist and I have an address and kids in school,” he wrote to chancellor May and USD provost Mary Croughan. “Should I be afraid?”

The current chair of the University of California Board of Regents, Kurson noted, is Rich Lieb, who would like to see more support at UC schools for Jewish students. “Presumably, threatening to kill the families of those who support the world’s only Jewish State is not what Leib had in mind.” Kurson also called out UCD donors to “demand accountability from a university that funds a professor who threatens murder and celebrates anti-American violence.”

That professor, a biological male, was “formerly known as Jeramy Decristo.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Time for Billionaire Donors to Face Reality By Robert Weissberg

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/time_for_billionaire_donors_to_face_reality.html

An important repercussion of the recent campus anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies is that major university donors, many of whom are Jewish, say that they are re-thinking their continued support of their alma mater.

The billionaire Ronald Lauder has threatened to end his donations to the University of Pennsylvania. Fellow Penn alum, Marc Rowan, who has donated some $50 million recently asked fellow mega donors “to close their checkbooks.”  TV producer Dick Wolf, another Penn alum, joined this chorus while the Huntsman family has already shut its checkbook. Four thousand donors just signed a letter denouncing Penn’s support of anti-Semitism. Nor are these Penn donors unusual as billionaires at other schools have finally awoken from their slumber.

Can these aroused financial titans root out anti-Semitism? No doubt, the closed checkbooks will alarm top administrators who will promise “steps will be taken,” but, sadly, matters will not change, rhetoric aside.

No university will de-fund anti-Israel organizations since this generosity for student groups is a long-standing policy and administrators cannot anticipate what campus groups will do next.

Among the 30 Harvard groups denouncing Israel (listed here) were the Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association, The Harvard Jews for Liberation and, oddly, the Design Students Society, among others that, technically, have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Moreover, rabid anti-Semites can seize control over any campus groups just by showing up and then voting for a toxic statement in the group’s name regardless of the membership.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In the Mouth of Marxist Madness By J.B. Shurk

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/in_the_mouth_of_marxist_madness.html

At the beginning of October, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán denounced the European Union’s 1984-inspired manipulation of language: “Brussels is creating an Orwellian world in front of our eyes.  They buy and supply weapons through the European Peace Facility.  They want to control the media through the Media Freedom Act.  We didn’t fight the communists to end up in 1984!”  The “Peace Facility” is responsible for transferring billions of dollars worth of artillery and ammunition to Ukraine.  The “Media Freedom Act” gives European bureaucrats extraordinary powers to censor any speech or ideas they dislike.  

Although Orbán is absolutely correct in his assessment of European madness, there is no sign that his warning will have any corrective effect.  The Eurocrats are so steeped in self-deluding propaganda that it would be not at all surprising to see them pull another page straight out of 1984 by carving on one of their marble government buildings the same three slogans that adorned Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth”: “War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”  Such is the depth of the rabbit hole into which the European hive mind has descended that too many ordinary citizens would miss the depressing irony.

As if recognizing that Europe’s embrace of censorship, surveillance, and social control inconveniently mirrors Orwell’s condemnation of Big Brother and Big Government to perfection, the British “ruling class” attempted this month to “cancel” Orwell by using an article in The Telegraph to accuse the prophetic genius of being “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, and sometimes violent” — in other words, someone who should not be “tolerated” and no longer “deserves” to be read.  If “cancelling” the author who warned the world about such forms of slithery government tyranny is not “peak Orwell,” then the crazy train still barreling down the tracks promises to be a doozy.  

Americans, of course, are similarly under siege from an Orwellian deep state that manipulates the public by distorting history and undermining the meaning of words.  In a nation that celebrates George Floyd as a hero, clings to the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie as a sacred “truth,” and blames Hillary’s election loss on Russian bots, propaganda is king.  The U.S. government fights racism by institutionalizing racial preferences.  It supports Black Lives Matter and Antifa domestic terrorists while locking up American patriots as “domestic enemies.”  It replaces impartial justice with “social justice” and equality under the law with “equitable” special privileges.  “Climate change” communism kills property rights.  Meme-makers are imprisoned, but Russia collusion hoaxers are not.  Gene-altering serums are called “vaccines.”  And generations of judges have replaced the U.S. Constitution with their own postmodern revisions.  

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Latest On Global Warming Is … There Is No Global Warming

By on October 25th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/25/the-latest-on-global-warming-is-there-is-no-global-warming/

A new study out of Norway is exactly what was needed to shut down the climate alarmists. Its findings show that man has not set fire to his home planet.

Right from the top, in the abstract not 10 lines into the study, the authors get to the point.

“Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find,” the researchers say, “that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”

In other words, our words, the greenhouse effect is so weak that it should be sidelined as an argument.

From there, the bad news only gets worse for priests of the climate religion.

“​​Even if recent recorded temperature variations should turn out to deviate from previous variation patterns in a systematic way it is still a difficult challenge to establish how much of this change is due to increasing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases.”

The researchers, from Statistics Norway, the government’s official data agency, also address the apparent “high degree of consensus among many climate researchers that the temperature increase of the last decades is systematic (and partly man-made),” while noting that “is certainly the impression conveyed by the mass media.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real Hamas’s atrocities force us to confront the concept, though it doesn’t take long for equivocation to begin. By Lance Morrow

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-periodic-reminder-that-evil-is-real-rage-history-israel-hamas-6b255ebd?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Justice Potter Stewart observed in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) that while hard-core pornography is difficult to define, “I know it when I see it.” The same is true of evil.

A decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it is looking at. The torments that Hamas “militants” inflicted on Oct. 7—mass slaughter, rape, the beheading and incineration of babies—amounted to behavior that the high court of any uncorrupted intelligence in the world would describe as evil.

What other word would be sufficient? Wicked? Gruesome? Atrocious? Naughty? No one with any brains uses the word evil lightly. I tend to capitalize it to give the concept (vile, mysterious, theologically absolute) its metaphysical due. President Biden chose his language carefully when he spoke of the Hamas raids as “pure, unadulterated evil.” Since Oct. 7, the word—from which people used to shy away, regarding it as radioactive, over-the-top—has become commonplace and almost unavoidable.

Some years ago I wrote “Evil: An Investigation.” Preparing the book, I would sometimes ask people if they knew anyone they considered to be truly evil. Most would think for a moment, then shake their heads: “Not really. Hitler, of course. But I didn’t know him.” When I asked William F. Buckley Jr., he replied without hesitation, “Gore Vidal.” I laughed. I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t.

Many people believe evil doesn’t exist. That view is especially common among the rational and enlightened, who insist that events always have a scientific, clinical or political explanation. They are mistaken. Evil is real, with a spooky, inscrutable life of its own.

Evil resides, a law unto itself, in the penetralia of history and human nature. Anyone who doubts its existence should study, in no particular order: the Cambodians’ mass killings under Pol Pot (1975-79), the Japanese Rape of Nanking (1937-38), the Belgians’ atrocities in the Congo (1885-1908) and of course the Holocaust. You might begin your studies in that last topic by reading “Into That Darkness” by Gitta Sereny. It’s about how Franz Stangl, an ordinary Austrian policeman and family man, morphed into the monster who presided over the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Red-Line Moment With Iran Blinken promises a swift and decisive response, but will Biden back it up?

By on October 25th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-red-line-moment-with-iran-9e1bbf5a?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Tuesday that the U.S. would respond “swiftly and decisively” to any attack on American forces from Iran or its proxies. That’s a welcome message aimed at deterring the mullahs in Tehran and their agents. But will the President enforce the red line he appears to be drawing? He hasn’t so far.

“The United States does not seek conflict with Iran,” Mr. Blinken said at the United Nations. “We do not want this war to widen. But if Iran or its proxies attack U.S. personnel anywhere, make no mistake. We will defend our people.” Mr. Blinken’s remarks are the sharpest U.S. warning to Iran so far, and from the most senior U.S. official. They go beyond President Biden’s previous vague warnings of “don’t” to discourage Hezbollah or Iran from getting involved in the Hamas-Israel war.

Clearly the White House is worried, and it should be. Even the Administration has been obliged to acknowledge that Iranian clients have used drones and rockets to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East more than a dozen times in the past week.

White House spokesman John Kirby said Monday that Iran is “in some cases, actively facilitating these attacks” on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria. Mr. Kirby also acknowledged that “Iran’s goal is to maintain some level of deniability here, but we’re not going to allow them to do that.” A senior defense official noted this week that “when you see this uptick in activity and attacks” in the Middle East, “there’s Iranian fingerprints all over it.”

The obvious implication of Mr. Blinken’s remarks is that if American forces are attacked, the U.S. will respond with military force. Multiple reports suggest that Iran’s clients are planning more attacks on U.S. positions in the Middle East. The Pentagon has dispatched more air defenses and on Tuesday announced an F-16 deployment to complement other fighter aircraft in the region. One carrier strike group is already operating in the area and another is on the way. So when will the swift and decisive U.S. response arrive?

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