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November 2023

125 Years After Zola, It Is Time for Americans of All Faiths To Confront Identity Politics and Say More Than ‘J’Accuse’ Also, to remember that those who stood up for Dreyfus liberated all of France. Rebecca Sugar

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-cocktail-party-contrarian-125-years-after-zola-it-is-time-for-americans-of-all-faiths-to-confront-identity-politics-

In January 1898, Emile Zola published an open letter titled “J’accuse” in a French newspaper, L’Aurore. It called out the antisemitism that inspired false charges of treason against a Jewish officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, accused of passing secrets to the Germans. Zola’s morally courageous declaration shamed those who hid their rank bigotry behind a façade of enlightened patriotic allegiance.

Zola’s cri de coeur ultimately led to Dreyfus’s freedom. It was a close call. Antisemitism has always been a powerful force. Dreyfus was twice convicted before being pardoned, and Zola himself was charged with libel and forced to flee to England for a time.

“J’accuse” was ultimately effective — not because 19th century France was persuaded to love its Jews, but because Frenchmen still loved the idea of France. They believed in the legitimacy of their system more than they hated their Jews, and they chose to honor the French commitment to justice by refusing to corrupt it.

Today, Jews in America rely on allegiance to democratic ideals as preconditions for their safety and security no less than did Alfred Dreyfus. Yet once-revered American values like personal responsibility, the sanctity of the individual, blind justice, religious freedom, and free speech — which have long served as traditional guardrails against antisemitism in this country — have been decolonized.

In their place, identity politics and diversity, equity, and inclusion have been mainstreamed. We see the results across academia, and the broader culture: division along racial and ethnic lines, loss of national pride, and the upending of the American idea itself. The oppressor/oppressed model of social organization legitimizes hatred of the designated “guilty” class and allows antisemites not just to blame the “white, colonialist” Jews for their list of grievances, but to do so righteously and brazenly.

Keep Your Head on a Swivel By J.B. Shurk

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

When terrorism strikes, do not expect government help

This is an essay about surviving.  We should be living our lives today with an expectation that something bad will soon happen.  That feeling should not dominate our existence or preclude us from pursuing rich and joyful lives, but it should keep us mentally vigilant and physically prepared before disaster strikes.  In this Obama-Biden America of open borders, out-of-control violent crime, economic fragility, and international provocations, it is only a matter of time before conflicts abroad become conflicts at home.  It is vitally important to keep your head on a swivel.

The October 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israeli civilians serve as a shocking reminder that evil is raring to go when people least expect it.  One second, concertgoers were enjoying festival music, the next second they were struggling to escape slaughter.  One moment, families were asleep in their beds, and the next moment gunmen were breaking into their homes.  Life-and-death situations require critical thinking without the luxury of time; therefore, those who have already mentally prepared for the worst put themselves in the best position to prevail.

Unfortunately, Americans are at a disadvantage today because they have been conditioned to depend entirely upon government institutions for protection.  A culture that values strength and self-reliance produces citizens who are capable of defending themselves when necessary.  A culture that embraces victimhood, views masculinity as “toxic,” finds language “triggering,” and insists that only government agents should be armed with weapons is a culture ripe for swift defeat.  

Furthermore, too many official U.S. government policies are intentionally geared toward harming Americans.  No sane nation interested in the safety of its citizens would open its borders to tens of millions of illegal aliens, refuse to prosecute violent criminals, or secretly resettle anti-American, military-aged “refugees” into unsuspecting American communities.  No sane nation wastes its resources harassing patriotic citizens as “domestic enemies,” while turning a blind eye to the damage caused by Antifa and BLM riots and the very real threats from Islamic terrorism.

A ‘Humanitarian Pause’ – To Save the Terrorist Group Hamas?! by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20125/gaza-humanitarian-pause

A pause or a ceasefire would allow Hamas to regroup and prepare new attacks against Israelis.

On November 4, Hamas took advantage of a humanitarian window of opportunity… and carried out attacks with mortar fire and anti-tank missiles against Israelis.

On November 4, however, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to his credit and that of the Biden administration, rebuffed calls for a ceasefire, as “such a halt right now would only allow Palestinian militant group Hamas to regroup and attack Israel again.” The next day, however, Blinken continued his calls for “humanitarian pauses” — which Hamas would also use to prepare new attacks.

The Biden administration should be denouncing Hamas for forcing Palestinians — about whom it cares so deeply that it shoots at them to prevent them from fleeing to safety — to die as human shields in its genocidal war to slaughter Israelis and destroy Israel.

The Israeli victims of Hamas’s October 7 massacre were not given a chance to flee through a safe corridor. No one called on Hamas to accept a “humanitarian pause” as its terrorists were committing atrocities against Israelis that day in cities and towns near the Gaza Strip. The terrorists invaded Israel for one purpose: to murder, rape and behead as many Jews as possible.

Hamas and its patrons in Iran would be delighted to see a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip so that they can say that international pressure forced Israel to halt its war. Any “humanitarian pause” should start only after all the hostages have been released…

The Biden Administration has been pressuring Israel to agree to “humanitarian pauses” in the war against the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, whose members carried out the October 7 massacre in which 1,400 Israelis were murdered and thousands more wounded. Hamas has also kidnapped more than 240 Israelis into the Gaza Strip, including toddlers, women and the elderly.

By calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the war, the Biden Administration is throwing a lifeline to Hamas. A pause or a ceasefire would allow Hamas to regroup and prepare new attacks against Israelis.

This Time Israel Will Finish The Job The murderous attacks perpetrated by Hamas tore the mask off the ‘poor, suffering Palestinians’ By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/05/this-time-all-signs-are-that-israel-will-finish-the-job/

There are many reasons for any sane person to regret the existence of Hamas, the savage Sunni Muslim militia that controls the Gaza Strip in Southern Israel. Founded in 1987, the group has specialized in terror attacks against Israelis while maintaining vigorous side-concessions fomenting anti-Western sentiment and keeping their own populace in a state of wretched poverty.

Such are the convoluted workings of providence, however, that the world may eventually find itself grimly grateful for what one percipient observer called “the Sabbath Massacres”: the barbaric slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which left some 1,400 dead, thousands wounded, and more than 200 kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.

The main reason to be grateful for this horrific carnage follows from the revelation it afforded. In the first place, by acting with such savage and sanguinary abandon—deliberately targeting the young and helpless, the old and infirm, raping, mutilating, beheading—Hamas in effect signed its own death warrant.

We’ve seen all the usual suspects fulminating against Israel, “the Zionists,” “the Jews.” A prominent Hamas spokesman called Ghazi Hamad said in an interview that the Sabbath Massacre of October 7 was only the start, that there would be many more and similar attacks “until Israel is annihilated.”

The Mindset of Our Anti-Semites Why does the world apply a special standard of conduct to Israel? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/06/the-mindset-of-our-anti-semites/

Peruse campus literature. Watch clips from university protests. Scan interviews with pro-Hamas protestors. Read the chalk propaganda sketched on campus sidewalks. Talk to raging students in the free speech area. And the one common denominator— besides their arrogance—is their abject ignorance. Take their following tired talking points:

“Refugees” 

We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967 wars still “refugees?”

Most fled to Israel. Do they now live in “refugee” camps administrated by the UN? Are they protesting to recover their confiscated homes and wealth in Damascus, Cairo, or Baghdad? Do Jews on Western television dangle their keys to lost homes in Damascus a half-century after they were expelled?

How about the 150,000-200,000 Greek Cypriots who in 1974 were brutally driven out of their ancient homes in Northern Cyprus? Are they today living in “refugee” camps in southern Cyprus? Are Cypriot terrorists blowing themselves up in “occupied” Nicosia to recover what was stolen from them by Turkey?

Turkish president Recep Erdogan lectures the world on Palestinian “refugees,” but does he mention Turkey’s role in the brutal expulsion of 40 percent of the residents of Cyprus?

Are there campus groups organizing against Turkey on behalf of the displaced Cypriots? After being slaughtered and expelled, are the Cypriots a cause celebre in academia? Do the “refugee” cities of southern Cyprus resemble Jenin or Jericho?

For that matter, how about the 12 million German civilians who between 1945-50 were expelled, and mostly walked back from, East Prussia and parts of Eastern Europe, some with Prussian roots going back a millennium and more. Perhaps 1 million died during the expulsions.

Are any current survivors still “refugees?” If so, are they organizing for war to get back “occupied”  “Danzig” and “Königsberg” for Germany? So why does the world damn Israel and romanticize the Palestinians in a way it does not with any other “refugee” group?

“Apartheid”

Israel is said to practice “apartheid,” although since 2005-06 Gaza has been autonomous. Mahmoud Abbas runs in his fashion the West Bank. Like the Hamas clique, he held elections one time in 2005, and then after his election, of course, cancelled any free election in the fashion of the one election, one time Middle East. Who forced him to do that? Zionists? Americans?

At any time, Gaza could have taken its vast wealth in annual foreign aid and become completely independent in fuel, food, and energy, without need of any such help form the “Zionist entity.”

Gaza could have capitalized on its strategic location, the world’s eagerness to help, and the natural beauty of its Mediterranean beaches. Instead, it squandered its income on a labyrinth of terrorist tunnels and rockets. Today, it snidely snickers at any mention of following the Singapore model of prosperity–a former colonial city whose World War II death count vastly surpassed that of the various wars over Gaza.

Philadelphia’s Woke Entertainment Welcome to the Stalinist-style propaganda messages. November 6, 2023 by Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/philadelphias-woke-entertainment/

When you attend a play at one of the smaller theaters in Philadelphia, what you get before Act One is something called a ‘Land Acknowledgment’ speech. This is a statement reminding you that the ground the theater was built on was once “owned” by Native Americans before it was stolen by the evil colonists and settlers.

What that statement never explains is that when the same land was “owned” by Native Americans centuries ago, it was often stolen by other Native tribes in violent ways.

In other words, Native American society was just as warlike as any other in human history.

Jeff Flynn Paul in ‘The Spectator,’ explains:

“In North America, most Natives were primitive farmers. This means that (with some exceptions) they had no permanent settlements: they farmed in an area for a few decades until the soil got tired, before moving on to greener pastures where the hunting was better and the lands more fertile. This meant that tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes.“

Real history, of course, doesn’t matter, since most of the subscribers at these little theaters are committed leftists.

Thankfully, there are no ‘land acknowledgment’ speeches in the city’s larger, commercial theaters. Yet even here on opening night you’ll hear a sprinkling of words like “equity” and “diversity” in the welcoming remarks—a little woke salt to keep pace with the more radical thespians on the other side of town.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the city’s commercial venues fill opening night with stories about how Native Americans built wigwam settlements and campfires where the theater’s bar is located.

When Daniel Fish’s rehabbed “Oklahoma” came to the city’s Forrest Theater in 2022 (in 2009, the rights to the original show were sold to a Netherlands-based pension fund), audiences were in for a shock. Suddenly, middle class season ticket holders were face to face with a didactic, virtue-signaling Bolveshik rape of a beloved American classic.

Obama and the Occupation Eileen F. Toplansky

NO URL…ORIGINAL COLUMN

Barack Obama once again showed his true colors when he engaged in his circumlocutory analysis of the Hamas genocidal activities.  Claiming that it is a “complicated” issue he used the term occupation even though Gaza was returned in total to the Palestinians and they, in turn, decided to elect baby murderers.

Obama promised to transform America and now in his third term via his puppet Biden, Americans are suffering the lies of a man whose every decision proves his comfort with Left-leaning, as well as jihadist thinking and actions.  He cannot help himself in his loathing for freedom and deep-seated hatred of the Jewish state.  Instead he wraps himself in a cloak of faux intellectual profundity counting on the fact that most of this audience do not know the actual facts of which he speaks.

After all, to this day, a videotape of a 2003 banquet where then-state Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian activist has been deliberately suppressed.

In the Commentary Magazine of July/Aug 2002, one learns that “no term has dominated the discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than ‘occupation.’”

Consequently, “the prevailing view not only among Arab residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian ‘right of return’ that is meant to reverse the effects of the ‘1948 occupation’, i.e., the establishment of the state of Israel itself. Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel’s actions before and after 1967.”

Ivy League absent from university presidents’ condemnation of Hamas Yeshiva University President Ari Berman marshaled his colleagues to sign a declaration denouncing the terror group.David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/ivy-league-absent-from-university-presidents-condemnation-of-hamas/

Stung by their colleagues’ half-hearted condemnations of Hamas and by on-campus anti-Israel protests in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre, more than 100 presidents and chancellors of U.S. colleges and universities appended their names to a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 28-29) condemning Hamas in no uncertain terms.

However, not a single Ivy League school signed onto the statement.

This, as student chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—an eliminationist slogan calling for the destruction of Israel—echo in every Ivy League courtyard.

At Dartmouth and Princeton, students chanted, “Israel is a terror state.” Yalies4Palestine justified Hamas’s massacre in an Instagram post, saying, “Breaking out of a prison requires force.” Thirty Harvard student groups held Israel as “the only one to blame” for the pogrom.

Nor has such sentiment been heard only from students. At Columbia, 144 faculty members signed an open letter justifying Hamas’s rampage as a “military action.” A Cornell professor told students that he found the attacks “exhilarating” and “energizing.” A Columbia professor called the attack “awesome” and “astounding.” A Yale professor said that “Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”

Meanwhile, Jewish students on these campuses say they don’t feel safe. At Cornell, a student was arrested for threatening to shoot up the school’s kosher dining hall. At Columbia, a student was beaten.

The reaction of Ivy League leadership has been notable for its limpness. Special ire has been directed at the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

The war in Gaza; a wake up call to reality: Moshe Dann

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/flashes/618788

The Swords of Iron war has extracted a terrible price in Israelis dead and wounded,mostly on the day of Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel. But it accomplished what was not possible in any other way.

Until Hamas’s declaration of war, most people, including many Israelis, believed that PLO and Hamas terrorists could be bought off with economic, diplomatic, and territorial incentives, concessions and rewards. The world poured $billions into their coffers, no questions asked, despite constant terrorist attacks. Except for Arab and Muslim countries which support them (e.g. Iran, Qatar, Malaysia, Pakistan, etc), that delusional thinking has not stopped, but the world understands what Hamas is.

Until the war, many people believed that Palestinian Arabs were entitled to a state by international humanitarian laws, such as the right of self-determination, and promoted as “the two-state solution” (2SS). This was the basis of the Oslo Accords, the creation of the Palestinian Authority, and it became enshrined as a moral principle, regardless of the leadership and purpose of such a state.

Then-Israeli PM Ehud Barak used it to offer Yasser Arafat a state; then-PM Ariel Sharon used it to justify the expulsion of Jews from the Gaza Strip (the “Disengagement”); and then-PM Ehud Olmert used it to make even more generous offers to Mahmoud Abbas. They were rejected, as usual, since it required accepting Israel’s right to exist. Nevertheless, until the war, the 2SS was supported by the international community, the media, and many Israeli leaders.

That is no longer the case. No one who cares about Israel is talking about the 2SS.

Islamic Nazis They’re shouting their goals from the rooftops. by David Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islamic-nazis/

Quiz: What is the difference between Hitler’s Nazis and Palestinian supporters of Fatah and Hamas? Both are national socialists, both have embraced the totalitarian oppressors of their respective peoples and elected them whenever they were given the chance. Both are driven by a demonic hatred to exterminate the Jews. Both deploy “Big Lies” to justify their malignant cause.

Answer: The main difference is that Hitler hid the “Final Solution” – the extermination of the Jews – because he feared that Germany’s citizens were too civilized to embrace such an inhuman and evil cause. By contrast every Palestinian leader has stated their intentions clearly, written them in their covenants and visions of a Palestine without Jews, boasted of their massacres of innocents down to the cradle, and even shouted them from the rooftops.

Why is this so? German Nazis were pagans. The genocidal goals of the Palestinian Nazis are religious in origin, emanating from the mouth of the prophet Mohammed himself. The head of Hezbollah has proclaimed the Muslim war against the Jews a “Holy War.” The call to murder the Jews – “every last one” – and to behead them as infidels, is part of the sacred texts of Islam. The Hamas Slogans “Gas the Jews” and “Finish the job that Hitler started” are just tributes to a secular monster who shared their evil goal.

For decades hundreds of American campuses have been targeted by university-supported and subsidized student groups that function much like the Hitler Youth. The most prominent among them is the Muslim Students Association, created by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is seconded by the more activist Brotherhood creation, Students for Justice in Palestine. Some 20 years ago, on a speaking visit to the University of Wisconsin, I was greeted by a poster created by the MSA caricaturing me as a Nazi with a hook nose standing in a garbage can. The cartoon reminiscent of the Nazi caricatures of Jews can still be viewed on the Internet today.

Students for Justice in Palestine, which turns a blind eye to the murder of gays by the Hamas dictatorship in Gaza, was created by a Berkeley professor and Muslim Brotherhood star, Hatem Bazian, who has notoriously called for a terrorist Intifada in America while retaining his professorship. Several presidents of the Muslim Students Association have gone on to the Middle East to become terrorist leaders in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.