FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Administration Empowered Iran’s Terror Group, the Houthis by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20221/houthis-iran-empowered

The Houthis have been fortunate to have, as a powerful patron and sponsor, Iran. Their backers in Tehran will not let them run out of ammunition and the Biden administration will not let the Iranian regime run out of funds.

Iran has been employing every political and military tactic possible — including racing toward nuclear weapons capability — to complete its objectives of annihilating Israel, driving the United States out of the Middle East, and establishing an Islamist caliphate.

Does anyone seriously think that if Iran finally acquires a nuclear bomb, they will not use it — or at least threaten to?

To deter further escalation, the US needs seriously to target the real source of this mayhem — the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its IRGC. Perhaps the US might try incapacitating the Iranian ports that are used for oil exports, or take out a few IRGC facilities — or maybe just send every IRGC officer a picture of his home?

Thanks to the Biden administration’s alarmingly misguided officials and their counterproductive policies of appeasement towards Iran and its proxies, the Iranian regime’s militia and terrorist group in Yemen, the Houthis, has ratcheted up attacks on ships in the Red Sea, and escalated the launching of missiles and attack drones at Israel. Now, the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah (“Partisans of Allah”), are threatening to attack any ship headed to Israel, regardless of its nationality or ownership. Why not just replace their flags with American ones?

The current problem with the Houthis began almost three years ago, when the Biden administration, after less than a month in office, reversed yet another policy of the Trump administration. On February 12, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially revoked the designation of the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A History of Feminist Antisemitism The story of how activists and academics exchanged the struggle for universal female improvement for a politics of division and hatred. Kara Jesella

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/12/15/a-history-of-feminist-antisemitism/

I. It Wasn’t Always Like This

In my academic life, I was fortunate to have my rabbi teach my first Women’s Studies course and Angela Davis teach my second. At Vassar during the multiculti-and-identity-obsessed 1990s, I learned from Rabbi Shirley Idelson about intersectionality and black feminism, and I was taught that if I didn’t understand the Spanish in the now-canonical anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, I had to find someone who did to translate it for me. I also learned that I could be a Jewish feminist, parsing my own complicated personal and communal history for theoretical insights, in the manner of my favorite theorist, Adrienne Rich.

During my 13 years as one of the only Jews in the Catholic schools I attended, the boy I sometimes thought was my boyfriend drew swastikas on my book covers. The boss at my summer job was delighted to learn that I was going to Vassar, “even though there will be a lot of JAPs there” (a JAP, she explained, is a Jewish American Princess). I didn’t write about the panic of coming-of-age at a time—and in a city—where Operation Rescue picketed abortion clinics and screamed at “baby-killers” every weekend. (A 1990 story in the Jewish feminist journal Lilith was headlined, “The Anti-Choice Movement: Bad News For Jews.”) The year after I graduated—I had already fled to New York City—Barnett Slepian, a local Jewish doctor who performed abortions, was assassinated by a member of a Catholic anti-abortion group upon his return from shul.

Nevertheless, in my first paper for Rabbi Idelson’s class, I compared my own experience of racism to that of black Americans and concluded that American blacks had it worse. “I think you mute the terror of the swastika,” Rabbi Idelson remarked as she awarded me an A-/A. Later, in Professor Davis’s class, I learned that the term “women of color” wasn’t about melanin, it was an imaginative political formation. Those two classes informed everything I have done since: my undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies; my years as a feminist journalist and book author; and the doctorate I received two years ago, when I finally completed my dissertation on feminist historiography.

May 2021 was a sad and scary month to be a Jewish feminist, as violence escalated in the Middle East and in New York City, where I still live. Friends from graduate school and the feminist internet posted anti-Zionist infographics on social media and a counterterrorism unit kept watch in front of my daughter’s Jewish nursery school. The morning of my graduation, I awoke to a petition circulating on Twitter titled, “Gender Studies Departments in Solidarity with Palestinian Feminist Collective.” It informed me that Jews are colonizers not indigenous to Israel and rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Two days later, I received an email from my department with news of an award, and another professing solidarity with the Palestinian people. It was hard to understand exactly what that meant—who doesn’t want a better life for Palestinians?—but given the department’s politics, I could guess. 

But this was only a prelude of what was to come after the atrocities committed by Hamas against the kibbutzim of southern Israel on October 7th.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Joshua T. Katz Do Not Give Even $1 to Corrupt Universities It’s time for a donor revolt—of regular alumni, not just billionaires.

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fgate-on-harvard-yard.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“This year I gave only $1 to Brown.” Last week, three people said this to me.  Well, to be exact, one said, “only $10 to Princeton” and another “only $100 to Harvard.” But you get the idea.

All three have given millions to these institutions in the past. All three are infuriated by what is happening on campuses across the country. All three sought my approval for their pointedly small gifts.

They do not have my approval. The amount of money they should give is zero. Not $1, like Harvard alumna Tally Zingher, who plans to join “hundreds of other former students in a symbolic protest,” but $0. I made this argument last December, and reiterate it now at the end of a year in which public confidence in higher education understandably has hit a new low.

Colleges and universities, like other nonprofit organizations, care not only about how much they receive in donations but also about how many people donate. These institutions express great pride (or, sometimes, consternation) in the percentage of alumni who contribute money and, at the fanciest institutions, have an army of employees and volunteers working year-round to get as many people as possible onboard.

Take Princeton, which historically has had by far the country’s most loyal alumni. Today, many are unhappy with the university and are withholding donations. One reason explored in a long article in June’s Princeton Alumni Weekly is “politics,” on both the Left and the Right. Some alumni are so concerned about the state of free expression on campus—read the report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on Princeton for an illustration of the problem—that they launched a 501(c)(3) to defend the speech rights of students and faculty.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Academy at the Crossroads, Part Two Penn 2.0 and the larger ideological problem: universities are waging a war on the West.

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fentrance-to-university-pennsylvania.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. Penn’s most recent president, Liz Magill, had to resign on December 9, following widely mocked testimony at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president. If enough Penn constituents, especially faculty, endorse it, the board of trustees will be compelled to adopt such a prerequisite, their thinking goes. An ongoing donation boycott provides the financial pressure. Ultimately, alumni across the country may be inspired to seek a similar foundational shake-up in their own alma maters, the drafters hope.

The new constitution adopts the thinking behind the Kalven Report, drafted in 1967 at the University of Chicago. Penn must henceforth abstain from adopting an institutional position on political issues. Embracing an official line alienates dissenting members of the university who might want to challenge “common orthodoxies,” explains the charter. Individual members of the university, by contrast, shall be free to propose, test, and reject the “widest spectrum of perspectives.”

The university’s selection committees have one mission only: identifying excellence. Hiring non-excellent diversity candidates makes it harder to attract outstanding faculty and students. (This assertion will seem commonsensical to anyone who believes in merit. The diversity complex would respond that, to the contrary, faculty and students shun non-“diverse” institutions. Sadly, in some cases, especially in the case of woke students, the diversity complex is correct. That does not make Penn 2.0 wrong, however, to seek to break the stranglehold of diversity thinking.) The new constitution posits that an unambiguous, publicly understood commitment to excellence will give Penn a competitive edge in hiring and student admissions in the decades ahead. This, too, seems commonsensical. Testing such a hypothesis is long overdue.

Penn 2.0 overcomes in one stroke a weakness bedeviling a central strategy of campus reform. Those seeking to create new universities face the challenge that no new institution can offer the prize that a legacy university confers: status and bragging rights. It is prestige that drives the ever-more frenzied torrent of college applications, rather than any promise of knowledge. The beauty of the Penn 2.0 plan is that it re-founds Penn on a new footing, while maintaining Penn’s prestige-granting power.

Were Penn 2.0 to become part of the presidential hiring search, it would be clarifying to see how many university apparatchiks demurred from its principles. 

Penn’s temporary replacement for ousted president Magill shows how heavy a lift Penn 2.0 is going to be. Penn’s trustees chose J. Larry Jameson, now dean of Penn’s medical school, to serve as the university’s interim president. As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration. He created the school’s first vice dean for Inclusion and Diversity and first associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Naturally, an Office of Inclusion and Diversity followed, which rolled out endless diversity initiatives and mandates, including Health Equity Weeks, the Transgender Patient Advocate program, and the LGBT Student-Trainee-Faculty Mentorship program. In 2021, Jameson initiated what the Penn press office called a “new institution-wide program aimed at eliminating structural racism.” (Hint: There is no structural racism at the Penn medical school. The medical school, like the rest of the university, is desperate to admit and hire as many blacks and Hispanics as possible, often disregarding academic skills gaps to do so.) As with all such duplicative programs, the conceit of the 2021 “institution-wide” antiracism initiative was that the school was for the first time prioritizing “diversity” at “all levels of staffing.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Migrants reject ‘bad’ sandwiches, pancakes, donuts and chicken dishes at NYC shelters By Jack Morphet , Nolan Hicks and Emily Crane

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/12/15/metro/migrants-reject-sandwiches-chicken-dishes-at-nyc-shelters/

Several migrants confessed to The Post Friday the meals served up at New York City asylum seeker shelters are so “bad” they often just trash them — with some opting to sneakily cook in their rooms instead.

Their claims of terrible food came a day after it was revealed thousands of uneaten, taxpayer-funded meals prepared for asylum seekers are tossed each day.

“No one likes the food,” Jesus Alberto, 31, from Venezuela, told The Post outside the Roosevelt Hotel — the Big Apple’s main migrant intake center.

“Without lying, it’s bad, bad.”

Meals served to the migrants include pancakes and Quecas, a type of fried tortilla, for breakfast; sandwiches for lunch and dinners including chicken alfredo and chicken with spaghetti.

The number of meals being wasted is down, in part, to asylum seekers ditching the city-funded food in favor of buying their own.

Migrants staying at the Big Apple’s Roosevelt Hotel mega shelter say they often trash meals because they are “bad.” Robert Miller

The Post spotted several migrant families hauling groceries into the Roosevelt this week — including strollers stacked with boxes of Cheerios and Cornflakes, as well as bags filled with chips, bread and pasta.

“There is a lot of food left over because people eat in their rooms,” one migrant, Victor Herrera, 29, said. 

“A lot of people get food on the street because it tastes better and there’s better variety.”

Migrant mom, Johana Roa, 23, admitted the breakfast is varied, but not to her taste.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The persistent “two-state” delusion If the west wants to solve the Middle East conflict, it must take a long look in the mirror Melanie Phillips

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-persistent-two-state-delusion?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The simmering tensions between Israel and the Biden administration over the plan for post-war Gaza have now come to the boil.

The US is doubling down on its insistence that Gaza must be run by a revamped Palestinian Authority. The Americans are still obsessed with a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

This week, US President Joe Biden told a White House Chanukah reception that there had to be a Palestinian state in the future and that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to make an effort to strengthen, change and “move” the PA.

Netanyahu riposted that Israel would permit neither Hamas nor the PA to rule Gaza. Israel, he said, would not repeat the “mistake of Oslo,” a reference to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation under which control of Gaza and parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria were handed over to the newly-created PA.

The previous day, Netanyahu had caused outrage by stating that the Oslo Accords caused as many deaths as the October 7 Hamas massacre, “though over a longer period”.

His enemies immediately claimed that the comparison was invidious, that he was seeking to shrug off any blame for Israel’s vulnerability to the Hamas pogrom and that he was already campaigning to win the general election that many assume will follow the war.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

An Antisemitic Occupation of Harvard’s Widener Library Claudine Gay promised to prevent ‘disruptions of the classroom experience.’ How’s that working out? By Dan Sullivan

Posted By on December 16th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-antisemitic-occupation-of-harvards-widener-library-politics-anti-israel-bias-e4cea52a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mr. Sullivan, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alaska and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.

I was in Boston last weekend for the Army-Navy game. The day after the game, five days after Harvard President Claudine Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress, I decided to walk the campus to reminisce about my time at Harvard, where I earned my undergraduate degree in 1987, and reflect about what had gone wrong at this once-great university.

I visited places that held significance to me while I was there: St. Paul’s Catholic Church, my freshman dorm and, of course, Widener Library—a monument to learning, study and contemplation that sits like a temple in the middle of Harvard Yard.

As I did during my undergraduate years, I spent several minutes staring up at the powerful mural by John Singer Sargent, “Death and Victory.” It’s one of two Sargent paintings memorializing the men of Harvard who sacrificed their lives for our country in World War I. I’ve thought about the painting often throughout the years—including when I made the decision to join the Marine Corps.

When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: “No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.” A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”

Curious about what was going on, I was soon in a cordial discussion with two of the organizers of this anti-Israel protest inside of one the world’s great libraries—not outside in Harvard Yard, where such protests belong. They told me they were from Saudi Arabia and the West Bank. I told them I was a U.S. senator who had recently returned from a bipartisan Senate trip to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I mentioned the meetings I had. I expressed my condolences when they told me their relatives had been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza.

One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Daily Jihad in France by Guy Millière

Posted By on December 15th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20220/france-jihad

From the murder of Sébastien Sellam in 2003 to that of Mireille Knoll in 2018, all murders of Jews in France have been committed by radicalized Muslims.

Shouting “we are coming to kill white people”, they attacked, murdering Thomas Perotto, aged 17, who had his throat slit. Seventeen other people were wounded, some seriously. Criminologist Xavier Raufer, asked about the attack, replied that raids like that take place throughout the country every week.

Although the prosecutor in charge of the case received multiple testimonies that the attackers said they were “coming to kill white people,” authorities maintain that the motive for the attack is “unknown”.

74% of Muslims between the ages of 18 and 25 in France say they place Islamic sharia law above the laws of the French Republic.

Television journalist Christian Malard, who had access to the results of confidential inquiries carried out for the French Ministry of the Interior, said they show that more than half of the imams in France proclaim the superiority of Islam over Western culture and the need to Islamize France, even if that means using force.

The anti-Jewish atrocities by Hamas on October 7 reinforced a distrust of Islam, and for the first time in years, a majority of French people support Israel’s fight in the ongoing war.

Paris, December 2, 2023. 9 pm. A man shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) stabbed a German tourist walking along the Seine near the Eiffel Tower, an area considered safe. On the way to the hospital, the victim died. The murderer, again shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”, attacked two more people, seriously wounding them, before the police arrested him. A government press release quickly mentioned that the killer was a French citizen, born in France, with the exceedingly French first name of Armand.

Then reality struck. Armand was indeed born in France in 1997, but his original first name was Iman (full name: Iman Rajabpour-Miyandoab) — until 2003, when his Iranian parents, who had fled the Islamic Republic, became French citizens and changed his name to Armand. In 2015-2016, he proclaimed his allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS) and made contact on social networks with many Islamists who had perpetrated terror attacks in France in that time period, and he planned a terrorist attack in Paris.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Here’s the Real Reason Why So Many American University Students Hate Israel Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 15th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/12/14/heres-the-real-reason-why-so-many-american-university-students-hate-israel-n4924761

It’s simple, really. Why do so many college and university students hate Israel? Because they know nothing about it, and have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed.

In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.” 

This wholly unstartling bit of information was gleaned from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley. Ron Hassner, who has the unenviable position of being Berkeley’s Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, conducted the survey, which began by presenting students with 18 issues and asking them to rate how interested they were in them.

These issues, according to Hassner, included “US-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5).” The survey went on from there to ask the respondents a “series of open-ended questions ‘on history, geography, and current affairs.’”F

Forty-three percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.”

That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous leftist rubbish about the massive, outrageous, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. In all likelihood, they haven’t even heard of either one.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

‘Horrendous’ Tap Performance of Nutcracker Suite in White House Video Roasted Online, Compared to ‘Hunger Games’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on December 15th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/14/horrendous-tap-performance-of-the-nutcracker-suite-in-white-house-video-compared-to-hunger-games/

A White House Christmas video showcasing a bizarro tap dance performance of the Nutcracker Suite is being roasted online and compared to the Hunger Games. The video features a woke, “antiracist” New York City tap company tapping their way down a White House hallway adorned in Nutcracker-themed décor. Jill Biden posted the performance on X, Wednesday.

“A bit of magic, wonder, and joy brought to you by the talented tappers of Dorrance Dance, performing their playful interpretation of The Nutcracker Suite,” Biden wrote.

American musician Duke Ellington recorded the album Nutcracker Suite in 1960 featuring jazz interpretations of Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet “The Nutcracker.”

The full title of Dorrance Dance’s production currently being performed at the Kennedy Center is: “The Nutcracker Suite or, a Rhythmaturgical Evocation of the SuperLeviathonic Enchantments of Duke and Billy’s Supreme Adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Masterpiece That Tells a Tale of a Misunderstood Girl Who Kills a King and Meets a Queen and Don’t Forget OOOO-Gong-Chi-Gong-Sh’-Gon-Make-It-Daddy, and That It Ain’t So Bad After All.”

The White House performance included several androgynous dancers clad in garish sequined costumes with huge and elaborate headdresses. Their unconventional interpretation of the Christmas classic prompted comparisons online to the Hunger Games.