ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Trump’s Anti-Semitism Crackdown Has Already Changed Education by Seth Mandel

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/how-trumps-anti-semitism-crackdown-has-already-changed-education/

The Trump administration’s deportation proceedings against Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia student active in the anti-Zionist tentifada movement, is getting most of the attention regarding the president’s fight against campus anti-Semitism. That’s understandable—put a human face on something and it becomes a lone streetlight around which every media moth will flutter.

But that attention should not crowd out coverage of the fact that university administrative culture is already changing in significant ways thanks to the White House’s focus on combating campus anti-Semitism. Khalil’s case will develop more this week as court hearings begin, so at the moment nobody really knows where it’ll lead. Such uncertainty no longer applies to the colleges themselves.

Last week, the administration cancelled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia and announced it was undertaking a review of billions more in grants. Finally, we had the answer to a lingering question: Would there be any tangible consequences for the schools that allowed their campuses to descend into prolonged bouts of anti-Semitic hysteria?

Universities clearly took President Biden’s passivity as a reason to bet against being held to account for their flagrant violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. If they were right, that meant that the only students they had to placate were the anti-Zionists: There was no reason to protect Jewish rights or Jewish safety on campus because the Jews would never cause anywhere near the same amount of trouble for them. In contrast, there were a thousand scrawny segregationists in keffiyehs with nothing to do but wait for orders from their Hamasnik organizers.

But now the playing field has changed entirely. A source at Columbia told the journalist Steve McGuire that the Trump Education Department’s threats weren’t empty: “Grant cancellation notices flowing in now. Labs shutting down. Layoffs imminent. Faculty apoplectic at Katrina Armstrong for letting it get to this point. She has to fix this fast.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Jews defending other Jews is a revolutionary act’ David Christopher Kaufman on why the Jewish diaspora must stand up for Israel.

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/13/jews-defending-other-jews-is-a-revolutionary-act/

David Christopher Kaufman was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:

When does anti-Zionism become outright anti-Semitism? Since 7 October 2023, it has become disturbingly commonplace for ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations to demand the total destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Claims that Israel deliberately targets children have echoes of the ancient, anti-Semitic blood libel. Sympathy for Hamas, a terror group committed to the murder of Jews, is also disturbingly widespread in a protest movement that claims to stand for ‘peace’.

David Christopher Kaufman – editor and columnist at the New York Post – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why Jews need to be more vocal in standing up for Israel. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim that, in the aftermath of 7 October, people were marching against Israel, rather than against Jewish people?

David Christopher Kaufman: The horror of that statement is that, when people turn on Jews, the endgame is usually an attempt at mass extermination.

Jews have often been alright in history. They were alright in Weimar Germany. In many ways, Jews were alright in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in late-15th-century Spain. But, suddenly, they weren’t alright. Millions of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and millions of Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Second World War.

It pains me greatly to see so many Jewish people not speaking up. We had Adrien Brody winning an Oscar for playing a Holocaust victim for the second time in his career. Yet he said nothing about anti-Semitism, even while he was on the biggest stage in the world, benefiting from telling Jewish stories. In many ways, our own people are not doing their job. We’re allowing the bad guys to define the narrative.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hannah E. Meyers Mahmoud Khalil Doesn’t Deserve to Be in the U.S. The former Columbia University student has been a ringleader of anti-Semitic activity and pro-Hamas demonstrations.

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-columbia-deport-hamas

Manhattan is home to one less terror-supporter.

On Saturday, immigration enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian national with U.S. permanent resident status, and removed him to a detention facility in Louisiana. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson explained that Khalil’s arrest, in coordination with the State Department, was made “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and because Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” A hearing is set for Wednesday after a federal judge blocked Khalil’s deportation on Monday—but the White House has doubled down on its intent to deport him.

Khalil was arrested at his Columbia University-owned apartment, near the school where he’s spent much of the last year and a half as a student leading pro-Hamas demonstrations. He has been a ringleader of the anti-Semitic activity that has kept Columbia in lockdown, and has helped escalate disorder at its sister school, Barnard College.

Khalil’s removal offers a lesson that the free world has been reluctant to learn since the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel: sometimes expulsion is the best solution. This is especially true for those who commit the kinds of anonymous violence that have characterized the anti-Israel movement at Columbia and Barnard, and which Khalil, as a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has helped propel.

Khalil has been candid about his commitment to make Columbia uninhabitable until the university denounces Israel. “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist,” he declared. At Columbia, that “resist[ance]” has involved everything from erecting encampments on school property to directing death wishes at Zionists to storming Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and taking maintenance staff hostage.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Greenland elections produce upset as party favoring gradual independence from Denmark wins

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/greenland-elections-upset-denmark-independence/

Nuuk, Greenland — The center-right Demokraatit Party won the most votes in Greenland’s parliamentary elections, a surprise result as the territory went to the polls in the shadow of President Trump’s stated goal of taking control of the island one way or another .

Both Demokraatit – the Democrats – and the second place party, Naleraq – “Point of Orientation” – favor independence from Denmark but differ on the pace of change.

Four of the five main parties in the race sought independence, but disagreed on when and how.

Naleraq is the most aggressively pro-independence, while Demokraatit favors a more moderate pace of change.

Demokraatit’s upset victory over parties that have governed the territory for years indicates that many in Greenland care just as much about health care, education, cultural heritage and other social policies.

“I think this is a historic result in Greenland’s political history,” Demokraatit party leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen said at the election party after the results.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Demowhigs’ Race to Extinction The Democratic Party’s radical stances and cultural missteps could doom it to the same fate as the Whigs. By William F. Marshall

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/the-demowhigs-race-to-extinction/

Once upon a time, there was an esteemed American political party called the Whig Party. It was one of the two great American political parties of its time. It stood alongside the Democratic Party in the mid-19th century and produced four U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Millard Fillmore. It also enjoyed the membership of other eminent American political leaders, like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Quincy Adams. Notwithstanding these great achievements, however, the Whig Party managed to destroy itself and was dissolved in 1854, just 21 years after its founding. Could today’s Democratic Party be on the same path to extinction as the Whigs?

It certainly seems that today’s Democratic Party’s “brain trust,” such as it is, is either utterly hapless or has a conservative mole within its ranks deliberately engineering the destruction of the party through the incomprehensible stances it is taking. Given that political conservatives, of which I count myself, are historically terrible at devising Machiavellian tactics against their opponents, I’m guessing there is no mole. Democrats are simply foundering in the wake of a force of nature called Donald Trump, who is simply brilliant at tapping into the sentiments of the majority of the American people and turning his political opponents’ weaknesses against themselves.

To be fair, Trump is benefiting from Democratic policy positions that, on almost every issue, are 180 degrees out of phase with most of the American people and with common sense.

Beginning with the administration of Barack Hussein Obama—that inscrutable, rising-out-of-nowhere community organizer, whose background is still largely a mystery to most of us—the Democratic Party began to take positions on matters of public policy that were real head-scratchers.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education? Elite universities face a reckoning as public backlash and new legislation threaten their finances, admissions policies, and ideological excesses, forcing them to reform or risk irrelevance. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Antisemitism on the Hill A Senate committee discusses Jew-hatred. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/antisemitism-on-the-hill/

On March 5, the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill was the setting for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that was truly fascinating. The subject: antisemitism, in particular the displays of vicious Jew-hatred that have taken place on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023.

It’s a subject that the Democrats have tried to avoid for years because it sorely divides their ranks. After all, several congressional Democrats – notably members of the so-called “Squad” – are openly antagonistic toward Jews and deeply hostile to Israel. In 2019, a House resolution condemning antisemitism – introduced in the wake of remarks by the appalling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the members of the Squad – was watered down by Democrats into a general condemnation of all hatred and intolerance.

Well, it’s a new day. Hence this two-and-a-half-hour hearing, which was made possible by the fact that the Republicans won a senatorial majority in the November elections. Of the five witnesses, three were selected by the Republicans: Adela Cojab of the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law;  and Asra Q. Nomani of the Pearl Project. All had powerful, disturbing things to say about the rise in student antisemitism since October 7.

Cojab, for instance, recalled a college class in Middle Eastern Studies in which she’d asked the professor whether bin Laden should be considered a terrorist. “Everybody laughed,” she said – because, you see, her classmates had all been taught that the terrorist label is vulgar and simplistic. Indeed, Cojab explained, they’d been taught a lot of things – among them, that “the political is personal”; that the world is divided into the “global north and global south,” the former of which is always wrong and the latter always right; and that it’s permissible to commit acts of violence “if your ideology is correct.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

The Moral Inversion of Antisemitism A review of Robert Spencer’s new masterpiece, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-inversion-of-antisemitism/

After Oct 7, Robert Spencer, the eminent scholar of religions and expert on Islamic terrorism, witnessed the irrational return of antisemitism, not just on the left, but also on the right.

“Fervent and articulate opponents of globalism and socialism began sending me articles in which globalists and socialists rehearsed all the alleged evils and misdeeds of Israel,” he writes.

“Vociferous critics of the United Nations began citing its figures on civilian deaths in Gaza.”

In response, Spencer began working on what would become his latest book, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’. Spencer, already the author of numerous critically acclaimed books touching on the intersections of religion and history including ‘Empire of God’, about the Byzantine Empire, ‘The Palestinian Delusion’ and his recent, ‘Muhammad: A Critical Biography’, once again goes back in time and perhaps further so than his past books have ever traveled before.

In  ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’, Spencer traces the origins of antisemitism to an initial pagan reaction against the translation of the Bible until “in the ancient world, revisionist versions of the accounts in the Jewish scriptures became a cottage industry.” Antisemitism became a way to rebut scripture and with it the moral foundations of a divine religion. The more contemptible the Jews were, the less reason there was to respect anything that Moses and later prophets had to say. This echoes the moral inversion that Spencer now sees all around him on social media in which the Jews attacked on Oct 7 become the perpetrators and Hamas becomes the victim.

In trying to understand this present day moral inversion, ‘Antisemitism: History & Myth’ travels through the ancient pagan world, from Egypt to Greece and Rome, through to the rise of Christianity in which Spencer, a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church, grapples with the troubled history of antisemitism in Christianity, and then on to the Muslim world.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The escalating leftist violence against conservatives from Trump and Musk on down By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 13th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/the_escalating_leftist_violence_against_conservatives_from_trump_and_musk_on_down.html

The news lately has been filled with stories of the escalating violence against conservatives. We already saw it last year with the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, but it’s now spread to Musk, Vance, and conservatives generally. As with the blasphemous song a so-called “transgender” person sang at the Bernie rally, I can’t say I’m surprised. Some things are predictable, and leftist violence, especially when you’ve driven your supporters insane, is especially predictable.  

I don’t need to rehash the Butler assassination attempt that Trump survived by a millisecond and millimeter. Nor do I need to remind you about the wannabe assassin at Mar-a-Lago.

But for the left, two missed assassination attempts aren’t a sign of societal breakdown; they’re a sign of failure, which needs to be remedied. So it was that a UCLA professor (that is, a man making his money on the public dime) is urging the military to engage in a violent coup against President Trump.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Immigration and Fertility by Nation As birthrates drop in developed nations, mass immigration reshapes demographics, raising concerns about cultural integration, intelligence decline, and the long-term stability of advanced economies. By Edward Ring

Posted By on March 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/12/immigration-and-fertility-by-nation/

“But one thing is certain: the human population is rapidly declining in every developed nation on earth. How we adapt to that, and who we invite into our nations, should involve a discussion that includes all variables.”

When a nation’s population grows, it’s easier for that nation to experience economic growth. This is the conventional economic wisdom that has been unchallenged for centuries. And there was little reason to challenge this axiom, because throughout human history, the global population trend has been one of perpetual increase. But as birthrates are crashing in wealthier nations, without exception, it may be time to reexamine what constitutes healthy economic growth and how it may be achieved without increasing population.

The way Western nations have chosen to respond to crashing birthrates is to rely on mass immigration. Tens of millions of people are being encouraged to migrate from poor nations where fertility remains high into rich nations with low fertility. This gives rise to challenges that remain unresolved and indeed may worsen as people arrive by the millions from cultures with dramatically different values and beliefs than the host culture.

Let’s assume for a moment that these cultural clashes can be resolved. That’s making a huge leap of faith, but let’s envision a world where, as the developed nations saw their indigenous population diminish, they were steadily replaced by immigrants from high-fertility nations. This is not mere speculation. Based on current trends, within a generation, indigenous populations in developed nations will become minorities, outnumbered by immigrants.

So notwithstanding how these nations would maintain social stability in the face of replacement levels of immigration, and notwithstanding how the indigenous cultures would merge with the immigrant cultures into something unrecognizable by any historical comparisons, what else can we surmise might characterize these new and blended populations?

One of the most salient determinants of individual success is an individual’s general intelligence, and what’s true for individuals is also true for nations. The data on average IQ by nation is available online, and when checking multiple sources here, here, and here, the overall figures were remarkably consistent. What is also true, although the scatter plot does reveal some outliers, is that in the world today, the higher the national average IQ, the lower the fertility. The converse is also true.