RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/10/the-passionate-intensity-of-the-know-nothing-protester/

“The most-quoted poem to describe the world we live in has for some years now been WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. And especially the line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Let us at least teach our children not to mistake one for the other. Especially when, on a rare occasion, the best display some conviction after all.”

A short video was shared on X this week in which two young female protesters at a pro-Palestine march were asked a pretty straightforward question about the crisis in the Middle East: ‘When Hamas invaded Israel on the 7 October, what was your initial reaction to that?’

The first one looked briefly confused. Was this a trick?, she seemed to be thinking. Her companion stepped in: ‘I don’t believe they did, did they? Hamas?’ Then something started coming back to the first one. The stirrings of something like a distant memory. ‘I think so…’, she said, trying to correct her friend who didn’t think Hamas had done anything.

Encouragingly, in the light of this, the first one then appeared to experience an awakening. ‘Honestly, I think I need to be a bit more clued up on everything that’s going on’, she said, before finally responding to the original question: ‘I feel like I’m not really qualified to answer that too well…’

Her companion, however, was having none of this. No room for doubt in her ranks. So she persisted in her Baudrillard-tier scepticism about the 7 October attack: ‘I mean, I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything that shows that that’s actually happened or that’s actually correct.’

It’s tempting to respond to this video by wondering who the fuck are these virtue-signalling halfwits and why aren’t they in a library studying? Yet even if these young women are typical of many of those attending the anti-Israel demos, a bit more understanding might be in order.

https://www.thefp.com/p/american-marxists-funding-pro-palestinian-rage

The pro-Palestinian protests over the last month, where tens of thousands in the U.S. have chanted for the end of Israel, are not merely a story of organic rage. 

They are also funded in large part by an uber-wealthy American-born tech entrepreneur: Neville Roy Singham, and his wife Jodie Evans.

Since 2017, Singham has been the main funder of The People’s Forum, which has co-organized at least four protests after 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7. One rally, in Times Square, happened on October 8 before Israel had even counted its dead.

Based in Midtown Manhattan, The People’s Forum calls itself a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” But a review of public disclosure forms show that multimillionaire Singham and his wife Evans have donated over $20.4 million to The People’s Forum from 2017 to 2022 through a series of shell organizations and donor advisory groups—accounting for nearly all of the group’s funding. 

Singham’s wealth stems from Thoughtworks, a software consulting company that he launched in 1993 in Chicago and sold in August 2017 to private equity firm Apax Partners for $785 million. That same year, The People’s Forum was founded and set up on the ground floor of a multistory building on 37th Street just blocks from Times Square; Evans was also installed as one of its three board members. As of 2021, the organization employed 13 staff members and held more than $13.6 million in total assets. 

“I decided that at my age and extreme privilege, the best thing I could do was to give away most of my money in my lifetime,” said Singham, now 69, in a statement after selling his company, according to a New York Times investigation in August. 

But Singham is more than just a Marxist with deep pockets. He is also a China sympathizer who lives in Shanghai and has close ties to at least four propaganda news sites that boost the Chinese Communist Party’s image abroad, the Times reported.

These Chinese media interests are helping sow discord in the U.S., Rep. Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told The Free Press. 

“The Chinese Communist Party uses tools like Confucius Institutes on college campuses, TikTok’s addictive algorithm, and organizations like those that Mr. Singham funds to divide and weaken America,” Gallagher said. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uncivil-servants-foreign-policy-bureaucrats-target-israel-war-gaza-3bb7ceff?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Biden administration faces a wave of internal dissent against its support of Israel. On Nov. 14, more than 500 staff members and political appointees from about 40 government agencies sent a joint letter to President Biden criticizing his administration’s policy on the Gaza war, according to the New York Times.

It was the latest of several protest letters. The Times reported that the administration has received similar messages, including three internal memos addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a letter “signed” by more than 1,000 employees of the Agency for International Development. The State Department requires that employees sign their names to dissent cables, but the other two letters have no signatures. The Times reported that these government employees wrote anonymously out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.”

The internal memos, two of which were sent during the first week of the war, called on Mr. Biden to press for an immediate cease-fire. One State Department memo, Axios reported, accused the president of “spreading misinformation.” Signed by 100 State Department and Agency for International Development employees, the memo said members of the White House and National Security Council showed a “clear disregard for the lives of Palestinians.”

Mr. Blinken responded to government employees’ protests in an email, according to Reuters. Mr. Blinken said the administration was organizing forums and “candid conversations” to hear employees’ feedback and ideas. “We’re listening,” he wrote. “What you share is informing our policy and our messages.” It would seem that the fear of losing one’s government job, or of angry mobs threatening the safety of the “signers,” was overblown.

The proper reaction would have been to squash the mutiny. Those who called for a cease-fire in week one were essentially saying Israel had no duty or right to protect itself after Hamas’s brutal attack on its civilians. Mr. Blinken should have told these government workers that he and the president reject their views as entirely wrong and contrary to U.S. national interests. Instead of encouraging the dissenters to offer more “feedback and ideas,” he should be wondering if he can count on such people to offer any sound advice on foreign policy—or even to implement a policy that he sets.

This wave of protests is anomalous. Between 2011 and 2021, according to the United Nations, more than 300,000 Syrian civilians died due to the conflict there. The highest death counts were between 2012 and 2015. Frederic Hof, the Obama administration’s special adviser on Syria policy, wrote in 2017 that “during 70 months of chaos in Syria, the United States had protected not one Syrian civilian from the homicidal rampages of Bashar al-Assad and his remorseless regime.” Yet in 2016 only 50 State Department officers protested Barack Obama’s Syria policy in a non-anonymous signed letter.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/the-democratic-socialists-of-america-is-a-hate-group/

Many state and federal officials whose names grace its roster seem unvexed by the group’s terrorization of American Jews.

Despite the organization’s efforts to bury the evidence, CNN’s Jake Tapper helpfully reminded his followers on Thursday that the first reaction to the October 7 massacre of the New York chapter of the far-left group Democratic Socialists of America was to affirm the legitimacy of that unspeakable slaughter.

“In solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid,” the group implored its allies to flood Times Square and register their satisfaction with Hamas’s barbarism. That is what is meant by the word “solidarity,” after all — a fellowship formed around shared goals and objectives. It describes a state of commonality and kinship. To judge by DSA’s actions, its organizers chose the right word to describe their outlook.

Well-meaning liberals and progressives who take exception to some Israeli policies are often quick to assure their skeptics that Hamas’s actions are unrepresentative of the Palestinian people writ large or even the Gazans over whom the terrorist organization illegitimately rules. The DSA disagrees. To judge from its reaction to the multiaxial attack on Israeli civilians, culminating in acts of murder, rape, dismemberment, and torture so obscene it would have made the Roman Colosseum blush, the DSA’s members seem incapable of denouncing Hamas’s tactics. Perhaps that’s why we’ve seen so many DSA followers deliberately menace American Jews and supporters of Israel’s right to defend itself against an avowedly genocidal terrorist group.

The October 8 pro-Hamas rally the DSA championed occurred as scheduled. There, protesters “cheered the rocket barrage that devastated Israeli citizens,” the New York Times reported, horrifying the politicians “aligned with New York’s left.” If the DSA’s allies were horrified then, imagine the psychological torment they’re enduring nearly a month into the outfit’s campaign of intimidation against American Jews and their allies.

At least 139 people were arrested, including a DSA-affiliated member of the New York City Council and a state senator, during a menacing nighttime march through Gotham’s streets on October 23 billed as a demonstration calling on Israel to stand down and absorb the murder of its civilians. “I do not condemn Hamas,” read the signs they carried. “There is only one solution,” they droned in unison as they paraded down emptied streets and past lighted windows behind which the targets of their intimidation took shelter. “Intifada. Revolution.” This was another event sponsored by the DSA, which the organization’s social-media account gleefully promoted.