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Harvard, in New Filing in Court, Suggests Its Jewish Students Were Too Fearful in the Wake of October 7 Who’s to blame — the lawyers or the client? Ira Stoll

Posted By on June 23rd, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvard-in-new-filing-in-court-suggests-its-jewish-students-were-too-fearful-in-the-wake-of-october-7?lctg=1474955502&recognized_

Harvard reportedly spent more than $25 million, mostly on the law firm WilmerHale, defending the racial preferences in college admissions that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional. After losing the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case in June 2023, Harvard again turned to WilmerHale to prepare its president, Claudine Gay, for a December 2023 congressional hearing on Harvard’s response to antisemitism. 

President Gay’s performance at the hearing was widely denounced.  Both she and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who also relied on WilmerHale for pre-hearing preparation, resigned after apologizing for giving overly legalistic answers suggesting that whether calls for genocide against Jews violate their university policies would depend on the “context.” 

Now Harvard is facing a third embarrassment. This past week, one of the same lawyers who tried the Asian-American admissions case, Felicia Ellsworth, who sat in the first row behind Ms. Gay in the December congressional hearing, joined three other WilmerHale lawyers and four from another firm in filing a motion to dismiss and strike a complaint filed in court by Jewish students alleging antisemitism at Harvard.

The students, Alexander  Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., said that on October 19, 2023, a mob stormed Harvard Law School. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks,” their complaint says. In a memo supporting the motion to dismiss and strike, the lawyers for Harvard said that the Jewish students do not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.”

By basically calling Harvard’s own Jewish students unreasonable for fearing violence less than two weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel, the lawyers risk proving the complaint’s point about Harvard antisemitism, rather than persuading Judge Richard Stearns to dismiss it. 

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Fauci Was Just a Symptom By Jeffrey H. Anderson

Posted By on June 23rd, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/fauci-was-just-a-symptom/

Editor’s Note: Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Anthony Fauci has emerged as a living symbol of federal abuses: lockdowns, mask mandates, and myriad other arbitrary restrictions that unduly burdened the lives of ordinary citizens. Yet there is nothing exceptional about the former NIAID head; he is merely one of countless bureaucrats in Washington who feel entitled to rule their countrymen by the mandate of expertise. Jeffrey H. Anderson reviews RFK Jr.’s recent book on America’s most controversial doctor and concludes that Fauci is not just a bad scientist, but an embodiment of the grave threat posed by a new regime to our Constitution and our way of life.

The mainstream press corps prefers to deal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by pretending that he doesn’t exist. This is true both for his presidential campaign—which is thought to pose too much of a threat to President Biden to risk acknowledging it—and for his popular book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

Relegated to Skyhorse Publishing, which Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith describes as “something of a refuge for the cancelled,” Kennedy’s book nevertheless cracked the top 15 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list for 15 consecutive weeks—topping out at #7. Yet apparently it did not merit space in the Times for a review. Wikipedia quickly dismisses The Real Anthony Fauci as a “controversial” book by a “conspiracy theorist” who unjustifiably “attacks” Fauci and “offers disinformation.” 

In truth, however, Kennedy’s book is a valuable and generally well-researched indictment of the public health establishment, and more broadly of anti-republican rule by “experts.” While the book’s claims should not be taken as gospel in the way that the credulous press corps hangs on Fauci’s every muddled word, Kennedy shows impressive willingness to stand strong against the current, and his informative and rather countercultural book is very much worth a read. He makes a compelling case that—from AIDS to Covid—Fauci and friends have been pursuing their own agenda at the expense of the American people.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Mullahs Drastically Speed Up Their Nuclear Program, US Administration Sits Idly By by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20722/iran-speed-nuclear-program

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility.

By waiving sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has effectively provided financial support amounting up to an estimated $100 billion to the mullahs. Worse, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s destabilizing and aggressive policies, both within the region and without.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has explicitly articulated his vision for Israel’s destruction in his 416-page book, Palestine. This manifesto serves as a detailed guide to eliminating Israel, often referred to in Iran as “The Little Satan,” and vehemently condemns the United States, referred to as “The Great Satan.”

By acquiring nuclear weapons, the regime could also equip its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — with these weapons to use against Israel. Using its proxies as its “human shields” allows Iran’s regime to maintain plausible deniability, so it can continue hiding behind them while escalating the real threat to Israel, which is Iran itself.

The Biden administration needs urgently to take decisive action to curb Iran’s aggressive nuclear advancements. The US needs to stop its current practice of waiving sanctions on Iran and start reimposing — and enforcing — severe sanctions on the country’s oil and gas industry. The US also needs to cut off the financial flow to the regime by imposing secondary sanctions: any country that does business with Iran may not do business with the United States.

US failure to act will only rapidly lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, significantly upending global stability and providing a potential vacuum for America’s adversaries to fill.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility. These cascades, which consist of multiple centrifuges working in unison, increase the efficiency of uranium enrichment by spinning the uranium gas at extremely high speeds, allowing Iran to enrich it at a much faster rate and significantly reducing the time required to produce nuclear weapons.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans by Peter Schweizer

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

It’s often said that China is in a cold war with America. The reality is far worse: the war is hot, and the body count is one-sided.

China is killing Americans and working aggres­sively to maximize the carnage while our leaders remain passive and, in some cases, compliant. Why?

If anyone could crack the code, it’s the renowned nonpartisan investigator Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s previous three number one New York Times bestsellers sent shock waves through official Wash­ington, sparking FBI investigations and congres­sional probes that continue to this day.

For Blood Money, Schweizer and his team of forensic investigators spent more than two years scouring a trove of restricted Chinese military documents, data-mining a mountain of American financial records, and tracking US political lead­ers’ investments and family businesses. Schweizer unloads bombshell after bombshell, exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s covert operations in the American drug trade, social justice movement, and medical establishment to sow chaos and deca­dence in the United States.

A towering achievement of investigative jour­nalism, Blood Money is one of those rare books that makes you clearly see the world anew.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How This Woke Mess Happened Tony Abbott

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/06/237388/

The Hon. Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015

With most conservative parties split between populist and establishment wings, and with the West challenged in ways not seen in almost a century, John O’Sullivan’s Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here‘s collection of essays is both timely and instructive. Indeed, there are few better placed to reflect on the travails of the Anglosphere than O’Sullivan, who has been a key conservative intellectual for over four decades. He was Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer at the time of her Bruges oration that marked the beginning of a credible Brexit movement. In America, he edited National Review for a decade. In Canada, he helped to found the National Post newspaper. And in Australia he edited Quadrant for two years. He now runs the Danube Institute in Budapest (where I am a visiting fellow), a think-tank bringing conservative perspectives to economic, social and strategic issues; striving, in particular, to reconcile economic liberalism with social conservatism in ways that “unite the right”. 

This compilation of essays testifies to a depth of insight and consistency of purpose, as well as being a good commentary on many of the big issues since Thatcher’s time. O’Sullivan brings a well-stocked mind and a genial temperament to everything he discusses. As Rod Dreher writes in his foreword, he “has a conservative’s capacity to perceive the severity of the problems about which he writes, with an Englishman’s ability to maintain good humour and sound judgment when everyone else around him wallows in despondency”. As well, he’s great on memorable quotes. A couple of examples: from Disraeli, he gives us the injunction to “read biography, for that is life without theory”; and from Thatcher, this riposte: “Reactionary? Well, there’s a lot to react against.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The lethal narcissism of Joe Biden Why is America so blasé about the threat posed by Hezbollah’s Jew-haters? Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/21/the-lethal-narcissism-of-joe-biden/

What is more important: Joe Biden winning the votes of America’s entitled coastal elites, or Israel protecting itself from an army called the Party of God that has sworn itself to the eradication of the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East? This would have been a no-brainer a few years ago. Most people – aside from Israelophobic hotheads on the far right and hard left – would have agreed that defending the Jewish State from fanatics who view Jews as ‘evil’ and ‘blasphemous’ is of greater moral import than a president’s longing to get back in the good books of woke voters. And yet today, such simple moral clarity is in alarmingly short supply.

Right now, nothing fills the Biden set with greater dread than the prospect of war between Israel and Hezbollah. And it’s not because they’re peaceniks. Biden voted in favour of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. He was vice-president to the drone-happy Barack Obama, who dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone. In Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. If Biden is now of an anti-war bent, it’s been a recent conversion. No, it is self-preservation, not anti-militarism, that underpins Biden’s fear of an Israel-Hezbollah war. It’s the potential death of his presidency, not potential death in the Middle East, that keeps him up at night.

Tensions have exploded between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based terror group whose name means Party of God. Unsurprisingly, the West’s ‘anti-war’ activist class has had little to say about Hezbollah’s blitz on northern Israel. Hezbollah, which is allied with Hamas, has been firing rockets into Israel almost every day since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October, with the aim of ‘pulling Israeli forces’ away from Gaza. That is, with the aim of aiding the anti-Semites of Hamas in their holy war against the Jewish nation. Entire ‘swathes of northern Israel’ have been engulfed by fire as a result of Hezbollah’s rockets. Tens of thousands have been evacuated.

Now, Israel is talking about taking decisive action against Hezbollah. You can almost hear the West’s activist class buffing their anti-Israel placards and rummaging around for their keffiyehs in order that they might hit the streets and damn Israel for plotting yet another ‘genocide’. In these people’s minds, fried by the binary moralism of identity politics, ‘white’ Israel is to blame for everything in the Middle East, while ‘brown’ Gaza and Lebanon are pure, sad victims, responsible for nothing. If Israel were officially to declare war on Hezbollah, they would rage and splutter, with not one thought for the rockets from Lebanon that have rained on Israel almost every day for the best part of eight months.

Even Hezbollah’s threats against Cyprus were not enough to rouse the concern of the West’s supposed peace lobby. This week, the leader of the Party of God – Hassan Nasrallah – warned that Cyprus would feel his wrath in the event of war between Israel and Hezbollah. It is presumably the fact that Cyprus has let Israel use its territory for military training that led to this outrageous threat against its sovereign integrity and social peace. Where are the peaceniks? Where are the anti-war activists who’ve been marching every week against Israeli militarism? It’s almost as if it’s not war they hate, so much as the world’s only Jewish state.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Cheap fakes’? Biden’s defenders are getting desperate The liberal media are going out of their way to silence concerns about his health. Tom Slater

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/21/cheap-fakes-bidens-defenders-are-getting-desperate/

Do you think Joe Biden might be a bit… doddery? Are you worried about the leader of the free world appearing to fade out during public events, mix up the names of politicians and accidentally say explosive things – only for them to be contradicted by his carers (sorry, staffers). Then I regret to inform you that you’ve been fooled – you poor, low-info soul – by right-wing ‘cheap fakes’.

This is the new coinage the White House is using to dismiss allegedly selectively edited videos of Joe Biden, 81, already the oldest US president in history, apparently showing his age at a series of public events. Over recent weeks, a string of clips have gone viral of Biden appearing to ‘freeze’. There was Biden at a Juneteenth celebration, looking like a cardboard cut-out of himself as people bopped beside him. There was Biden at the G7 summit in Italy, wandering in the wrong direction during a world-leader photo-op. Then there was Biden onstage at a Hollywood fundraiser, being gently led off stage by Barack Obama.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed the clips earlier this week as partisan disinformation. ‘They are cheap fakes’, she said, ‘and they are done in bad faith’. Her claim, and that of the ‘fact-checkers’, is that conservative tweeters and journalists made these incidents look much worse than they actually were by editing or cropping out key context. ‘The right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because… the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation’, Jean-Pierre said. She even used the phrase ‘deepfakes’ at one point, thus falsely suggesting the clips might have been outright digital fabrications. (With more than a little irony, Jean-Pierre later had to clarify her misleading comments.) The left-leaning media have also leapt to Biden’s defence, with CBS News running a stern segment on the ‘cheap fakes’ and liberal sites amplifying the White House’s rebuttals.

On social media, liberal and conservative accounts have naturally been poring over these videos like they are mini Zapruder films, arguing the toss and accusing one another of misrepresenting Biden’s behaviour. That this is what political debate has been reduced to is frankly a bit depressing. For what it’s worth, the viral G7 clip definitely did misleadingly crop out a parachutist, who Biden was walking towards to give him a thumbs up, thus making it look like he was just aimlessly wandering off. But at the risk of being labelled a Trumpist wingnut, I dare say Biden doesn’t look exactly sprightly in any of these videos, whatever way they are spliced. Sure, maybe he was just taking in the applause onstage in Hollywood, as his defenders have suggested, but he was then led off stage by his old boss. Okay, he may not have fancied dancing on Juneteenth, which is his aides’ explanation for that bit of ‘freezing’, but he did go on to slur his words during his speech.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

In Case You Think Someone Has The Answer To New York’s Looming Energy Disaster Francis Menton

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-19-in-case-you-think-someone-has-the-answer-to-new-yorks-looming-energy-disaster

In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.” At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for these DEFRs in large amounts. Smith presented charts quantifying the capacity of DEFRs needed for New York to “balance” its prospective intermittent wind/solar supply as something in the range of 30+ GW. 30 GW is close to the peak electricity demand for the entire state, and is approximately equivalent to the existing capacity of New York’s fleet of natural gas plants, all of which are mandated to be closed by 2040.

So what is the answer to the great DEFR conundrum? New York’s Public Service Commission, operating from its usual playbook, has initiated a proceeding, under the name Proceeding 15-E-0302, to uncover the answer. My New York co-blogger Roger Caiazza calls this the “DEFR Proceeding,” although I don’t find the PSC using that name. Everybody gets to submit their brilliant thoughts and ideas. So far there seem to be well over 22,000 items entered in the docket — more than any human being can ever read.

In just the past few days, some big comments from important players have floated in. On Monday (June 17), a comment appeared on this DEFR docket co-signed by two environmental NGOs, Earth Justice and the Sierra Club. These are two of the very biggest, best funded, and most vociferous advocates of the urgent necessity of an immediate energy transition away from fossil fuels. With their hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue and scores of staffers, surely these guys must have found the answer to the DEFR conundrum.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Ethics and Hypocrisy: Turmoil at The Washington Post The Washington Post faces a contentious power struggle over appointing Robert Winnett as editor, revealing ethical and ideological rifts among its journalists.By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/22/ethics-and-hypocrisy-turmoil-at-the-washington-post/

For the time being, at least, it appears that the inmates at The Washington Post have gained the upper hand, forcing management to terminate plans to put British journalist Robert Winnett in charge of the asylum. Much to the inmates’ chagrin, one supposes, this entire episode in American journalism has been far less a dramatic battle for the future of one of the nation’s greatest institutions than a modestly entertaining reenactment of the Iran-Iraq War, in which many outside observers are hoping to see both sides lose.

Perhaps the most entertaining—if also somewhat dispiriting—aspect of the Washington Post slap fight has been the insistence by the paper’s old guard that Winnett simply could not be their new editor because he lacks the requisite “ethical” standards to do so. He is, as the Post’s long-timers fear, too morally compromised to be the leader they so richly deserve. For example, NPR reported that David Maraniss, a “highly regarded Post writer and associate editor,” penned a Facebook post in which he “expressed disgust” at Winnett’s lack of character. Maraniss went so far as to say that “the scandal that has erupted this spring around [Post publisher Will] Lewis and Winnett is worse than the revelation that a Pulitzer Prize-winning account was fabricated by Janet Cooke, a junior Post reporter fed by the hunger of her editors to land a story.”

That’s quite a charge from Maraniss, who, as NPR noted, is among The Washington Post’s most respected and beloved longtime employees. It’s also, one might conclude, an invitation to examine other examples of journalistic ethics as they are practiced at the Post by its old guard, perhaps starting with David Maraniss.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Mayorkas Claims Global Warming Makes Him Better at Dealing With Crises The only thing FEMA learned from the big lie of “global warming” was to lie. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mayorkas-claims-global-warming-makes-him-better-at-dealing-with-crises/

FEMA, which has been drained by being redirected to deal with Biden’s open borders invasion, needs money to smuggle more migrants around America.

The city government of El Paso, Texas, is busing illegal migrants to the Big Apple on the dime of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino told the DCNF Monday. The federal agency covers the travel costs of illegal migrants through a grant program.

But, according to the as yet unimpeached Secretary Mayorkas, global warming has prepped him to deal with hurricanes.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said during an interview with the Associated Press that the U.S. is prepared to go into an intense hurricane and wildfire season, but he did raise concerns about budget shortages.

Mayorkas said that the department is well equipped to deal with hurricanes and other natural disasters this summer, adding that more intense national disasters, partially due to climate change, have allowed the agency to gain experience in dealing with crises.

“As the impacts of climate change have been more and more evident, we have seen and experienced increasing frequency and gravity of extreme weather events,” Mayorkas said.

“Extreme weather events” are much of a myth as FEMA’s competency.