NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hamas Supporters Probably Aren’t Fit to Practice Law Don’t denounce student radicals’ ‘values.’ See if there’s any substance behind their positions. By Hadley Arkes

Posted By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-supporters-probably-arent-fit-to-practice-law-1b42128d?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Dozens of law firms have signed an open letter to law-school deans warning that “anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms.” Earlier, Davis Polk & Wardwell had said it was reconsidering job offers to three Ivy League students who held leadership positions with organizations that signed letters supporting Hamas’s assault on Israel, and Winston & Strawn withdrew an offer to a New York University student who called the atrocities “necessary.”

The letter calls on the schools to affirm “the values we all hold dear” and reject “unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values.” It asserts that “there is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.” Weeks earlier the president of the University of Pennsylvania, jostled by donors into saying something emphatic, picked up the same script and said that “hateful speech that denigrates others” is “contrary to our values.”

But are the “values” of Sullivan & Cromwell the same as the “values” of Kirkland & Ellis, or of the University of Pennsylvania? Is there nothing in the distinct character of these institutions that can produce a moral response with edge and substance? The term “value judgment” came to us through Nietzsche and Max Weber, when people lost their confidence in speaking of moral truths and began to speak rather of the things they happened to “value,” which may not be what others “value.”

It was hardly controversial for the law firms to denounce “hatred or bigotry.” But what is it exactly that the law firms are enjoining the universities to do? The firms would doubtless assure the schools that they are against interfering with the freedom of the demonstrators to assemble and to speak.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Players of the Gazan “War” and Their Strategies: Part One: the Terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-players-of-the-gazan-war-and-their-strategies-part-one-the-terrorists-of-hamas-and-hezbollah/

Hamas

Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its own internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for a bit quelled its eliminationist rhetoric—as if it was useful to Israel to play off Hamas against Abbas and the West Bank. Again, all a clever ruse as it crafted a plan to kill more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.

So meanwhile for a year Hamas planned and trained, likely with the Iranians, to stage a mass-murder raid into Israel—at peace, during the holidays, early in the dark of morning, and ironically to be staged 50 years almost to the date after the similar surprise attack on Israel that had started the Yom Kippur War. Hamas in other words would then brag it had done more damage to Israel in a single day than any other terrorist organization in history.

So the overall killing strategy of Hamas was clear enough. Send 2,000 gunmen through the wall, via the air, and at sea to murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and butcher and mutilate them to such a savage degree that the murderers would either so shock the Israelis by their inhumanity that the Israelis would be stunned into concessions, or the inhuman butchery would at least suggest to the world that only premodern people so oppressed could be capable of such animal-like cruelty. That is, the world would eventually blame Israel for reducing Palestinians to such a state of bestial despair.

Then the Hamas killers and their tag-along opportunistic civilian counterparts would retreat with Israeli captives, the more elderly, young, and vulnerable the better. So the second part of the strategy was to leave the mutilating behind, get safely back to subterranean Gaza to hide the captives in their network of tunnels, and then either use them as shields to deflect retaliations or to swap some children and women for Hamas killers jailed in Israel or threaten to kill them all unless the IDF relented and stood down—or all that and more.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Barbarian Evasions Hamas’s progressive apologists seek self-justification in the moral incoherence of relativistic absolutism. David A. Eisenberg

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/09/the-barbarian-evasions/ When I ask my students to rethink the universality of human rights, the mere suggestion befuddles them. Creatures of their progressive times, the a priori existence of such rights is as firmly established in their minds as the existence of witches or geocentricity was in the minds of their ancestors. Even as they indulge […]

ISRAEL, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The ABC on Gaza: Exactly as Expected, Except Worse Tony Thomas

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/ Forlorn creatures of habit, our household watches                   https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/   Australian Broadcasting Company’sTV flagship 7pm News (Victoria) nightly. As I remarked across the dinner table at 6.59pm on Tuesday, “Stand by for Hamas footage of suffering children in Gaza, with no ABC mention that Hamas uses […]

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

High Stakes and a Simple Choice Bernie Marcus

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/09/high_stakes_and_a_simple_choice_150037.html

Bernie Marcus is the co-founder of Job Creators Network, a philanthropist, and the retired co-founder of The Home Depot.

I am 94 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.

We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments. There are rarely consequences for the wrongdoers because George Soros-elected prosecutors across America refuse to prosecute them.

Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.

This should not be a partisan issue. This should be an issue for all Americans – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – that I hope to reach with this op-ed. You enjoy the freedoms and values on which the nation was founded. Sadly, I see these freedoms and values being eroded today as government gets bigger and weaponized against its political opponents.

I wrote this op-ed because of my love for America, not for any financial gain or advantage. I have been retired for 30 years and spend my time engaged in philanthropic causes, with which I have committed to share 90% of my net worth. I was born here and can give testimony about The American Dream. I lost my job and was broke when I was 48 years old. A dear friend of mine suggested that my misfortune presented a great opportunity to build a small business based upon an idea I had shared with him. Only in America, the land of opportunity, could being without a job and broke be a great opportunity. In 1978, my partners and I built four hardware stores, and this small business grew and is known as The Home Depot. We could only have done this in America because of America’s system of free enterprise and pro-jobs growth government policies. The state of America today, especially record inflation, government over-regulation, and the problems of the last three years, would prevent my partners and I from succeeding as we have.

Part of our legacy must be passing on to future generations of Americans our founding freedoms and values, including The American Dream. We must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years. We must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism. Most of them seem to have never had a job outside of government. All they know is making government bigger and more intrusive in the lives of its citizens.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Schools for Hamas-Cide The slaughter in Gaza has exposed the presence of Jew hatred in many of our schools By Larry Sand

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/schools-for-hamas-cide/
While the slaying of some 1,400 Jews by Hamas is a major tragedy in and of itself, other important facets of the story merit attention. For example, a Harris poll taken after the massacre reveals that 51% of  American 18-24-year-olds think the murder of innocent Jewish men, women, and babies was justified, and much of this Jew hatred can be attributed to our nation’s schools. 

Rethinking Schools, a radical activist outfit established in 1986, whose products are used by 200,000 teachers and are on university reading lists, asserts that educators have a “moral and educational responsibility” to join and teach about “the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.”

Also, a wing of Rethinking Schools, the Zinn Education Project, which has developed history curricula since 2008, is used by 155,000 teachers nationwide. On October 10, the organization declared that the terror, violence, murder, and rape we’ve seen in the past week “is the direct result of decades of Israeli occupation.” 

In Oakland, the teachers union has accused Israel of carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. The teachers union in Seattle passed a resolution in 2021 supporting the same lie. In Virginia, a school board member in Fairfax County has, under the banner of culturally responsive pedagogy, pushed for an explicitly anti-Israeli curriculum.

Also, Black Lives Matter, which has had success infiltrating our public schools, insists that the recent events in the Middle East are a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians.”

Then there are the colleges. The colleges! Yes, the same cohort of far-left, cultural ignoramuses who can’t define what a woman is and offers classes like “Queering Menstruation” and “Anal 101” are now, not surprisingly, weighing in on the Middle East.

In addition to Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion tenets have become de rigeur on college campuses. The DEI-ists see everything in black and white, labeling white people as oppressors and blacks as the oppressed. While DEI typically concerns itself with USA issues, Israel, too, is on the hook, being tarred as a bastion of Jewish whiteness with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of Palestinians, who are considered people of color.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Hamas Ally CAIR Has Been Operating With Impunity Inside America for 30 Years The FBI is doing nothing about it By Paul Sperry

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/hamas-ally-cair-has-been-operating-with-impunity-inside-america-for-30-years/

After Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women and children in Israel last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that the terror group “and its allies” could inspire attacks on Americans “here on our own soil.” He also told the Senate that the FBI is conducting “multiple, ongoing investigations” into people affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group.

What Wray didn’t say is that the FBI has been investigating Hamas’ biggest ally in America for the past 30 years – without filing any charges. Launched in 1994 as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has, in the decades since, become an accepted member of Washington’s lobbying community. The New York Times and other influential newspapers routinely describe CAIR as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”

Although it has not repudiated its support for Hamas – which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people – CAIR was enlisted by the Biden administration in May to take part in a White House initiative to fight antisemitism.

On Oct. 7, the day Hamas terrorists butchered 1,400 Jews, including 33 Americans – raping many and abducting some 240 others to Gaza from southern Israel – CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, delivered an anti-Israel message in Arabic which seemed to justify what Hamas did. Translated into English, it read: “All Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, Oct. 8 – and every day – in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime [Israel].”

On Saturday afternoon, CAIR helped rally more than 100,000 Muslims in D.C. to instead condemn Israel for supposedly carrying out “genocide” in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Multiple speakers called for the destruction of Israel – and, by implication, the Jewish people there – by demanding Palestinians take all the lands “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Squeezing the World’s Vulnerable Peoples Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/

The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people.

The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.

There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries— Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—despite hundreds of years of residence.

Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly-500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.

And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide—catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.

Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the pro-Hamas activist who killed a 69-year-old, pro-Israel Jewish man, turns out to be a Muslim

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

https://barenakedislam.com/2023/11/09/caliphornia-to-absolutely-no-ones-surprise-at-all-the-pro-hamas-activist-who-killed-a-69-year-old-pro-israel-jewish-man-turns-out-to-be-a-muslim-after-all/

Muslim college professor, Loay Alnaji, has been identified as the pro-Hamas activist ‘who killed Jewish protestor Paul Kessler’ with a megaphone that knocked him to the ground when rival rallies clashed in Thousand Oaks, California.
Daily Mail (h/t Charlotte)  The man who police have questioned in relation to the death of a Jewish man during a clash with pro-Palestinian protestors is 50-year-old college professor,  Loay Alnaji, who teaches computer science at Ventura Community College in California allegedly hit Paul Kessler with a megaphone knocking him to the ground, resulting in a fatal blow to the head.
Records show that Alnaji came to the United States in the 1990s – he had previously taught in the United Arab Emirates. He married Palestinian economics professor Nada Al Hammouri on Christmas Eve 2015. They have three children.
On his Facebook page he has posted several messages in Arabic supporting the Palestinian cause. In his most recent from three weeks ago, he wrote: ‘O Allah, release the captivity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque… Sooner than later……..Oh Allah, don’t deprive us of praying in it before we die… ‘Oh God, give victory to your weak servants in Palestine, and everywhere…O Allah, bind their hearts with the bond of patience and faith..’
Tensions have been growing between supporters of Israel and the Palestinians since Hamas’s October 7 surprise raid on the Jewish state in which some 1,400 people were killed. Alnaji’s stand against Israel’s actions took him to the streets of Thousand Oaks on Sunday afternoon, where the pro-Palestinian group was confronted by another supporting Israel.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Remaking Gaza: A Harsh And Necessary Road Map By Michael Widlanski

Posted By on November 9th, 2023

Gaza is a knife aimed at Israel. Just look at the map. It’s not an accident.

The Gaza Strip was created by Arab states who attacked and lost to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48. It became a narrow festering laboratory where humans were turned into monsters, encouraged and trained to commit atrocities.

Gaza became the anti-Israel terror base, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Gaza’s people have got no flag, no citizenship. Their symbol became the UN refugee card known in Arabic as al-Hawiyya.

Egypt kept the refugees penned up in Gaza in poverty and 70% unemployment, refusing them citizenship, denying them statehood and independence.

Lebanon and Syria also kept their Palestinians in camps. They saw the political potential of the refugees, exploited their suffering to harden them as a knife aimed at Israel. Enmity to Israel was the heart of Qawmiyya — Pan-Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Hafez Assad built their careers around it.

Whenever Arab leaders failed their people — low literacy, poor health care, general poverty — they distracted attention, wrapping themselves in the flag of Palestinian resistance and pan-Arab nationalism.

Fighting terror from Gaza consumed Israel in its first 20 years. After winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Sinai as part of diplomatic settlements, hoping terror would end. Under the 1993 Israel-PLO accords, Israel handed military control in Gaza to Arafat’s PLO. Terror increased. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel, also evicted its civilians from Gaza in 2005.  Arab terror rose even more.

Hamas beat the PLO in the 2006 elections after its participation was encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yes, it was a bad idea. Hamas then violently evicted the PLO. Gaza again became the main terror base against Israel. Its main domestic product was not locally grown flowers and citrus fruit pioneered by Israeli farmers, but rocket-based terror. Hamas called it muqawwama sarwakhiyya — “rocket-propelled resistance.”

Hamas used its state educational and social networks to mold thousands of hate-filled killers.  From first grade to summer camps, Hamas gave children rifles and taught them to hate Jews, as detailed in the 36-paragraph Hamas Covenant.