ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The red-green alliance against the West by Alex Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky

Posted By on December 3rd, 2023

https://romirowsky.com/27373/red-green-alliance-against-west

The murderous Hamas attack on Israel can be described as a success only in a limited and horrific tactical sense: More Jews were murdered in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust. The surprise was achieved thanks to elaborate planning and lavish Iranian funding and to Israeli complacency on the part of the military and distracted political echelon. The price was immense and terrible.

But in a strategic sense, the attack was a failure and illustrates a truism of Middle Eastern history: The Palestinians, in this case Hamas, are their own worst enemies. Even their successes are, or will be, failures. Consider some of the unintended consequences of the Hamas attack. These range from local to regional to global effects.

To begin, Hamas has set back the Palestinian movement and destroyed Gaza. The Palestinian movement has long been characterized by two theoretically distinct but interrelated strands: Islamic rejection of Jews and a nationalist strand that played on contemporary concepts such as Third Worldism, liberation movements, and, most lately, decolonization. In practice, however, these were mutually reinforcing and in neither case contributed to the conception of a functioning nation-state. Neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas has run or can run a state.

The resurgent Islamic violence — the Oct. 7 raid was at one level a classic Muslim razzia of unconstrained violence, rape, and looting, in the tradition of Muhammad — proved again that Hamas, Islamic governance, and the Palestinian movement as a whole are addicted to violence. The reconfiguration of Gaza, using international aid money, into a gigantic base in which civilians existed only as human shields is another aspect of this failure. Add to this the complete collapse of Hamas on its own carefully prepared battlefield, which proved the ineptitude of its strategy, leadership, and field capabilities. The self-victimization of Gaza by Hamas, the intentional “martyring” of innocents along with terrorists, was a fundamental part of this plan. But the scale of destruction, apparently unanticipated, that has reduced northern Gaza to near-uninhabitable rubble proves the failure of that plan as well.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Isaiah Berlin and the Meaning of Life: Mervyn Bendle

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/11/isaiah-berlin-and-the-meaning-of-life/

Excerpt:An amusing vignette about Churchill and  Isaiah Berlin, from a very long article on Isaiah Berlin.

What to do? As it turned out, the Second World War ensured the question was deferred while Isaiah Berlin spent the next five years working for the British Information Service and Foreign Office in Washington and elsewhere, building up a vast network of useful contacts and a reputation as an incisive researcher and commentator on political, diplomatic and economic issues.

So prominent did his reputation become that he was honored with an invitation to lunch at Downing Street with the Churchills, along with the Commander of the Imperial General Staff and other dignitaries. At the table, the Prime Minister eagerly sought out the views of his special guest on various complex political matters, including the likelihood of Roosevelt being re-elected for a fourth term, but the answers he received seemed not particularly well-informed. He then asked Mr Berlin what he felt was the most important thing he had ever written. “White Christmas,” was the reply. Churchill, perplexed, gave up and turned to someone else. It was only later that he was told that through a mix-up it was the composer Irving Berlin who had been invited to enjoy lunch and Churchill’s company. Ironically, when the story of “the Irving–Winston–Isaiah affair” got out, it further enhanced Isaiah’s reputation, and he found that even more doors in the corridors of power and influence were now open to him.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

University Quietly Abandons DEI Requirements, Free Speech Activists Celebrate Victory By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/01/university-quietly-abandons-dei-requirements-free-speech-activists-celebrate-victory/

The University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass) ended an application requirement that forced potential employees to pledge their support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Fox News reports that the decision, which had previously brought criticism to the university, was celebrated as a “victory” for freedom of speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“Public institutions like the University of Massachusetts Boston are bound by the First Amendment to make hiring decisions in a viewpoint-neutral manner,” said FIRE’s Program Officer Haley Gluhanich. “We’re glad the university eventually changed course. But maybe next time, it doesn’t need to take five months of advocacy.”

FIRE first discovered the existence of the requirement in June, where faculty applicants were ordered to submit statements expressing their “experience and commitment” to DEI. FIRE denounced these rules as a “clear violation of both prospective faculty’s academic freedom and the university’s obligation to uphold the First Amendment.

“UMass Boston tried dodging the issue for several months,” Gluhanich continued, noting that FIRE “recently discovered that the DEI requirements had finally been removed from the job listings we flagged and that newly posted job listings contained no similar requirements.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Democrats have no Biden backup plan for 2024, despite age concerns by By Jeff Mason

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democrats-have-no-biden-backup-plan-for-2024-despite-age-concerns/ar-AA1kOhSF

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Democratic Party has no Plan B if President Joe Biden decided for any reason to halt his 2024 re-election campaign, and a sudden need to replace him as its standard-bearer would spark a messy intraparty battle.

Despite weak poll numbers and questions, including from some Democrats, about his age, Biden has stuck to his plan to seek a second term after clearing the field of serious Democratic primary challengers when he announced in April that he was running again.

Even if more Democratic candidates were to jump in now, the path forward would be unclear as deadlines to get on the primary ballot in critical states such as Nevada, South Carolina and Georgia have already passed.

Biden loyalists, citing his record in office, argue that the party does not need a backup plan to defeat probable Republican nominee Donald Trump, who Biden beat in the 2020 election.

Among the possible scenarios if the president, 81, did drop out: Democrats could pick another nominee next August at their convention, or even later, in line with party rules.

Reuters spoke to multiple current and former officials who, while making clear they want Biden to succeed, acknowledge the party could face upheaval should the oldest president in U.S. history encounter a health issue or step aside for other reasons during the White House contest.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Before and After, in House Testimony For former Mike Pence official Olivia Troye, what a difference one hour made Matt Taibbi

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.racket.news/p/lol-before-and-after-in-house-testimony

I know I said I wasn’t going to dwell on this, but some things are too funny. In yesterday’s surreal House hearing on censorship, the Democrats’ witness Olivia Troye denied to North Carolina congressman Dan Bishop something she’d said in her opening statement.

It turns out the time between Troye statements “Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship” and “I’ve never said this was a conspiracy, you have not heard that comment from me” was exactly one hour. That has to be a first of some kind, although one minute would’ve been more impressive. Just an FYI from the train home…

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How George Soros funds anti-Semitism Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-george-soros-funds-anti-semitism

Congress is debating legislation to strip tax-exempt status from “terrorist-supporting organizations.” The Open Society Foundations would be a prime target.

As pro-Hamas, virulent anti-Semitic propaganda against Israel and Jews erupted and continues spreading after Hamas’ brutal attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7, the silence of the poster boy of anti-Semitic victimhood, George Soros, is deafening.

Deafening but not surprising.

In his 1995 book, “Soros on Soros,” the Hungarian-American financier declared that Zionism “doesn’t appeal” to him because it is “the founding of a nation [Israel] where the Jews are in the majority.” For Soros, “being a Jew [is] being in a minority.” He also asserted moral equivalence between the Jews’ response to attacks and that of their attackers, saying that sometimes Jews choose to “identify with their oppressors” and even “try to become like them.”

In 2003, at a Yivo Institute for Jewish Research event, Soros blamed the rise of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred in Europe on the George W. Bush administration’s war on Islamic terrorism and “likened the behavior of Israel [in defending itself against Arab terrorist attacks] to that of the Nazis, invoking some psychological jargon about victims becoming victimizers.” He was booed, and many walked out of the event.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We mustn’t let the left erase the truth of 7 October Owen Jones’s reaction to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities speaks to a serious sickness in the bourgeois left. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/29/we-mustnt-let-the-left-erase-the-truth-of-7-october/

There is a video doing the rounds related to Hamas’s barbaric pogrom of 7 October that is difficult to watch. It is making viewers wince and recoil. It shows the madness that can flourish when people retreat from reason. I am speaking, of course, about Owen Jones’s reaction vid to the footage of Hamas’s atrocities; that arch Guardianista’s 25-minute YouTube musing over what he saw Hamas do. It is a disturbing watch. It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.

The IDF has put together a graphic 43-minute video of the savagery Hamas filmed itself committing against the Jews of Southern Israel on 7 October. The morally deracinated cynics of the liberal Western media say the video is an IDF ruse to whip up support for its war in Gaza. In truth, Israel felt compelled to put out this gross footage of anti-Semitic mass murder because there has been so much 7 October doubt in influential circles in the West. It was the atrocity denialism of unhinged Israelophobes that forced Israel to say: ‘Okay, here are the atrocities.’ They showed the film in London last week and Mr Jones was in attendance.

To be clear, Jones does not deny that Hamas committed ‘grave war crimes’ on 7 October. He is not an October denialist as some on the viscerally anti-Israel left are. And yet his reaction to the footage is chilling nonetheless. He casts doubt on many of the claims about 7 October. He sows seeds of suspicion. It is a masterclass in moral obfuscation. Yes, Hamas did wicked things, he says, but where’s the evidence for the really wicked things it is said to have done? The beheaded babies. Raped women. Children killed ‘intentionally’. There’s no ‘conclusive evidence’ for that, he says. I am trying my best to understand the mind that can see images of the corpses of Jewish children and wonder, ‘But were they killed intentionally?’. But I cannot. It is beyond my moral bandwidth to understand this.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Frank Furedi:The woke scapegoating of the Jews The Western left’s response to Hamas’s atrocities has exposed a virulent new form of anti-Semitism.

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/12/the-woke-scapegoating-of-the-jews/

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled ‘progressives’ have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that ‘the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid’.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an ‘All Out for Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent ‘comedy’ material. ‘As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time’, he said, ‘until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters’. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this ‘joke’ about the mass murder and kidnapping of ‘several dozen hipsters’ with gales of laughter.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Diversity Rape of the Day by Mark Steyn

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.steynonline.com/13949/diversity-rape-of-the-day

Have you ever been to Hamburg’s Stadtpark? They call it the “green heart” of the city, over 350 acres of woods and lakes and meadows, playgrounds and sports fields and concert stages, plus Germany’s largest planetarium. It’s also a great place to rape someone.

So a fifteen-year-old girl gets dragged into the bushes by a gang of four “youths”. They rape her, and take the trouble to film themselves doing so. Because, after all, if you gang-rape someone, you want to have something to show to the lads who weren’t able to make it. When they’re sated and push off, the girl gets to her feet and staggers away only to run into five more chaps, who rape her all over again. And film it all over again, in what by now is enough video for a full-length feature – over two-and-a-half hours. That’s getting close to Lord of the Rings – and with a cast to match: the semen of nine different men was found in and on her body. And from all over the map: Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, Montenegro, Poland, Armenia… That’s a lot of diversity: it’s like the UN General Assembly of semen …although officialdom was eager to characterise most of the rapists as “German”, with two said to be of “uncertain nationality”. There’s a lot of that about.

The rape of a schoolgirl is a terrible thing – especially for the guys. As the eminent lady psychiatrist assigned to the case, Nahlah Saimeh, was at pains to explain, “a migrant background can push offenders to the margins of society” and lead to “fantasies of grandeur as an attempt to compensate for one’s own misery”.

Yeah, but two-and-a-half hours? That’s some fantasy of grandeur.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

David Randall The Usual Grotesques Another day, another cultural event invaded by leftist goons David Randall

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/climate-protests-at-the-met

So there I was, in the middle of the opening night of Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, when the shouting started. “Climate protesters,” or “climate activists”—the usual grotesques—were shouting “No opera on a dead planet,” and other such inanities. They placed themselves around the theater, timing it so that when one was arrested, another started shouting somewhere else. I counted five interruptions, though the first press reports say there were only four; did I get it wrong? The audience was displeased; I heard shouts of shame! and even, briefly from one member of the audience, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! The management finally announced that the program would go on no matter what, keeping the lights on so that security could remove people more quickly; either the thugs were exhausted, or the remainder figured that it wasn’t worth bothering with. So we finished the opera, with too much light, and (at least for me) some nervousness at every loud noise, thinking it might be another interruption.

There have been at least two previous intrusions at operas, in Amsterdam and Milan. Less than a day ago, pro-Hamas goons tried to interrupt the lighting of the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Less than a week ago, others tried to disrupt the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It’s a general campaign to try to make normal life impossible until you give in to the radical demands.

That’s the short version, but it’s worth considering the various elements.