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December 2023

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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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Real Claudine Gay Scandal By Robert Weissberg

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/the_real_claudine_gay_scandal.html

Dr. Claudine, current President of Harvard University, is one lucky woman or, as she might describe herself a “a lucky woman of color.” She first survived her dreadful testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where she refused to unambiguously denounce calls from Harvard students and faculty to kill all Israeli Jews. It was an embarrassing performance filled with weasel words and amorphous defenses such as “it all depends on context” as if genocide might be legitimate in some circumstances.

Gay’s second lucky break was to survive clear-cut evidence that she was a career plagiarist, and this scholarly dishonesty far exceeded inadvertent sloppiness. Side-by-side comparisons of Gay’s writings with the published work of others displayed smoking-gun proof, and the official Harvard definition of “plagiarism” offered zero wiggle room due to substituting a new word or two for the original. No student or faculty member of Harvard could possibly accept Gay’s excuses and,  ironically, as a Harvard dean Gay had presided over the expulsion of 27 undergraduates for plagiarism. Predictably, she denied everything: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she wrote. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.” Keep in mind the former Harvard president Larry Summers suffered defenestration for merely opining that men and woman differed in mathematical abilities.

But, once again, luck was with her. The Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, praised her work (blatant plagiarism was referred to as “a few instances of inadequate citations), 700 faculty members signed a letter of support, and a group of former Harvard presidents proclaimed, “As former Presidents of Harvard University, we offer our strong support for Claudine Gay as she leads Harvard into the future. We look forward to supporting President Gay in whatever ways we can as Harvard faces this challenging moment for higher education and the wider world.”

Harvard’s malfeasance runs deeper, namely how did Claudine Gay become Dr. Claudine Gay, Ph.D., and this tale goes to the very core of Harvard’s intellectual integrity.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Progressivism Forces Americans to Forget Their History America’s collective memory of its greatness is a formidable one for young Americans – and it must be restored By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

By on December 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/19/progressivism-forces-americans-to-forget-their-history/

The difficulties of the presidents of major American universities—Harvard, MIT, and UPenn—to denounce anti-Semitism is both appalling and a symptom of the larger ideological upheaval in the United States between traditional liberalism and progressivism. The consequence of the increasing strength of progressivism is the loss of the country’s ability to meet the challenges that it once possessed. The most important of these waning abilities is how to confront and defeat with great power enemies. Thus, the progressive movement is regressive by its very nature.

Like a dementia patient in gradual decline, the U.S. is regressing, gradually becoming enfeebled and infantilized, losing its knowledge, memory, coherence, and the ability, desire, and willingness to meet challenges. This is due in part to the ageing of the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Generation X (1965-1980) who possessed the direct experience of fight against the Soviet Union and its allies in the Cold War. People matter, as does their historical experiences and knowledge. As those fade, the nuts and bolts of American civil society and identity are lost.

But a more significant cause is the rise of progressivism and its deliberate consequence—the decline of political liberalism in the U.S. The advance of progressivism evinced in the shameful testimony of the university presidents entails the diminishment, rejection, or replacement of U.S. history, political ideology and culture, and the regressive transformation of political ideology, culture, and institutions. The U.S. population and leadership either willingly forget or are forced to forget. As a result, Americans are becoming disorientated and detached from America’s liberal foundations and institutions. They do so voluntarily if they are progressives.  If they do so with considerable resignation, they are political liberals, and people compelled to go with the progressive flow.

The forced memory loss is part of the “Great Forgetting” of the knowledge, behavior, culture, skills, practices, and abilities that led to victory in America’s wars, allowed the country to overcome economic difficulties to become the world’s greatest economic engine, the world’s leader in science and technology, possess peerless universities and professional schools, and a standard of living unmatched. American society provided untold benefits to its citizens and to the Free World. The “Great Forgetting” is intentional, not an accident or an artefact of history. Progressivism is destroying America’s memory so that they may advance their revolutionary agenda, while disarming Americans who know or would come to know their country’s history and who would be able to thwart them.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American University, RIP Has the plague of illiberal ideologies become terminal?Bruce Thornton

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-american-university-rip/

Having spent more than half a century in universities, I wasn’t shocked or even surprised by the despicable display of craven obeisance to illiberal ideologies on the part of presidents of three of our most prestigious universities. Even their hypocritical rationalization for homicidal antisemitism using a defense of the First Amendment––which all three campuses for decades have violated when it comes to conservatives and other dissidents––didn’t raise an eyebrow.

After all, the predicates for this shameful spectacle have long been developing in our diseased groves of academe. Now the plague has become terminal, and the American university may never recover.

For at least a century, the obvious source of corruption of the university’s traditional mission to prepare young minds for ordered liberty, has come mainly from Marxism, these days mostly in its tactical guise of Cultural Marxism. Ethnonationalist passions like fascism and Nazism were other vectors of the virus, as French writer Julien Benda noted in his 1926 book The Treason of the Clerks.

All these political pathologies corrupted intellectuals and professors, Bend argues, who sacrificed their vocation to seek truth, in order to gain “practical advantages,” fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality”––nearly a century later, a succinct definition of today’s “woke” leftism and “critical race theory.”

In our times, this leftist politicization has been worsened by the rise of identity politics. The movements to remove illiberal restrictions on various Americans who had been denied their unalienable rights, especially black Americans, soon became tools of factional political power and leverage. A narrative of endemic white, male, heterosexual oppression and guilt arose, and demanded compensatory policies and programs for its victims. Discrimination, once the prime evil to be battled, became a political weapon codified in federal laws. The goal was to pursue the left’s program of establishing a technocracy of concentrated powers at the expense of the Constitution’s divided and balanced powers.

Universities, backed by the courts and government agencies, soon became a critical institution for achieving this goal by formulating and promulgating politicized curricula and discriminatory campus policies. A repressive orthodoxy of ideas took over universities through “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” “political correctness,” and now “woke” policies like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and toxic ideas like “systemic racism” that teach discriminatory, politicized, intellectually incoherent and daft ideas.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Do You Spell ‘College Antisemitism’? D.E.I.

By on December 19th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/19/how-do-you-spell-college-antisemitism-d-e-i/

In a rare show of bipartisanship, 84 Democrats joined 219 Republicans on a resolution condemning antisemitism on college campuses and calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign after they refused to condemn student calls for genocide of Jews at a House hearing. The University of Pennsylvania’s president, who was also at that hearing, has already stepped down.

But even if all three them were gone, so what?

The problem is far wider and much deeper than antisemitism at three elite schools. And if you want to stamp out intellectual and moral rot driving it, start by firing the army of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers at colleges across the country.

Two years ago, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, did groundbreaking work on the DEI bloat at 65 universities that are members of the five “power” athletic conferences: the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10, the Big 12, the PAC 12, and the Southeastern Conference.

What he found was that these schools averaged 45 DEI staffers, which was 1.4 times larger than the number of history professors. More recently, he looked at three public colleges in Virginia and found they had 6.5 DEI staffers for every 100 faculty members, which is higher than any single public university outside Virginia.

Later, Greene studied their posts on Twitter (now called X), and found that the ranks of DEI staff were full of antisemites. He found that 96% of their tweets about Israel were critical of the Jewish state, while 62% of the tweets about communist China were favorable.

“Frequently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes while rarely leveling similar criticisms toward China indicates an irrational hatred that is particularly directed toward Jews and not merely a concern for human rights,” he wrote.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Half of Young Americans Say Israel Should Be ‘Ended and Given to Hamas’: Poll By David Zimmermann

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/half-of-young-americans-say-israel-should-be-ended-and-given-to-hamas-poll/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Roughly half of young Americans say Israel should be “ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians” amid the ongoing war despite continuing support for the Jewish state among older Americans, according to a new poll.

While 51 percent of 18–24-year-olds in the U.S. want Israel to lose to Hamas, that sentiment decreases significantly among the higher age brackets in the monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris poll. Thirty-one percent of 25–34-year-olds, 24 percent of 35–44-year-olds, 15 percent of 45–54-year-olds, 13 percent of 55–64-year-olds, and only 4 percent of Americans aged 65 and older say Israel should be wiped out.

In comparison, an overall 81 percent of Americans support Israel over Hamas. However, support between the two sides is split evenly among the 18–24 age bracket.

Although the slight majority of respondents in that age group support the genocide of Jews, 58 percent of respondents aged 18–24 say Hamas should be removed from running Gaza. The same group further displayed contradicting views, with 66 percent saying Hamas’s October 7 attack was genocidal and 60 percent answering that Israel’s campaign in Gaza also constitutes genocide.

Additionally, 32 percent of young Americans want Israel and Palestine to be recognized in a two-state solution and 17 percent think Arab states should absorb the Palestinians displaced by the conflict. Overall, a two-state solution was the preferred answer to that question, with 60 percent of all respondents favoring it.

The poll comes over 70 days since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel two months ago, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping approximately 240. About 110 living hostages remain in Gaza, although that number has dropped in recent days.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Confederate Statue in Arlington Cemetery to Stay for Now, Federal Judge Rules By David Zimmermann

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/confederate-statue-in-arlington-cemetery-to-stay-for-now-federal-judge-rules/

A federal judge intervened on Monday to stop the removal of an Arlington National Cemetery monument commemorating national reunification after the Civil War.

U.S. district judge Rossie Alston issued a temporary restraining order shortly after work began Monday morning to remove the Civil War landmark, which the Defense Department ordered to be removed by January 1.

Alston’s ruling was delivered in response to a lawsuit that sought the restraining order. A preservation group called Defend Arlington, which is tied to Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed the suit Sunday in Alexandria, Va. The judge will hear opinions from both parties on Wednesday before deciding whether to extend the restraining order.

The plaintiffs alleged the U.S. Army, which runs the cemetery, is violating regulations by seeking a quick removal that will possibly “desecrate, damage, and likely destroy” the monument “as a grave marker and impede the Memorial’s eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places,” according to the lawsuit. An attorney for the plaintiffs reportedly said they have evidence that the hasty deconstruction project would disturb grave sites.

Over the weekend, Arlington National Cemetery said it will ensure the protection of “the surrounding landscape, graves, and headstones,” while announcing tentative plans to remove the Confederate memorial by December 22. The cemetery intends to comply with a congressional mandate that was issued after an independent commission recommended its removal last year, as part of a larger effort to rename military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why a Formal Impeachment Inquiry Is Now Necessary By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/why-a-formal-impeachment-inquiry-is-now-necessary/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

To make the serious allegations against the Bidens penetrate the public consciousness, Republicans must stage their own show.

Since the prospect was first raised, I have been of the view that the Republican Party would be better off moving too slowly than too fast in its inquiry into the Biden family’s peculiar business dealings. James Comer and Chuck Grassley have done sober and sedulous work over the past couple of years, and I have worried that, if they were to run out over their skis, they would fatally undermine their own efforts. As National Review’s editors correctly observed this week, impeachment is ultimately a political question, not a legal question, and it is thus subject to the slings and arrows of demagoguery and the vicissitudes of public opinion. Hitherto, my advice to the GOP has been to keep up the good work and wait for the right moment. An inquiry was already ongoing. What need could there be to formalize it?

I have changed my mind. Naturally, I still consider it imperative for the Republicans to remain diligent and shrewd and for all involved to stick assiduously to the facts. But, having watched the brazen manner in which both the White House and the press have continued to stonewall, I have come to the conclusion that a more ceremonial investigation is, in fact, necessary. In theory, the media ought to be keenly interested in informing the country of where things stand. In practice, its leading lights have effectively been working for the president. If the GOP is to have any chance of conveying what it has found thus far — and, despite the foot-stamping and gaslighting, what it has found thus far is extremely interesting — it will be obliged to do so under its own steam. We are a long, long way away from Woodward and Bernstein. To break through, the Republicans will need to stage their own show.

Thus far, the White House’s response has been to deny everything in the hope that the questions will go away. And, thus far, that has worked. Why? Certainly, it is not because President Biden’s denials have been proven reliable. Far from it! Asked recently whether he had done anything wrong, Biden was categorical: “I did not,” he replied. “It’s just a bunch of lies.” Perhaps so. But one cannot help but notice that this is exactly how President Biden has spoken about all of the other allegations, too. “I have never talked with my son or my brother, or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period,” Biden said in 2019. Actually, he had. “My son has not made money, in terms of thing about, what are you talking about — China,” Biden insisted in 2020. The records show that his son’s firm made $11 million there. “That’s not true,” Biden said this year, when asked whether “Hunter Biden’s business associates sent over $1 million to three of your family members.” As it happened, it was. Now, President Biden is claiming that he was not financially involved with his son’s business — or, as CNN is putting it, that that he was not “improperly” involved with his son’s business. This may turn out to be true — we’ll see. Given how the rest of his denials have panned out, however, it ought at least to be treated with skepticism.

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