EDUCATION Comments turned off

Jacob Howland The Campus Peril to Western Civilization Student and faculty reactions to Hamas’s atrocities demonstrate once and for all the fraud of elite higher education. We must reform our universities—or create new ones.

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-campus-peril-to-western-civilization
When I interviewed in 2022 for the job of Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the just-founded University of Austin (UATX), Pano Kanelos, the university’s founding president, asked me what I thought the new institution’s mission was. “To save civilization,” I said. “And here I thought the mission was to save American higher education,” he replied.

Informed observers have known for some time that our universities are broken. But the cheerleading on American campuses for terrorists who unleashed a pogrom of a magnitude and viciousness not seen since the Holocaust has made it clear that the collapse of higher education imperils Western civilization itself. Without real higher education, we would forget the past and stumble blindly into the future. Without universities worthy of the name, there would be no civilization.

Higher education exists to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge, including the sound judgment and knowledge of the whole we call wisdom. Universities stand at the threshold between past and future, self and society, the eternal verities above and the flow of time below. Their job is to join what would otherwise fall apart: to remember the past, fructify the present, and incubate the future. At their best, they are modern temples of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who looks backward and forward, inward and outward—a symbol of wakeful, vigilant minds that receive tradition with gratitude, seek knowledge with grace, and face challenges with grit.

But in the United States, universities have never been worse than they are today. Barbarians have invaded the temples of teaching and learning, ransacked the sanctuaries, and defiled the sacred scrolls. For decades, students have been steeped in a postmodern intellectual culture of repudiation, relativism, and reductivism. They’ve been taught to “deconstruct” the great books and noble ideals of the West; to regard morality, and even the criteria of scientific truth, as social constructions; and to understand politics and society as “discourses of power” illuminated by the doctrines of “critical theory” and “intersectionality.” Bereft of precious civilizational compasses and maps, they have learned to regard fundamental social relationships as zero-sum games of domination and servitude.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Who Says Hamas Does Not Represent The Palestinians? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20089/hamas-represent-palestinians

The Biden administration’s assertion that Hamas is an insignificant group of terrorists that does not enjoy the support of many Palestinians is not only false; it is dangerously so. This assertion contradicts the reality, which proves that Hamas actually does represent a significant portion of the Palestinians.

This inconvenient reality is based on public opinion polls conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) and the results of elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and university student councils and professional unions. It is also based on mass demonstrations and rallies in support of Hamas before and after the October 7 carnage in which Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and wounded more than 4,000.

The most recent PSR poll, published last month, showed that if new presidential elections were held today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would win 58% of the vote, while Mahmoud Abbas would only receive 37%. Hamas’s “armed struggle” (terrorism) against Israel was supported by 58% of the Palestinian public, the poll showed…

This means that a majority of Palestinians share Hamas’s desire to eliminate Israel as expressed in the terror group’s 1988 charter. The poll also showed that 71% of the Palestinians support the formation of armed groups to murder Israelis.

In the past few months, Hamas-affiliated students won elections at two major Palestinian universities in the West Bank.

“The [university] elections are considered the bellwether of West Bank politics… With no general Palestinian elections on the horizon, student polls are seen as a ‘test for measuring public opinion’…” — Middle East Eye, May 25, 2023.

In 2021, Abbas cancelled elections he had called for the Palestinian Authority presidency and parliament after realizing that his Fatah faction was poised to lose to Hamas, as took place in the 2006 parliamentary election.

If, according to Biden and Blinken, Hamas does not represent the Palestinians, how do they explain the fact that… hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip joined the Hamas terrorists who attacked the Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip?

The Biden administration is presenting a false claim according to which most Palestinians are opposed to Hamas and that Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which rewards terrorists who murder Jews with monthly stipends, is a “peace partner” for Israel. This is a complete distortion of reality and does not represent the truth.

Recently, Abbas reminded everyone that he is an antisemite and a Holocaust denier.

When will Biden and Blinken grasp that there is no difference between the murderous Hamas leaders and Abbas the antisemite? Surely, Biden and Blinken are aware that Abbas has not condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Abbas’s silence is a rambunctious approval of the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis. Let there be no mistake about it: both Hamas and Abbas represent a majority of Palestinians whose goal is to murder Jews and destroy Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The George Floyd, Jr. Narrative Unraveled His demise reminds us that that we live in a country governed by the rule of narrative By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/22/the-george-floyd-jr-narrative-unraveled/

I wonder what Derek Chauvin is thinking these days?

He’s the former Minneapolis cop who became the Scapegoat Number One after George Floyd—sorry, St. George Floyd—died from a Fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest in May 2020.

As all the world knows, that is not how The Narrative tells it. Witness Wikipedia, that Great Repository of Approved Narratives. “George Perry Floyd Jr.,” it begins, “was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020.”

“Murdered,” eh?  “May” have passed a counterfeit bill, you say?

Well, that’s what we were told.

It takes a long time for someone to be canonized in the Catholic Church. There is an official process to be followed. Some miracles have to be recorded. One moves from being denominated a Servus Dei, a “servant of God,” to the status of being Venerabilis, to Beatus, and finally Sanctus. It’s much easier and much quicker with our secular saints. All you need is a festering politically correct grievance, a compliant media, and a terrified justice system.

So it was with the woman-and-drug abusing felon George Perry Floyd Jr. His corpse was not cold before he was elevated to secular sainthood  and became the mascot for the Black Lives Matter hooligans who, over the course of a year or more, inflicted more than $2 billion of property damage, injured or maimed scores of people, and released a mesmerizing, racially fortified toxin into the atmosphere that addled the minds and hearts of all the beautiful people who run the country and from which we have yet to recover fully. Last week, on the occasion of Floyd’s birthday, Joe Biden prayed at the shrine, issuing an emetic White House statement “to honor his life and legacy” and urge us “to redeem the soul of America.”

Back in 2021, Derek Chauvin, along with three of his police colleagues, were offered up as sacrificial lambs by Minneapolis prosecutors. ChaUvin was slapped with federal and well as state convictions and, as I write, is rotting in an Arizona prison for the murder of Floyd.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The media and the Gaza hospital hoax By W.A. Eliot

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/the_media_and_the_gaza_hospital_hoax.html

Conservative media had a field day exposing the MSM on its collective false claim that Israel bombed the Gaza hospital and that 500 died.  It was covered well on AT.  Drew Holden and Thaleigha Rampersad at the Washington Free Beacon supplied the complete list of media outlets that were duped or unquestioningly went along.  Truth won.  Or did it?

When a story like the Gaza hospital bombing comes out, it is the lead on all the networks, the main headline in the large bold font atop the print and internet editions of news sites.  By the time the media get around to their stealth edits, inaccurate corrections on page A24, and 15-second network news retractions, the damage is done and never undone.  The internet does help get the word out, but the half of the populace still relying on TV news, too liberal to visit conservative sites, or too filled with hatred for Israel, will still think that Israel bombed the hospital or at least tries to do such things.

You think I’m kidding?  Recall the al-Dura affair in 2000, in which video captured a Palestinian boy supposedly caught in an Israeli-Palestinian crossfire and allegedly killed by the Israelis, with the picture of him crying while crouching next to his father at a wall behind a barrel still etched in the world’s mind.  But the evidence is overwhelming that the scene was faked, that the boy likely didn’t even die, and that the spliced-and-diced video of Al-Dura shown on France 2 was a travesty.  It led to French court scenes reminiscent of the Dreyfus affair.  In the end truth won, right?  Wrong.  The initial press coverage led directly to the so-called Second Intifada in which 1,000 Israelis and around double that number of Palestinians died.  And to this day much of the world still holds Israel responsible.

Closer to home, the press breathlessly reported over a long period of time on alleged Trump-Russia collusion.  A lot of intrepid investigative work mainly by conservative media finally uncovered that this was a plot concocted by Hillary Clinton and her operatives, who used the Perkins Coie law firm (which at some point set aside office space for FBI participation) as a cutout to hire Christopher Steele of Fusion GPS as a cutout to concoct his infamous dossier implicating Trump.  So truth won, right?  Wrong.  To this day, a large chunk of Americans (if I recall, a recent poll suggested it’s close to 40%) still thinks Trump was a Russian spy, which is bad enough, but not only that, these charges and the Mueller investigation hampered Trump’s first term.  Think of the possibly permanent damage done to our country these last three years due to Trump’s ouster.  They won and truth lost.  Mission accomplished, and no one was even punished.

OPINION Comments turned off

The Management of Savagery: Part II David Martin Jones

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/10/the-management-of-savagery-part-ii/

The dedicated proponents of the anti -Zionist cause in Palestine, Lebanon and across the Middle East have over the last two decades carefully exploited mainstream media outlets such as Sky News, the BBC and CNN, those media organs’ studied neutrality, and the fear of being labelled “Islamophobic”. As  Abu Bakr Naji’s definitive guide to the management of savagery maintained, the Islamist cause  must never overlook the importance of ‘political work’ while also understanding the West’s ‘political game’.[1] The spider’s house of the West is fragile and can fragment. The Management of Savagery thus distinguishes between military strategy and media strategy while planning for the effects of these strategies, as in the wake of a successful attack like the recent barbarous assault on Israel. In particular, the Islamist agenda exploits the West’s open borders, sympathetic media and multicultural tolerance to advance, pro-Palestine and pro-Islamist causes. Sympathetic fifth columnists infiltrate the army, police, civil institutions and, in particular, the media and secondary and tertiary educational institutions. The media and higher education’s woke embrace of the non-Western ‘other’ render them particularly congenial to pro-Palestinian and antisemitic manipulation.

Thus as events in Israel and Gaza unfold, an all too predictable narrative begins to take shape on what Bernard Henri Levy termed the “zombie Left”. Almost as soon as news of the operation occurred, BBC World News trotted out an expert from Chatham House who deplored the Islamist attack but nevertheless contended Israel’s treatment of Palestine and the desperation of its inhabitants apparently left them with little alternative but ‘resistance’. The BBC, of course, eschews the use of the pejorative ‘terror’ to describe the savagery Hamas unleashed. In the ensuing days it became something of a trope in the West’s mainstream media and eleemosynary institutions to opt for moral equivocation and a specious relativism. The attack, soi-disant experts opined, had little to do with ideology; rather, it demonstrated, perhaps too brutally, a necessary reaction to Israeli oppression which the West had for too long duplicitously condoned. Demonstrators immediately appeared outside the Israeli embassy in London chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’. The Scottish National Party refused to raise an Israeli flag outside the Scottish Assembly in Edinburgh. In Sydney a gathering outside the Opera House chanted ‘Gas the Jews’. Meanwhile across the Pacific, more than 30 student organizations at Harvard University endorsed a letter shamelessly blaming Israel for the attacks.

We should recall that before critical race theory there was critical terror theory — a perverse form of deconstruction that found the West, its colonialism, orientalism and Islamophobia responsible for all the problems in the post-Cold War order. This particular species of Western self-loathing first came to the fore in the aftermath of 9/11, but assumed prominence following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Over two decades it has undermined any objective study of terrorism on Western campuses from Aberystwyth in Wales to Queensland in Australia, taking in Harvard on the way. Sedulously promoted across the Anglosphere as a fashionably progressive take on terror that empathises with the misunderstood resistance of the non-West, critical terror theory now permeates not only academe but the mainstream media journalists trained in its discipline over the past twenty years.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden shatters records for worst border with 3.2 million illegal immigrants, 169 terrorism suspects By Stephen Dinan

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/21/biden-shatters-records-worst-border-32-million-ill/

The Biden administration just tallied the worst year in border security history, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s final numbers for fiscal 2023, which showed record numbers of illegal immigrants, terrorism suspects and fentanyl detected.

Customs and Border Protection delivered the numbers in a highly unusual Saturday morning news release.

Border Patrol agents detected 2.1 million illegal immigrants, which was down slightly from 2020, when it reported 2.2 million. But the real action was at official ports of entry — land border crossings and, increasingly, airports, where officers encountered 1.1 million unauthorized migrants.

That’s double the rate of 2022, and it reflects Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ attempt to try to convince illegal immigrants to schedule their arrivals in order to be let in. He had said it would take pressure off the Border Patrol agents, who patrol the boundaries between the crossings, but the numbers suggest the overall flow of people continues to rise unabated.

Troy Miller, acting commissioner at CBP, insisted his agency is on top of things.

“CBP will continue to remain vigilant, making operational adjustments as necessary and enforcing consequences under U.S. immigration law,” he said in a statement announcing the grim new numbers.

The numbers will likely fuel a push among House Republicans to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, who along with Mr. Biden erased most of the previous administration’s get-tough policies, with the resulting surge in illegal activity.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate of Hate: Greta Thunberg Joins Pro-Hamas Resistance Adult child activist promotes Jew hatred on social media Andrew Stiles

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://freebeacon.com/culture/climate-of-hate-greta-thunberg-joins-pro-hamas-resistance/

Greta Thunberg, the 20-year-old child activist best known for skipping school to protest so-called climate change, dabbled in anti-Semitism on Friday.

• The celebrity truant held a “Stand with Gaza” sign in a photo posted on social media, the initial version of which also included a blue octopus plush toy resembling the anti-Semitic imagery in Nazi propaganda.

• Thunberg deleted the original photo, claiming to be “completely unaware” of the common anti-Semitic trope. Nevertheless, her revised post included links to a number of so-called Palestinian activist groups that defended the Hamas terrorist attack that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians earlier this month.

What they’re saying: One of the groups Thunberg promoted, the Palestinian Youth Movement, described the mass-murder of Israeli civilians, including children, as “the active decolonization of Palestinian land led by the Palestinian resistance” and repeated the false claim that “over 500 Palestinians were martyred after Israeli forces bombed Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.”

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Will Never Forgive Israel for Not Bombing That Hospital By Becket Adams

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/the-media-will-never-forgive-israel-for-not-bombing-that-hospital/

“It’s worth noting a final word about the Barzilai Medical Center in southern Israel, which was struck by a rocket launched from Gaza on October 11. Fortunately, the rocket didn’t kill anyone because the hospital was moved underground. You likely didn’t hear anything in the U.S. press about this attack.Now, ask yourself this: Why?”

Reporters and pundits mishandled the Gaza hospital story because they wanted so badly for it to be true.

Few things are as dangerous as the newsroom that wants a story to be true.

An overzealous editor is how the really dangerous stuff gets printed.

The free press is supposed to operate from a set of principles, working within established guardrails to spare readers the publication of false information, including hoaxes and lies that may incite violence or escalate preexisting hostilities. All bets are off, however, when news editors have a deep-seated psychological need for a story to be true. And on this score, American media failed miserably this past week when major outlets falsely reported an Israeli missile strike had hit the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, leveling it completely and killing at least 500 civilians.

The story was suspect from the get-go, considering the sole source of the claim was the Gaza health ministry — in other words, Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization that runs Gaza. But this didn’t matter. The U.S. press wanted the story to be true, as evidenced by the indefensibly slipshod and irresponsible coverage that clogged up newsfeeds around the world.

There was indeed an explosion in the vicinity of the hospital, but the facility still stands. It was not leveled. It wasn’t even struck directly. Whatever exploded did so in a nearby parking lot. The civilian death toll from the explosion is estimated to be “50 at most,” a European intelligence officer told Agence France-Presse. Contrary to Hamas’s claims, there is no evidence of an Israeli missile strike. In fact, separate assessments by both Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies suggest the damage was caused by the failed launch of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket in Gaza, producing an explosion at ground level that killed people gathered near but not in the hospital.

Yet these are the news headlines readers saw this week:

“Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say,” declared the New York Times’ breaking news headline. Inexplicably, the photo that went with the front-page headline showed a different building damaged by a completely unrelated airstrike, though one would obviously assume the photo was that of the “destroyed” Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.

Later, after the New York Times decided to do the bare minimum required of entry-level journalism, the story’s headline was amended to the slightly less terrible “At least 500 dead in strike on Gaza hospital, Palestinians say.” Even after that, the headline was amended once more to “At least 500 dead in blast at Gaza hospital, Palestinians say.” Note the subtle change from “strike on” to “blast at.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Americans’ Trust In The Media Hits All-Time Low In Latest I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/23/americans-trust-in-the-media-hits-all-time-low-in-latest-ii-tipp-poll/

Do the major media outlets in the U.S., online, on-air or in print, care whether their audience trusts them or not? It certainly doesn’t seem to be the case today. Americans’ trust in the U.S. media has plunged to its lowest levels ever, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll data show.

Both big, mainstream “traditional” media outlets and mid-sized “alternative” media outlets continue to suffer from declining revenues as their audience and readership numbers shrink. The October I&I/TIPP Poll shows that a loss in underlying trust is a key cause of media industry decline.

The poll was taken Sept. 27-29 from among 1,378 adults around the country and has a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.

Each month, I&I/TIPP asks two questions:

First, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the traditional or established news media (Example: Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, CBS News, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

Second, “Generally speaking, how much trust do you have in the alternative news media (Example: New York Post, Washington Times, NewsMax, The Daily Caller, RealClearPolitics, etc.) to report the news accurately and fairly?”

There is no good news to report to the media. Both the traditional media group and the alternative media group hit new all-time lows this month, as readers, viewers and listeners became increasingly disgruntled by what they consider to be biased and inaccurate reporting.

For the major media, 63% of those responding said they either had “little trust” (29%) or “no trust at all” (34%). Just 30% said they had either “a lot of trust” (8%) or “quite a bit of trust” (22%). Just 6% said they were “not sure.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestine: A Cause or a State? by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20081/palestine-cause-state

Why did Hamas trigger its attack out of the blue? Hamas apologists repeat the usual shibboleths: occupation, colonial settlements, expulsions, Apartheid, the two-state solution.

A closer look, however, shows that none of those “reasons” could explain, let alone justify, why Hamas did what it did on October 7.

The [Palestinian Authority] and Hamas have preferred to pose as guardians of the flame rather than builders of state structures…. For a brief period, 2007-2013, the PA under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad tried to promote the state-building culture as opposed to the chest-beating posture of “the cause”. But both Hamas and the PA did all they could to derail Fayyad’s project.

The “Gaza first” scheme exposed the concept of “security through evacuation” as a dangerous myth that replaced another myth: land-for-peace, which has offered what amounts to lukewarm and always reversible peace.

All along, Israeli leaders tried to jump through one hoop after another to avoid seriously dealing with the “two-state” formula, which the United States and its Western allies promoted regardless of its lack of support among Israelis and Palestinians.

[T]he “Palestinian cause” [is] used, and abused, as a means of legitimizing regimes as diverse as the Islamic Republic of Iran; the AKP in Turkey and, believe it or not, the leftist outfit in Colombia. And that not to mention “return ticket revolutionaries” in the West who draw voyeuristic pleasure from watching others kill and die for “great causes.”

Throughout the Cold War, ignoring the geopolitical dimension of the Israel-Palestine issue encouraged wild-goose diplomatic chasings most notoriously symbolized by the “two-state” formula. Today, the same error is repeated by focusing almost exclusively on Hamas without asking who is funding, training, arming and manipulating Hamas in the name of “clash of civilizations”.

The current tragedy has shattered the status quo that took shape in the aftermath of the Cold War. Attempts at reviving it in one form or another would only provide a prelude to even bigger tragedies.