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DemocratPolitics Shift Toward the View That Hamas Should Win Noah Rothman

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/democratic-politics-shift-toward-the-view-that-hamas-should-win/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first

Israel’s critics will not be sated until Jerusalem is forced to accept the status quo ante.

Not even six full months have passed since the October 7 massacre, and already that act of unspeakable barbarity has been reduced to a passing aside in Democratic rhetorical assaults on Israeli perfidy — that is, when it is mentioned at all.

“Of course,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken began in remarks before reporters on Thursday, “what happened after October 7 could have ended immediately if Hamas had stopped hiding behind civilians, released the hostages, and put down its weapons.” Indeed. At any point in the war Hamas inaugurated, including the present moment, the conflict would end and a brighter day for the Palestinian people would dawn. Nothing else needed to be said. But Blinken continued.

Following a throat-clearing digression about the importance of drawing distinctions between Israeli democracy and a “terrorist organization,” he proceeded to mute those distinctions. “As has been said, whoever saves a life, saves the entire world. That’s our strength,” America’s chief diplomat mused wistfully. “It’s what distinguishes us from terrorists like Hamas. If we lose that reverence for human life, we risk becoming indistinguishable from those we confront.”

The implication in this poetic digression is that it will be Israel’s fault when those who lack elementary powers of discretion discern no difference between the Jewish state and a nihilistic death cult that murdered, raped, and burned alive as many Jews as it could — including Americans. As a matter of fact, the observational deficiencies that would lead someone to endorse this hopeless moral equivalency are the observer’s problem. But the myopia Blinken described is increasingly endemic among his fellow Democrats.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fetterman Is the Democrats’ Stand-Up Guy By Jeffrey Blehar

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fetterman-is-the-democrats-stand-up-guy/

I was wrong about John Fetterman. I misjudged the man’s ability, his character, and his strength. Writing an encomium to a reliably Democratic senator is an odd position for a conservative opinion writer to find himself in, and yet I have done so before. Given current events, however, it feels like a particularly appropriate time to reiterate the point, and explain why I missed so badly on him initially.

It was overdetermined, really; I was deeply skeptical of Fetterman’s ability to serve as senator after his stroke while on the campaign trail in 2022. I never much cared for his working-man shtick — his personal dress habits may be slovenly, but he comes from family money. And I had my partisan desires regardless. (That this put me in the awkward position of preferring a quack TV doctor from New Jersey was merely another one of the many indignities Republicans have had heaped upon them since 2015.) And when Fetterman got to Washington, his first move of note was having the Senate dress code temporarily revised to allow his own peculiar brand of sweatpants chic, which didn’t help either.

But even at the time, one thing was pleasantly clear: Fetterman was making a surprisingly strong recovery from his stroke and, equally as surprising, from the crippling depression that accompanied it. (In all honesty, that was the most important thing of all.) And then, he started going a little bit off the reservation as well: When Senator Robert Menendez was indicted in one of the most amusingly sleazy corruption scandals of recent New Jersey history, which is saying something, Fetterman literally jumped the line ahead of anyone in the Republican Party not only to denounce Menendez but also to clown on him brutally in public. (“Today sure would be a great day to resign, Bob!” remains my favorite political line of 2023, and it was spoken by Fetterman to Menendez as they were sharing an escalator in the Capitol building.)

October 7 was his public turning point, however: Since that awful day, he has been a genuine beacon of moral clarity in the midst of a maelstrom of confusion enveloping the Left as the Gaza war unfolds.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Data Show Israel Is Not Causing a Gazan Famine By Awi Federgruen & Ran Kivetz

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/05/the_data_show_israel_is_not_causing_a_gazan_famine_150751.html

Awi Federgruen Is the chair of Columbia Business School’s Decision. Risk and Operations Division. He is an expert in logistics and data science.

Ran Kivetz is the Philip H. Geier Professor at Columbia Business School. He is an expert in decision making, including the intersection between behavioral economics and political science.

Israel’s acknowledgement that a drone attack mistakenly killed seven aid workers in Gaza has led to renewed criticism of the Jewish State. The tragic incident came less than three weeks after a report issued by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) claimed that 1.1 million people – nearly half the population of Gaza – face “catastrophic food insecurity” conditions and that Northern Gaza will face famine by May if hostilities continue.

The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, blamed Israel, saying, “Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine.” And U.S. officials unveiled a United Nations ceasefire resolution that cited “famine” conditions after the IPC report came out.

But Hamas, which has been hoarding food and stealing from Gazans, is the root cause of Gazans’ suffering. As Congressman Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated in a CNN interview: “Hamas has a long history of stealing aid, and needs to stop that in the interest of the people that they purport to represent.”

Israel has tried for years to balance its interests with those of innocent Palestinians. Its maritime blockade did not stop Gaza from being self-sufficient in fruits and vegetables, with enough left over to potentially export.. Despite the war, three-quarters of greenhouse acres were still available as of Feb. 15, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, which has the latest available data. Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) indicates that bakeries can still provide “over 2 million breads, rolls, and pita breads a day.” 

Since the war began, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have engaged in what West Point Urban Warfare Studies Chairman John Spencer described as “a remarkable, historic new standard” for wartime treatment of civilians, resulting in a civilian-to-combatant mortality ratio that is “historically low for modern urban warfare.” For example, Israel regularly provides warnings of impending attacks, assists with evacuations, and even stops its attacks on a daily basis to allow humanitarian aid to arrive.

BOOKS Comments turned off

John Ketcham Ready for Freedom? A new book proposes reestablishing responsible and accountable authority.

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ready-for-freedom

Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society, by Philip K. Howard (Rodin Books, 128 pp., $15.83)

“Everyday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?”

In a now-obscure 1960s BBC interview, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, journalist, and convert to anti-Communism (and later Christianity) declared: “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”

That sentiment of Muggeridge’s—the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s—is the starting point of Everyday Freedom, the latest book by attorney and good-government advocate Philip Howard. Reformers of that era felt that biased individuals couldn’t be trusted with discretion. Those in power had given American society racial segregation and other forms of discrimination, destructive urban-renewal projects, and environmental costs that would be paid by future generations. The reformers believed that the way to prevent unfair and unjust outcomes was to limit and check authority.

But the worthy goal of limiting institutional power ran aground with the reformers’ emphasis on grievance and resolution. Howard chronicles how the discretion that had characterized an earlier mode of governance gave way to a new system of individual rights and impersonal rules. Dense rulebooks came to dictate the “one correct way” for workers to do every task. Formal processes constrained executives from disciplining employees and planning for new development. Expansive civil rights, and a bureaucracy designed to enforce them, added arrows of state power to the quiver of every student and individual suffering personal disappointment. The prospect of massive jury verdicts turned these rights into a “weapon for selfishness,” leading to absurdities like a $54 million case against a Washington D.C. dry cleaner for losing a customer’s pair of pants.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

BIDEN DEMANDS THE UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER OF ISRAEL ERIC LEVINE

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

No link….private correspondence

In January 1943, FDR and Winston Churchill issued the Casablanca Declaration, stating that the Allies’ goal was the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers. It was a statement of moral clarity and resolve for the ages.

In sharp contrast, earlier this week, President Biden effectively demanded Israel’s “unconditional surrender.”

After the tragic killing of seven aid workers for the World Central Kitchen by the Israel Defense Forces, Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demanded that Israel agree to an “immediate ceasefire.” That ceasefire was not conditioned on the release of the hostages still held by Hamas (at least five of whom are Americans), nor the surrender or even a reciprocal ceasefire by the terrorist organization that launched the October 7 attack. To ensure there were no misunderstandings as to what the President meant, Secretary of State Antony Blinken followed up by saying: “If we don’t see the changes [in Israel’s conduct in Gaza] that we need to see, there will be changes in our own policy…[.]”

Biden’s ultimatum to Israel demonstrates that he fails to possess the cognitive ability, judgment, or moral compass to lead the United States or the free world. It is the best evidence to date as to why the new Axis powers of China, Russia, and Iran are ascendant, and America is in retreat. In addition, Biden’s irresponsible and misguided statement does not just betray Israel in its struggle for survival and on behalf of Western Civilization, it has made the world more dangerous for Jews everywhere, including in the United States.

While tragic, the death of the World Central Kitchen workers was the result of a mistake. Israel immediately initiated an investigation into how such a tragedy could have occurred. The investigation’s results were immediately made public. The government immediately took full responsibility for the killings, identified those responsible, and meted out appropriate punishment.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anti-Netanyahu protests threaten war effort, hostage deal, experts say David Isaac

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/anti-netanyahu-protests-threaten-war-effort-hostage-deal-experts-say/

The demonstrations against Benjamin Netanyahu are back, this time wrapped in calls for the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

Analysts tell JNS that protest organizers, many of whom, like former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, were behind the anti-judicial reform protests, are obsessed with bringing down the Netanyahu government to the exclusion of all else, endangering the war effort and the possibility of a hostage deal.

Since the start of the war, anti-government protests had quieted, only to burst out fiercely in Tel Aviv on Saturday night. Tens of thousands turned out, according to estimates, with protesters blocking the Ayalon Highway and accusing the country’s leadership of purposefully torpedoing a hostage deal.

Some hostages’ families, who joined the protests on Saturday, urged War Cabinet members Benny Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot of the National Unity Party to leave the government and “replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately.”

Demonstrations shifted to Jerusalem on Sunday, turning violent on Tuesday night as a group, some bearing torches, evaded barricades and rushed Netanyahu’s official residence.

Police said the protest descended into “unrestrained disorder and street rioting” as “hundreds of rioters tried to break through by force the police barriers placed near the Prime Minister’s Residence.”

Some observers described speeches at the protest as “incitement.” Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is held by Hamas, said of Netanyahu: “You are the traitor. You betrayed your people. You betrayed your voters. You betrayed the State of Israel.”

She labeled him a “Pharaoh who inflicts on us the plague of the firstborn.”

“We will continue to persecute you: we will burn the country down, we will shake the earth, you will not have a day and you will not have a night. As long as my Matan has no day and no night neither will you,” she said.

Not at any price

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The reality of migrant crime By Byron York

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2954997/the-reality-of-migrant-crime/

THE REALITY OF MIGRANT CRIME. There’s been a political debate lately about crimes committed by migrants who entered the United States illegally. Actually, there’s not much to debate about their first unlawful act, entering the U.S. without authorization, but much disagreement about how many illegal border crossers commit crimes after that. 

In recent weeks, Republicans have publicized the murder of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who police say was allegedly abducted and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. illegally in September 2022, only to be quickly released into the country. Ibarra was one of millions of illegal crossers who rushed into the U.S. after the implementation of virtually open-border policies by President Joe Biden. In response to Republicans highlighting the murder, some Democrats argued that the “immigrant crime narrative is racist,” in the words of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA).

The issue popped up in the State of the Union address, during which some Republicans tried to goad Biden into saying Riley’s name. Biden did say the name — although he got it wrong — and then referred to the alleged killer, Ibarra, as an “illegal.” Democratic activist groups reacted in anger, not at the murder but at the use of the word “illegal” to describe an illegal immigrant. Biden swiftly apologized, saying he should have called Ibarra “undocumented” instead.

Now, there is another migrant crime in the news, this time in New York City. This week, police raided a house in the Bronx that had been taken over by migrant squatters who had entered the U.S. illegally. In addition to arresting eight of them, police confiscated several firearms, extended magazines, ammunition, plus the drugs ketamine and cocaine. The officers moved in, the New York Post reported, after one of the migrants “allegedly flashed a pistol at someone on the property March 27, leading to a 911 call and the discovery of the squatter gang.”

In true New York fashion, a judge quickly freed most of the suspects without bail. At that point, the Enforcement and Removal Operations office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested three of them. How did they do that? Officers just went back to the house in the Bronx, where the suspects had returned to keep doing what they were doing before their arrests. Now, it appears four others have also been picked up by ICE.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

D.C. Jury Convicts Great-Grandma For Walking Around The Capitol For 10 Minutes On Jan. 6 By: Brianna Lyman

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/05/d-c-jury-convicts-great-grandma-for-walking-around-the-capitol-for-10-minutes-on-jan-6/

After being strung up on charges by President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ), a 71-year-old great-grandmother may be thrown in jail because she walked around the Capitol for a few minutes on Jan. 6, 2021.

Rebecca Lavrenz was convicted on four counts Thursday after just three days of jury deliberation for entering the Capitol on J6. Lavrenz entered the building through an open door around 2:43 p.m., according to the official statement of facts.

Lavrenz told The American Spectator‘s Jack Cashill that she “felt that if those doors [on the east side of the building] opened I was supposed to go through.”

Lavrenz exited the Capitol around 2:53 p.m., just 10 minutes after entering, having briefly spoken to at least one Capitol Police Officer before leaving, according to the statement of facts.

Two FBI agents showed up on April 19, 2021, to Lavrenz’s home in Colorado. Lavrenz told the agents she was in the middle of baking a cake for her son and asked if they could return at a different time, according to The American Spectator. The agents returned one week later for a “consensual interview,” according to the statement of facts.

After months of investigation, agents reportedly told Lavrenz she should be grateful the weaponized agency would only charge the self-described “praying great-grandmother” with four misdemeanor charges for entering a building her tax dollars pay for.

“Glad?” Lavrenz reportedly said. “I shouldn’t be charged with anything.”

Lavrenz was charged with entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; disorderly conduct in a capitol; and parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol, according to the criminal complaint.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Innovation: The Forgotten Factor Western innovation is the most effective foreign aid programme ever discovered. Conor McKinley

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/04/04/innovation-utilitarianism-conor-mckinley-tesla/

Utilitarianism is currently en vogue. Two of its important contentions are that all lives have equal value and that decisions should be evaluated on how much they raise average well-being (so-called utility). This philosophy underpins many left-wing economic policies because the same amount of money has more value to a poor person than to a rich one. For example, if you take $100 from Jeff Bezos and give it to a starving artist, Bezos won’t even notice but the artist will have ramen for weeks, and average utility will therefore increase. This is probably the rationale behind Bernie Sanders’ claim that the “obscene level of income and wealth inequality in America is a profoundly moral issue that we cannot continue to ignore.” Implicit in this is the assumption that the redistribution of wealth would provide much more benefit to the poor than it would harm the rich.

The problem is that this is only true if we restrict our view to the domestic arena. When inequality is measured on a global scale, most people in the developed world can be considered affluent. If we include foreigners into our utility calculus, we should recommend very different policies: in particular, we should loosen regulations on biotech; we should oppose excessive unionisation; and we should increase the number of highly skilled immigrants we accept.

All these policies promote the most effective foreign aid programme ever discovered: innovation. Figuring out how to do things is expensive, but once we develop that knowledge, it is relatively cheap to distribute. For example, US research institutions and venture capitalists have poured billions into AI research and, as a result, ChatGPT has given every kid with access to the Internet a personal tutor that is an expert in every subject. There is well documented research to show that this effect, known as “catch-up growth,” partially explains why emerging markets grow faster than developed ones. They can just copy what has already worked for us.

Biotech

Developing countries are generally unable to invest large amounts into the research and development of new drugs. But, thanks to innovation in the US, Japan, and Europe, this has not stopped them from accessing vaccines against polio, malaria, smallpox, and COVID-19.

Pharmaceutical companies get lots of bad press for their high profit margins on successful drugs (think of Martin Shkreli). But these criticisms fail to consider the underlying pharmaceutical business model: successful drugs have to pay for all the drugs that never made it to market.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Woody Allen’s Cancellation Is a Crime Against Culture The great director made his 50th film far from Hollywood, which has unjustly shunned him. By Kyle Smith

Posted By on April 6th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woody-allens-cancellation-is-a-crime-against-culture-hollywood-metoo-fb417fa5?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

In August 2017, a year after Prime Video aired Woody Allen’s comic miniseries “Crisis in Six Scenes,” the director signed a deal with Amazon Studios to produce his next four films for a reported minimum payment of $68 million. A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein emerged and the #MeToo movement was born. In December, Mr. Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Why Has the #MeToo Revolution Spared Woody Allen?”

Mr. Allen wasn’t spared much longer. Ms. Farrow’s op-ed accused Mr. Allen of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7—a charge that her mother, Mia Farrow, had raised at the time in a custody dispute with Mr. Allen. Authorities in two states thoroughly investigated, and no charges were filed against Mr. Allen. Child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven hospital reported that “it is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”

Yet a quarter-century later, Mr. Allen found himself an unperson. Though in the intervening decades he had worked with acclaimed actors at major movie studios, been nominated for Oscars and won one for writing “Midnight In Paris” (2011), he became a target of obloquy and outrage.

Several of Mr. Allen’s collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig, publicly turned against him. Others, such as Diane Keaton, Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson, rallied to his defense. Amazon Studios canceled the deal with Mr. Allen, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court on terms that weren’t disclosed. Amazon Studios also declined to release to theaters the third film he had made for them, “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019).