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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Floor is Falling Out From Under Biden’s Ukraine Policy A year of Russian gains could force major U.S. policy changes in 2024 By Fred Fleitz

By on December 1st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/01/the-floor-is-falling-out-from-under-bidens-ukraine-policy/

Just two weeks ago, President Biden again likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hamas. In a November 18 Washington Post op-ed titled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas,” he made this comparison and said America will stand against these aggressors to prevent them from wiping neighboring democracies off the map.

I have major concerns about how committed Biden is to Israel in its war against Hamas after its barbaric October 7 terrorist attack, given his lecturing to the Israeli government on how it should conduct the war and increasing anti-Israel pressure against Biden from his progressive supporters. I expressed my concerns about Biden going wobbly on his support for Israel in an October 27 American Greatness article. Unfortunately, this problem is now getting worse.

But let’s talk about Ukraine, a conflict that has been pushed off the front page by the Israel-Hamas War. You know that President Biden’s Ukraine policy is in trouble when MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show hosts panels, like one held on November 21, to discuss why the war is unwinnable, explain why Ukraine needs to change its strategy to protect the 80% of the country it controls, and encourage Ukraine to pursue a cease-fire with Russia.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and his guests also reluctantly admitted what many members of Congress have long realized: the Biden strategy to arm Ukraine “for as long as it takes” but not send the weapons it needs to win is not a strategy.

Although Scarborough and others in the mainstream media won’t admit it, they now recognize something else about the Ukraine War: that the highly vaunted 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to turn the tide of the war failed to reclaim a significant amount of territory and may have lost ground to Russia.

As a result, many experts on the right and left have concluded that this conflict has become a stalemate and a war of attrition that Ukraine will eventually lose because Russian forces are dug in and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

The New York Times reported in August 2023 that Ukraine’s war casualties were estimated at up to 70,000 killed and 120,000 injured. Russia’s estimated casualties of up to 120,000 killed and 180,000 injured were significantly higher, but Russia can more easily absorb these losses since its population is three times larger.

Resistance to the Biden Administration’s Ukraine policy is especially strong in the House of Representatives, where many members have demanded the Biden Administration provide a clear strategy for ending the conflict and reaching a cease-fire instead of just sending weapons to Ukraine. Many House members are also concerned that the Ukraine conflict is consuming advanced weapons that the U.S. cannot quickly replace that may be needed elsewhere, such as to defend Taiwan.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Black Progress and Black Rage A new biopic about Bayard Rustin and the New York Met’s opera about the life of Malcolm X celebrate very different notions of black struggle. Joshua Muravchik

By on December 1st, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/30/black-progress-and-black-rage/

Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, two enormously important figures in black history, were each the subject of a major cultural event in November. The biopic Rustin, produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, opened in movie theaters and was released on Netflix. Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a decades-old production that has at last reached opera’s biggest stage. 

The simultaneity is a coincidence, but the contrast between the two men brings into unusually sharp relief a fundamental divide in the struggle of black people for equality. Aside from Martin Luther King, almost no one contributed more to the victory of civil rights in America than Rustin. The only other figure who deserves to be placed ahead of him is A. Philip Randolph, who organized the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a substantial base that enabled him to play the role of patriarch to the movement. 

Randolph was also something of a father figure to Rustin, who was born to a young single mother and raised among Pennsylvania Quakers by his grandparents. The two men first collaborated in 1941, when Rustin, then in his late twenties, assisted Randolph in organizing a march to demand an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries. President Roosevelt yielded, and the march was called off. At the war’s end, Randolph and Rustin reprised that scenario, securing an order from President Truman to integrate the armed forces. 

Then, in 1947, Rustin and a few other pacificists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation undertook the first “freedom ride,” which aimed to secure enforcement of a ruling against discrimination in interstate transport. In North Carolina, he was beaten by police, arrested, and sentenced to work on a chain gang. From his cell he sent dispatches to the New York Post, generating such an outcry that North Carolina abolished chain gangs. 

In 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott propelled King into national prominence. Rustin had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s techniques and he mentored King in the strategy of nonviolent protest. Then, together with Randolph and a few others, Rustin organized the first civil-rights mass marches, the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and the “freedom rides” of 1961, reenacting the 1947 effort of Rustin and his pacifist colleagues but this time into the murderous deep south. The gathering momentum led to the movement’s culmination in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the most important protest in US history.

The 1963 march was orchestrated by Rustin, who bore the misleading title Deputy Director (the other civil-rights leaders were afraid that his homosexuality and brief youthful membership in the Young Communist League made him too controversial to be called the Director), and it provided the venue for King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even more importantly, it decisively tilted Washington’s political scales in favor of civil rights. There followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This trifecta of legislation put paid to a century of overt racial discrimination.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pro-Hamas Nazi Students at Harvard Give President Claudine Gay a Deadline Emboldened more than ever. by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-nazi-students-at-harvard-give-president-claudine-gay-a-deadline/

In the annals of campus presumption, this latest news takes some kind of cake. Various student groups at Harvard who are united in their hatred of Israel, and in their solidarity with those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a twenty-third Arab state, have just issued an ultimatum to President Claudine Gay. She has until Monday, November 27 to respond. More on this absurdity can be found here: “‘Your Move’: Anti-Israel Harvard University Students Issue Demands to School President, Give Monday Deadline,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 24, 2023:

Dozens of anti-Israel student groups at Harvard University, along with several allied campus groups across the US, have issued a set of demands to Harvard President Claudine Gay and given her until Monday to respond, adding further fuel to what’s become an explosive situation at one of the world’s most elite universities over the Israel-Hamas war.

Earlier this week, students protested on campus and issued the list of demands, which included the reinstatement of a student proctor who three weeks ago participated in mobbing a Jewish student and screaming “Shame!” into his ears.

That proctor was part of a group that ganged up on a Jewish student, surrounding him and screaming “Shame! Shame!” — while he tried to get away. You can see the disturbing scene here.

According to The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, the university had suspended indefinitely Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a second year student at the Harvard Divinity School, from his role as a proctor over his involvement in the incident, video of which went viral earlier this month. Tettey-Tamaklo reportedly has been ordered to vacate free housing he received as compensation for holding the position, which gives graduates the opportunity to mentor freshmen.

What kind of a “mentor” to freshmen can this Elom Tettey-Tamaklo possibly be, if he thinks ganging up on a lone Jewish student, surrounding him and preventing him from leaving is an acceptable way to behave? And he’s a student the Divinity School? His spirituality takes strange forms.

This week, the students also demanded that Gay commit to pursue no disciplinary or punitive actions against “pro-Palestinian students and workers engaging in non-violent protest.” The letter came as, according to The Harvard Crimson, eight undergraduate students had been summoned to hearings as part of disciplinary proceedings against students who last week occupied University Hall on campus for 24-hours.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘Net Zero’ Fails the Cost-Benefit Test As COP28 opens, two new studies show that extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful. By Bjorn Lomborg

By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/net-zero-fails-the-cost-benefit-test-paris-climate-accord-cop28-748ae52d?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

World leaders are gathering in Dubai for another climate conference, which will no doubt yield heady promises along the lines of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep the global temperature’s rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But they’d be wiser not to. New research shows how extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful.

A new special issue of the journal Climate Change Economics contains two ground-breaking economic analyses of policies to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees and its practical political interpretation, mandates to reach net zero, usually by 2050. Though more than 130 countries, including most of the globe’s big emitters, have passed or are considering laws mandating net-zero carbon emissions, there’s been no comprehensive cost-benefit evaluation of that policy—until now.

One of the Climate Change Economics papers is authored by Richard Tol, one of the world’s most-cited climate economists. He calculates the benefits of climate policy using a meta-analysis of 39 papers with 61 published estimates of total climate change damage in economic terms. Across all this, Mr. Tol finds that if the world meets its 1.5 degree promise, it would prevent a less than 0.5% loss in annual global domestic product by 2050 and a 3.1% loss by 2100.

If that sounds underwhelming, blame one-sided reporting on climate issues. While headlines tend to focus on stories of violent climate catastrophes and modeled worst case scenarios, the data reveal a far less frightening picture. Despite a drumbeat of stories this summer about rising heat deaths, higher temperatures also prevent cold deaths, and so far in much greater number. Globally, the result has been fewer overall temperature-related fatalities. Writ large, the damage the world experiences each year from climate-related disasters is shrinking, both as expressed in fraction of GDP and lives lost.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

DeSantis DOMINATES in Red State-Blue State Debate With Newsom Paula Bolyard With videos

By on December 1st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/paula-bolyard/2023/11/30/desantis-dominates-in-red-state-vs-blue-state-debate-with-newsom-n4924384#google_vignette

I was not among those who said a debate between the governors of Florida and California—Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, respectively—was a bad idea. I’d actually like to see more debates—more good debates, that is, not the bread-and-circus shows we’ve seen on network and cable television in recent years. If it were up to me, we’d switch to a Lincoln-Douglas debate format. Back then, there weren’t TV executives rigging the debates to ensure maximum eyeballs, profits, and mud-slinging. They’re designed to make money, not reveal what the candidates would do if they were elected.

This brings us to tonight’s Red State/Blue State debate in Alpharetta, Ga., moderated by Sean Hannity on Fox News. 

Hannity promised at the beginning of the debate that he would not tip the scales in favor of one candidate, but the questions he asked and the graphics he displayed definitely favored DeSantis. He debated Newsom several times, which I wish he hadn’t done. DeSantis proved more than capable of handling Newsom on his own. In fact, he wiped the floor with Newsom, who wouldn’t know a truthful statement if it hit him in the head. Over and over again, the Florida governor used facts to back up his claims and called out Newsom for saying things that were not true. 

The first question was about net migration from California to Florida. DeSantis explained why people are leaving and coming to Florida. “You almost have to try to mess California up,” he quipped. 

When it was Newsom’s turn to answer, he completely ignored the question and rambled about all the great things California has, like Silicon Valley (which no doubt carts a truckload of cash over to Newsom’s campaign every other month). 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Osama bin Laden, Big Man on Campus His 2002 ‘Letter to America’ is consistent with what students have been taught. By Christopher Nadon

By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-osama-bin-laden-became-the-big-man-on-campus-bff1c53b?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

College students haven’t always been persuaded by Osama bin Laden’s prose. Yet when his 2002 “Letter to America” went viral among young Americans earlier this month, I wasn’t surprised. I had assigned the document for a course on religion and politics when it first appeared. Students found it compelling as a clear and concise statement of al Qaeda’s motives, intentions and understanding of world and Middle Eastern history. They were horrified, as were most faculty.

Yet a year earlier, only a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, a cultural Marxist professor lectured a staff meeting on the need to understand and sympathize with the 19 unfortunate men who had been driven to their martyrdom by Western colonial oppression. Those in the towers, he intoned, had it coming. On that day, my colleagues reacted to this claim with derision and contempt. But the virus had arrived. It would soon spread.

I began to teach the course again in 2017, after a 12-year hiatus. By then the class was filled with students whose education took place entirely within the post-9/11 world. Again we read bin Laden’s letter, and again the students were horrified—this time, not at bin Laden but at me for having assigned it. The students had been trained to consider anyone who might suggest a connection between al Qaeda and religion as racist. The ground had been prepared to insulate so-called non-Western discourse from critical discussion. They denounced me as “Islamophobic” and walked out of class. But at least at that stage they hadn’t yet taken bin Laden as a model.

Today his letter appears prescient to the young because the views it espouses resonate with what their professors have taught for years. Opposition is rarely heard. At the Claremont Colleges, where I teach, 186 faculty members signed onto a letter blaming “Israeli settler colonialism” for the Oct. 7 massacre and supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Students erected a shrine “to the insurgents who have died for the liberation of Palestine.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Forget The ‘Red v. Blue State’ Debate: This Was A Great Debate Bob Maistros

By on December 1st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/01/forget-the-red-v-blue-state-debate-this-was-a-great-debate/

Who won – and lost – Thursday night’s primetime clash between mega-Governors Ron DeSantis, Republican of the Free State of Florida, and Gavin Newsom, Democrat of the Golden State?

On this scorecard, the winners were the American people. And the losers: one and the same.Why was America writ large the winner? 

Because though the event was billed as Great Red State v. Blue State Debate, a nationwide audience was actually privileged to see a just-plain great debate between two attractive and transcendently talented politicians.

America took in more substance, more facts, more clear contrasts, more smart thrusts and parries, and more rhetorical skill, intellectual heft and displays of energy in the first five minutes of this MMA-quality cage match than in the entire series of Republican contests to date. 

The no-holds-barred, mano-a-mano square-off was the Thrilla to those debates’ Vanilla.

Your commentator will leave fact-checking to the “fact-checkers.” Because what mattered much more was the quality and skill of the participants.

Face it, folks. This Newsom guy is good. Surprisingly good, even to this jaded observer.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Save The Salmon, Kill The Humans? Think of the Insanity in all This

By on December 1st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/01/save-the-salmon-kill-the-humans/

A leaked Biden administration document is “a strong sign” that the U.S. will consider breaching four Snake River dams to promote salmon populations on the river. Normally, we wouldn’t care, but the push to tear down these (and other) dams exposes the rank hypocrisy of the “climate change” zealots.

Those four dams are hydroelectric stations. In other words, they are sources of clean, carbon-free energy. According to the non-profit NW Energy Coalition, they produce about 1,000 megawatts of power throughout the year, but that can climb to 2,200 MW during peak energy demand.

So, where’s that energy to replace that loss supposed to come from? Coal plants?

Well, that’s what this leaked document was about. The Biden administration says it’s willing to spend $1 billion to find new “clean energy” sources to replace what the dams produce today.

“The draft agreement says the government will help plan and pay for tribes in the Pacific Northwest to develop enough clean energy resources to serve as replacement power for the lower Snake River dams,” reports ABC News.

There’s also $5 million for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to “identify the best ways to meet the region’s energy resource needs and clean energy goals while accounting for breaching of the dams and the loss of their hydropower,” according to the Lewis County Chronicle.

Think about the insanity of all this.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Behind the Human Rights Watch Curtain: Hate and Corruption Dedicated to the memory of Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch by Gerald M. Steinberg

By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20190/human-rights-watch

Two major revelations have ripped away the curtain from HRW’s moral facade, and revealed a thoroughly corrupt organization.

A week later, a second earthquake ripped through HRW’s carefully manicured curtain of secrecy.

In 2009, Roth and HRW started hiding the full list of donors – an early red flag for an NGO claiming a moral agenda.

[A]n independent investigation of all financial activities covering the past 25 years is required, accompanied by the examination of possible violations by Roth, Whitson and others of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The damage done to the moral core of human rights and to Israeli victims of Hamas terrorism is incalculable and irreversible. But an internship or work experience at HRW is no longer an asset, and being listed as a donor in HRW’s glossy PR publications is worse than embarrassing.

Two recent major revelations have ripped away the curtain from Human Rights Watch’s moral facade, and revealed a thoroughly corrupt organization. In 2009, then Executive Director Ken Roth and HRW started hiding the full list of donors – an early red flag for an NGO claiming a moral agenda. Pictured: Roth at a press conference at the United Nations on January 14, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

On October 7, the Palestinian Hamas terror group slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and foreign visitors in a carefully planned massacre that included the brutal torture and disfigurement of victims. Hamas abducted more than 240 other people, including more than 30 children, and took them to the Gaza Strip, holding them as hostages.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Douglas Murray: Wartime Diary ‘As the helicopters carrying the released hostages landed, traffic stopped. People got out of their cars and broke into song.’

By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-diary-israel-hamas-hostages-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“What is life?” a child asks Oriana Fallaci at the beginning of her great 1969 book Nothing and Amen. As Fallaci wrote, the next morning she flew to the Vietnam War to find out.

I have thought about that question a lot in recent weeks, since arriving in Israel earlier this month to cover the war. I have seen plenty of wars before and they always throw up that question: “What is life?” To understand life you have to understand death, and to understand death you have to try to understand the worst thing that humans can do to each other: war.

Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 has left 1,200 dead. Nearly 240 hostages—children, women, grandmothers—were taken to Gaza. Over the past few days, about 81 hostages have been returned to their loved ones during the cease-fire.

I was at the children’s hospital in Tel Aviv when the first children and their parents were released. When the helicopters landed and the hostages got out, IDF soldiers blocked their faces with screens to protect them from the glare of the cameras. But I’d already been sent a single photo taken by the Arab press that showed some of the mothers with their children inside a bus when they were still in Gaza.

The terror on their faces. They looked as though they’d aged by decades.

But at this moment, there was joy. As the helicopters landed, traffic stopped, and people got out of their cars and broke into song. They clapped and their voices rang out as they welcomed back the hostages with songs like “Hevenu Shalom Alechem.” (“We brought you peace.”)

As it happened, 12 of the 13 returnees that night were from Kibbutz Nir Oz, the first place I visited on my trip to Israel. But for every returnee, you remember those still in Gaza. I thought especially of the grandsons of the man who showed me around the kibbutz during my visit. On the morning of October 7, the teenage boys were alone in the house. Their grandfather was on the phone with them trying to tell them how to hold the safe room door shut while avoiding being shot from the other side. The two boys struggled with a wound-up sheet, and held out a while, but they couldn’t fight back against two grown men, members of Hamas. They were taken into Gaza.

So was Kfir Bibas, a baby of ten months. So was his brother. So was their mother. Yesterday, Hamas said that they would not be released because they died in captivity. 

Who knows if Hamas killed them, as they killed so many others, or if they are lying in order to torture those waiting for their return. 

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