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The Left’s Siege of Our Universities David Horowitz’s latest book chronicles the Left’s transformation of academic institutions into doctrinal training centers. Barbara Kay

By on January 5th, 2018

In November, an incident regarding freedom of speech on campus took place at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University that galvanized the attention of Canadians and of those with an interest in this subject beyond our borders.

A graduate student in the field of Communications, Lindsay Shepherd, used a short segment in class from a debate on TVOntario’s nightly issues show, The Agenda, to illustrate to her students how linguistic terminology can become contested terrain in the realm of ideas. The presenting issue was freedom of speech; the vehicle for debate was the use of transgender pronouns. The segment Shepherd showed – without either approval or condemnation – included forceful pushback against “compelled speech” by Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor whose publicly avowed refusal to use constructed gender pronouns has in the past 18 months rocketed him, via a tsunami of vlogs and public appearances, from virtual obscurity outside the academy to continental celebrity.

In short order Shepherd was summoned to a meeting with her supervisor, her department head and the director of WLU’s Gendered and Sexual Violence and Support program. What happened at that meeting – more like a Star Chamber interrogation – would have fallen into the historical oubliette, except for the fact that Shepherd recorded it and shared it with the media.

Ordinary Canadians who listened to this recording were stupefied at the overt intimidation and condemnation Shepherd was subjected to, including accusations of “transphobia,” a comparison of Peterson to Hitler and for good measure a sprinkling of demonizing “racism” and “ “white supremacist” to ensure the message took hold. All because she adopted a perspective of neutrality in presenting conflicting opinions to her class so that they could freely discuss the issue without her influence. This was an intolerable stance for her left-wing superiors.

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“The Second World Wars” Victor Davis Hanson by Sydney Williams

By on December 30th, 2017

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His background is ideal for an analysis of the Second World War. “Wars” are plural in the title because, as Hanson notes, it was fought in many different places, from Singapore to Finland, and in many different ways, on air, sea and land, with weapons ranging from side arms to atomic bombs. It was the first war which saw more civilians die than soldiers.

The book is divided topically, with chapters titled “Ideas,” “Air,” “Water,” “Earth,” “Fire,” and “People.” A complaint may be that the book is repetitive, but different aspects are looked at from different angles. The War was fought on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, with combatants from every continent except Antarctica. It was fought on the land, the sea and in the air, and Hanson reviews all facets. The facts he assembles are sobering: From a world population of about two billion, five hundred million people were displaced, perhaps a hundred million mobilized, and sixty million died, two thirds of whom were civilians. Seven million Jews were killed. “No other deliberate mass killings in history, before or since, whether systematic, loosely organized or spontaneous, have approached the magnitude of the Holocaust – not the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian ‘killing fields,’ or the Rwandan tribal bloodletting.”

His details are encyclopedic. In 1939, the U.S. spent one percent of GDP on defense. By 1944, forty percent of GDP was going to defense. During the war years, the U.S. produced forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition and one billion rounds of artillery shells. In 1939, 9.5 million square feet of industrial plant space was devoted to aircraft production. By 1944, that had grown to 165 million square feet. Britain, despite being bombed, having been defeated in most every major battle during the first two years of the War and having mobilized 3.5 million men, added more ships to its fleet during the war than the entire naval production of the three major Axis powers. The Allies were more efficient manufacturers; The thousandth B-29 to roll off the production line required half the man hours as the four hundredth. With his eye for detail, we learn that in 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. “In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter million vehicles.” About three hundred thousand planes were destroyed or badly damaged during the War.

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HIP, HIP HOORAY HAPPY ABORTION DAY

By on December 30th, 2017

In South Korea, Japan, China and other spots around the globe, universities are training students in the skills needed to drive their nations’ economies. Here in Australia, young minds are being immersed in the likes of Adelaide University’s Dr Erica Millar’s crusade to make abortions happy and festive affairs. As her university profile explains, sort of (emphasis added):

Erica’s research expertise is in the sociology and cultural politics of reproduction. She is interested in representations of reproduction, systems of stratified reproduction, reproductive justice movements, and biopolitics. Erica’s most recent research is on the cultural politics of abortion. Her project combines feminist theory with theories of emotion, neoliberal governmentality, critical race studies and biopolitics to examine how the decisions women make about their pregnancies are regulated in the late modern era. She is especially concerned with identifying, theorising, and historicising the emotions that circulate alongside representations of abortion, including maternal happiness, abortion shame, and foetocentric grief. She has published several articles on the topic and her monograph Happy Abortions: Our Bodies in the Era of Choice has recently been published by Zed Books.

As to Ms Millar’s hope that abortions will come to be seen as moments of joy, she’s deadly serious:

…the idea that abortion could or should be a happy experience for women is virtually unrepresentable in the current socio-political landscape. Instead, an array of negative emotions—particularly grief, shame, regret and distress—dominate the representational terrain of abortion.

The emotions of abortion contrast sharply with the position motherhood occupies as the unassailable placeholder for women’s happiness. Erica Millar explains how cultural and political forces continue to circumscribe the decisions women make about their pregnancies, forces that are commonly disguised under the rhetoric of choice. In doing so, she provides an account of how women’s freedom is constrained in the neoliberal era of choice.

The various blurbs and reviews for Ms Millar’s book may be read at Amazon, available via this link or the one below. Her groundbreaking work on Anxious White Nationalism and the Biopolitics of Abortion will also be appreciated by those seeking a greater understanding of our universities and how they came to be as they are. A sample:

…a history of maternal citizenship for white women, which reverberates in the present, and the articulation of the desire to eradicate abortion (amongst white women) alongside other key biopolitical technologies—the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty and the exclusion of non-white immigrants from the nation. The figure of the aborting woman thus stands alongside other bodies perceived as threats to white sociocultural hegemony in Australia and one of its key institutions—the white, hetero-family. In the 1970s, such figures included the communist, the divorcee and the (non-white) immigrant, and in the 2000s, the lesbian mother, the single mother and the boatperson.

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What Led Germany to Accept a Tsunami of Migrants? By Bruce Bawer

By on December 19th, 2017

To my astonishment, I see that it’s been a full six years since I reviewed Tuvia Tenenbom’s I Sleep in Hitler’s Room: An American Jew Visits Germany. The book, an account of the author’s encounters with anti-Semitism and Jew-obsession in a country that claims to have thoroughly repudiated its Nazi past, was, I wrote, “deeply sobering, depressing even,” yet “so chatty and engaging and laugh-out-loud funny that it’s hard to put down.” I praised Tenenbom as “an acute observer of his fellowman, but also a born entertainer, a comedian, who approaches his interview subjects – of whom there are dozens, ranging from leading political and cultural figures to folks he runs into on the street – as a combination inquisitor and tummler.”

And he does it all, I emphasized, “on a human level: he’s not a journalist taking notes but a fellow human being, intense in his curiosity and incapable of hiding his emotions. He challenges his interlocutors, posing questions nobody has ever asked them before, and he’s relentless, always demanding the truth, wanting to know what these people really think and feel, rejecting their canned answers, the things they say because they think that’s what he wants to hear.” And even when he doesn’t exactly like what they say, he often turns out “to like them anyway, able to separate his intellectual revulsion at their ideas from his personal response to them as human beings.” Indeed, although he’s revolted by German attitudes, he admits that “somewhere deep inside me…I love the Germans.”

Pretty much everything above applies as well to Tenenbom’s new book, Hello, Refugees! Like I Sleep in Hitler’s Room, it’s grim yet entertaining, and – most of all – supremely human. This time, as the title suggests, he’s concerned with the migrant issue – specifically, with the consequences of Angela Merkel’s decision to open the floodgates to undocumented foreigners. Journeying from one refugee camp in Germany to another, and to various hotels where migrants are being put up at taxpayer expense, he meets some newcomers who are gentle, civilized, educated, grateful to be in Europe, and absolutely in love with Germany, and others who are angry, violent, and seething with hostility and contempt toward infidels in general and Germany in particular. (In order not to earn the instant hatred of Muslim migrants, he speaks to them in Arabic and pretends to be one of their coreligionists.) CONTINUE AT SITE

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Deconstructing the Anti-Israel Book ‘State of Terror’ by David Collier and Jonathan Hoffman

By on December 16th, 2017

Before post-modernism, there were facts. But things have changed — nowhere so much as in the history surrounding Israel’s conflict with its neighbors.

The latest addition to this genre comes from Thomas Suarez, an American violinist and expert on antique maps. Last year, he published a book called State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. His effort to rewrite history were Herculean: Seven years of work, five of them reading 430 files in the UK’s National Archives, resulting in 680 endnotes, and 124 entries in the bibliography.

This diligence enabled Suarez to find some nuggets of history undiscovered by even the most eminent academic historians. For example: Zionist leaders opposed the Marshall Plan; UN Resolution 181 was a “scam” because “no Israeli leader had any intention of honouring Partition;” Jewish orphans in post-war Europe were “kidnapped” by Zionists; after the Second World War, Zionist leaders sabotaged plans to safeguard Jewish displaced persons (DPs); and Israel destroyed the Iraqi Jewish community.

Incredibly, this fraudulent book has gained traction.

Suarez has given talks in the UK Parliament, at SOAS (a London University) and at four venues in Scotland. He will soon be speaking in the US (on September 18 at the University of Massachusetts; September 25 at Columbia; and September at 26 Rutgers).

In blurbs of the book, Ilan Pappé, a professor at Exeter University, calls it a “tour de force,” and Baroness Jenny Tonge says, “Everyone who has ever accepted Israel’s account of its own history should read this book and hear the truth.”

So, we decided to fact-check the book.

We read 26 of the same National Archive files and 8 of the same books that Suarez used — in addition to information that Suarez ignored. We found widespread evidence that was misinterpreted or ignored, always in a manner that denigrated Zionism.

One example is the statement that Zionist leaders opposed the Marshall Plan because of the fear that reconstruction in Europe would prove “an obstacle to Zionism.” Suarez’s evidence? An archive document showing that a small group of (unnamed) Zionists took this stance — not the mainstream Jewish leadership or the Jewish Agency.

We found other allegations that were not only false, but flagrantly antisemitic — for example, that Jewish children in Europe who had been orphaned by the Second World War were “kidnapped” and spirited to Israel. The truth is that after Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jewish people, many Jewish orphans were in the care of Christians.

The rescue operation — by Israeli Chief Rabbi Herzog, which was carried out with the blessing of national authorities — was simply intended to ensure that the orphans could remain Jewish rather than de facto be converted to Christianity. After six million Jews perished, it is nauseating to label this resettlement in Israel as kidnapping. It shows a wilful failure on the part of Suarez to understand the Holocaust, and the very essence of Judaism itself.

Throughout the book, we found a strategy to attribute to all Zionists the action of one. If any Jewish Zionist said or did anything negative, Suarez used the example to reflect the action back on all Zionists. He then labeled it as Zionist policy. This is a highly dubious, and racist, strategy to employ. When discussing the Holocaust, it becomes sickeningly offensive.

We also found a strategy of wilful selectivity in the selection of archive material, focusing disproportionately on the years of maximum civil strife in then-Palestine (1947-48), in order to support the author’s calumny that “terrorism created Israel.” And describing only half of the conflict — deliberately evading uses of Arab violence — presents an utterly skewed impression that the violence related to Israel’s creation only came from Jews.

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Comprehending the Big Lessons of World War II By Peter Mansoor

By on December 13th, 2017

Victor Davis Hanson’s latest work, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, is a synthesis of existing scholarship on World War II, presented with insights from the history of warfare throughout the ages befitting the author’s expertise in the broad sweep of military history. The book is arranged topically, with sections dealing with air, naval, and land warfare as well as the ideas, weapons, economies, and people that energized, fought, fueled, and led the conflict. Hanson’s analysis of the bloodletting from 1939 to 1945 is perceptive and provocative and his exploration of counterfactuals provides plenty of material for speculation among those well-versed in the history of the war. https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/12/comprehending-the-big-lessons-of-world-war-ii/

Victor Davis Hanson, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and noted classicist, makes frequent allusions to pre-modern battles and wars, illustrating how geography, tactical circumstances, and human nature weave their way throughout time. Thus we learn that the Normandy invasion “was the largest combined land and sea operation conducted since the invasion of Greece by King Xerxes of Persia in spring 480 BC,” which led to the epic battles at Thermopylae and Salamis. Hanson also explains what is different about World War II, including the racism and ideology that fueled the conflict and which led to the industrialized slaughter of millions in death camps and by starvation.

Hanson categorizes World War II as a war of machines. The book examines various aspects of long range bombing, carrier aviation, and submarine wars in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, always with an eye to determining why the Allies won and the Axis powers lost. Tiger, Panther, Sherman, and T-34 tanks; Katyusha rocket launchers and American howitzers; Lancaster and B-29 bombers; Messerschmidt, Zero, Spitfire, Hurricane, Thunderbolt, and Mustang fighters; Essex class carriers and fast battleships; the iconic M-1 rifle and Sturmgewehr 44; and other weapons are analyzed for their role in the fighting and outcome of the war. Having examined the implements of combat, Hanson pays due attention to the supreme leaders and military commanders who devised strategy and led operations, as well as the economic output of the great powers that made victory possible or defeat inevitable.

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BEN ROTHKO REVIEWS “THE STORY OF HEBREW” BY LEWIS GLINERT

By on December 3rd, 2017

This review originally appeared in The Jewish Link of New Jersey.

Many people have likely heard the claim that Hebrew is the only
ancient language to be in active use today. While speakers of Farsi
and Chinese may disagree,Hebrew’s resurgence and resurrection may be
the linguistic equivalent of a miracle. From being a peripheral
language in far off Israel a little over a century ago, it’s now a
vibrant language spoken by millions across different continents.

In a fascinating new book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University
Press 978-0691153292), Dr. Lewis Glinert, professor of Hebrew Studies
at Dartmouth College, provides a history of the Hebrew language from
biblical times to today. While written by an Ivy League professor and
published by Princeton University Press, this is nonetheless a most
readable and highly engaging book.

In addition, knowledge of Hebrew is not needed to enjoy this
remarkable book. At Dartmouth, Glinert teaches a class From Genesis
to Seinfeld: Jewish Humor and its Roots. As to his dry sense of humor,
he has written an entire book about Hebrew, and aside from a few
illustrations, not used a single Hebrew character. The truth is that
this is not a book about what the Hebrew words mean. Rather it is
about what the Hebrew language has meant to the people who have
possessed it.

The book tells two stories. First, how Hebrew has been used in Jewish
life for the past 3,500 years; how it was left for dead, only to come
back. The other story is that of how Jews and Christians have
conceived of Hebrew, and invested it with a symbolic power far beyond
normal language.

A few of the many questions that Glinert addresses are: how did Hebrew
figure into the sense of identity of the Jews, how did that
relationship change with the advent of Zionism and their love affair
with the Hebrew language, what kept Hebrew from dying out completely,
and perhaps most importantly: what can its remarkable story teach
about the working of human language in general.

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Hannah Arendt on Eichmann:A Study in the Perversity of Brilliance One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial is involved in the fact that it… Norman Podhoretz 1963

By on November 27th, 2017

One of the many ironies surrounding Hannah Arendt’s book on the Eichmann trial1 is involved in the fact that it should have been serialized in the New Yorker so short a time after the appearance in the same magazine of James Baldwin’s essay on the Black Muslims. A Negro on the Negroes, a Jew on the Jews, each telling a tale of the horrors that have been visited upon his people and of how these horrors were borne; and each exhorting the prosperous, the secure, the ignorant to understand that these horrors are relevant to them. The two stories have much in common and they are both, in their essentials, as old as humankind itself—so old and so familiar that it takes a teller of extraordinary eloquence, or else of extraordinary cleverness, to make them come alive again. Baldwin is all eloquence; there is nothing clever in the way he tells the story of the Negro in America. On the one side are the powerless victims, on the other the powerful oppressors; the only sin of the victims is their powerlessness, the only guilt is the guilt of the oppressors. Now, this black-and-white account, with the traditional symbolisms reversed, is not the kind of picture that seems persuasive to the sophisticated modern sensibility—the sensibility that has been trained by Dostoevski and Freud, by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, by Eliot and Yeats, to see moral ambiguity everywhere, to be bored by melodrama, to distrust the idea of innocence, to be skeptical of rhetorical appeals to Justice. And indeed, not even Baldwin’s eloquence, which forced many of his readers to listen for once, could overcome the dissatisfaction many others felt at the moral simplicity of the story as he told it. For as he told it, the story did not answer to their sense of reality; it was an uninteresting story and a sentimental one.

Precisely the reverse is true of Hannah Arendt’s telling of the story of how six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. If Baldwin is all eloquence and no cleverness, Miss Arendt is all cleverness and no eloquence; and if Baldwin brings his story unexpectedly to life through the bold tactic of heightening and playing exquisitely on every bit of melodrama it contains, Miss Arendt with an equally surprising boldness rids her story of melodrama altogether and heavily underlines every trace of moral ambiguity she can wring out of it. What she has done, in other words, is translate this story for the first time into the kind of terms that can appeal to the sophisticated modern sensibility. Thus, in place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the “banal” Nazi; in place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in place of the confrontation between guilt and innocence, she gives us the “collaboration” of criminal and victim. The story as she tells it is complex, unsentimental, riddled with paradox and ambiguity. It has all the appearance of “ruthless honesty,” and all the marks of profundity—have we not been instructed that complexity, paradox, and ambiguity are the sign manifest of profundity?—and, in addition, it carries with it all the authority of Miss Arendt’s classic work on The Origins of Totalitarianism. Anyone schooled in the modern in literature and philosophy would be bound to consider it a much better story than the usual melodramatic version—which, as it happens, was more or less the one relied upon by the prosecution at the Eichmann trial, and which Miss Arendt uses to great effect in highlighting the superior interest of her own version. But if this version of hers can from one point of view be considered more interesting, can it by the same token be considered truer, or more illuminating, or more revealing of the general situation of man in the 20th century? Is the gain she achieves in literary interest a matter of titillation, or is it a gain to the understanding?

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Israel’s Secret War Against Terrorism’s Financiers A new book explores Israel’s daring covert operations against terrorism’s enablers. Ari Lieberman

By on November 27th, 2017

Harpoon
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel Katz
Hachette Books, 308 pp.

Mohammed al-Ghoul had no idea that loading cash-stuffed, leather suitcases into the trunk of his sedan would be one of the final acts of his life. Al-Ghoul was Hamas’s money man, responsible for distributing cash to the terror group’s members.

It was August 24, 2014 and the Gaza War wasn’t going well for Hamas. The Israeli Army (IDF) was wreaking havoc on the terror group, systematically knocking off its field commanders with unprecedented intelligence and accuracy. Hamas terror tunnels, some of which had taken years to construct, were being uncovered and destroyed by the IDF while the terror group’s rocket arsenal was dwindling rapidly.

But of even greater import for Hamas was the fact that its operatives weren’t getting paid. Some of its members hadn’t been paid for a month. Those that weren’t killed, wounded or captured began contemplating desertion. It was an untenable situation for Hamas.

Wiring money to Gaza wasn’t an option. Banks were on notice that wire transfers to the terror entity was a venture that carried high risk and little reward. But al-Ghoul had a plan that would provide a lifeline for Hamas.

Thirteen million dollars, secured from a friendly Muslim country, would be wired to the account of a moneychanger in Sinai. Once the moneychanger received confirmation that the funds were safely in his account, he would give a courier the cash. The courier would then smuggle it into Gaza via one of the many smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to northern Sinai. Once in Gaza, the cash could be distributed to the fighters to stave off sagging morale and desertion.

Everything went according to plan. The courier delivered the cash to al-Ghoul, who along with his bodyguards began loading the trunk. Unbeknownst to al-Ghoul however, Israeli intelligence had been monitoring the entire sequence of events.

Lurking beyond visual range was an IDF AH-64 Apache Longbow armed with Hellfire missiles. A missile struck home instantly transforming al-Ghoul’s vehicle into a ball of flame and the car’s occupants into smoldering corpses. More importantly, most of the cash vaporized or otherwise became unusable. Hamas was unable to pay its fighters. Forty-eight hours later, Hamas, after losing 1,000 of its men, agreed to a ceasefire without a single of its demands being met.

Israel’s approach to combating terror has always been somewhat unorthodox but effective. The myriad of terror threats facing the Jewish nation is like no other in the world and compels those on the forefront of combating terror to adopt novel, cutting edge methods to defeat the threat. Harpoon, a new book co-authored by counter-terrorism expert Samuel Katz and human rights attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, of the Israel Law Center, provides us with intriguing insight as to some of those unique but very effective strategies.

In the early-1990s a few maverick-minded security officials understood that cash was indispensable to organized terror networks. They argued for the need to set up a special task force dedicated to identifying and tracking sources of terror financing and methods employed by terrorism’s financial enablers. In 2001, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sanctioned the creation of a special unit, code-named “Harpoon,” tasked to do just that. The unit was headed by Sharon’s old army buddy, Meir Dagan, who had held various security posts in the past and would end up becoming head of Israel’s vaunted Mossad intelligence organization.

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Review: A Bounty of Troublemakers While mutineers succumbed to half-clad Tahitians, Capt. Bligh performed a navigational feat—and convicts began populating Australia. A. Roger Ekirch reviews ‘Paradise in Chains’ by Diana Preston. By A. Roger Ekirch

By on November 21st, 2017

Historians and novelists, no less than Hollywood producers, have long been drawn to the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, notwithstanding its dubious historical importance. For compared with British naval mutinies in the 1790s—at Spithead and at Nore, both off England’s coast, and aboard the Hermione in the West Indies—the rumpus on the Bounty was a tame affair. No lives were lost. The mutiny did not erupt in wartime or endanger the homeland. Nor did it lead to naval reforms.

Yet the tale of the Bounty, set against the backdrop of the South Pacific, in time became romanticized, at the expense of the “tyrannical” captain, William Bligh, and to the advantage of young Fletcher Christian, a target of his ire, who as a petty officer led the uprising. It is well known that many of the crew, including Christian, had by then succumbed to the amorous appeal of half-clad Tahitians. Less emphasized in most accounts was Bligh’s epic feat of seamanship upon being cast adrift after the mutiny: navigating a cramped launch with 18 loyal sailors before finding a safe harbor in the Dutch East Indies. In 48 days, they had traveled more than 3,600 nautical miles.

The author of 10 earlier books on such disparate topics as Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Boxer Rebellion, the historian Diana Preston revisits the mutiny in “Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia.” Grounded in a familiar assortment of printed manuscripts and secondary sources, the book is comprehensive in scope, cogently written and amply detailed. In addition to the Bounty’s factious crew, we encounter an intriguing cast of indigenous personalities, including the Tahitian queen Purea, who years before the Bounty’s mutineers came to her island had seduced the famous naturalist Sir Joseph Banks.

Yet for the most part “Paradise in Chains” offers neither new insights nor fresh information. Ms. Preston acknowledges Bligh’s navigational skill and bravery, but she blames his short temper and narcissism for triggering the mutiny, giving insufficient weight to Caroline Alexander’s painstaking evidence, presented in “The Bounty” (2003), of a concerted campaign in England to tar Bligh’s reputation by the prominent families of Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood, a fellow mutineer. Not to be minimized, in addition to Christian’s inflated sense of entitlement, was the reluctance of some crewmen to return home once they had seen Tahiti.

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