ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism The same identitarian worldview that is driving campus anti-Semitism is rife within Joe Biden’s White House. Heather MacDonald

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-take-on-anti-semitism/

On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?

Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.

The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.

According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.

Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers.

What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A President Who Cannot Conceive of Victory By Noah Rothman

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-president-who-cannot-conceive-of-victory/

Yesterday, I wrote of President Joe Biden and his administration’s extraordinary facility for self-sabotage that this White House “cannot envision victory, either for America or its allies.” Indeed, “it sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to which it can muster the contribution of only half measures.” It was only hours later that one ranking administration official proved the observation correct.

Israel and the United States are “struggling over what the theory of victory is,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN reporter Kylie Atwood on Monday. “They talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” he said of his Israeli counterparts. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

As CNN’s Alex Marquardt observed, Cam’s comments dovetail with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s befuddling remarks on Sunday. Then, Blinken insisted that Israel’s small-footprint strategy in Gaza — the very strategy the U.S. lobbied Israel to adopt — was failing because it had allowed Hamas to reconstitute itself in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had already cleared. Since that calibrated approach had been unable to achieve its tactical goals, Israel should abandon its strategic objectives entirely. Victory over Hamas is unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah,” Blinken said, “or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Must the Jury Be Thinking about Why Trump Is on Trial? Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-must-the-jury-be-thinking-about-why-trump-is-on-trial/

With former president Trump’s criminal trial now in its fourth week of testimony, I wonder what the Manhattan jury must be thinking about the resources the elected Democratic district attorney is devoting to it.

The majority of crime goes unreported. Of that which is reported, the number of crime cases that are “solved” — what police call the “clearance rate” — is alarmingly low. That is especially the case in Manhattan. Last week, the Manhattan Institute’s Tim Rosenberger noted in the City Journal that less than three in ten cases (29.8 percent) are cleared.

In New York City in 2022 (the last year for which there are complete annual stats), there were over 156,000 arrests. A little less than half of them, about 72,000, were felony arrests — nearly 29,000 categorized as violent felonies. All of these arrests resulted in less than 12,000 indictments. More disturbing, still, is the bottom line: Those 156,000 arrests yielded a grand total of just 4,375 prison sentences — i.e., sentences of incarceration were imposed in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

As you think about that, bear in mind that many attacks that normal people would consider violent are deemed non-violent in New York if no serious injuries result. Consequently, many forcible attacks that result in arrests are charged by prosecutors as misdemeanor assaults. The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers points out on X/Twitter that many misdemeanor assault cases are “disposed” by simply being dismissed: Last year, the dismissal rate in New York City was 66 percent, having surged from 45 percent a decade ago.

Meyers further reports that recidivism is at its highest level in seven years — a fact acknowledged by NYPD Crime Control Strategies Chief Michael Lipetri, correcting false claims of improvement by public advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams, one of the city’s many progressive champions of criminal-justice “reform.” An extraordinary amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are on the streets rather than behind bars because of Democratic-dominated New York’s hostility to prosecution and imprisonment.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Congress Must Act to Stop Noncitizens from Voting Action is long overdue.Rebecca Weber

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/congress-must-act-to-stop-noncitizens-from-voting/

With less than six months to go until Election Day, Americans have ample reason to be concerned that a wave of non-citizens casting ballots could undermine the integrity of our elections. Urgent federal action is needed to address this threat before it is too late.

Many in the corporate media and the political establishment have assured Americans that they need not worry because non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote in federal elections is already illegal – and indeed, this is the case. But this prohibition has been effectively neutralized by caveats and special carve-outs in dozens of states’ laws which create ample opportunity to violate federal election law.

One of the biggest glaring weak points in U.S. election law is the voter registration process itself. Under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, every state must use a common voter registration form which only asks applicants to check a box stating that they are an American citizen.

In other words, states must take someone’s word for it that they are eligible to vote in federal elections – effectively eliminating all structural barriers to non-citizens registering to vote.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Colleges Side With Radicals Their students be damned. Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/colleges-side-with-radicals/

The Left and their media allies want you to believe the protests roiling college campuses are spontaneous uprisings of morally fervent students worried about Gaza war victims. Don’t fall for that claim. It’s a scam. These protesters don’t represent most students or the American public.

Yet recently, Columbia University canceled graduation ceremonies, kowtowing to the radical fringe, with whom they largely agree. Students and their families be damned.

Here are the facts: A miniscule 2% of people ages 18 to 29 polled by Harvard’s Kennedy School named the Israel-Hamas conflict as their top political concern, compared with double digits who were concerned about the economy. Students couldn’t care less about this issue.

Claims that today’s campus riots are reminiscent of 1968, when students closed down campuses to protest the Vietnam War, are nonsense. Back then, Gallup found 46% of respondents in that age group considered the Vietnam War the nation’s biggest problem. Not 2%.

Ray Kelly, former New York Police commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil “looks like a conspiracy. … We need the federal government’s investigative capacity to look at this whole situation.”

Organized outside groups are behind much of the campus violence. Hours before the storming of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, an outside organization called The People’s Forum — known for its anti-Israel activities and links to the Chinese Communist Party — started gearing up for its Hamilton Hall invasion. In a meeting, TPF’s leader spewed invectives against Columbia.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Refund the Police, UNC Trustees Say The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill redirects DEI funding to campus safety.

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unc-chapel-hill-trustees-dei-funding-campus-security-protests-israel-palestine-e5960b62?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Universities have made big investments lately in diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, and it hasn’t bought them much except divisiveness. Now the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is putting those funds to better use. On Monday its board of trustees voted unanimously to redirect $2.3 million from school DEI programs to public safety.

Rancorous anti-Israel protests and rising antisemitism have put campus safety top of mind. Shoring up university police forces looks especially wise after some municipal police departments have declined to come to the aid of colleges that called for it. As protests escalated in Chapel Hill, UNC requested support from both the town and the state highway patrol, under Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

When state officers arrived, they acted as reinforcements while campus police struggled with an unruly crowd. The town refused to send police to help with the encampment, claiming protesters were engaged in peaceful dissent protected by the First Amendment. Yet watch the video of the angry mob that surrounded and blocked UNC Provost Chris Clemens’s car. School buildings were defaced and an American flag was torn down and replaced with a Palestinian one.

“It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” said UNC Trustee Marty Kotis. Bigger changes might also be in the offing next week, when the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, which oversees 17 institutions, will review its diversity policies.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Strange Non-Death of TikTok And The Current College Chaos Ian Oxnevad

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the-strange-non-death-of-tiktok?utm_source=NAS+
CounterCurrent: China Edition is a monthly newsletter of the National Association of Scholars uncovering and highlighting the effects of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on American education.

Cognitive warfare is a technical term for altering the attitudes and behaviors of a specific individual or a population for political purposes by “degrading rationality” and changing perceptions of reality. At the end of last month, Joe Biden in his cognitive wisdom signed into law a bill that forces China to sell one of its foremost cognitive weapons: TikTok. Included as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the bill mandates that the Chinese company ByteDance either sell the app or face an outright ban in the United States. While TikTok’s looming legislative death sentence has upset Communist China and American libertarians alike, it will likely remain an enabler of college campus chaos under new ownership.

As a tool of cognitive warfare, China’s reasons for wanting and using TikTok are as evident as its effect. According to Congressional testimony from United States Army General Paul M. Nakasone, roughly a third of American adults get their news from the app, while one out of six children are chronic users of it. The FBI and FCC have noted that TikTok collects data ranging from a user’s history and location to biometric data and shares it with its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

Regarding content, TikTok is an app parade of the ugly and horrible. Vinod Khosla, one of Open-AI’s major investors, has called the app an “AI-powered subversion weapon.” According to algorithmic studies of the app, after five hours on the platform, users are exposed to content harmful to mental health. Videos encouraging teenagers to commit suicide play alongside those enabling child exploitation. Anti-Semitism is plentiful in TikTok’s “Photo Mode,” and has faced allegations from whistleblowers over moderating content on the Middle East to favor Hamas. Osama bin Laden went viral at the end of last year, seemingly from the grave, on a viral TikTok. Add to the mix idiotic and dangerous TikTok “challenges” like cooking chicken with NyQuil, eating corn cobbs on rotating drill bits, overdosing on Benadryl, choking yourself until blackout, and eating Tide pods. Cognitive warfare not only works—it works too well. In China, TikTok is restricted to educational and patriotic content favoring the Chinese Communist Party.

ByteDance has been active in the minds of American students in more formal ways by contributing heavily to colleges and universities. In 2020, ByteDance announced it would donate $10 million to medical scholarships awarded for “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” ByteDance gave much more than that. In fact, ByteDance gave in excess of eight figures in donations that universities failed to disclose. Despite Beijing’s largesse, universities in predominantly Republican states have banned TikTok.

TikTok has played its role in the recent protests of Jews and Israel playing out across college campuses nationwide. According to a survey conducted by the data firm Kaggle, spending only 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases someone’s likelihood of holding anti-Semitic views. According to the study, “TikTok users are more likely to believe that Jewish people are dishonest in business, are disloyal to America, and have too much power in the media.” Kaggle’s findings are not unique, as its conclusions were verified by an experiment conducted by the Wall Street Journal that found teenagers exposed to “apocalyptic, conspiratorial” content warped in a lopsided anti-Israel position. It is no wonder that campuses are currently overrun with anti-Semitic mobs.

While banning TikTok or forcing its sale seems a logical step to safeguard national security, it nonetheless begs the question of whether such a move would be little more than a Pyrrhic victory. There is a good chance that TikTok’s algorithms, which contain its secret sauce of subversion, would not be included in a forced sale of the app to an American buyer. Even if out of the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, there is no guarantee that the “new” TikTok would not continue to erode societal cohesion and the mental capacity of young Americans. After all, other apps such as Facebook and Instagram have fostered similar discord.

One way to determine a political slant of an app’s content is to measure its hashtags to assess how they align with or against a given cause. The Washington Post found that hashtags for TikTok were lopsided in favor of #freepalestine against those in support of Israel. At the same time, Facebook posts with the #freepalestine dwarfed those of #standwithisrael by 39 times. Instagram’s posts in favor of the Palestinians were 29 times more numerous than those supporting Israel. TikTok may be waging cognitive warfare on young Americans; however, the darker truth is that China can only be blamed so much for the societal rot exemplified in today’s surge of anti-Semitism or the broader polarization in America. Americans are perfectly capable of destroying civilization on their own.

This brings us to the strange “non-death” of TikTok. With or without its algorithms, potential American tech investors buying TikTok will obtain an amazing tool to sway popular opinion for political purposes. In 2018, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place.” While major figures in the high-tech sector such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have shifted rightwards in recent years, there is no guarantee that a TikTok under new management would be any less conducive to societal fragmentation. TikTok may be the next leftwing app used by protest groups and promoting dangers to mental health. In other words, TikTok’s effects will likely never die, even if the app is effectively banned.

China’s strategy to make America angry and stupid with an app has proven remarkably successful. Still, it must be stressed that China’s efforts to sow discord only add momentum to cultural fracturing due to existing domestic dynamics. TikTok may help make students more anti-Semitic, but it only adds to what is heard in campus classrooms across the country where Western civilization is repeatedly condemned as illegitimate and Israel an oppressive, racist state. For those looking to Beijing’s app as the cause of today’s campus chaos, a mirror would suffice.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Eurovision hurricane The tantrums over Eden Golan epitomised the childishness of performative protest Melanie Phillips

Posted By on May 15th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/account

This is an expanded version of my column in The Times of London (£) today.

When the Irish Eurovision contestant, Bambie Thug, failed to bully Israel’s competitor out of the contest being staged in the Swedish town of Malmö, Thug did what today’s culture warriors feel is an appropriate reaction when they don’t get their way. The singer had a meltdown and burst into tears.

Thug, a “non-binary” individual who performed a pagan satanic routine as a kind of goblinesque Goth, had demanded that Israel’s entrant, Eden Golan, be barred from the contest because… well, because of course all Israelis everywhere should be shunned and hounded and cancelled by the entire human race because of the war in Gaza.

Asked how it had felt when Golan qualified for the contest’s final, the goblin replied, choking back the tears, “I cried with my team”.

Of course! Because the protest was all about them, to demonstrate their virtue as victims of… well, Israel’s existence, not to put too fine a point on it; and to demonstrate the frankly intolerable human cost to themselves of their principled stand of resistance. “The world has spoken!” cried Thug triumphantly, gulping back principled sobs.

Except the world hadn’t quite said what Thug —  speaking from within the alternative universe where Israel’s fight for its life against a genocidal enemy is itself denounced as an act of genocide — thought the world had said.

Because in the real world people had seen something rather different. They saw a vast mob on the streets of Malmö supporting the “Palestinian resistance” —  ie terrorism against Israeli Jews — and besieging a young Israeli singer to force her out of the contest.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Secretary Blinken Throws a Tantrum Over Israel Matt Vespa

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/05/13/secretary-blinken-to-israel-get-out-of-gaza-n2639025

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday delivered one of the Biden administration’s strongest public rebukes of Israel, amid its war with Hamas in Gaza. 

During a pair of TV interviews, Blinken said the United States wants Israeli forces to “get out of Gaza” amid what he described as “a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians.” He also said Israel’s tactics in the war have failed to neutralize Hamas and could create a power “vacuum” in the Palestinian territory. 

[…] 

“As we look at Rafah, they may go in and have some initial success, but potentially at an incredibly high cost to civilians, but one that is not durable, one that’s not sustainable. And they will be left holding the bag on an enduring insurgency because a lot of armed Hamas will be left, no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do. Then you’re going to have a vacuum and a vacuum that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy, and ultimately by Hamas again.” 

[…] 

…Blinken praised President Biden’s support for Israel — saying “no one has done more than Biden” — despite the apparent shift in tone. 

“No one has done more to defend Israel when it mattered than President Biden,” the Secretary of State said. “He was there in the days after October 7th, the first president to go to Israel in the midst of a conflict when Iran mounted an unprecedented attack on Israel. Some weeks ago, 300 projectiles, including ballistic missiles, launched in Israel. The United States, for the first time ever, participated in its act of defense, and President Biden brought together a coalition of countries that helped defend Israel.”

Didn’t Biden also tell Iran that its ballistic missile salvo should be within “certain limits?”  

The United Nations and even Hamas have revised their death toll figures downward. Shocker: a terror group inflated the number killed. As Spencer wrote yesterday, the UN reduced civilian deaths by 50 percent. Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy venture for the past 40 years, and we’re going to trust him advising Israel on how to execute their war. Israel has defended itself from annihilation three times. Speaking of civilians, I can’t help but notice, along with others, that the Biden administration no longer cares about the American hostages. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Egypt’s Duplicity, the World’s Silence by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20638/egypt-duplicity-world-silence

“A one-hundred-dollar bill does wonders with an Egyptian police officer at a Sinai roadblock who intercepts a truck packed with ‘pipes.'” — Efraim Inbar and Mordechai Kedar, BESA Center, January 22, 2009.

This is just another example of how, when Palestinians become victims of oppressive measures taken against them by their Arab brothers, the world does not care a bit. About a decade ago, when Egypt demolished dozens of houses and buildings in Rafah as part of a campaign to combat terrorism, no one said a word against the Egyptians — or even bothered to look.

If the Egyptians actually cared about the Palestinians, instead of blocking the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, they could easily coordinate with Israel though alternative border crossings such as the nearby Kerem Shalom terminal.

Evidently the Egyptians would rather see the Gazans starve; then, the international community, as usual, would hold only Israel responsible.

That is the real problem: Where is the demand from the international community for Egypt to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip? Where are social media posts, the US college campus protests, and the op-eds condemning Egypt for deliberately withholding aid from Gaza’s Palestinians?

Why doesn’t the Biden administration pressure Egypt, and not just Israel, to allow aid to enter Gaza for the Palestinians?

Egypt has, in fact, been imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip for the past 15 years…. Where are the protestors calling to stop the billions in aid to Egypt? They do not, of course, exist. The protests were never about helping Palestinians. They were always only about attacking Jews.

This is the same Egypt that been displacing thousands of Palestinians from Rafah after demolishing their homes and is now blocking aid to the Palestinians, that has piously decided to join the South African case against Israel at the ICJ.

Now that Israel is attempting to dismantle a terrorist group whose primary objective is the elimination of Israel, the Biden administration and many in the international community suddenly claim they are “outraged.”

If they really want to help the Palestinians, they could begin by filing cases against Egypt and the Arab states in the region that, for many decades, have turned their backs on the Palestinians and paid billions to their governments to keep on mistreating them.

On May 12, Egypt announced that it will support South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is accused of “genocide” for defending its citizens against Hamas’s murderers and rapists who invaded Israeli communities on October 7, 2023. The announcement came in response to the ongoing Israeli military operation against Hamas terrorists and bases, especially in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.