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Anti-Israel Hate on American Campuses A new book shines a disturbing light on the university, the suppression of free speech, and the poison of the BDS movement. Noah Beck

By on April 3rd, 2018

About six months after Andrew Pessin posted on his Facebook profile a defense of Israel during its 2014 war against Hamas, the once popular Connecticut College philosophy professor was subjected to an academic smear campaign. The school paper published articles defaming him. The administration hosted condemnations of Pessin from across the campus community on the school’s website, and tolerated other anti-Semitic activities that only worsened the climate for Jews and Israel supporters. Pessin received death threats and, in the spring of 2015, took a medical leave of absence. The Connecticut College administration offered no meaningful protection or support to Pessin, and never issued any apology for its role in his abuse.

The Pessin affair was part of a growing trend of anti-Israel hostility on U.S. campuses, but at least his story has a somewhat happy ending. Pessin resumed teaching last fall after an extended paid sabbatical, and – together with a colleague – convinced the school to establish a Jewish Studies program. Moreover, he has edited a new book with Fordham University’s Doron Ben-Atar on the general campus trend: Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS. Ben-Atar, who is part of Fordham’s American Studies program, protested at a faculty meeting about the 2013 passing of a resolution calling for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel, only to find himself soon being investigated for unspecified charges, resulting in a Kafkaesque campaign of intimidation and vilification. This volume of essays, by faculty and students who have confronted anti-Israelism on their campuses, documents and analyzes how this movement masks an underlying anti-Semitism that creates a hostile environment for Jews while undermining free speech and civility.

Writer Noah Beck interviewed Pessin via email.

Q: Your book catalogues the many underhanded tactics used to promote the anti-Israel agenda on college campuses, which should help Israel advocates prepare for what awaits them. Did your personal ordeal inspire you to create a potential resource for campus Israel advocates? Or did you have the idea for such a book even before what happened to you?

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David Isaac :How Not to Secure Israel Review: ‘Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for An Era of Change’ by Charles D. Freilich

By on April 2nd, 2018

“Surprisingly, perhaps, Israel does not have a formal national security strategy, or defense doctrine, to this day,” writes former Israeli deputy national security adviser Charles D. Freilich. Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change is his effort to move Israel closer to creating one. According to Freilich, David Ben-Gurion was the only “sitting leader to conceptualize an overall national security strategy,” and with the dramatic changes to Israel’s security situation since, a new one is needed. He may be right, but the reader leaves this book hoping that Freilich isn’t the one to develop it.

Freilich describes “a growing sense among both practitioners and scholars alike, that Israel has lost sight of its strategic objectives and course as a nation.” On the practitioner side, he notes that there have been efforts to chart a course, notably the 2006 Meridor Report, and a 2015 document “IDF Strategy.” But the former proposal was never adopted and the latter is a military paper and not the required higher-level strategic overview, something that the report’s authors themselves admit. On the scholarly front, Freilich describes as “remarkable” the lack of comprehensive assessments of Israeli national security strategy in academia–the “vast literature” on Israel’s foreign and domestic affairs notwithstanding.

Freilich sees it as his mission to fill the gap, and he makes a serious attempt to provide a bird’s-eye view of Israel’s strategic situation. He covers a wide-range of topics, from the numerous military and diplomatic threats Israel faces to socioeconomic factors that affect Israel’s strategic posture to the influence of the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” A good editor could have profitably cut as much as 100 from the book’s 384 pages, given the extent of repetitions.

Despite Freilich’s insistence that “Israel has never been stronger and more secure militarily,” the picture that emerges from his prose is actually quite disturbing. While Israel may not have faced an existential threat since 1973, neither has it won a decisive military victory since Lebanon in 1982. “Indeed, all of the major rounds between Israel and Hezbollah, from 1983 to 2006, ended unsatisfactorily for Israel,” Freilich writes. Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s strategy of a war of attrition seems to be working. Israel is severely limited in its response. It wants to avoid escalation, international opprobrium, and high casualties. It also wants to steer clear of controlling more territory. Freilich notes that the Winograd Commission (the commission that investigated the failures of the 2006 Lebanon War) laid the blame for that war’s operational shortcomings on the “IDF’s mystical fear of conquering additional territory.”

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Comey’s book tour is a colossal mistake By James Gagliano,

By on April 2nd, 2018

Announcements of scheduled appearances for the widely anticipated $850-to-attend book tour by fired FBI Director James Comey foreshadow a much-ballyhooed return to the public square. Media outlets eagerly booked the former director, and his opus, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” briefly jumped to No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list.

But should Comey — a central witness in special counsel Robert Mueller probe — be making public his version of events which will certainly differ significantly with what President Trump, the central target in the special prosecutor’s probe, has repeatedly stated?

Comey was humiliatingly removed by the president last May and enjoyed a brief period of bipartisan sympathy for the disgraceful manner in which he was dispatched. The FBI’s seventh director learned of his termination via televised news reports while appearing before an FBI audience in Los Angeles. This is not the manner with which career public servants should ever be separated from service. Yet, with the current president, it has become de rigueur.

Initially taking the high road, remaining silent, professional and above the fray, Comey has now resorted to directly confronting the president at his own game. He shed his original anonymous Twitter nom de plume, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” and directly waded in to criticize and taunt his tormentor. In the immediate wake of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s firing and Trump’s Twitter gloating, Comey ominously warned, “Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.”

And, just like that, Comey conceded the tiny sliver of moral high ground he precariously clung to and reduced his position as an advocate of the pursuit of facts into a narcissistic quest to sell books. He unwittingly joined Trump in the pig-wallow that currently serves as civil discourse.

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Václav Klaus: “Let´s not give up fighting climate alarmism, it is never late!”

By on March 28th, 2018

Dr. Václav Klaus, first Prime Minister (1993–1998) and second President of the Czech Republic (2003–2013) and an economist who advocates free markets, delivered this speech at the conference of Association des Climato-réalistes, Musée Social, Paris, December 7, 2017. We are grateful for President Klaus’s permission to publish it here, and we commend him and thank God for his courageous, intelligent, and persevering defense of freedom and reason.

Ladies and gentlemen,

many thanks for the invitation and for the possibility to participate in this important gathering. It is great to be in France after many years and to see Paris as it looks in the era of mass migration.

I travel abroad almost permanently, but not to France. I don´t know whether it is my fault or something else. It may be partly caused by my inability to speak French, something I consider a great deficiency of mine, partly by the evident discrepancy between my views and the mainstream French thinking.

Nevertheless, I was in the last couple of years inspired by the works of several French authors, such as Michel Houellebecq, Pascal Bruckner, Pierre Manent, Alain Finkielkraut, not to speak about my old friends such as Pascal Salin. It gave me a new motivation to be in contact with France and its intellectuals.

I must admit that I was not – until very recently – aware of the French Association des Climato-réalistes, of its activities, and of its ability to organize such an important gathering as today´s one. Many thanks for bringing me here and for giving me a chance to address this distinguished audience.

The issue of climate alarmism, of man-made and human society endangering global warming has become one of my main topics as well as worries. I strongly disagree with the global warming doctrine which is an arrogant, human freedom and prosperity of mankind endangering set of beliefs, an ideology, if not a religion. It lives independently of the science of climatology. Its disputes are not about temperature, they are part of the “conflict of ideologies”.

My way of looking at this topic is based

– on a very special experience gained under the communist regime in which I spent two thirds of my life. This experience sharpened our eyes. We became oversensitive to all attempts to violate freedom, rationality and free exchange of views, we became oversensitive to all attempts to impose on us the dogmas of those who consider themselves better than the rest of us. In the communist era, we witnessed an irrational situation when science was at the same time promoted and prohibited, praised and celebrated, manipulated and misused. I have very similar feelings now;

– on my being an economist who has strong views about the role of markets and governments in human society and economy, about the role of visible and invisible hands in controlling our life and shaping our future and who considers the politically based interventions in the economy connected with the ambitions to fight climate absolutely untenable;

– on my being a politician for 25 years of my recent life who has always been fighting all variants of green ideology, and especially its highlight, the global warming doctrine. I have been for many years intensively involved in the world-wide, highly controversial and heavily manipulated debate about global warming and about the role of human beings in it. I was the only head of state who dared to openly express a totally dissident view at the UN General Assembly already 10 years ago[1].

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Europe All Inclusive: Understanding the Current Migration Crisis by Václav Klaus

By on March 28th, 2018

“Multiculturalism and human-rightism promote the notion that migration is a human right, and that the right to migrate leads to further rights and entitlements including social welfare hand-outs for migrants.” — Former Czech President Václav Klaus and economist Jiří Weigl, writing in their book, Europe All Inclusive.

“Europe is weakened by the leftist utopia of trying to transform a continent that was once proud of its past into an inefficient solidaristic state, turning its inhabitants from citizens into dependent clients.” — Václav Klaus.

“There are plenty of arguments suggesting that the contemporary migration crisis is connected with the post-democratic character of the EU. That it is a by-product of the already long time existing European crisis, of the systemic errors and misconceptions of European policies, of the built-in defects of EU institutional arrangements, and of the ideological confusions and prejudices of European multicultural political elites.” — Václav Klaus.

Europe All Inclusive, a book by former Czech President Václav Klaus, co-authored by the Arab-speaking economist Jiří Weigl, recently published by Hungary’s Századvég School of Politics Foundation, has already been translated into six languages. The Századvég School of Politics Foundation is connected to the think tank Századvég, which, in turn, is close to the FIDESZ party led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In the book, the authors write:

“What we see today is a similarly fundamental challenge to the future of Europe… and especially its ‘integrated’ part, is riddled with hypocrisy, pseudo-humanism and other dubious concepts. [When] the most dangerous of them are the currently fashionable, and ultimately suicidal, ideologies of multiculturalism and human-rightism…These ideologies promote the notion that migration is a human right, and that the right to migrate leads to further rights and entitlements including social welfare hand-outs for migrants… Europe is weakened by the leftist utopia of trying to transform a continent that was once proud of its past into an inefficient solidaristic state, turning its inhabitants from citizens into dependent clients.”

The following are excerpts of a speech, “Is Our Membership in the EU a Real Blessing?”, delivered by Václav Klaus at the Corvinus University of Budapest on February 22, 2018:

I came to Budapest to participate in the launching of the book about the recent mass migration to Europe. Its formal launching took place yesterday in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

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Dr. Jordan Peterson, full speed: A new book By John Dale Dunn

By on March 27th, 2018

Jordan Peterson, a clear-eyed traditionalist advocate on political and social issues, has inspired and compelled sensible people to support his efforts. I predicted back in January that he would be subjected to the intolerant thugs of Canadian and international speech police totalitarianism, and so it goes.

On March 5 at a Queen’s University (founded in 1841 in Kingston, Ontario), he was an invited speaker for the law school-sponsored inaugural lecture in a series intended to promote liberty. Dr. Peterson, professor at the University of Toronto, presented by the dean of law, discussed “The Rising Tide of Compelled Speech in Canada” to a packed house of almost a thousand. A leftist thug rent-a-mob started disruption proceedings, banging on walls and even breaking a window.

Dr. Peterson’s eloquence, mastery of the science of psychology and sociology and social science research, and insight are extraordinary. I recently downloaded his new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018 Random House, Canada), which puts to print his commitment to moral philosophy and social science. He reminds the reader of the teachings of many – Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, Aristotle – with an emphasis on his study of the classics from many cultures along modern neuroscience and the social sciences. This is scholarly but commonsense advocacy of the Peterson canon of virtuous adulthood and good citizenship. He teaches what parents hope to be proud of in their children.

In the foreword to the book, Norman Doidge, M.D., psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, colleague, and friend of Peterson, provides a great deal of information on why Peterson is so well received and so energetically committed to fight the speech police and totalitarianism. Doidge relates that Peterson, a child of the isolated and cold Fairview, Alberta, married his hometown sweetheart and went on to great academic success at Harvard and then the University of Toronto. On the way, he worked in all kinds of blue-collar jobs and never forgot his roots. Doidge describes the unique goodness (yes, I said goodness) of Peterson and his indomitable desire to stand for individual freedom and liberty.

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A Review of Halik Kockanski’s The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and Poles in the Second World War.By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on March 24th, 2018

It’s hard to overstate the way that Polish feelings about the great wars are almost inverted from the common ones in the United Kingdom and the United States. For Western powers, the common perception is that the First World War is at best a fratricidal slaughter, conducted for ambiguous reasons. At worst it was the suicide of Western civilization. For Poland, that war was the resurrection of their nation from the dead. For Western powers the Second World War is a moment of sharp moral clarity, in which the victorious powers defeated a truly wicked regime, and rebuilt Western Europe on surer foundations. For Poland, it is an unrelenting nightmare. Technically, the war was launched because the United Kingdom intended to vindicate her sovereignty. In the end the West threw Poland to Stalin like a bone to chew on, while investing millions to swiftly rebuild West Germany.

Kochanski gives us a brief look at the Poland that was reborn at the Treaty of Versailles. It was bitterly funny to read British Prime Minister Lloyd George enter the scene and express his doubts about the proposed Polish borders because they would subject an unacceptable number of Protestant Germans to the rule of Catholic Poles. What is unacceptable in Belfast is unacceptable in Danzig, so carve-outs must be made. These had a democratic and sectarian logic, but were not geopolitically sustainable.

This reborn Poland had a fighting spirit, and immediately committed itself to a few quick wars to grab territories and cities, including present-day Lviv, that would make it a more economically viable nation. It was also an extremely heterogeneous nation, with many ethnic and minority linguistic groups. It was also an underdeveloped economic backwater compared with Western Europe.

The German and Russian attitudes toward this reborn Poland were often hysterical. Kochanski quotes German general Hans von Steckt’s remarks to German Chancellor Joseph Wirth around the time Germans and Russians signed a treaty in 1922, renouncing their territorial claims against each other:

When we speak of Poland, we come to the kernel of the eastern problem. Poland’s existence is intolerable and incompatible with Germany’s vital interests. It must disappear, and will disappear through its own weakness and through Russia with our aid. . . . The attainment of this objective must be one of the firmest guiding principles of German policy, as it is capable of achievement — but only through Russia or with her help. A return to the frontier of 1914 should be the basis of agreement between Russia and Germany.

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As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t By Tyler O’Neil

By on March 22nd, 2018

In 2013 and 2014, China embarked on an aggressive air and island campaign to dominate the South China Sea, much to the dismay of Japan and other countries in the region. When Vice President Joe Biden visited the country in 2013, he emphasized trade between the U.S. and China and did not focus on the South China Sea. Secretary of State John Kerry did the same in 2014.

Meanwhile, Biden’s son Hunter and Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz carried out massive business deals with Chinese officials and the state-owned Bank of China. Worse, Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz even invested in a Chinese nuclear company under FBI investigation.

“During a critical eighteen-month period of diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Beijing, the Biden and Kerry families and friends pocketed major cash from companies connected to the Chinese government,” Peter Schweizer writes in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

Schweizer’s book delves into the ways in which “American Princelings” profit at home and abroad from the economic and diplomatic policies of high-ranking U.S. officials. With former Vice President Biden rumored to be considering a 2020 presidential run, the scandals surrounding how his diplomatic efforts enriched his son take on renewed importance. His role in abetting China’s aggression for family gain seems particularly damning.

When Biden became the vice president in 2009, his son Hunter Biden “became a social fixture in Washington,” Schweizer explains. In the summer of 2009, the VP’s son joined forces with Chris Heinz, a wealthy heir to the late Senator John Heinz, whose wife Teresa married Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.). The two formed Rosemont Capital, an alternative investment firm “positioned to strike profitable deals overseas with foreign governments and officials with whom the U.S. government was negotiating.”

Devon Archer, Chris Heinz’s roommate at Yale and star fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run, joined the American Princelings at Rosemont. Federal agents would later arrest Archer in May 2016 for defrauding a Native American tribe in an effort to enrich a branch of Rosemont Capital, Rosemont Seneca Bohai.

The American Princelings set up Rosemont Capital as an alternative investment fund of the Heinz Family Office, and attached several branches to it, including Rosemont Seneca Partners and Rosemont Realty.

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A ‘Higher Loyalty’ to Their Inflated Sense of Virtue By Roger Kimball

By on March 20th, 2018

Some portion of the reading public is eagerly awaiting A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, the aptly titled exercise in self-serving historical revisionism by James Comey, the disgraced former FBI director who was fired last May by President Trump.

The reading material in which I am most interested at the moment is the report by Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Department of Justice who has been toiling away for the last year investigating the DOJ and the FBI for its handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal.

Comey’s aria, currently swaddled with embargoes, is due out April 17. Horowitz has said he aims to release his report “in the March, April time period.”

So there is a lot to look forward to. Chris Swecker, a former FBI assistant director, said that the report will contain “some pure TNT.” I have no doubt that’s true.

Adventures in “Ethical Leadership”
On Saturday, in the aftermath of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s sacking, Comey tweeted:

James Comey
✔ @Comey
Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.

Well, yes. Comey’s Twitter profile informs the world that these days he is “writing and speaking about ethical leadership.” It also notes that he is “taller and funnier in person.” I hope so.

As for “ethical leadership,” we needn’t even wait for his book to understand exactly how he embodies ethical leadership. When the College of William and Mary announced last month that Comey would be coming to teach a class on the subject, the announcement was accompanied by a statement from Comey. “Ethical leaders,” he said, “lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” The Wall Street Journal, digesting this declaration, published a useful classroom aid for students struggling with the question of ethical leadership.

Week One case study: The FBI is investigating a presidential candidate for mishandling classified emails as Secretary of State. The director decides on his own to violate Justice Department rules and exonerate that candidate in a public statement to the media, letting an aide replace the legally potent phrase “grossly negligent” in a draft of his statement with “extremely careless” in the final version.

Possible test question: When and under what circumstance may a federal official decide that the rules that bind others do not apply to him?

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Thou Shalt Innovate How Israeli ingenuity repairs the world. Joseph Puder

By on March 19th, 2018

Avi Jorisch and I met at the AIPAC conference. He was a panelist at an exciting forum titled “The Israeli Ethos,” dealing with Israeli technologies, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Jorisch is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, and author of Thou Shalt Innovate. We discussed what is it about Israel that nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation — and how Israeli innovation has impacted the world.

Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World

Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World
Mar 1, 2018
by Avi Jorisch

Joseph Puder (JP): Tell our readers where you come from and what motivated you to write Thou Shalt Innovate?

Avi Jorisch (AJ): I was born into a family of Holocaust survivors and raised primarily in New York City. But I also lived in Israel for long stretches of my childhood, through my teenage years and into adulthood, because of my family’s cultural, historical, and religious ties there.

My interest in Israeli technology was kindled during the summer of 2014, when my family and I lived through Operation Protective Edge, in large part going in and out of bomb shelters. My family, like the rest of Israel, found comfort in the Iron Dome. I marveled at this invention. It kept Israel from descending into the chaos and carnage that was engulfing the rest of the Middle East.

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