Harvard Bans ‘Cisheterosexism’ but Shrugs at Antisemitism College presidents are directly responsible for the hatred that has flourished on campus since Oct. 7. By Elise Stefanik

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-bans-cisheterosexism-but-shrugs-at-antisemitism-95a2c5d7?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos3

What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that “cisheterosexism,” “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as “abuse” and perpetuated “violence” on campus.

But when I asked Harvard President Claudine Gay at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she answered: “It depends on the context.” Pressed further, she said it would qualify “when it crosses into conduct.” I received similar answers from the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania.

This lack of moral clarity is shocking. If only it were surprising. In the months since Oct. 7, the mainstreaming of anti-Jewish hate has been on full display at the poisoned Ivy League and other so-called elite schools, as has the gutless lack of response from university leaders. When 34 Harvard student groups signed a statement that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” Ms. Gay and other Harvard leaders were silent for days.

Since then, we have heard reports of Jewish students being spat on, verbally accosted and, in a widely circulated video, physically assaulted. We’ve seen students march chanting “There is only one solution: Intifada revolution,” a call for violence against Israel. They follow that with a chant of “Globalize the Intifada,” implying that the hatred of Israel is a hatred of Jews everywhere, including on campus.

The Penn, Harvard and MIT presidents’ refusal to identify these calls for violence as policy violations is revealing, and their attempt to justify it with feigned concern for free speech is insulting. Just this year, Harvard placed dead last among 248 universities on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings, receiving the only score of zero out of 100.

Where was Harvard’s concern for free speech when it disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from a colloquium on campus last year because of her views on transgender issues? Where was its concern for free speech in 2020 when it revoked conservative activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance because of social media posts he made as a 16-year-old, or in 2017 when it revoked admission for 10 incoming freshmen who shared offensive memes on Facebook?

Apparently the same outrage doesn’t apply to students sharing antisemitic memes on Slack today, as Bill Ackman noted in his letter to Harvard last month.

While this hypocrisy is being exposed now, it has been festering for years. The failure to call out and punish those demanding the genocide of Jewish people is the consequence of decades of appeasement of radicalism and watering down of principle at our most hallowed institutions of higher education, which were founded as bastions of moral clarity and the pursuit of truth.

The Truth About Net Zero, at Last Climate enthusiasm hits the political wall as voters face the costs.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cop28-net-zero-carbon-emissions-climate-sultan-al-jaber-da4b4763?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The great and good of politics and business have converged on Dubai this week for the global climate conference known as COP28, and by now they must wish they hadn’t. The event has done the one thing such confabs are supposed never to do, which is expose the truth about climate change and the race to net-zero carbon emissions.

The truth-teller in chief is the event’s host, Sultan Al Jaber. He’s become a figure of hate on the eco-left since letting slip that he’s a net-zero skeptic. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” he said of the climate industry’s global temperature target during a virtual event last month. He warned that attempting to wean the world off fossil fuels would “take the world back into caves.”

The net-zero apostles say the political leader and head of the state oil company in a major petroleum-producing country never should have been invited to host COP28. But then someone has to drill the oil that powers the private jets that ferry the bigwigs to these confabs.

The bigger embarrassment for the climate left is that voters agree with Mr. Jaber. If you haven’t paid much attention to COP28 this week, perhaps you’ve read about the collapse of the net-zero agenda around the world.

The True Face of the Anti-Israel Movement The leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations celebrated Oct. 7, in his own words.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-true-face-of-the-anti-israel-movement-fa3e94fe?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The response in anti-Israel circles to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre has been clarifying. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the tip of the spear on U.S. campuses, early on called the slaughter “a historic win for Palestinian resistance.”

The tune hasn’t changed, even from the leaders pressuring President Biden. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), celebrated Oct. 7 at an American Muslims for Palestine convention on Nov. 24. A damning excerpt was publicized Thursday by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

American Muslims for Palestine then took down the full video, and Mr. Awad now claims a “hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning.” But we got the video before Mr. Awad’s ally hid it, and here’s what CAIR’s leader had to say:

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, that they were not allowed to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”

The crowd applauded, and not a word in Mr. Awad’s speech qualified his pleasure with Oct. 7, justified as “self-defense.”

Democrats and media have long treated CAIR as a primary political spokesman for Muslim Americans. In late October the White House invited Mr. Awad to convey Muslim concerns about the war to the President. In May the Biden Administration included CAIR as a partner in its Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. The White House has now removed CAIR from that document and condemned Mr. Awad’s remarks.

The disgraceful, ducking, diving, dodging college presidents Their testimony to Congress was saturated by feminization Roger Kimball

https://thespectator.com/topic/university-presidents-testimony-ducking-gay-magill/

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question. 

You might think it was a pretty simple question. Stefanik, exhibiting a mixture of incredulity and barely contained rage, stressed: “This should be be the easiest question to answer,” as one president after the next emitted a pained I-can’t-believe-this-unenlightened-pol-is-asking-me-me-the-president-of-Harvard/MIT/Penn-this-stupid-question.” Each in turn reverted to a script they must have worked out with their handlers/lawyers. “It all depends on the context.” 

“Context.” It was the weasel word of the moment. We’re all champions of free speech, don’t you know, so we wouldn’t dream of intruding upon our flock’s exercise of that sacrosanct right in pursuit of their dream of self-congratulatory moral perfection — unless, of course, that dream involves some prohibited attitude, criticizing St. Anthony Fauci, for example, or St. George Floyd, or, heaven forfend, supporting Donald Trump or expressing skepticism about the 2020 election or January 6. Then, of course, it’s open-season on “free expression.”

I almost felt sorry for those three women. Almost. There they were, emanating the self-righteous demeanor they had perfected over years, and, bang, an angry congresswoman exploded that cheap facade in minutes. The upshot was not obvious to them immediately. But the world’s outrage at those moral pygmies instantly washed over the PR offices of those obscenely rich bastions of self-entitlement. “Uh, oh: the girls really stepped in it this time.” That was the universal reaction.  

Jonathan Tobin:The problem is bigger than three college presidents The woke ideologies that govern academia enable the antisemitism that the heads of Harvard, Penn and MIT refuse to say breaks their rules.

https://www.jns.org/the-problem-is-bigger-than-three-college-presidents/?_se=cGhpbGlwdGVzdGFzQHNhcG8ucHQ%3D&utm_

It was a very bad week for the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. But as much as the discomfort and job security of the trio of academic bureaucrats put on the spot by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) during a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses is a focus of interest, no one should think what they now say or what happens to them is of critical importance.

On the contrary, the viral video of their appalling testimony is merely a symptom of the problem plaguing America’s educational establishment and the rest of society. It is the toxic ideologies that have created these three pathetic examples of university leaders without a moral compass that we should be worried about, not their individual fates. As long as the schools they lead, and as long as most other such institutions—whether considered among the country’s “elite” schools or not—remain captured by the woke mindset that has made critical race theory and intersectionality the prevailing orthodoxy, antisemitism there will be a given.

To The New York Times and others on the left, the predicaments of Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Penn’s Liz Magill were a “prosecutorial trap”—one into which they fell headlong.

The question of genocide

Behind the anger of the young American Hamas apologists Their heads are filled with falsehood Peter Wood

https://thespectator.com/topic/behind-anger-young-american-hamas-apologists/

EXCERPTS

For the last twenty-five years or so, I have been writing (off and on) on the topic of anger in American life. In one of my books, A Bee in the Mouth, I examined a revolution in American attitudes towards anger. From very early in the English colonization through World War Two, Americans regarded anger as a dangerous force, to be kept under control. The admirable man (and woman) was someone who, when provoked beyond all reason, still kept his cool. He might have to fight, but he would fight with a clean purpose. To be angry beyond self-control was a sign of weakness. Gary Cooper in High Noon was an ideal type; Edward G. Robinson’s character Rico in Little Caesar was the antitype: bloodthirsty, self-pitying, consumed with resentful pride.

All this went into reverse in the years after World War Two. It was an era in which our cultural elites discovered both existentialism and psychoanalysis. Existentialism lauded the “authenticity” of unfettered anger. Psychoanalysis taught us that repressing anger is “unhealthy.” Other factors came into play as well: grievance-based protest politics, the sexual revolution, the Sixties, et cetera. Not suddenly or instantaneously, but gradually and step by step, Americans began to feel that anger could be a good thing. It was empowering to the individual and a tool for “social justice.” It was a scourge of the “hypocrisy” of the middleclass. It was “liberating.”

I would say it took civilization several thousand years to learn how a society could master its darkest impulses. The ancient Greeks failed the test, as anyone who reads the blood-soaked pages of the Peloponnesian Wars knows well. And learning how to suppress rage was never a guarantee that the monsters would always stay away in the forest or under the bed. Nazism and communism showed us that the demonic was always there waiting for its opportunity to burn civilization to the ground and to turn otherwise decent people into murderous brutes.

Which brings me to today. I am not speaking about the intoxicated evil of the young men unleashed by Hamas on Israeli civilians. Those killers are not a case study in the breakdown of civilization, but rather instances of the atavistic savagery of people raised to be piranhas: frenzied, gleeful, sated only by pure evil. They provide no lesson in the breakdown of the norms of self-control, since their only measure is loyalty to a fanatical cause.

U.S. House Approves Reporting on Foreign Funds to Universities

https://www.meforum.org/65316/us-house-approves-reporting-on-foreign-funds-to

American universities will no longer be able to count on a complacent federal bureaucracy and weak legislation to avoid disclosing foreign gifts and contracts, if a House vote two days ago becomes law.

The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act – the DETERRENT Act (H.R. 5933) – passed the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday in a bipartisan vote of 246 to 170. Introduced by Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA) and co-sponsored by Education and Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and 25 other members, the bill significantly strengthens key provision of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act.

For decades, many universities have ignored requirements to report foreign gifts or contracts of over $250,000. Legislation lacked the teeth to hold academe accountable, allowing parts of the education bureaucracy to ignore violations of the law. Even if universities complied, they did not need to disclose the purposes for which the funds would be used – a loophole that allowed foreign states such as Qatar and China quietly to fund potentially disreputable projects or individuals.

The Middle East Forum (MEF) has long advocated for greater transparency in the billions of dollars flowing annually to academe from overseas. It especially sounded the alarm about funds from Qatar, a major state patron of Hamas – a danger that Congress has now highlighted after years of MEF’s research drove home this point.

“The fundamental problem with Section 117 is the lack of a serious enforcement mechanism and penalties for those who violate it. It requires far too little disclosure as to what foreign dollars are used for,” says Cliff Smith, MEF’s Washington Project director. “This bill addresses both of those problems and helps ensure that watchdog groups, journalists, and citizens have the information they need in order to know if our universities are falling under malign foreign influence.”

Charles Lipson: Hunter Biden’s refusal to testify strengthens impeachment argument There is more than enough evidence to warrant establishing a formal impeachment committee

https://thespectator.com/topic/hunter-biden-refusal-testify-strengthens-impeachment-argument/

Surprise! Surprise! Hunter Biden just told the House Oversight Committee he won’t to comply with their subpoena for a closed-door deposition.

Hunter’s refusal was delivered by his formidable attorney, Abbe Lowell. Their “stonewall strategy” was foreordained when Hunter chose Lowell several months ago. Lowell is smart, tough and relentless. He’s a “let’s fight” litigator, replacing Hunter’s former counsel, who was known for striking deals. When the sweetheart deal blew up in federal court, Hunter switched to Lowell.

Abbe Lowell’s strategy and persona borrow something from Roy Cohn, the equally tough attorney known for representing Joe McCarthy. Cohn once remarked that when prospective clients wanted the toughest SOB in New York for their attorney, he wanted them to think of just one name: Roy Cohn. Lowell has the same marketing strategy in the nation’s capital. He’s a fighter, not a compromiser, and he has demonstrated that in representing Hunter Biden. Presumably, that’s why the president’s son chose him.

Hunter’s latest refusal to testify reiterates his earlier one. The first refusal came wrapped in camouflage. Lowell told the Oversight Committee that Hunter was willing to testify — he couldn’t wait to do it — but that he would do it only in public. Actually, it is the committee, not the witness, who chooses how testimony will be given.

Hunter’s offer was always a slick gambit, with two purposes in mind. One was to run out the clock, delaying Hunter’s appearance until the committee had moved on and issued a report. The second was to fool the public by pretending Hunter actually wanted to testify and that it was the Republican committee making it impossible. In fact, testifying was the last thing Hunter wanted to do. He’s facing potential criminal charges in California and has a lot of information about how his businesses operated and what role his father played. Why would he possibly want to speak about those matters under oath before a congressional committee?

Hamas attack plans, including map of IDF base, suggest espionage By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/hamas-attack-plans-including-map-of-idf-base-suggest-espionage/

New documentation, including the laptop of a key Hamas commander, offers additional proof of the terrorist group’s meticulous planning of the Oct. 7 massacre.

The field intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Intelligence Directorate, known by the Hebrew acronym AMSHAT, released the documents on Monday.

The material provided to JNS by the IDF came from a laptop belonging to the head of Hamas’ Nukhba Force, who took part in the attack. It was recovered in southern Israel.

Uploaded to the laptop was a notebook with detailed plans to conquer the army’s Nahal Oz base adjacent to the border fence along the northern Gaza Strip.

It included a hand-drawn sketch of the base, providing a visual representation of the strategic details in the notebook. The illustration, revealing accurate knowledge of the base, suggests Hamas had help from within.

(An Israeli intelligence source cited by The Guardian said the map revealed “inside knowledge … almost certainly from a Hamas spy.”)

Prior to Oct. 7 many Arabs from Gaza entered Israel regularly for work (17,500 daily at the time of the attack), and a week after the attack, Israeli security services had already begun investigating the possibility that some of these individuals had passed information to Hamas.

The time has come to hold Mayorkas accountable By William Davis

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/the_time_has_come_to_hold_mayorkas_accountable.html

As Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas continues to treat Congress and the American people with contempt, it’s far past time for the secretary to finally face some consequences for his actions.

Mayorkas narrowly escaped becoming the second cabinet official in U.S. history to be impeached when eight Republicans voted with all House Democrats last month to refer Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment resolution to the House Homeland Security Committee. Some members who voted against the impeachment resolution indicated that they would ultimately support impeaching Mayorkas, but would like to see a more thorough investigation completed before moving forward.

Mayorkas, like any cabinet official facing impeachment for high crimes and misdemeanors, of course, deserves due process. Yet, more than 10 months into the 118th Congress, and over a year since former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy vowed an impeachment inquiry was imminent, there has been no inquiry, and no timetable put forward for impeachment.

The case against Mayorkas is extensive and damning. Since he has been in charge of DHS, the department responsible for securing the U.S. border, millions of illegal aliens have crossed the border, shattering all the wrong records. Just Tuesday, 12,000 foreign nationals crossed into the U.S. illegally, hitting an all-time record for a single day. Mayorkas and other leading Biden administration officials have worked to systematically destroy America’s operational control over its border, while violating the Immigration and Nationality Act, and flagrantly disregarding their Constitutional responsibility to protect the U.S. from invasion. Mayorkas has demonized and demoralized Border Patrol agents, siding with anti-borders conspiracy theorists over his own agents.

He has put the national security of the U.S. at grave risk, allowing a record number of suspected terrorists to cross the border. Every step of the way, Mayorkas has prioritized his destructive anti-borders ideology over his responsibilities under the law. The case for his impeachment and removal is clear, but one person who doesn’t seem to be concerned is Mayorkas himself.