RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-other-crises-demanding-our-attention/

Israel’s battle to neutralize Hamas has dominated our collective attention, as it should. For all of its existence, Israel has been the canary in the mine shaft, the West’s beleaguered outpost of political freedom, tolerance, and equality in the midst of illiberal and tyrannical enemies that want to destroy the West’s power and influence. As Israelis have said over the past month, Israel’s fight is our fight, and always has been.

Yet our country is at a dangerous crossroads, with other threats both at home and abroad that demand our attention, and that should be the focus of next year’s elections. We are at the point where democracy’s historically bad habit of kicking multiple cans down the road is becoming unsustainable, if not lethal.

The Ukraine Stalemate

You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the Russo-Ukrainian war would become a stalemate redolent of the Western Front in World War I. For all the self-congratulation of the Nato countries about standing up to Vladimir Putin and protecting the “rules-based world order,” their money and materiel have been just enough to create the current stasis.

We seem to be pursuing a Mr. Micawber foreign policy, waiting for “something to turn up,” like a coup in Russia, to get us out of this quagmire. But more-realist commentators are casting doubt on Ukraine’s chances of defeating Russia and recovering their purloined territories.

In the U.S., the policy positions have settled into a bipartisan contrast: America First isolationism and a “no more costly endless wars abroad” sentiment vs. “aggression must be checked and deterred” by intervention lest we incentivize other aggressors to try conclusions. The result is the choice still facing us, between the bad and the worse.

Yet this debate is an exercise in shutting the barn door after the horse got out. The real story here is how our feckless foreign policy in the Nineties assumed that in a post-Soviet world we could enjoy the “peace dividend” and cut our defense spending.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/11/20/alan-dershowitz-alleged-rise-of-islamophobia-at-universities-fake-n4924086

On the latest episode of “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News, famed lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz scoffed at the idea that there’s a rise of Islamophobia on college campuses today.

“Let me ask you this, Alan — we have a very big bureaucracy. We have a huge Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. We have a huge Civil Rights Division and another big bureaucracy called the Department of Education,” began host Mark Levin. “Donald Trump signed an executive order, which gives those authorities the power to act against anti-Semitism and threats on college campuses. Maybe they’re doing it here and there. I’m not seeing a big push. I’m not hearing from the attorney general. I’m not hearing from the head of either Civil Rights Division. What the hell is going on?”

Dershowitz explained how he was at the White House when Trump announced the executive order and how he congratulated him on it despite the fact Dershowitz is not a Republican. 

“I congratulated him for his great efforts in getting the administration behind this effort to root out anti-Semitism,” he said. “It hasn’t worked. In fact, what’s happened, and it’s this administration and Biden as well, whenever they talk about anti-Semitism, they say, ‘and Islamophobia.’ I’ve got news for you. There is no Islamophobia at any university in the United States. It’s a fake. It’s virtue parading. Oh, we have to fight anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Let me tell you who the anti-Semites are. They are largely, not completely, the radical Muslims who claim to be victims of Islamophobia. This is a one-sided issue.”

In fact, real incidents of Islamophobia are so hard to come by that a Palestinian man in Ohio faked an Islamophobic hate crime last month. Unfortunately, too many people on the left choose to pretend this isn’t a one-sided issue.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/22/democracy-dies-in-darkness-dems-overwhelmingly-back-big-tech-govt-censorship-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have come to realize that being online can mean having your speech rights curtailed. But that doesn’t mean they like it. Indeed, they mostly oppose the idea, in particular when it’s Big Tech and Big Government censoring together, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

With growing complaints over online censorship, the online national I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Nov. 1-3, asked 1,400 respondents the following question: “Do you approve or disapprove of Big Tech companies working with federal agencies to engage in online censorship?”

For most people, the answer is negative. Of those who responded, 43% say they either disapproved of government and large tech and social media firms cooperating with each other to curb Americans’ speech “strongly” (26%) or “somewhat” (17%).

By comparison, 36% say they approve of it “strongly” (18%) or “somewhat” (18%). A significantly large group, 22%, say they were “not sure.”

The poll has a +/-2.7 percentage point margin of error.

But, the relative closeness of the response is deceptive. When broken down by demographics and political affiliation, surprisingly sharp differences between and within different groups emerge.

Start with politics. Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Big Tech and Big Government censoring online content, 57% “approve” to just 25% “disapprove.”

Compare that with Republicans, who are almost exactly the opposite of the Dems in their response: 26% “approve,” vs. 54% “disapprove.” Similarly, independents “approve” by just 21%, while they “disapprove” by 52%. Republicans and independents are nearly identical, while Democrats are the outlier.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-hamas-became-an-environmentalist-and-gun-control-cause/

From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas Nazi cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.

The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas Nazis.

How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”

The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.

Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/21/what-the-latest-attacks-on-musk-are-really-all-about/

Just as Democrats were trying to downplay the rampant antisemitism in their ranks, what happens? Elon Musk, who has lately become something of a darling on the right, suddenly becomes the poster boy for antisemitism. This is how the left works.

This latest twist started when Media Matters — the George Soros-backed media “watchdog” — released a report claiming that ads for major corporations were appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content.

This is a two-fer for the left. It both attacks Musk — whom the left now hates because he stopped Twitter’s side hustle as the federal government censor — and it takes the spotlight off the left’s virulent antisemitism on display after the Hamas attacks.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter and promised to live up to the company’s “free speech wing of the free speech party” mantra, the left went into fits of hysterics.

Media Matters puts it, “Musk has opened the floodgates to hateful content.” Really? Because Twitter was pure as the driven snow before Musk?

We seem to recall that “blue check” leftists had free reign to say whatever they wanted about conservatives on Twitter, up to and including calls for their assassination. After Donald Trump took office, to cite just one example, “assassinate Trump” was showing up all over Twitter. When Twitter banned Trump before Musk bought the company, it let Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continue to incite hate and violence on its platform. Etc., etc.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-is-gen-zs-first-real-war-hamas-israel-social-media-world-war-ii-3111692f?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?

I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.

As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of about 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Many of the expulsions took place in winter amid terrible scenes of hunger and deprivation, all while mass rapes of German women slowly subsided across the Soviet zone of Germany.

Lawyers and legislators can debate whether these actions constitute war crimes, but as Cicero put it more than two thousand years ago, “inter arma enim silent leges.” Roughly, that translates as the “laws go silent when armies clash.” Or as William Tecumseh Sherman put it more succinctly, “War is hell.”

One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. The war in Gaza hasn’t merely introduced young Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also has shown them the face of war.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2015/10/18/a-watershed-for-americas-jews/

Are the years when the United States was a supremely comfortable place for American Jews coming to an end? Thanks to President Obama’s polices, the answer may be yes, although most American Jews are not only blind to the dangers, but actively promoting those very policies.

Challenged by what U.S. Secretary of State Kerry calls Germany’s “example to the world” in opening its borders to 800,000 (overwhelmingly Muslim) migrants this year, the Obama administration now proposes to boost the number of refugees it accepts to 100,000 annually, including 10,000 Syrians.

In practice, this means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. Breitbart reported that in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Of these, just under 40,000 were refugees. The rest were divided almost equally into those given permanent resident status and those coming as temporary (in theory) migrants, including students and foreign workers. With Obama more than doubling the number of those admitted as refugees, there is little doubt there will be a substantial rise in the other categories. Don’t forget, family unification is a major source of legal immigrants.

There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration. Unlike in Germany, a million more Muslim immigrants will not upend the religious demographics of the United States with its population of almost 319 million. But the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small U.S. Jewish population. There are estimated to be five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, over-matching the number of Jews.

One cultural trait Muslims infallibly bring with them is hatred of Israel — and contempt for Jews –  inculcated in them from a very early age. When a reporter for The Times of Israel interviewed migrants at a reception center in Milan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee named Adman told her, “In Syria we have all races and religions living together. We are all brothers but Israel, Israel is the ultimate enemy.” Rima, a Syrian who has lived in Italy for years and now registers migrants, explained “For Syrians, Israel is Palestinian territory.” When the reporter suggested a two-state solution, Rima replied “I don’t think Jews should have a state. They are a religion, not a people.” The reporter encountered no contrary views among the refugees.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/19/flirtation-with-evil-will-not-end-well-for-leftists/

Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?

Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process.  Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

Those videos were watched by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Millions—millions—have searched for bin Laden’s paean to Jew-hatred, radical  Islamic theocracy, and contempt for America. The Guardian newspaper, which had published a transcript of Osama’s letter back in 2002 when it first appeared, took it down because, an editorial note explains,  it “had been widely shared on social media without the full context.” Ah, “context.” Patient readers can still avail themselves of the 4,000-word lunatic effusion here. I offer two brief snippets, chosen more or less at random (slice him where you will, as Bertie Wooster observed, a hellhound is still a hellhound), just to give readers a little taste of the surreal world we’re talking about:

The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [i.e., Americans] are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily. [My italics, but bin Laden’s emphasis.]

So what, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done? Bin Laden does not disappoint. 

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. . . . complete submission to His [Allah’s] Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). . . It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. . . 

Et very much cetera.

In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe,  by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.