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January 2024

None so Blind as Those who Refuse to See Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/12/none-so-blind-as-those-who-refuse-to-see/

Swerving, deflecting and distracting are symptomatic of our current malaise in the West. No better examples are those which come via commentaries on the plight of Israel and on the persona of Donald Trump. I’ll give a couple of illustrations from The Weekend Australian. It wouldn’t be hard to find a legion more.

Gemma Tognini (“Progressives in lockstep with Hamas ideology”) writes, “This isn’t a conversation about Islam versus Christianity, or Judaism.”

Don’t get me wrong, Tognini is one of the good guys and her article is fine for the most part. But what is this ideology of which she speaks? It isn’t owned by Hamas. It’s called Islam. And while Tognini might not be having a conversation about competing religions. Islamic clerics are, and constantly. They make no bones about it. They want the ummah to predominate in every country. They make no secret of it; apropos.

Hitler made no secret of it. He wanted German hegemony in Eastern Europe. He laid it out clearly in Mein Kampf in 1925-26. Somehow or other, most commentators manage to swerve around the obvious, which would be to take would-be conquerors at face value and instead put issues into a transactional Western Judaeo-Christian framework. It doesn’t work.

Alfred Pennyworth in the movie The Dark Knight (2008) comes to mind: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical … They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Well, one religion wants to ride roughshod over all others. It can’t be bargained with. You can’t bargain with Allah. And the problem Israel has with its neighbours is Islam. Islam can’t abide Jews and, only to a little less extent, Christians and other non-believers; as I expanded on here. Yet we pretend it isn’t so.

It’s Time to Make Some Examples Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/its-time-to-make-some-examples/

As anti-Israel protests grow menacingly violent, Biden and his party can separate themselves from the extremists or face the consequences of their inaction.

It’s easier to itemize the conditions that aren’t contributing to a general sense of apprehension among American voters than to list the many sources of our national malaise.

Americans are beset by a “crisis of confidence” in their governing institutions. Economic anxiety abounds. Crises overseas and on the country’s southern border have made geopolitics into a kitchen-table issue in American households. And millions of Americans are increasingly convinced that the country is on the precipice of an outbreak of political violence. Recent events suggest those fears are amply justified. A multiweek campaign of unabated criminal unrest prosecuted by opponents of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas could be nearing a deadly crescendo.

Anti-Israel demonstrators mounted a coordinated effort to block access to two of America’s busiest transportation hubs over the Christmas holiday: New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The attempt to tie up airport traffic is already responsible for violent interactions between protesters and the targets of their harassment. Over the weekend, demonstrators temporarily shuttered JFK’s Terminal 4 as videos taken from the scene showed them releasing balloons near the airport runways — an exercise designed to ground commercial aircraft by imperiling travelers’ lives.

When the protests against the exercise of Israel’s right to its own defense aren’t menacingly violent, they’re a nuisance designed to irritate as many Americans as possible. The protesters are as likely to be found gumming up the works of holiday celebrations — ruining parades, terrorizing tourists, and generally ensuring that “joy is canceled” for most Americans — as besieging the Democratic Party’s political headquarters or even killing their opponents.

Claudine Gay’s Resignation Won’t Solve Harvard’s Problems

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/claudine-gays-resignation-wont-solve-harvards-problems/

The new year is barely two days old, yet it has already witnessed a surprise conclusion to a sordid controversy from 2023: Claudine Gay has tendered her resignation as president of Harvard University after her unsuccessful testimony before Congress on the subject of campus antisemitism led to a deeper exploration of her questionable academic background and uncovered a stunning number of examples of plagiarism dotting a publication history only a mere eleven pieces long in the first place.

It is a pathetic end for the first black and female president of such an august intellectual institution, but one that all involved — Gay, the university administration, its faculty, and the unruly student body alike — were wholly complicit in bringing about. Gay’s resignation is richly deserved, but it obviously isn’t going to solve the crisis America currently faces on its elite campuses.

At this point, there can be no denying the gravity of the plagiarism accusations against her. All throughout her academic career dating back to her days as a graduate student, Claudine Gay engaged in serial plagiarism in nearly all of her published writing. It is no exaggeration at all to say that Gay was revealed — by the dogged work of researchers like Christopher Rufo as well as Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel here at National Review, among others — to have been a phony scholar, one whose very small and uninfluential body of work was itself appropriated from others in a repeating pattern of indifference to the basics of proper scholarship. Gay seems to have been in the university business for other reasons, and (even more shamefully) her peers recognized and celebrated it: Despite having a negligible record of scholarship — and this before it was understood that what little existed contained instances of plagiarism — she was rapidly promoted by her peers from a tenure-track faculty position to a full professorship with tenure, then made dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, then president of Harvard itself. It is safe to surmise now that none of this happened because of her brilliant contributions to advancing knowledge.

2024: Do We Hit the Iceberg or Finally Change Course? By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/2024_do_we_hit_the_iceberg_or_finally_change_course.html

It is difficult for any American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and military “leaders” destroy it.  Part of the political theater propping up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders from different parties are at each other’s throats.  More Americans than ever finally see through this convenient fiction and understand that a single Uniparty acts as a guild of political thespians who are the face of a permanently entrenched national security Deep State that runs the show.  

Furthermore, more Americans than ever finally recognize that the United States is not a country that supports free markets but rather a central bank-directed financial cartel that regulates labor, commodities, and transactions so stringently that there is nothing outside of the government’s (or Wall Street’s) economic control.  Taxing Americans’ labor, forcing them to use an inflation-driven paper currency, and encumbering their ownership of real property are not policies for encouraging middle class prosperity; they are chains meant to create debt-anchored, government-dependent slaves.

For many decades, it seemed as if a vanguard of American communists were pushing these destructive policies and operating as a kind of fifth column from within an otherwise pro-America governing class.  Whether that fifth column was always much larger than it appeared or whether it simply succeeded, through strategic patience, in conquering America’s political and economic institutions and converting them to its advantage, there is no question that America’s internal demolition is now an all-of-government operation.

You do not hand a private central bank the power to print dollar bills, unless you expect those dollars to become untethered from any gold standard.  You do not print and spend money without budgetary constraints, unless you never intend to pay down those debts.  You do not engage in such a monetary Ponzi scheme that artificially raises the prices of stocks and real properties while depreciating the common person’s meager savings, unless you plan on precipitating the mother of all economic crashes in the future.  You do not start seeding the idea of a new central bank digital currency, unless you intend to take advantage of that economic crash and transition the whole population onto a mandatory system of government welfare.  

A Hamas Terror Network in Europe A terror plot in Berlin shows the Islamic terror group has a bigger plan. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-hamas-terror-network-in-europe/

Hamas have been described as Nazis and recent arrests shows that the Islamic terror group tried to live up to the name by planning to kill Jews in Berlin.

The first warning that Hamas, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, was preparing to deploy its international capabilities came when Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas spokesman, called for “violent acts against American and British interests everywhere, as well as the interests of all the countries that support the occupation.”

The question of whether this was anything more than empty rhetoric was settled when 7 Muslim terrorists were arrested across Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. While Islamic terrorist plots are nothing new in Europe, these arrests reveal that Hamas has built an international terrorist network across a number of nations in preparation for carrying out attacks.

The official release from Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office revealed that four of the Muslim men arrested “have been longstanding members of HAMAS and have participated in HAMAS operations abroad.”

It revealed that Hamas had set up “an underground weapons cache in Europe… created in the past in a conspiratorial manner.” This weapons cache had been set up well before the Oct 7 atrocities committed by the Islamic terror group and the terrorists were activated and told to search for it “no later than spring 2023” making it clear that this was not an attack planned in response to Israel’s bombing of Hamas targets in Gaza, but long before the Oct 7 attacks.

Why The Sudden Media Interest In The Biden Border Crisis?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/03/why-the-sudden-media-interest-in-the-biden-border-crisis/

The fact that the corporate media has finally decided to report on the border crisis is good news. Just don’t mistake it for honest journalism.

After spending three years largely ignoring the border, the mainstream press is suddenly all over it, with headlines blaring about a “surge,” “crisis” and “call for action.” Why now?

Last week CNN reported that a “December migrant surge” at the southern border was the “largest in more than two decades.” Several other news outlets used similar language. The New York Times warned that “surging” Mexico border crossings “push U.S. resources to the brink.” In another story, CNN even described the situation as a “crisis.”

Weirdly, the press is even exaggerating the current “surge.” Consider that CNN story, which says:

“Border authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border this month, marking the highest monthly total recorded since 2000, according to preliminary Homeland Security statistics shared with CNN.”

Except that’s not true. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, illegal crossings exceeded 225,000 in August, September, October, and November of this year, and in six previous months since President Joe Biden took office.

As a matter of fact, illegal crossings have averaged more than 200,000 since Biden moved into the White House.

The Deadly Rise of Scientism We All Suffer Once You Can No Longer Debate “The Science”

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/p/an-essay-on-scientist?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=413102&post_id=140309584&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

One of the greatest challenges each society faces is deciding what constitutes “truth.” Whoever holds that power wields enormous influence and steers the direction of the society for better or for worse.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard.

Code red: DEI is in the ICU Opposition to programs based on racial discrimination is mounting Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/code-red-dei-is-in-the-icu/

One of the most important political developments of 2023 was the growing pushback against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Those DEI programs and the ideology that underpin them are under siege politically and legally, and they are losing. They had grown rapidly, thanks to a mixture of support, indifference and timidity. But that began to ebb last year and will continue to recede in 2024.

The wounded patient was wheeled into the intensive care unit when the Supreme Court undermined a crucial foundation for DEI and related affirmative action programs. The decision came in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a similar case against the University of North Carolina. SCOTUS ruled the universities were illegally discriminating when their admissions favored some minorities and effectively penalized others. Neither public nor private universities had the right to do that.

Those lawsuits were brought against universities on behalf of Asian-Americans, but their victory has reverberated through the world of corporations, non-profits and government agencies. That’s not surprising since those institutions have a host of programs and practices similar to those at Harvard and UNC. They, too, discriminate in hiring and promotion, in hopes their “affirmative” policies will create more inclusive, racially-diverse workplaces. One question sure to reach the High Court is whether these programs are illegal.

The programs also raise practical questions. One is whether they actually achieve their aim of creating more inclusive workplaces. Or do they create more hostile, racially-divided ones and wider public resentment beyond them? Another question is whether institutions committed to these programs can find ways to work around the court decisions and hide their efforts.

The policies used to pursue these goals are sometimes called “reverse discrimination” because they benefit groups, primarily African-Americans, who had long been subjects of pernicious discrimination, segregation, and, indeed, racial hatred.

The terminology of “reverse discrimination” is outdated and misleading. We live more than half a century after the tectonic changes of the mid-1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson and a supportive Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and a series of massive government programs, many of them meant to assist historically-disadvantaged groups. After that long span, the beneficiaries today are the children and grandchildren of those who were harmed by segregation and Jim Crow laws.

WHAT ARE THEY LEARNING? BRANDON POULTER !!!!????****!

https://thedailybs.com/author/brandon-poulter/

Universities offered students in the U.S. the opportunity to enroll in many courses that push gender ideology and left-wing activism during the 2023-2024 school year.

Princeton University offered a class titled “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” in the Spring 2023 semester, according to the university’s course catalog. The class will survey black BDSM culture via research available in libraries and individuals involved in the groups that participate in the culture.

“We will consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” the course description reads.

Princeton made headlines in 2022 following the addition of this course to the catalog as well as “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization.”

Tuition at Princeton costs more than $59,000 per year and can cost more than $76,000 including housing and food costs, according to the university’s website.

Westminster College in Salt Lake City offers a course titled “How to Be a Bitch,” according to their course catalog. Students are encouraged to “unpack” the words “bitch” and bossy,” which are “interesting but problematic.”

One course offered at Wesleyan University, titled “Queer Russia,” offers students an overview of the influence of queer people on Russian culture, according to the university’s 2023-2024 course catalog. The course “focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present.”

The university offered another class titled “Bad Sex” which debates the value of sex and questions if modesty in sexual relations is a worthwhile pursuit, according to the 2023-2024 course catalog.

Claudine Gay blames ‘personal attacks’ and ‘racial animus’ in Harvard resignation letter by Breccan F. Thies

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/education/claudine-gay-personal-attacks-racial-animus-harvard

Claudine Gay, the embattled now-former president of Harvard University, blamed “personal attacks” and “racial animus” in her resignation letter to the university community.

Gay resigned her position Tuesday after facing mounting accusations of plagiarism, but in her resignation letter, she turned the focus to race in a move critics highlighted as an example of her commitment to controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology.

“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay, whose tenure atop the university is now the shortest in Harvard history, wrote in her letter.

Gay, who saw a last-ditch effort from former President Barack Obama to save her job, added that the future of Harvard will require a commitment to “combat bias and hate in all its forms” and to “create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion.”

“When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education,” she concluded.

Calls for Gay’s resignation have been growing as more allegations of plagiarism in her past published works have surfaced. The latest plagiarism claims emerged Monday in a report from the Washington Free Beacon, bringing the total number of allegations close to 50.

Gay was also one of several university presidents accused of allowing antisemitism on campus following their recent congressional testimonies, during which Gay and others refused to specify whether calls for genocide against Jews would violate their universities’ codes of conduct.