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December 2023

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden’s 2024 election insurance policy might surprise you

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/bidens-2024-election-insurance-policy-surprise-you

Democrats are marching through various stages of grief as they contemplate President Joe Biden running for reelection in 2024. They have variously been hopeful, worried, frantic … and now they’re getting downright angry.

Far-left columnist Harold Meyerson, editor of the liberal magazine American Prospect, is furious that more Democrats have not jumped into the race. His latest piece asks, “Are the Democrats sleepwalking to disaster?” Disaster, of course, being the election of Donald Trump, who will bring the U.S. – according to Meyerson – to the “brink of authoritarian rule.”

The former Washington Post writer says Biden has been an “excellent president,” but is concerned that he is “the candidate least able to defeat Donald Trump.” Meyerson is certainly not alone; a rising chorus of Democrat voices are urging Biden to step aside,including now, apparently, Barack Obama. The New York Post reports that the former president “knows this is going to be a close race” and “feels that Democrats very well could lose.”

The question is: who might replace Biden? Meyerson lofts Gavin Newsom as a possibility but notes that the California governor “lacks appeal to working-class voters (California has the lowest share of white working-class residents of any state save Hawaii).”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. Francesca Block

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last fall, Siriana Abboud put a new poster on the wall of her pre-K class at a public school in Midtown Manhattan that, she claimed, would teach her four- and five-year-old students about the human body.

The poster showed four sketches of differently shaped noses—two small, one hooked, and another with a nose ring.

“Why do people have different noses?” a headline above the drawings asked.

Underneath, kids posted their answers:

“I think it’s because of your ancestors,” one wrote.

“Where you are from,” scribbled another, with a smiley face and a heart.

Next to these replies Abboud penned her own answer:

“I think it’s based on your ethnic identity. In art, we can often tell ethnicity from the bridge of your nose.”

One senior educator in the district, who is Jewish, told The Free Press she was “appalled” by the poster. “It’s clearly connected to the ethnic tropes of Jews having big noses. Quite frankly, it reminded me of Nazi comics. I had a visceral reaction to it. It was antisemitic.”

The poster Siriana Abboud put up in her pre-K class last year.
But Abboud, a twentysomething who teaches pre-K at PS 59, Beekman Hill International School, wasn’t punished or disciplined by the Department of Education for the poster, a source who knows Abboud told The Free Press. In fact, last December, she won the Big Apple Award, the highest distinction for a city teacher, for being a “liberation-inspired educator” who “raises societal expectations of the critical work of young children.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Crossing the Line: Justifications for Terror Brendan Craig

By on December 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/crossing-the-line-justifications-for-terror/

“As a historical scholar once put it: first, they said, You have no right to live among us as Jews; then they said, You have no right to live as Jews; the Nazi regime simply reduced the historical anti-Semitism to its logical endgame: You have no right to live. Once a nation and its citizens cross that line, once they can see the “other” as less human, or simply not human at all, then no atrocity is unthinkable.”

There are no innocent British: I struggled, as a ten-year-old in 1975, to understand the news reports on our television; why my parents were so upset, particularly my English mother. “Disgusting,” they would murmur. “What kind of people could do this?” Every other week, it seemed back then, a new IRA bombing would make headlines. In September 1975 an IRA bomb exploded in the lobby of London’s Hilton Hotel. Two people were killed and sixty-three injured, many suffering limbs blown off and other horrific injuries.

There is an excellent book by a former IRA member, Eamon Collins, called Killing Rage, in which he explains the cold rationale behind the IRA’s terror tactics. The fact was, while there were some attempts to target British soldiers and military targets, the IRA hard-liners argued that all Brits were complicit in the long-running abuse of Irish nationals, and no tears should be wasted on collateral victims. The cause was all. And any means was justified by the end goals.

There are no innocent Chinese: It is unfortunate that the West has learnt almost nothing about Japanese atrocities of the 1930s. Unlike the Holocaust, Japan’s shameful past has been effectively papered over, in part because of the tremendously successful efforts of the US since the war to rebuild Japan as a modern Western ally.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

WHO is None Too Keen on Jews Stephen Buetow & Kira Baccal

By on December 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/12/who-is-none-too-keen-on-jews/

The World Health Organization (WHO) is a United Nations agency whose primary focus is to improve global public health. It claims to be politically impartial and to use its technical expertise to bring scientific evidence to bear on international issues whose politics impact health. However, the WHO r over-reaches this scope of practice and fails to uphold its founding principles, including egalitarianism and neutrality in global health governance. The 2023 Israel‑Hamas war is the latest reminder that the WHO, in its 75th anniversary year, perpetuates anti‑Israel bias and anti-Semitism.

Like any form of racism, anti-Semitism is an intolerable moral evil of concern to all people who value human dignity and justice. By anti‑Semitism, we mean Jew-hatred, as codified in the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition, and not a reasoned debate about or legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.

Indeed, political divisions are evident in Israel itself. They accommodate calls to increase respect for Palestinians’ right to health without delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist and dehumanizing Jews and Israelis, including the 20 per cent of Israeli citizens who are Arabs. Contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred include anti-Zionism. Amid increased anti-Westernism, it weaponizes the anti‑Semitism  that is surging worldwide.

Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism because, as British commentator Melanie Phillips explained in 2019, to treat Israel “as a Jew among nations to be uniquely vilified, slandered, and exterminated” is anti-Semitic. This article demonstrates how the WHO exemplifies such bias, acts against the sovereign equality of states, and promotes Israel’s disengagement rather than cooperation in confronting health emergencies in crises like the Israel‑Gaza war. We will discuss how WHO’s treatment of, and communications about Israel, differ from its diplomatic response to other states and conflicts. WHO’s condemnation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and international pressure for a ceasefire serve as a case study.

Differential treatment of Israel

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Aharon Friedman Israel’s Right of Reprisal After October’s brutal attack, the Jewish state is entitled to respond in kind.

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israels-right-of-reprisal

“The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.”

President Abraham Lincon’s military orders resonate 160 years later, after Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas-run Gaza, effectively an independent country, organized the massacre and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, the vast majority civilians, with widespread torture, rape, and mutilation.

Hamas bound victims, including young children, and burned them alive, leaving ashen remains that took weeks to identify. Hamas tortured and killed parents and children in front of each other, and, in one instance, sat down to eat the family’s holiday meal. Hamas broke into one home, tortured the father, raped the mother, murdered both, and burned alive their baby child in the oven. Hamas ripped open the stomach of a pregnant woman, stabbed the baby, and shot the mother. Hamas took 240 hostages, some of whom it raped and paraded around Gaza. Hamas videotaped its atrocities with GoPro cameras, and sometimes with the phones of its victims.

“It is the duty of every government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color, or condition,” said President Lincoln. No government but Israel’s carries, or will fulfill, this responsibility to protect the Israeli people. To do so, the Israeli government must destroy Hamas and convince Palestinian Arabs that massacring Israelis will backfire. Its response must be devastating enough to deter Israel’s other enemies, chiefly Iran. The Islamic Republic wants to erase Israel from the map and may soon have the means to do so with a breakout time of a month to build multiple nuclear bombs.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Claudine Gay’s DEI Empire Harvard’s embattled president quietly built “diversity” ideology into every facet of campus life.

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/claudine-gays-dei-empire

Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.

Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The endless veil of deception Victor Sharpe

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231219

Though they will not expose it in the media, Arab-Muslim anti-Israel activists feel a profound and debilitating sense of humiliation at the inherent failings of their own societies. So, what better way to deflect their dissatisfaction within the Arab and Muslim world than to employ the language of the Left – in particular, such phrases as “national liberation, anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism – with which to level false charges against the embattled Jewish state?

It doesn’t matter to these Arab-Muslims, or to their leftist and ‘progressive’ amen chorus, that Israel is dwarfed by an enormous Arab landmass, which is 570 times greater than that of tiny Israel – a state no larger than Wales or New Jersey. Indeed, the leftists, while ironically turning on the one state in the Middle East that provides its people with freedoms no Arab or Muslim country will ever provide, choose to embrace the Arab falsehoods. Why? Because the Left is terrified of being seen as racist. Yet by their very own actions and words, they are just that.

The Left buys the Arab and Muslim lies against Israel because they believe that the Arabs can never change for the better. That is pure racism of the worst kind. The corollary to this put-down of an entire Arab ethnicity is that the Left refuses to admit that it is the Arab-Muslim culture that actively engages in the very evil practices that they falsely hurl towards Israel. And where do you find apartheid, racism, repression, torture? Why, in the very Arab-Muslim world the Left supports and embraces.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The next front in America’s global war – the Texas border Joe Biden’s foreign policy has floundered under myriad pressures. But the greatest problem of all is right under his nose Charles Lipson

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/12/19/joe-biden-texas-border-war-on-terror-illegal-migration/

The Biden administration is risking American lives with two failing policies. One has left the southern border open. The other has failed to deter attacks by Iranian proxies on our troops in the Middle East.

The two may seem largely separate, but they share one common danger: both involve deadly threats from Islamic extremists. Terrorists like those who fire at American servicemen in the Middle East and ships in the Red Sea can also sneak across our porous borders to attack Americans at home. They aim to kill.

The failure on the southern border is obvious. The Biden administration methodically dismantled Trump-era policies that limited illegal migration. Those included requirements to remain in Mexico while applying for asylum, building a barrier wall, and convincing the Mexican government to station troops near the border to prevent transit.

The new policies have encouraged a flood of illegal migrants from around the world. US Customs and Border Patrol has officially counted 6.9 illegal border crossings during the administration’s first three years. Among them, the gravest danger comes from the 1.5 million “gotaways,” who were detected but never caught. They must have strong reasons to evade Border Control. Of course, we still don’t know how many were never detected at all.

This influx has affected the country in two palpable ways: deadly drugs brought in by Mexican cartels and crushing financial burdens imposed on state and local governments. The latest evidence of those burdens comes from Arizona, where Governor Katie Hobbs presented fellow Democrats in Washington with a bill for over half-a-billion dollars, the cost of services her state has provided for illegal migrants so far.

Gov. Hobbs has now ordered the National Guard to deploy on the southern border and criticised Biden for refusing to deliver aid. She is not alone. The mayor of New York has complained vociferously, proposed raising city taxes, and started cutting police, schools, and other essential services. The mayor of Chicago is so clueless and overwhelmed that he is now suing the bus companies that bring migrants to his beleaguered city.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia University’s top antisemite – In a recent webinar, Joseph Massad spewed lies, Oct. 7 revisionism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, pro-Hamas propaganda and more. Andrew Harrod

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/columbia-universitys-top-antisemite/

The “Oct. 7 Hamas offensive” from Gaza into Israel was part of a “war between the Palestinian resistance” and an “Israeli colonial settler and apartheid regime,” declared Joseph Massad in a Dec. 4 webinar. The tenured Columbia University professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, already facing a massive petition drive calling for him to be fired after he celebrated Hamas’s atrocities, had once again proudly displayed his despicable and murderous antisemitism.

In the webinar, held by the ironically named Rutgers University Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Massad discussed what was titled “The West, Israel and Settler Colonization of Palestine.” His comments drew largely on two articles published on the Muslim Brotherhood- and Qatar-linked Middle East Eye website (here and here). CSRR’s director, the factually challenged Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz, moderated.

As usual, Aziz introduced Rutgers as the “people’s electric law school” with a “proud history of defending the rights and the lives of the underprivileged, the oppressed and the censored” before launching an anti-Israel tirade. She falsely asserted that, in its ongoing offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza, Israel is “carpet bombing residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques.” In fact, Israel has succeeded in limiting civilian casualties in a difficult urban combat environment to a remarkable degree.

Aziz claimed without evidence that “Israel’s war crimes include systemic starvation, dehydration and destruction of the health care system,” calling these “medieval” practices. She failed to mention that Hamas steals humanitarian aid while the IDF tries to guide civilians to safe zones. Aziz continued with her blood libels nonetheless, falsely claiming that Israel implements a “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.” She omitted the fact that Hamas has extensively embedded its terrorist infrastructure among civilians in order to use them as human shields. This is undoubtedly a systemic “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.”

For his part, Massad sought to portray the recent American deployment of warships to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel as old-fashioned Western gunboat diplomacy.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

In Israel’s Time of Need, Jewish Hollywood Has Failed the Audition The list of celebrity Jews who have said nothing is truly shocking. Fearless in front of the camera, ferocious at the negotiating table, but cowering when it comes to moral courage. Thane Rosenbaum

By on December 19th, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/366431/in-israels-time-of-need-jewish-hollywood-has-failed-the-audition/

For a people that purportedly invented, and now control, Hollywood, Jews are awful at making demands—as Jews. There’s a reason why those early nickelodeons featured silent cowboy-westerns and scant Jewish immigrants. Jewish invisibility continued into the talkie era—more cowboys, wicked witches, tap dancers in gowns and tuxedos, a gin joint in Casablanca, and, yes, one Jewish jazz singer. Jewish characters didn’t only find themselves left out of the picture, they weren’t even on the cutting room floor. And as for silence, well, . . . that’s a Jewish specialty when it comes to standing up for their own people.

Antisemitism has overtaken America in ways not seen since the 1930s, when Hitler was ascending in Europe and the Depression caused pernicious divisions within the United States. The Jewish influence in Hollywood was never greater among studio chieftains and writers back then, but the motion picture industry had nothing to say about Hitler’s plan for European Jewry.

Some studio heads still had families in Europe. And they were at the helm of the ultimate megaphones and spotlights. But there was no golden hour for the Holocaust. Hollywood’s cameras were dark. The Third Reich was the second largest market for movies in the world—and foreign sales, in industry speak, is the Golden Calf. It wasn’t until Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), as Auschwitz was beginning to burn, that Hollywood realized that the number of Jewish actors and extras in the world was rapidly shrinking.

And Chaplin wasn’t Jewish!

There’s a sequel to this sad story playing out all over again, an even more inexplicable example of how La La Land goes all blah blah rather raise the red flag for Jews. In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Southern Israel, which included the most gruesome and unimaginable of all horror flicks—the beheading and baking of Jewish babies, and the gang raping and mutilation of Israeli teenagers—sympathy for Israel evaporated before it even started. Instead, there was the surreal solidarity with Hamas. The victims were thrust into the woke paradigm as oppressors; and the terrorists were reincarnated as the resistance.

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