I have in equal balance justly weighed
What wrong our arms may do,
what wrongs we suffer,
And find our griefs heavier than our offences.’
The Archbishop of York in 2 Henry IV
This amazing woman deserves national prominence. She is also charming and interesting. Sears served as an electrician in the United States Marines from 1983 to 1986. Before running for public office, Sears directed a Salvation Army homeless shelter. rsk
The first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia reveals in her memoir how her Christian faith, unwavering patriotism, and fervent commitment to conservative principles propelled her to serve and sacrifice for her country and a better future.
Winsome Earle-Sears sent shock waves across Virginia and the country at large when she pulled off her stunning upset victory in November 2021 and became the first woman lieutenant governor of Virginia and the first Black woman, the first naturalized female citizen, and first female veteran elected to statewide office. She earned intense national coverage because of her unwavering support for Second Amendment rights and her strong commitment to education opportunity for all students. Now in her memoir, How Sweet It Is, Winsome will tell her story and explains how she arrived at that historic moment in time.
What could explain his recent posting? He has been eloquent in denouncing racists, libelers and rioters. Why this abhorrent posting?
Omer Bartov – Israel’s Hard Right Turn
My guest this week is the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, who is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war, most of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Food, water, and adequate medical services are in short supply. Still, grim as those facts are, Omer does not think they amount to genocide. At least not yet. He does worry that, with right-wing hardliners holding sway in Israel’s government, genocide is a distinct possibility.
In this conversation, Omer tells me about some of the history that led up to the current war before delving into the political pressures that he believes are driving the campaign forward. He believes that Benjamin Netanyahu has pieced together a hard right coalition that he protects because, among other reasons, it keeps him in power and out of court, where he is embroiled in an ongoing corruption trial that could lead to jail time. In the meantime, according to Omer, Netanyahu’s coalition functions as a “mirror image of Hamas” that encourages violence against Palestinians and threatens democracy in Israel. Omer believes that Israel’s current government is neither capable of nor interested in addressing humanitarian concerns in Gaza and finding a political solution to the conflict. That will require a US-led international effort.
Omer knows whereof he speaks—he’s a noted scholar in the field and a passionate public advocate. That’s why I wanted to hear from him. You may disagree with his read on the situation, but he can’t simply be shrugged off.
The criticism tossed at Israel in the mainstream media and among the pro-Hamas protesters that Israel’s response to the barbarism of October 7, 2023 is “disproportionate” is actually risible.
However, something in Israel is truly disproportionate. It is the outsize 24/7 research and development of technology, medicine, agriculture and water systems, that alleviate illness, famine, epidemics, and prolonged drought for billions of citizens throughout the world.
Got that? A nation about the size of New Jersey with a population of 9.73 million brings relief and hope to billions as Michael Ordman catalogs every week.
That is really disproportionate. rsk
September 2, 1945; At the conclusion of the Surrender Ceremony, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, broadcast this speech:
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death — the seas bear only commerce -men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way. I speak for the unnamed brave millions homeward bound to take up the challenge of that future which they did so much to salvage from the brink of disaster.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-re-education-camps-of-middle-east-studies/
Manufacturing Jew-haters.
During the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao Zedong declared that “bourgeois intellectuals” could not be trusted as educators; “politically correct” students and teachers should be in charge. Thousands of high school students were sent to camps to be re-educated and embrace communist ideology. Tuition was free.
In America today, parents fork as much as tens of thousands of dollars annually for the same kind of campus re-education, including the communist ideology.
When it comes to Middle East Departments, re-education has been startlingly successful thanks to MESA (the Middle East Studies Association), which could be described as an education cartel that controls what is taught regarding Israel.
If you don’t belong to MESA it is extremely difficult to get employment or tenure in Middle East Study departments in all American colleges and universities, but it is equally difficult to join MESA if you don’t promote their narrative about Israel.
Currently, even the diminishing number of students who have a friendly attitude to Israel with some knowledge of its religious roots and historical and legitimate sovereignty, are quickly disabused of that and indoctrinated with the false narrative that Israel is a colonialist state which dispossessed an indigenous Arab population and now conducts oppression and “apartheid,” justifying Arab resentment. Their success in promoting this fake history is evident in the pro-Hamas rallies ignited on so many campuses recently.
In 1966, Bernard Lewis was a founding member of MESA, but in 2007 he withdrew when it increasingly adopted an anti-Israel bias. If one goes to their website, Lewis is not even mentioned as a founding member.
MESA’s Mission Statement sounds benign enough:
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom in accordance with its status as a 501(c)(3) scientific, educational, literary, and charitable organization.
In 2023 about 14.2 million students are enrolled in an undergraduate program. MESA itself does not reach an overwhelming number of students but their professors do and they get their marching orders from the annual meetings. And they influence students in many departments.
Their 57th annual meeting was held at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal, Québec, Canada from November 2-5, 2023. The conference was the largest of its kind, with an estimated 2,200 attendees, 370 sessions, and nearly 50 exhibitors.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-cautionary-memoir/
My parents and my younger brother and I lived in Bolivia during the Holocaust. When we settled into life in America after World War II, most of my parents’ friends were European emigres. They were drawn to Jewish academics and physicians who always called each other ”Herr” or “Pan” or “Frau” or “Pani” in German or Polish, and never by first names.
I was particularly fond of the Jewish-German emigres. They had come from the belly of the Nazi beast. They became substitutes for the family I never met — grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all killed in Europe. They reciprocated my affection and always asked for me as soon as they entered: “Vo ist der tochter?”
While they hated Germany, they loved German poetry and composers and always listened to records and recited poems with translations for me. My favorite was Schiller’s “The Ring of Polycrates,” about a king who feared his good fortune and threw his beloved and very valuable ring into the seas, only to have it come back in a fish cooked for him. This was proof that he was doomed by fate. Decades later it became my daughter’s favorite poem.
I loved being with these people and often sat reverently next to them while they listened to an oratorio or piano concerto, followed by tea and pastries of chocolate mixed with jam. They brought me Snickers. I hungered for their stories about life in Germany before the war. They were all very voluble historians of their life and fate.
One of them was a professor in Hamburg until 1938. He was so assimilated that he sported a “Messerschmitt” — a dueling scar popular among upper class Germans on his cheek, and a handsome bald pate.
He and his Frau had two sons who also assimilated until the 1930s when the Nazi state abolished all youth groups in Germany except the Hitler Youth or its female equivalent, the League of German Girls — and all Jewish children were barred. In January 1933, there were approximately 50,000 members of the Hitler Youth. By 1939, the vast majority of German children were part of the Hitler Youth organization.
Nonetheless, as the professor detailed it, they were optimistic that sanity would prevail and that Nazi ideology would disappear. And in any event, where could they go? As the infamous Evian Conference (Jul 6, 1938 – July 15, 1938) disclosed, of all the delegates from 32 nations, who all expressed caterwauling sorrow and shock, only one country agreed to absorb additional refugees: the Dominican Republic. And who would go to the jungle — something my parents, and so many Jews, gladly did to flee Europe.
Who are the parents of Hamas-supporting students? By Ruth King
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/who_are_the_parents_of_hamassupporting_students.html
After the anti-Vietnam War turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Midge Decter wrote an outstanding book called Liberal Parents, Radical Children detailing a generation gap between young militants demanding an end to the Vietnam War with a quasi-Utopian challenge to the “establishment” and their standard-issue liberal, mostly Democrat parents who did not call American troops “war criminals” nor did they blame America first for every ill in the universe.
When the war and the draft ended, the protests subsided and even stalwarts of the protests like Senator Eugene McCarthy and David Horowitz, editor of the radical magazine Ramparts and now editor of the conservative FrontPage, announced their support for Ronald Reagan.
Other protesters then turned their sights on community organizations and councils, the academy, and the media, but nothing has prepared parents and the general public for the present outpouring of support for Hamas terrorists and hatred for Israel among students.
As Victor Davis Hanson has stated:
The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large. Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last — unapologetic, proudly, and defiantly — the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.
Noah Rothman adds:
Younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, disagree with their elders. This demographic is split almost down the middle when asked if the slaughter of senior citizens, the rape of young women, the murder of children, and the immolation of whole families in their homes was justified. Indeed, a slight majority of respondents in this age group said the butchery could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” What’s more, only a bare majority of this demographic backs Israel in this conflict. Forty-eight percent said they side not with Palestinians but explicitly with “Hamas” in this war.
But why blame only the media and the academies? Who are the parents?
That’s a rhetorical question. I know the parents. They are smug hypocrites who vociferously defend affirmative action but pay expensive tutors to give their own kids a leg up. They parrot trendy views on gender, cancel culture, trigger words, pronouns, and perceived offenses. They favor open borders, defunding police, bail reform across the board, and sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of George Floyd. They’ve ignored the drumbeat of rising anti-Semitism and support overtly racist organizations like Black Lives Matter. They ignore the turpitude of those who pervert truth and history by denying American exceptionalism and vie with their offspring on all liberal cant and demand for “flexible” history, science, and biology.
The Jews among them are called self-hating but that does not fit. They are self-loving with their preening. They see themselves as an aggrieved minority which rises above others with their empathy for both sides of every conflict and every issue. They curb all debate and dissent in their loathing of Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu while ignoring racist genocides throughout the world. They are mildly troubled by anti-Semitic leftist legislators and commentators because they “know where they are coming from.” But now that the rising tide of global antisemitism is lapping at their toes, they are alarmed but blaming conservatives. Zero insight.
I watched the messy and shrill GOP debate last night with the misgiving that none of it really mattered. Elections in America are the hallmark of democracy and equality. Every single citizen in America- rich, poor, black, white, radical, conservative, orthodox, secular, atheist, etc. has that day to express a national choice. But, and this is a huge but, that precious freedom to choose is endangered by the lack of real election integrity.
The media libels and disinforms with alacrity. Many pollsters routinely ask yes or no questions designed to elicit shaky results to favor chosen candidates, and shady revised election rules threaten the integrity of results in a preponderance of states and districts.
Not a single candidate last night even brought it up. rsk
At the risk of incurring some anger from valued readers, I wholeheartedly approve of Ramasamy’s reflections on ending aid to Israel in 2028.
Aid to Israel has historically been a cudgel to force Israel’s acceptance of policies inimical to its independence. Examples abound:
In the shuttle diplomacy following the October Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel bowed to the demands for withdrawal made by the aggressor Anwar Sadat of Egypt after a crude warning by Kissinger that failure to do so would lead to a” reassessment” of aid. Again, during the Camp David Accords of 1978, Vice President Mondale pressured Menachem Begin to accept all Sadat’s demands for territorial concessions by hinting at a reduction in aid. In 1992 Secretary of State James A. Baker III gave Israel’s Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir a blunt public warning that unless Israel halts building Jewish settlements in so-called occupied territories, it would not get $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. In October of 1998 after the Oslo Accords failed to get Israel’s full commitment to abandon the cities of Judea and Samaria to the PLO, a meeting was held at the Wye River in Maryland where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hinted that aid would be reconsidered if Prime Minister Netanyahu did not accede to Arafat’s demands.
Ramaswamy recognizes the value of the Abraham accords to ensure peace and deterrence to Iran’s genocidal agenda. A defense agreement with sharing of intel is far superior to aid at a time that America’s economy, military and infrastructure are failing.
I’m saving my opprobrium for the trio of rats- Matti Friedman, Daniel Gordis, Yossi Halevi who are issuing a call to world Jewry to “support Israel but not its present government”…..How does one do that? By threatening to cut off aid unless the democratically elected government is toppled? rsk
