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Can Anyone Give An Example Of A Muslim Country Treating Members Of Another Religion Appropriately? Francis Menton

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fcf96971c9

On and after October 7 the world has been treated to images of Hamas terrorists engaging in the most horrific acts against Israeli civilians, including even elderly people and babies. Surely all civilized people would react to these crimes with revulsion and outrage? To the contrary, the last several weeks have seen massive pro-Hamas demonstrations around the world, including on campuses of elite universities and in major cities like London, Paris, Washington, D.C., and New York.

Rationales that I have seen to justify Hamas’s conduct have included that Israel is supposedly an “apartheid state,” that Israel engages in “genocide,” and that the Israelis are “settler colonialists.” In each case the words used as accusations against Israel are completely detached from their usual meaning, or indeed from any meaning. Certainly, much that Israel has done over the years could be subject to fair criticism. But “apartheid”? “Genocide”? Ridiculous. “Settler colonialism”? I have no idea what that even means.

Here in the U.S. we have a well-established constitutional order of freedom of religion. People practice dozens of different religions, and members of one religion, and also the government, do not prevent or restrict the practice of other religions by other people. That was not an easy order to establish, but we have established it (at least for now), and it enables people who have come from all over the world and from many different religions to live among each other in peace.

The Muslim countries have no such principles. As far as I can determine, the record of Muslim countries with regard to treatment of members of other religions is universally abysmal, in every case far worse than anything Israel can possibly be accused of. Yet somehow in the torrent of criticism of Israel for “apartheid” or “genocide,” this subject never comes up.

So I thought it would be useful to put together a small round-up of treatment of members of minority religions in Muslim countries. I will focus on the countries of North Africa, and on their treatment of their Jewish populations, because that information is particularly relevant to the situation involving Israel today. The North African countries once had substantial and thriving Jewish communities, none of which exist any more. Nor was the abysmal treatment by the Muslims limited to Jews. Similar (if perhaps not quite as bad) treatment has befallen members of other religions like Christians or Baha’is by Muslims both in North Africa and also in places like Pakistan or Iran or Nigeria.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sarah Schutte:Rothman: We’re Seeing ‘Some of the Most Grotesque, Overt, Unselfconscious Displays of Antisemitism That I Have Witnessed in My Entire Lifetime’

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rothman-were-seeing-some-of-the-most-grotesque-overt-unselfconscious-displays-of-antisemitism-that-i-have-witnessed-in-my-entire-lifetime/

National Review senior writer Noah Rothman, on Tuesday’s episode of The Editors podcast, said antisemitism in the West is reaching levels he’s never before seen. The discussion followed the killing of a Jewish counter-protester in Los Angeles over the weekend.

“Attacks on Jews, for being Jews, are up by 388 percent in the last month,” he said. “That’s an estimate, so we don’t know. But it would comport with what we’re seeing.”

Rothman added, “We’ve seen acts of property destruction, specifically Hitlerian threats against lawmakers, ritualistic vandalism. This is all an act of intimidation and a sort of a rite, a ritual that summons in the people who engage in this, the will to engage in murderous violence.”

These acts, he said, amount to “some of the most grotesque, overt, unselfconscious displays of antisemitism that I have witnessed in my entire lifetime.” He noted that even New York City, with its large Jewish population, is hosting rallies “where people are chanting, ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ and, ‘There’s only one solution to the Jewish problem.’”

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SHOCK — One In Five Democrats Side With Hamas: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/08/shock-one-in-five-democrats-side-with-hamas-ii-tipp-poll/

When it comes to the Israel-Hamas war, Americans have made a clear choice: a significant majority support Israel, not Hamas, while an even larger majority now call antisemitism a “serious” problem, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll reveals.

But a shockingly high 20% of Democrats say they support Hamas in the current conflict, despite reports of blood-curdling barbarism committed against innocent Israeli men, women, and children. Just over half of Democrats say they support Israel.

Amid the backdrop of the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, I&I/TIPP asked Americans this question: “Generally speaking, in the Israel-Hamas conflict, do you side more with Israel or Hamas?” The national online poll of 1,400 adults was taken from Nov. 1-3, with a margin-of-error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

Of those responding, 58% sided with Israel, while just 11% supported Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip on Israel’s southern border. But there was a big unknown, given the polarizing effect the attack by Hamas (which killed 1,400 mostly civilian noncombatants, including women, children, and babies) had on public opinion: 31% “weren’t sure.”

The political split was fairly wide, though all three major political groupings in the U.S. supported Israel by 50% or higher. The results include Democrats (54% Israel support, 20% Hamas support, 26% not sure), Republicans (71% Israel support, 7% Hamas support, 22% not sure), and independents (50% Israel support, 6% Hamas support, 44% not sure).

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jewish Students Meet Hostility at Yale A university-backed event promotes denial and justifications of Hamas’s atrocities. By Sahar Tartak and Netanel Crispe

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-students-meet-hostility-at-yale-israel-hamas-violence-terrorism-anti-semitism-1d6f81da?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

New Haven, Conn.

When we found out about Monday’s anti-Israel event at Yale, “Gaza Under Siege,” we scrambled to produce fliers offering some context. They detailed Hamas’s atrocities, its anti-Jewish charter, its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Our classmates awaiting the event weren’t interested. They yelled, “don’t take the paper!” and tore it up or threw it back at us.

Organizers refused us entry because we weren’t registered but waved others through who also weren’t on the list. The lecture hall was filled, and we resorted to sitting outside and pressing our ears against the door to listen.

What we heard was two hours of denial, lies and incitement. Speakers referred to the atrocities of Oct. 7 in the sanitized language of “civilians killed,” not beheaded, raped or kidnapped. They called the terrorist group “militant,” and one observed that “violent resistance movements often emerge in colonized spaces.”

Nobody mentioned the Hamas charter’s call to “fight Jews and kill them,” but somebody asserted that Israel aims to “inflict as much harm, damage, and death as possible.” One panelist remarked, “The one most important part of our conversation here today is that Israel is still occupying Gaza.” Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

One of the speakers flatly declared: “No matter what the solution is—a two-state solution or a one-state solution—the Israeli state cannot remain the state of the Jewish people.”

This event had broad institutional support from Yale. “Gaza Under Siege” was co-sponsored by the American Studies, Anthropology and Religious Studies departments; the programs in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Center for Middle East Studies; the Black Feminist Collective (co-directed by the head of Pierson College); the Ethnography Hub; the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; and Yalies4Palestine. The head of Jonathan Edwards College promoted it in a weekly email. The heads of Yale’s colleges had previously been instructed not to advertise a post-Oct. 7 Shabbat dinner invitation. That event was controversial, an administrator told Ms. Tartak.

MEDIA Comments turned off

NBC Quietly Changes “Man Dies After Hitting Head” Headline on Death of Elderly Jewish Man by Pro-Palestine Protestor By Margaret Flavin

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/11/nbc-alters-headline-after-criticism-classic-msm-gaslighting/

On Monday, an elderly Jewish man, 65-year-old Paul Kessler, succumbed to injuries sustained at a pro-Palestinian protest over the weekend after he was hit in the head by a pro-Palestinian protester.

Despite the extensive media reports about the deadly incident, NBC News’ headline is classic Mainstream Media gaslighting.  The original headline read, “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.”

Keller did not just “hit his head.” He was attacked by a pro-Palestine protestor and assaulted with a megaphone.

The vicious blow caused Keller to fall to the ground where suffered an additional blow to the head, compounding his injuries.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that Kessler, “was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)” during which he “fell backwards and struck his head on the ground.”

The statement added that the “Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the cause of death to be blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide.”

Mr. Keller died from homicide, not from “hitting his head” in a passive fall.

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Bari Weiss: Is Campus Rage Fueled by Middle Eastern Money? According to a new report, at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes.

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-roots-of-campus-hatred?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, it has been hard to miss the explosion of antisemitic hate that has gripped college campuses across the country. At Cornell, a student posted a call “to follow [Jews] home and slit their throats,” and a professor said the terror attack “energized” and “exhilarated” him. At Harvard, a mob of students besieged an Israeli student, surrounding him as they bellowed “shame, shame, shame.” At dozens of other campuses, students gathered to celebrate Hamas. 

The response from school administrations has been alarming. With few exceptions, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, university presidents issued equivocal statements about the initial attack. Some professors even celebrated it. And the focus on the part of administration bureaucrats has been on protecting the students tearing down posters and being shamed for doing so.

Where did all of this hatred come from is a question worth pondering. As Rachel Fish and others have documented, for several decades a toxic worldview—morally relativist, anti-Israel, and anti-American—has been incubating in “area studies” departments and social theory programs at elite universities. Whole narratives have been constructed to dehumanize Israelis and brand Israel as a “white, colonial project” to be “resisted.” The students you see in the videos circulating online have been marinating in this ideology, which can be defined best by what it’s against: everything Western.

Many are rightly questioning how it got this bad. How did university leaders come to eulogize, rather than put a stop to, campus hate rallies and antisemitic intimidation? Why are campus leaders now papering over antisemitism? How could institutions supposedly committed to liberal values be such hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism?

In large part, it is a story of the power of ideas—in this case, terrible ones—and how rapidly they can spread. But it is also a story of an influence campaign by actors far outside of the university campus aimed at pouring fuel on a fire already raging inside.

We’ve known for some time about the links between anti-Israel campus agitators, like Students for Justice in Palestine, and shady off-campus anti-Israel activist networks. 

But thanks to the work of the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a nonprofit research center, we now have a clearer picture of the financial forces at play at a higher, institutional level.

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The Re-Education Camps of Middle East Studies by Ruth King

Posted By on November 8th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-re-education-camps-of-middle-east-studies/
Manufacturing Jew-haters.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao Zedong declared that “bourgeois intellectuals” could not be trusted as educators; “politically correct” students and teachers should be in charge. Thousands of high school students were sent to camps to be re-educated and embrace communist ideology. Tuition was free.

In America today, parents fork as much as tens of thousands of dollars annually for the same kind of campus re-education, including the communist ideology.

When it comes to Middle East Departments, re-education has been startlingly successful thanks to MESA (the Middle East Studies Association), which could be described as an education cartel that controls what is taught regarding Israel.

If you don’t belong to MESA it is extremely difficult to get employment or tenure in Middle East Study departments in all American colleges and universities, but it is equally difficult to join MESA if you don’t promote their narrative about Israel.

Currently, even the diminishing number of students who have a friendly attitude to Israel with some knowledge of its religious roots and historical and legitimate sovereignty, are quickly disabused of that and indoctrinated with the false narrative that Israel is a colonialist state which dispossessed an indigenous Arab population and now conducts oppression and “apartheid,” justifying Arab resentment. Their success in promoting this fake history is evident in the pro-Hamas rallies ignited on so many campuses recently.

In 1966, Bernard Lewis was a founding member of MESA, but in 2007 he withdrew when it increasingly adopted an anti-Israel bias. If one goes to their website, Lewis is not even mentioned as a founding member.

MESA’s Mission Statement sounds benign enough:

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom in accordance with its status as a 501(c)(3) scientific, educational, literary, and charitable organization.

In 2023 about 14.2 million students are enrolled in an undergraduate program. MESA itself does not reach an overwhelming number of students but their professors do and they get their marching orders from the annual meetings. And they influence students in many departments.

Their 57th annual meeting was held at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal, Québec, Canada from November 2-5, 2023. The conference was the largest of its kind, with an estimated 2,200 attendees, 370 sessions, and nearly 50 exhibitors.

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Today’s Nazis Are Hamas Gays for Gay-Killers, Jews for Jew-Killers, Feminists for Wife-Beating, Progressives for Fascists by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on November 7th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20126/hamas-nazis

[B]igots hate Jews and their nation-state. This has nothing to do with support for the Palestinian people, who are horribly oppressed by Hamas. If they really wanted to support the Palestinian people, they would be demonstrating for Palestinian freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom not to be used as a human shield, due process, equal justice under law, and especially freedom from the corrupt and repressive governance of their own leaders, some now safe from the devastation they began from their five-star hotels in Qatar.

Nor does it reflect support for stateless, oppressed or occupied national groups in general. These selective bigots are silent about the stateless Kurds , the oppressed Uyghurs and other groups that deserve their support. They only focus on the Palestinians because they are allegedly oppressed by Jews. It is hatred of Jews, not love of the Palestinians or other groups that motivates these bigots.

Let us remember that these shows of support for Hamas began before Israel even responded to the Hamas barbarity. They were shows of support for what Hamas did to innocent Jews: rapes, beheadings, torture, mass murder and kidnapping.

Many university students and faculty, not only in Germany but at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown, supported Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Today’s Nazis are Hamas. Today’s enablers of Nazism are the students and others who support Hamas. History will judge them the way history has judged Nazi collaborators.

Among the groups that have supported the rapes, beheadings, burning alive, mass murder and kidnappings of Jews by Hamas have been some that purport to speak for gays, Jews, feminists and progressives. If any of these groups were actually to travel to Gaza, they would be murdered by Hamas.

Hamas has no tolerance for gays, Jews, feminists or progressives. Indeed, among the people beheaded, raped, murdered and kidnapped were gays, Jews who support Palestinians, feminists, progressives and non-Jews. None of that matters to Hamas. If you are a Jew or an Israeli or just happen to be in the way, you are a target of their barbarity.

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What is the ‘Proportionate’ Response to Terrorism? Only Israel is expected to meet this fake standard of warfare. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on November 7th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-is-the-proportionate-response-to-terrorism/

On October 7th, 2023 – a date that will live in infamy – an army of bloodthirsty Hamas jihadists swarmed into Israel and laid waste to a reported 1400 innocent, unarmed civilians including women, children, the disabled, and old people, committing war crimes of a sickening nature that historian Victor Davis Hanson has labeled “pre-civilizational.”

In response to the terror assault, the Jewish state justifiably declared war on Hamas, with Israeli leader Bibi Netanyahu vowing that every single member of the terror organization is now a dead man walking. And right on cue, the mainstream (read: left-wing) media, left-wing politicians, and globalist institutions like the farcical United Nations Security Council that are packed with enemies of the Western world, demanded that Israel exhibit “restraint” in its response and refrain from “disproportionate violence.”

This curious notion of “proportionate response” comes up every single time Israel is hit with a terror attack. Has a single one of the aforementioned talking heads or politicos or global entities ever called for Hamas terrorists to show “restraint”?

What retaliation is “proportionate” to the burning alive of families, the gang rape of female prisoners, the beheading of babies and toddlers, the torture of old people, and the kidnapping of hundreds more who live in terror that their beheading will be live-streamed on the internet? What would the anti-Israel Left consider an acceptably “proportionate” response to those atrocities? Would they be satisfied if the Israeli Defense Force limited itself to a surprise invasion of Gaza, burning Palestinian families alive, raping Palestinian women, beheading Palestinian infants, torturing Palestinian grandmothers, and kidnapping hundreds of Palestinians? Because technically, that would be proportionate.

Of course not. The same Western leftists who celebrated the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th would have apoplectic fits of outrage if Israel ever perpetrated a single one of these war crimes. The revulsion and shock these hypocrites should have felt over Israel’s victims are reserved only for the “oppressed” so-called Palestinians. Let’s be real: the only response to Hamas terrorism which the Left considers appropriate for Israel is for the Jewish state to sit on its hands and submit to its own extermination.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

After These Disastrous Polls, We Hope To God Dems Stick With Biden

Posted By on November 7th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/07/after-these-disastrous-polls-how-long-will-dems-stick-with-biden/

In our decades of experience covering politics, we’ve never seen a poll as devastating to an incumbent president as the one CBS News/YouGov poll published over the weekend.  

The short version is that more voters think they would be better off if Donald Trump returns to the White House than they would if Joe Biden stays there. Think about that for a moment.  

Then there’s the New York Times/Sienna College poll, also published over the weekend, showing that Trump leads Biden in five key swing states, and by wide margins: 10 points in Nevada, 6 points in Georgia, 5 in Arizona and Michigan, and 4 points in Pennsylvania. 

The Times poll also found that 59% disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president, and 71% said he was too old, while only 38% said Trump was too old.  

Both polls have sent the mainstream press scrambling to reassure their readers that either the polls don’t mean what they seem, that Biden can “improve his position,” or that, fingers crossed, Trump gets convicted. (The New York Times Monday story carried the headline: “Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might.”) 

But of the two, the CBS News/YouGov poll is far worse for Biden. Instead of just asking who they’d support, CBS News asked likely voters a series of questions about who they think they’d be better off with in the years ahead, Biden or Trump.