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February 2024

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How the US Abandoned Israel under Biden by Robert Williams

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20415/us-abandoned-israel

“Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people. And I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be.” — US President Joe Biden, October 18, 2023.

It did not take long, however, for the Biden administration to completely turn that promise on its head. The reversal began with US demands on Israel to scale down military operations, which were already scaled down….

“Israel implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history…. Israel’s use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.” — John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point, newsweek.com, January 31, 2024

The only relevant country that has apparently not been invited to the “urgent” discussions [to reward terrorists unilaterally with a soon-to-be-militarized Palestinian State] is Israel.

Biden, clearly, seems not that intent on making Israel or the Free World a safe place again. At least not if it might compromise his reelection.

“I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone,” US President Joe Biden said right after the October 7 massacre by the terrorist organization Hamas of Israelis, Muslims, Americans, Europeans, Filipinos and Thai visitors enjoying a Saturday holiday in southern Israel. “As long as the United States stands — and we will stand forever — we will not let you ever be alone,” Biden continued.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Amy Winehouse and the fanaticism of the Israelophobes The defilement of her statue was an act of racial animus. Brendan O’Neill

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/20/amy-winehouse-and-the-fanaticism-of-the-israelophobes/

Not content with pillorying living Jews, now they’re coming for the dead ones. Witness the desecration of the statue of Amy Winehouse in Camden Town in London. Some lowlife covered the statue’s Star of David necklace with a Palestine sticker. Just when you thought woke anti-Semites couldn’t get any more repellent, they go and defile the likeness of one of modern Britain’s greatest cultural icons. And for one simple, chilling and sickening reason – because she was a Jew.

There have been many gross acts of Jew hate in the UK since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. Posters of kidnapped Israeli kids have been daubed with Hitler moustaches. The word ‘Gaza’ was spraypainted outside a Holocaust library. Jews have suffered a tsunami of ‘hate incidents’. But there’s something about the posthumous racial harassment of Amy that feels especially egregious. It’s the fanaticism of it. For me, it’s the realisation that there are people in London so in thrall to Jew hate that they can’t even walk by a statue of a singer who died 13 years ago without furiously eradicating its Jewish symbols.

The violation of Amy was an act of brazen racial bigotry. It has eerie echoes of a darker past when Jewish institutions and symbols – synagogues, Jewish-owned shops, Jewish gravestones – were frequently set upon by mobs of the hateful. Yes, it’s good that the weapon in this case was a mere peelable sticker, easily removed, rather than stones or fire. But the fact that the thing is happening again, the fact we’re witnessing a return of seething intolerance for outward expressions of Jewishness, should leave us truly cold.

The shaming of Amy the Jew confirms that the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is now so thin as to be virtually imperceptible. The git who put up that sticker no doubt thought he was being pro-Palestinian when in truth he was being anti-Jew. The racist probably thinks he is anti-racist. For all the defensive bleating of the activist class about their ‘anti-Zionism’ being a zillion miles from anti-Semitism, it is everyday Jews who are getting it in the neck on the back of the Israelophobic hysteria these people have whipped up since 7 October.

Indeed, long before the late Ms Winehouse had her Star of David hidden, many British Jews had taken to hiding their Jewishness. The Campaign Against Antisemitism found that 69 per cent of Britain’s Jews say they are less likely to show ‘visible signs of their Judaism’ right now. Kids at the Jewish Free School in London were given permission – for ‘security reasons’ – to remove their school blazer and tie when travelling to and from school. Some Jewish uni students have stopped wearing their kippahs after getting flak from campus leftists. Tell me – if anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have nothing in common, why are their consequences so unnervingly similar?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

You’re Not Imagining Food Inflation By Jim Geraghty

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/youre-not-imagining-food-inflation/

On the menu today: A new report in the Wall Street Journal confirms what you likely suspected — despite the Consumer Price Index numbers (CPI) getting much closer to normal, you’re still paying more to eat, whether you’re shopping at the grocery store or going out to a restaurant. In fact, Americans haven’t spent this much of their money on food since the early 1990s — a fact that is likely to widen the divide between the administration’s happy talk about the economy and Americans’ perceptions that they’re constantly being squeezed, even if they’re making more money than a few years ago. Meanwhile, to fight the rising cost of living, states are hiking the minimum wage, left and right. Hey, it’s not like that increased cost of labor could ever get passed along to consumers, right?

The ‘Shrinkflation’ Election

Have you had this experience? You read that the year-to-year numbers of the CPI indicate that inflation is largely, if not completely, beaten . . . and then you go to Trader Joe’s or your local grocery store, or you take the family out to eat, and when the bill comes you think someone has mistaken you for a much wealthier person. Did I accidentally get charged for a Lamborghini in there somewhere?

(This is where the typical Biden-defending lefty will jump in and say, “This is because you’re shopping at expensive stores and restaurants!” For what it’s worth, Trader Joe’s is less expensive than the average grocery store*. And if you want to argue that by living in northern Virginia, I’m buying food in a part of the country with a higher cost of living, fine, but the point is not that things are expensive compared to other places, it’s that things are expensive in this place compared to prices in the not-so-distant past in this place. )

Over in the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Newman and Heather Haddon lay out the numbers demonstrating that we’re not just imagining this. Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food since 1991:

The last time Americans spent this much of their money on food, George H.W. Bush was in office, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was in theaters and C+C Music Factory was rocking the Billboard charts.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

What Shocked Me About the Culture at Yale I grew up in foster care. I wasn’t prepared for what I found on campus. Rob Henderson

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-shocked-me-about-the-culture

There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the most passionate, literary critic and Shakespeare scholar in America.” When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, “You were forged in a fire.” I also met the psychology professor Albert Bandura—who at the time was 91 years old and died in 2021—to chat about a book he had recently written. I was surprised at how late in life many professors worked—some well into their eighties and even nineties. This was a notable difference from the aging adults I knew in my adoptive hometown of Red Bluff, Northern California, who typically looked forward to retirement and preferred not to work longer than they had to, unless it was out of financial necessity.

Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.

“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Nitwits on Campuses Who Want an End to Israel Do they know – or care – how they would fare under Islamic Law? by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-nitwits-on-campuses-who-want-an-end-to-israel/

These campus nitwits and stormtroopers in posse endlessly chant their dislike — no, their hatred — for the tiny Jewish state, and their hope for its disappearance, with its Jewish population expelled or killed, so that it may be replaced by a twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” On the other hand, they find the terror group Hamas, “the resistance” that showed its mettle on October 7, thoroughly admirable.

Here are a few snapshots of the latest demonstrations, which on some campuses are now a monthly or even a weekly affair.

At Stanford, you can see the “Sit-In To Stop Genocide” here:

No one in the Stanford crowd seems to have any problem with describing the war in Gaza as a “genocide,” even though we know that, in order to save civilian lives, the IDF has used every possible means to warn people to leave areas, and to notify civilians to get away from individual buildings that are about to be targeted. It has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of pre-recorded messages, made 79,000 phone calls. And if Israel were intent on committing a “genocide” of the Gazans, why is the sister of Yahya Sinwar now being treated in an Israeli hospital?

At Harvard, a black student harangues his audience here:

He repeats again and again that “there is no black liberation without Palestinian liberation.” And he insists that “there cannot be freedom anywhere as long as Palestine is not free.” He reminds his audience that he is a “history major,” which, I presume, is supposed to testify to the breadth and depth of his knowledge.

I wonder what that black student thinks of the hundreds of thousands of black Africans who are now being held as slaves by Arab masters in Niger, Mali, and Mauritania? I suspect he thinks nothing, because he has never heard a word about those slaves. And if he did hear about Arab slave masters and their black slaves, he would dismiss it as a fiction promoted by “Zionist propagandists.”

At Columbia, students chant “We don’t want two states. We want all of it” here:

In their most recent demonstration, the Columbia students poured fake blood on the snow in the middle of the campus — meant to represent, of course, not the blood shed by Israeli victims of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, but rather, the blood of the innocent civilians who, we are expected to believe, were being deliberately murdered by the IDF in Gaza.

Fortunately, universities have girded their loins and are one by one showing that they are prepared to face down the pro-Hamas protesters. MIT is the latest in a growing list of schools that are cracking down on pro-Palestinian student organizations, citing similar grounds. The MIT student group that was suspended is Coalition Against Apartheid – an offshoot of the better-known Students for Justice in Palestine. Columbia has banned two pro-Palestinian groups. So has George Washington University. Brandeis University has permanently suspended all pro-Palestinian groups on campus. A congressional investigation into antisemitism on American campuses, obviously prompted by the hideous spectacle of these menacing pro-Palestinian groups, has now begun. Things are looking up.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

US and Israel facing the mutual threat of Islamic terrorism Yoram Ettinger

By on February 22nd, 2024

http://bit.ly/3T7N2lM

*FBI Director Christopher A. Wray visited Israel on February 14, 2024, during the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars, meeting with leaders of the Mossad, Israel’s Secret Service, and Israel’s National Police in order to benefit from Israel’s unique urban and tunnel warfare experience and battle tactics in the war against Islamic terrorists, who are advancing the vision of Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Moslem Brotherhood.

*Director Wray considers Israel’s as the most effective battle-tested laboratory of the US armed forces, law enforcement agencies and defense industries.

*Director Wray is aware of the Ayatollahs’ and Hezbollas’ growing entrenchment in Mexico, along the US-Mexico border and throughout Latin America. In fact, since the early 1980s, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah have entrenched themselves in Latin America, bolstering collaboration with the drug cartels of Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, all Latin American terror organizations, and each anti-US Latin American government. They supply the drug cartels underground tunnel construction equipment, and train them in the areas of car bombs and Improvised Explosive Devices. In addition, they have leveraged the convoys of illegal aliens from Guatemala to the US-Mexico border, smuggling terrorists and drug traffickers into the US.

*Islamic terrorism has targeted the US since the early 19th century irrespective of US policy and independent of the identity of the US President.  Thus, Islamic terrorism afflicted the US during the presidencies of both Trump and Obama, G.W. Bush and Clinton, Reagan and Carter.

*Hamas is a branch of the Moslem Brotherhood – the largest Sunni terror organization with religious, educational and welfare branches – whose charter aims to topple all national Islamic regimes, establish a universal Islamic society, bring the Western “infidel” – and especially the USA – to submission, and establish Islam as the only legitimate and divinely-ordained religion.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Renu Mukherjee Supreme Injustice The Supreme Court declines to hear a case about an admissions policy adopted in defiance of its affirmative-action ban.

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/did-scotus-green-light-racial-discrimination

The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.

Before 2020, TJ’s admissions process was strictly merit-based. Any student who had completed or was enrolled in Algebra I and held at least a 3.0 grade point average was eligible to apply. Applicants were required to take a standardized test, similar to the SAT/ACT, and those with the highest scores advanced to the process’s second round, in which they had to submit two teacher recommendations and complete three writing prompts and a problem-solving essay. TJ’s class of 2024 (the last admitted under the old, merit-based system) is 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.

The high number of Asian American students at TJ—and the correspondingly low number of black and Hispanic students—troubled education officials in Fairfax County. TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, for example, said in October 2020 that she wanted a student body that “more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.” One school board member wrote in an email that she was “angry and disappointed” with TJ’s racial makeup. Other education officials in Fairfax County stated that TJ’s entrance exam had led to too many “students who had been in test prep since second grade.”

Apparently in response to these objections, the school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Richard T. Bosshardt Not Cutting It Bad policies are leaving the next generation of surgeons unprepared.

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/bad-policies-leaving-next-generation-of-surgeons-unprepared

What is going on in surgery? Why are young surgeons are coming out of residency programs unprepared for clinical practice? A 2013 Annals of Surgery report revealed that 40 percent of surgical residents lacked confidence to practice independently after five years of training, the typical length of a full general-surgery residency. According to the same report, one in five surveyed program directors “felt that new fellows arrived unprepared for the operating room,” and program directors deemed 66 percent of new fellows incapable of operating unsupervised for more than 30 minutes in a major surgery.

While these statistics are frightening, that report is 11 years old. Have things gotten better since? Judging by more recent reports and my conversations with peers, they have not, and in fact, have probably gotten worse. Surgeons I have recently spoken to have observed that too many young surgeons are poorly prepared and need remedial help, such as operating with a more experienced surgeon before they can be trusted to operate on their own. The young surgeons themselves seem to realize their inadequate preparation, as nearly 80 percent of post-general-training surgeons pursue a one or two-year fellowship in a subspecialty, which for some may be a way to get more surgical experience and put off entering general practice.

One possible explanation for young surgeons’ lack of preparation stems from the American Council on Graduate Medical Education’s 2003 decision to limit residents in training to 80-hour work weeks and no more than 24 consecutive work hours. For surgery residents, fewer work hours means less time spent caring for patients and performing surgeries. Only with time and repetition do surgical residents develop the requisite cognitive and technical skills necessary to learn sound surgical judgement—knowing when to operate and what operation to do—and how to operate safely under all circumstances. The hour reductions also have resulted in less continuity, as residents hand off patients to one another, diminishing residents’ sense of responsibility for patient care.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How To Understand Trump’s Jeremiad Against NATO Freeloaders Charles Lipson

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/02/21/how_to_understand_trumps_jeremiad_against_nato_freeloaders_150529.html

Donald Trump sent a shiver through official Washington and America’s friends around the world recently when he once again fulminated against NATO allies who refuse to pay for their own defense. His specific target was NATO members that failed to meet their pledge of spending at least 2% of their GDP on their military. Their “free riding,” he stressed, is costly to the U.S., Britain, Poland, and other NATO members who pay more than their share.

The problem is not a new one, nor an easy one to solve. Rich allies in Western Europe have been free riding for decades. The U.S. has been complaining and coaxing them for just as long. Unfortunately, neither cajoling nor warnings have ever been enough.

The reason for that failure is simple. Allies who want to skimp on defense know that Uncle Sugar will ultimately pick up the tab, not out of generosity but out of self-interest. They know Washington has long considered it in America’s vital interest to defend Europe against Russian (or Soviet) aggression, whether France or Belgium pay their share or not. When countries know this, they can free load. And some do. They’ve got plenty of other uses for their money if the U.S. will pay for their defense.

This knotty problem is the essential background for Trump’s threat to allies who refuse to meet their NATO commitments. The former (and perhaps future) president was speaking to them and to isolationist voters in the U.S., not to Moscow, when he made his latest incendiary remarks. Although it wasn’t quite reported this way in the media, Trump claimed that when he was president the leader of one NATO nation in arrears on its funding asked if the U.S. would still come to its defense if it was attacked by Russia. Calling this bluff, Trump said no, adding that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to any ally that fell short of meeting its alliance commitments.

President Biden denounced those comments as “dumb … shameful … dangerous … un-American.” One of Trump’s erstwhile national security advisors, John Bolton, added that the former president wants to withdraw entirely from the alliance.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Stalinist New York Attorney General Scores A Big Win Against Trump (For Now) Francis Menton

By on February 22nd, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-19-the-stalinist-new-york-attorney-general-scores-a-big-win-against-trump-for-now

Josef Stalin set the example for the world as the most ruthless practitioner of the art of using a thoroughly corrupt and subservient “justice system” to eliminate all political opposition. Many, many others have since followed Stalin’s lead. Current notable examples include the recent murder of Alexei Navalny in prison in Russia; Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who fled that country in late 2023 after his arrest was threatened by the Maduro regime; and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and current opposition leader Imran Khan, convicted in January 2024 of “disclosing a state secret” and sentenced to 10 years in jail. Funny how the countries that engage in such practices virtually always have failed economies as well.

The United States has been remarkably free of such practices during its history. But we have seen a sudden complete reversal of that commendable history with the efforts of multiple political actors and prosecutors to use the courts to take down former President Trump. Readers here are likely familiar with the long list of such efforts, from the two federal Jack Smith criminal prosecutions, to the Fani Willis criminal prosecution in Georgia, to the Alvin Bragg criminal prosecution in Manhattan (supposedly for incorrectly recording the blackmail payment to Stormy Daniels in financial statements), to the many efforts to remove Trump from primary and general election ballots.

Of all the multitudinous “get Trump” efforts, the most proudly and nakedly Stalinist is the civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. What distinguishes the James crusade from all the others, as political as those might be, is that the others all have had at least a pretext of investigating some known or suspected wrongdoing. With James, by contrast, from the start it has always been about finding some way, any way, to take out the man. James initially ran for AG in 2018 on a campaign explicitly promising to get Trump, who was President of the United States at the time. My first post covering James’s vendetta against Trump was on December 13, 2018, shortly after her first election victory and before she took office. That post quoted at length from an interview James had just given to NBC News. In her interview, James emphasized that her focus in office would be on somehow getting Trump, and she essentially conceded that she had no basis at the outset to believe that wrongdoing had occurred. A short excerpt:

“We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well,” James, a Democrat, told NBC News in her first extensive interview since she was elected last month. James outlined some of the probes she intends to pursue with regard to the president, his businesses and his family members. They include: – Any potential illegalities involving Trump’s real estate holdings in New York.

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