ISRAEL Comments turned off

Aharon Friedman Israel’s Right of Reprisal After October’s brutal attack, the Jewish state is entitled to respond in kind.

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/israels-right-of-reprisal

“The law of war can no more wholly dispense with retaliation than can the law of nations, of which it is a branch. Yet civilized nations acknowledge retaliation as the sternest feature of war. A reckless enemy often leaves to his opponent no other means of securing himself against the repetition of barbarous outrage.”

President Abraham Lincon’s military orders resonate 160 years later, after Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas-run Gaza, effectively an independent country, organized the massacre and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, the vast majority civilians, with widespread torture, rape, and mutilation.

Hamas bound victims, including young children, and burned them alive, leaving ashen remains that took weeks to identify. Hamas tortured and killed parents and children in front of each other, and, in one instance, sat down to eat the family’s holiday meal. Hamas broke into one home, tortured the father, raped the mother, murdered both, and burned alive their baby child in the oven. Hamas ripped open the stomach of a pregnant woman, stabbed the baby, and shot the mother. Hamas took 240 hostages, some of whom it raped and paraded around Gaza. Hamas videotaped its atrocities with GoPro cameras, and sometimes with the phones of its victims.

“It is the duty of every government to give protection to its citizens, of whatever class, color, or condition,” said President Lincoln. No government but Israel’s carries, or will fulfill, this responsibility to protect the Israeli people. To do so, the Israeli government must destroy Hamas and convince Palestinian Arabs that massacring Israelis will backfire. Its response must be devastating enough to deter Israel’s other enemies, chiefly Iran. The Islamic Republic wants to erase Israel from the map and may soon have the means to do so with a breakout time of a month to build multiple nuclear bombs.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Claudine Gay’s DEI Empire Harvard’s embattled president quietly built “diversity” ideology into every facet of campus life.

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/claudine-gays-dei-empire

Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.

Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The endless veil of deception Victor Sharpe

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231219

Though they will not expose it in the media, Arab-Muslim anti-Israel activists feel a profound and debilitating sense of humiliation at the inherent failings of their own societies. So, what better way to deflect their dissatisfaction within the Arab and Muslim world than to employ the language of the Left – in particular, such phrases as “national liberation, anti-apartheid and anti-colonialism – with which to level false charges against the embattled Jewish state?

It doesn’t matter to these Arab-Muslims, or to their leftist and ‘progressive’ amen chorus, that Israel is dwarfed by an enormous Arab landmass, which is 570 times greater than that of tiny Israel – a state no larger than Wales or New Jersey. Indeed, the leftists, while ironically turning on the one state in the Middle East that provides its people with freedoms no Arab or Muslim country will ever provide, choose to embrace the Arab falsehoods. Why? Because the Left is terrified of being seen as racist. Yet by their very own actions and words, they are just that.

The Left buys the Arab and Muslim lies against Israel because they believe that the Arabs can never change for the better. That is pure racism of the worst kind. The corollary to this put-down of an entire Arab ethnicity is that the Left refuses to admit that it is the Arab-Muslim culture that actively engages in the very evil practices that they falsely hurl towards Israel. And where do you find apartheid, racism, repression, torture? Why, in the very Arab-Muslim world the Left supports and embraces.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The next front in America’s global war – the Texas border Joe Biden’s foreign policy has floundered under myriad pressures. But the greatest problem of all is right under his nose Charles Lipson

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/12/19/joe-biden-texas-border-war-on-terror-illegal-migration/

The Biden administration is risking American lives with two failing policies. One has left the southern border open. The other has failed to deter attacks by Iranian proxies on our troops in the Middle East.

The two may seem largely separate, but they share one common danger: both involve deadly threats from Islamic extremists. Terrorists like those who fire at American servicemen in the Middle East and ships in the Red Sea can also sneak across our porous borders to attack Americans at home. They aim to kill.

The failure on the southern border is obvious. The Biden administration methodically dismantled Trump-era policies that limited illegal migration. Those included requirements to remain in Mexico while applying for asylum, building a barrier wall, and convincing the Mexican government to station troops near the border to prevent transit.

The new policies have encouraged a flood of illegal migrants from around the world. US Customs and Border Patrol has officially counted 6.9 illegal border crossings during the administration’s first three years. Among them, the gravest danger comes from the 1.5 million “gotaways,” who were detected but never caught. They must have strong reasons to evade Border Control. Of course, we still don’t know how many were never detected at all.

This influx has affected the country in two palpable ways: deadly drugs brought in by Mexican cartels and crushing financial burdens imposed on state and local governments. The latest evidence of those burdens comes from Arizona, where Governor Katie Hobbs presented fellow Democrats in Washington with a bill for over half-a-billion dollars, the cost of services her state has provided for illegal migrants so far.

Gov. Hobbs has now ordered the National Guard to deploy on the southern border and criticised Biden for refusing to deliver aid. She is not alone. The mayor of New York has complained vociferously, proposed raising city taxes, and started cutting police, schools, and other essential services. The mayor of Chicago is so clueless and overwhelmed that he is now suing the bus companies that bring migrants to his beleaguered city.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia University’s top antisemite – In a recent webinar, Joseph Massad spewed lies, Oct. 7 revisionism, antisemitic conspiracy theories, pro-Hamas propaganda and more. Andrew Harrod

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/columbia-universitys-top-antisemite/

The “Oct. 7 Hamas offensive” from Gaza into Israel was part of a “war between the Palestinian resistance” and an “Israeli colonial settler and apartheid regime,” declared Joseph Massad in a Dec. 4 webinar. The tenured Columbia University professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, already facing a massive petition drive calling for him to be fired after he celebrated Hamas’s atrocities, had once again proudly displayed his despicable and murderous antisemitism.

In the webinar, held by the ironically named Rutgers University Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights (CSRR), Massad discussed what was titled “The West, Israel and Settler Colonization of Palestine.” His comments drew largely on two articles published on the Muslim Brotherhood- and Qatar-linked Middle East Eye website (here and here). CSRR’s director, the factually challenged Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz, moderated.

As usual, Aziz introduced Rutgers as the “people’s electric law school” with a “proud history of defending the rights and the lives of the underprivileged, the oppressed and the censored” before launching an anti-Israel tirade. She falsely asserted that, in its ongoing offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza, Israel is “carpet bombing residential neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques.” In fact, Israel has succeeded in limiting civilian casualties in a difficult urban combat environment to a remarkable degree.

Aziz claimed without evidence that “Israel’s war crimes include systemic starvation, dehydration and destruction of the health care system,” calling these “medieval” practices. She failed to mention that Hamas steals humanitarian aid while the IDF tries to guide civilians to safe zones. Aziz continued with her blood libels nonetheless, falsely claiming that Israel implements a “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.” She omitted the fact that Hamas has extensively embedded its terrorist infrastructure among civilians in order to use them as human shields. This is undoubtedly a systemic “plan to maximize Palestinian deaths.”

For his part, Massad sought to portray the recent American deployment of warships to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel as old-fashioned Western gunboat diplomacy.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

In Israel’s Time of Need, Jewish Hollywood Has Failed the Audition The list of celebrity Jews who have said nothing is truly shocking. Fearless in front of the camera, ferocious at the negotiating table, but cowering when it comes to moral courage. Thane Rosenbaum

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/366431/in-israels-time-of-need-jewish-hollywood-has-failed-the-audition/

For a people that purportedly invented, and now control, Hollywood, Jews are awful at making demands—as Jews. There’s a reason why those early nickelodeons featured silent cowboy-westerns and scant Jewish immigrants. Jewish invisibility continued into the talkie era—more cowboys, wicked witches, tap dancers in gowns and tuxedos, a gin joint in Casablanca, and, yes, one Jewish jazz singer. Jewish characters didn’t only find themselves left out of the picture, they weren’t even on the cutting room floor. And as for silence, well, . . . that’s a Jewish specialty when it comes to standing up for their own people.

Antisemitism has overtaken America in ways not seen since the 1930s, when Hitler was ascending in Europe and the Depression caused pernicious divisions within the United States. The Jewish influence in Hollywood was never greater among studio chieftains and writers back then, but the motion picture industry had nothing to say about Hitler’s plan for European Jewry.

Some studio heads still had families in Europe. And they were at the helm of the ultimate megaphones and spotlights. But there was no golden hour for the Holocaust. Hollywood’s cameras were dark. The Third Reich was the second largest market for movies in the world—and foreign sales, in industry speak, is the Golden Calf. It wasn’t until Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940), as Auschwitz was beginning to burn, that Hollywood realized that the number of Jewish actors and extras in the world was rapidly shrinking.

And Chaplin wasn’t Jewish!

There’s a sequel to this sad story playing out all over again, an even more inexplicable example of how La La Land goes all blah blah rather raise the red flag for Jews. In the aftermath of the October 7th massacre in Southern Israel, which included the most gruesome and unimaginable of all horror flicks—the beheading and baking of Jewish babies, and the gang raping and mutilation of Israeli teenagers—sympathy for Israel evaporated before it even started. Instead, there was the surreal solidarity with Hamas. The victims were thrust into the woke paradigm as oppressors; and the terrorists were reincarnated as the resistance.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Real Claudine Gay Scandal By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/the_real_claudine_gay_scandal.html

Dr. Claudine, current President of Harvard University, is one lucky woman or, as she might describe herself a “a lucky woman of color.” She first survived her dreadful testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where she refused to unambiguously denounce calls from Harvard students and faculty to kill all Israeli Jews. It was an embarrassing performance filled with weasel words and amorphous defenses such as “it all depends on context” as if genocide might be legitimate in some circumstances.

Gay’s second lucky break was to survive clear-cut evidence that she was a career plagiarist, and this scholarly dishonesty far exceeded inadvertent sloppiness. Side-by-side comparisons of Gay’s writings with the published work of others displayed smoking-gun proof, and the official Harvard definition of “plagiarism” offered zero wiggle room due to substituting a new word or two for the original. No student or faculty member of Harvard could possibly accept Gay’s excuses and,  ironically, as a Harvard dean Gay had presided over the expulsion of 27 undergraduates for plagiarism. Predictably, she denied everything: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she wrote. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.” Keep in mind the former Harvard president Larry Summers suffered defenestration for merely opining that men and woman differed in mathematical abilities.

But, once again, luck was with her. The Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, praised her work (blatant plagiarism was referred to as “a few instances of inadequate citations), 700 faculty members signed a letter of support, and a group of former Harvard presidents proclaimed, “As former Presidents of Harvard University, we offer our strong support for Claudine Gay as she leads Harvard into the future. We look forward to supporting President Gay in whatever ways we can as Harvard faces this challenging moment for higher education and the wider world.”

Harvard’s malfeasance runs deeper, namely how did Claudine Gay become Dr. Claudine Gay, Ph.D., and this tale goes to the very core of Harvard’s intellectual integrity.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Progressivism Forces Americans to Forget Their History America’s collective memory of its greatness is a formidable one for young Americans – and it must be restored By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/19/progressivism-forces-americans-to-forget-their-history/

The difficulties of the presidents of major American universities—Harvard, MIT, and UPenn—to denounce anti-Semitism is both appalling and a symptom of the larger ideological upheaval in the United States between traditional liberalism and progressivism. The consequence of the increasing strength of progressivism is the loss of the country’s ability to meet the challenges that it once possessed. The most important of these waning abilities is how to confront and defeat with great power enemies. Thus, the progressive movement is regressive by its very nature.

Like a dementia patient in gradual decline, the U.S. is regressing, gradually becoming enfeebled and infantilized, losing its knowledge, memory, coherence, and the ability, desire, and willingness to meet challenges. This is due in part to the ageing of the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) and Generation X (1965-1980) who possessed the direct experience of fight against the Soviet Union and its allies in the Cold War. People matter, as does their historical experiences and knowledge. As those fade, the nuts and bolts of American civil society and identity are lost.

But a more significant cause is the rise of progressivism and its deliberate consequence—the decline of political liberalism in the U.S. The advance of progressivism evinced in the shameful testimony of the university presidents entails the diminishment, rejection, or replacement of U.S. history, political ideology and culture, and the regressive transformation of political ideology, culture, and institutions. The U.S. population and leadership either willingly forget or are forced to forget. As a result, Americans are becoming disorientated and detached from America’s liberal foundations and institutions. They do so voluntarily if they are progressives.  If they do so with considerable resignation, they are political liberals, and people compelled to go with the progressive flow.

The forced memory loss is part of the “Great Forgetting” of the knowledge, behavior, culture, skills, practices, and abilities that led to victory in America’s wars, allowed the country to overcome economic difficulties to become the world’s greatest economic engine, the world’s leader in science and technology, possess peerless universities and professional schools, and a standard of living unmatched. American society provided untold benefits to its citizens and to the Free World. The “Great Forgetting” is intentional, not an accident or an artefact of history. Progressivism is destroying America’s memory so that they may advance their revolutionary agenda, while disarming Americans who know or would come to know their country’s history and who would be able to thwart them.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American University, RIP Has the plague of illiberal ideologies become terminal?Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-american-university-rip/

Having spent more than half a century in universities, I wasn’t shocked or even surprised by the despicable display of craven obeisance to illiberal ideologies on the part of presidents of three of our most prestigious universities. Even their hypocritical rationalization for homicidal antisemitism using a defense of the First Amendment––which all three campuses for decades have violated when it comes to conservatives and other dissidents––didn’t raise an eyebrow.

After all, the predicates for this shameful spectacle have long been developing in our diseased groves of academe. Now the plague has become terminal, and the American university may never recover.

For at least a century, the obvious source of corruption of the university’s traditional mission to prepare young minds for ordered liberty, has come mainly from Marxism, these days mostly in its tactical guise of Cultural Marxism. Ethnonationalist passions like fascism and Nazism were other vectors of the virus, as French writer Julien Benda noted in his 1926 book The Treason of the Clerks.

All these political pathologies corrupted intellectuals and professors, Bend argues, who sacrificed their vocation to seek truth, in order to gain “practical advantages,” fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality”––nearly a century later, a succinct definition of today’s “woke” leftism and “critical race theory.”

In our times, this leftist politicization has been worsened by the rise of identity politics. The movements to remove illiberal restrictions on various Americans who had been denied their unalienable rights, especially black Americans, soon became tools of factional political power and leverage. A narrative of endemic white, male, heterosexual oppression and guilt arose, and demanded compensatory policies and programs for its victims. Discrimination, once the prime evil to be battled, became a political weapon codified in federal laws. The goal was to pursue the left’s program of establishing a technocracy of concentrated powers at the expense of the Constitution’s divided and balanced powers.

Universities, backed by the courts and government agencies, soon became a critical institution for achieving this goal by formulating and promulgating politicized curricula and discriminatory campus policies. A repressive orthodoxy of ideas took over universities through “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” “political correctness,” and now “woke” policies like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and toxic ideas like “systemic racism” that teach discriminatory, politicized, intellectually incoherent and daft ideas.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Do You Spell ‘College Antisemitism’? D.E.I.

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/19/how-do-you-spell-college-antisemitism-d-e-i/

In a rare show of bipartisanship, 84 Democrats joined 219 Republicans on a resolution condemning antisemitism on college campuses and calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign after they refused to condemn student calls for genocide of Jews at a House hearing. The University of Pennsylvania’s president, who was also at that hearing, has already stepped down.

But even if all three them were gone, so what?

The problem is far wider and much deeper than antisemitism at three elite schools. And if you want to stamp out intellectual and moral rot driving it, start by firing the army of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers at colleges across the country.

Two years ago, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, did groundbreaking work on the DEI bloat at 65 universities that are members of the five “power” athletic conferences: the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10, the Big 12, the PAC 12, and the Southeastern Conference.

What he found was that these schools averaged 45 DEI staffers, which was 1.4 times larger than the number of history professors. More recently, he looked at three public colleges in Virginia and found they had 6.5 DEI staffers for every 100 faculty members, which is higher than any single public university outside Virginia.

Later, Greene studied their posts on Twitter (now called X), and found that the ranks of DEI staff were full of antisemites. He found that 96% of their tweets about Israel were critical of the Jewish state, while 62% of the tweets about communist China were favorable.

“Frequently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes while rarely leveling similar criticisms toward China indicates an irrational hatred that is particularly directed toward Jews and not merely a concern for human rights,” he wrote.