ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Is Implementing Sinwar’s Genocidal Strategy by Alan M. Dershowitz and Andrew Stein

Posted By on October 29th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21065/hamas-media-genocidal-strategy

Although they could easily distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths, Hamas refuses to do so.

They [Hamas] fail to acknowledge that many of these so-called children were also combatants.

They do the same with women, conveying the impression that only men are terrorists.

Without the support of the media, this strategy would not succeed.

And useful ignoramuses on university campuses, along with bigots in international organizations, falsely accuse Israel of genocide, despite the successful efforts of the IDF to reduce civilian casualties to the minimum possible….

In the absence of an honest accounting, the media will continue to do Sinwar’s nefarious work in increasing Palestinian casualties in order to increase the pressure on Israel.

Sadly, the media’s dangerous cooperation with terrorists tells us more about them than about the war about which they purport to be “reporting.”

Following the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, documentary evidence has emerged confirming what many observers already knew: namely, that Sinwar weaponized the death of Gazan civilians, especially women and children.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Ordeal and Triumph of Mr. Netanyahu

Posted By on October 29th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/the-ordeal-and-triumph-of-mr-netanyahu/

https://victorhanson.com/the-ordeal-and-triumph-of-mr-netanyahu/

Ordeal

After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021.

The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.

Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.

Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.

Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.

Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.

And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence.

Massive immigration from the Middle East into Europe and the United States—spiked by hundreds of thousands of oil-subsidized foreign students in Western universities, coupled with the post-George Floyd woke/DEI hysterias—had made European and American political parties unapologetically not just anti-Israel but now increasingly anti-Semitic as well.

Western governments at times seemed far more terrified of their own Muslim citizens, foreign residents, radicalized students, and left-wing activists of their political parties than they were of any terrorist threats emanating from Iran and its surrogates.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

“We Are in The Midst of a War of Revival,” Netanyahu Tells Knesset “Our victory will not be just for us, it will be for all of humanity,” he says Ira Stoll

Posted By on October 29th, 2024

https://www.theeditors.com/p/we-are-in-the-midst-of-a-war-of-revival?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

Yesterday Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, in Hebrew, offering context and a progress report on the war. At least one longtime nonpartisan observer of Netanyahu’s long career described it as superb and one of Netanyahu’s best speeches. An official English translation isn’t yet publicly available but thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence I was able to muster this rough but fluid and rapid translation of the speech. If readers have corrections to the text, by all means send them along and I will update.

The honorable President Yitzhak Herzog; Distinguished Speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana; Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Justice Yitzhak Amit and his wife Rivka; dozens of Knesset members; Leader of the Opposition, Member of Knesset Yair Lapid, Members of Knesset, my brothers and sisters, To the bereaved families, relatives of the abducted men and women who stand relentlessly before our eyes, distinguished guests, everyone. We are in the midst of a war of revival. 

On Simchat Torah, on October 7th, a year ago, we suffered a severe blow, but we got back on our feet. We did not break, we did not fall apart, and not only did we not surrender, we launched a powerful counter-offensive against our attackers, a war that is changing the face of the Middle East. 

From then until today, alongside the terrible pain that is the lot of the entire nation, we are defending ourselves with high spirits and supreme determination for the revival of Israel. 

Whoever attacked us brought upon themselves an unprecedented disaster. 

There is a line of similarity in the current war to the War of Independence. Then we faced seven Arab countries, and today we are facing seven fronts of terror. 

But I must emphasize, today we are facing a completely different challenge, against a cruel and barbaric enemy that threatens not only us, it threatens the entire Middle East, it threatens the entire world. Its evil intentions are to kill, destroy, and annihilate. The axis of fanatical evil, led by Iran, which has killed thousands in the past year with its cruelty, threatens to destroy our country and threatens to capture more and more territories. It seeks to take over our region by force and from here threaten first of all the West, not only the West, first of all the West. 

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Washington Post Declines to Endorse for President, and Civilization Melts Jeffrey Blehar

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-washington-post-declines-to-endorse-for-president-and-civilization-melts/?utm_source=recirc-

The Washington Post — newspaper of the federal clerisy, official organ of the Resistance, the place where “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — announced this afternoon that not only will it not be endorsing either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president in 2024, but that it will never make an endorsement again. (This is truly a shame; as a colleague lamented to me, now I guess we’ll just never know how these people really felt about 2024.)

The reactions across media have ranged from disgust to outright garment-rending peals of agony — resignations have already been filed — and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be laughing until tears roll down your cheeks at every last one of them. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few, if only to illustrate the absurdity of it all.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, however: This was a business decision by Jeff Bezos. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis wrote the piece announcing the Post’s decision not to endorse (erm . . . “change its policy going forward,” that is), but all other reporting (including, hilariously, the Post’s own employees’ union) clearly indicates that this is a directive from on high, one that Lewis was willing to go along with. I think I know why — and it’s not the dull and obvious answer of “Bezos just worries about Trump regulators hurting Amazon” — but hold that thought for now.

Because before that we should note that Bezos wasn’t actually the first to act on this. Only yesterday, the media world flew into a similar outrage over the owner of the Los Angeles Times blocking his editorial board from issuing a presidential endorsement. The editorial page editor resigned after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong asked the board to — this is not a joke, dear readers — write a sober “pros and cons” analysis of each candidate instead. (I am deeply disappointed myself, because nobody should have been denied the comedy of reading the Times rate Donald Trump’s good qualities.)

The reactions to the Times kerfuffle were muted, because to be perfectly honest, nobody reads or cares about the Los Angeles Times. But the news from the Post was greeted with a collective gran mal seizure from online media lefties. There are simply too many denunciations from the cheap seats to mention here, but internally it was ugly: Editorial board member Robert Kagan announced his immediate resignation, while former editor Marty Baron tweeted “this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty” (leading one to assume he wrote the Post’s current masthead slogan, among other things). Meanwhile, notoriously surly race-harridan Karen Attiah first fell into stunned silence on Twitter, tweeting only “Jesus Christ” and “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism by Eric Kaufmann

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

Woke is not a fad but a cultural revolution—a movement that can only be stopped by a drastic intervention in our institutions and culture.

We in the West are in the third wave of cultural-left ideological enthusiasm. Each “Awokening” has crested, fallen a little, consolidated, then surged again to reach a higher level. The cumulative result is an elite creed which has produced a crime wave, a worsening education system, chaos at the border, and social division. Fired by a cultural socialism that puts equal results and emotional protection for minorities at the center of their moral universe, today’s young people are twice as intolerant of conservative speech as older generations. These young people will be the median voters and employees of tomorrow, leading and controlling the country. Woke cultural socialism is not the classical liberalism of the American Constitution, but a modern “majorities bad, minorities good” Left-liberalism. It is powered by a set of ‘liberal’ emotional attachments rather than liberal principles. These underpin a moral panic about whites and males combined with a starry-eyed patronizing approach to minorities.

Today’s woke extremism is not a repudiation of liberalism, but a perverse extension of it. Our only way out is to use elected, constitutional, government power to break the grip of wokeness in our institutions and schools, steering them toward neutrality and classical liberalism. To do so, the conservative and moderate majority must place culture front and center and spare no effort to win the battle of ideas. Nothing less than the future of our civilization depends on it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We live under a tyranny of the self-righteous From the Middle East to climate change, every issue is now a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Patrick West

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/25/we-live-under-a-tyranny-of-the-self-righteous/

We no longer live in an age of moral relativism, but one of moral absolutism.

That’s one observation made by Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann in his latest book, Taboo, published this year. It’s an arresting inversion of a long-held view. Everyone today does indeed seem to know what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’.

But it also makes it hard to square the argument that postmodernism is at the root of our ethical woes and moral vacuum. Rather than living in a state of doubt and ambivalence, as postmodernism’s most optimistic advocates argued in the 1990s, we now actually inhabit a world where people cleave to firmly held truths and fight over them with righteous fury.

This can be seen most evidently in the present day over Israel and the Middle East. For many, the Israelis – and very often, by extension, the Jews – are the personification of evil. Hence, the precipitous rise of virulent anti-Semitism and of correlating sympathy for the Palestinians. In the minds of many, this is a war of good against evil. The Palestinian flag has itself become a universal symbol of goodness. And when you feel you have good on your side, any sort of appalling or belligerent behaviour or words are permissible.

This Manichean viewpoint is replicated in matters over the environment. Here, those who supposedly have right on their side deem it acceptable to resort to any sort of anti-social behaviour because it’s for a ‘good cause’. Self-righteousness is an intoxicating sensation and a self-perpetuating one. The self-righteous become consumed by their own sense of power. Elsewhere in this regard, others abide by the creed that race determines everything. Others hold to the inviolable sanctity of trans rights.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why the ‘Nazi’ Slur Has No Power The accusations against President Trump fall on deaf ears because the political left has spent the last several decades ensuring that no one takes such allegations seriously. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/26/why-the-nazi-slur-has-no-power/

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi even. And you don’t have to take my word for it. The entirety of the political and media establishments is saying as much. The Atlantic says so. Vice President Kamala Harris says so. Even Hillary Clinton says so. The closing argument of this election, it seems, is that nothing matters except that Donald Trump is Hitler reincarnated.

The problem for the Democratic candidate and her supporters is that nobody cares. This “case” against Donald Trump won’t sway a single vote.

To be clear, it’s not that nobody would care if they had reason to, but they don’t have a reason. The accusations against President Trump fall on deaf ears because the political left has spent the last several decades—and the last couple of centuries, in some cases—ensuring that no one takes such allegations seriously.

For starters, the left has a “boy who cried wolf” problem. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to Democrats when they prattle on about Republicans being fascists because they have done so for almost as long as anyone can remember. Various wags on social media have insisted that Democrats have compared “every Republican since Reagan” to Hitler. In truth, it goes back even further than that, to the dawn of the modern GOP. As Steven Hayward noted ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s famous convention speech, even he was “Hitler”:

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.”
Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins: Goldwater’s election “would bring about a police state.”
California Governor Pat Brown: Goldwater’s acceptance speech “had the stench of fascism…. All we needed to hear was ‘Heil Hitler.’”
Jackie Robinson: “I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
San Francisco Mayor John Shelley: The Republicans “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”

None of this is to say that a wolf will never, ever appear on the political scene. Rather, it’s to say that because of the left’s fecklessness, if one does, no one will ever recognize it as such.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Oliver Traldi Who the Woke Are A new book delivers keen insights into the human condition while speaking directly to concrete social phenomena.

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-we-have-never-been-woke-by-musa-al-gharbi

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Can the Department of Education Be Used for Good? By Peter Wood

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/can-the-department-of-education-be-used-for-good/

Can the U.S. Department of Education be put to good use? Forty-six years of experience — it opened its doors in 1980 — have persuaded many Americans that we would be better off without this arm of government. But efforts to amputate it, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s attempt in 1981, have failed. It is a lot easier to persuade Congress to add to the national bureaucracy than to take away an entrenched instrument of state. 

Dislike of ED has many tributaries but one main source: the belief that education is something properly left to students, to families, and to local institutions — not the federal government. ED got much of its initial support from special interest groups representing teachers, and it continues to this day to favor programs that benefit teachers and educational bureaucrats over the needs of the citizenry. 

A concise summary of this indictment can be found in Lindsey Burke’s essay in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Supporters of Kamala Harris, of course, have excoriated Project 2025 and called out Burke’s essay in particular for calling for the abolition of ED. Donald Trump, moreover, has distanced himself from Project 2025 and never shown interest in uprooting ED.

This leaves open the possibility of attempting to put ED to good use if Trump manages to take back the White House. What might that look like? Can it be done? 

The guiding principle of such an effort must surely be that education serves a real national purpose. As soon as that door is cracked open, all manner of well-meaning (and some not so well-meaning) reformers come crowding in. Some say national purpose is now best defined as “anti-racism,” and ED does its part by advancing the DEI agenda. Others say our national purpose is the pursuit of “social justice,” and ED can advance this by dismantling the system that privileges the American middle class. 

Those are two of ways in which the national purpose of American education is subverted. There are plenty of others, but I want to focus on what I take to be the genuine national purpose of education, and that is to sustain the nation. We need our schools and our schooling (in whatever form it takes) to prepare young people to play positive and meaningful parts as citizens of our self-governing republic. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian Missiles Hit Europe: Europe Does Nothing by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 26th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21048/iranian-missiles-hit-europe

Iran’s Islamist regime has never made a secret of its ambitions. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who seized power following the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and established the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, said: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

Ignoring the warning signs will only make the price Europe pays even higher.

The question is, how much more aggression will Europe tolerate before it recognizes the full extent of the threat?

How come Europeans do not seem as distressed about the deaths of civilians in Ukraine as in Lebanon and Gaza?

All the EU seems to do is issue statements of condemnation against Israel, which is sacrificing the lives of its people to save these sanctimonious ingrates.

The first step should be to formally designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its elite Quds Force as terrorist organizations. This would send a powerful signal that Europe is no longer willing to tolerate Iran’s military and ideological expansion, and it would empower law enforcement across the continent to act decisively against Iranian operatives.

Europe should also take a bold step of shutting down all Iranian embassies and consulates on its soil.

Europe should sever all trade relations with Iran. Every euro that flows into Iran is likely being funneled into Tehran’s military machine and its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The EU also needs to be prepared to form a coalition to back up its words with military action. Continuing to sit passively while Iranian missiles and drones rain down on a European nation is not a strategy; it is a surrender

If Europe finds itself too hesitant to confront the Iranian regime directly, it should at the very least stand by those who are fighting the Iranian regime and its proxies. Israel has taken the lead in confronting Iranian aggression in the Middle East. Rather than undermining Israel for defending itself and the West against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, the EU should do everything it can support these heroes. Abandoning Israel while it fights Iranian-backed terror only weakens Europe and plays into the hands of everyone working to bring it down.

By responding with empty words as Iranian missiles hit European soil, the EU is essentially green-lighting Tehran to escalate its aggression. The lessons of Nazi Germany are there for everyone to see.

The time has come for Europe to support those risking their lives to take down this terror regime before they get a nuclear bomb.

Most grateful of all would be the people of Iran.

The European powers’ current approach to Iran is uncomfortably reminiscent of how, in the 1930s, they dealt with Nazi Germany.

European democracies, choosing appeasement over confrontation, turned a blind eye to Hitler’s rising aggression. This indulgence, not surprisingly, simply emboldened the Nazis, and led to the horrors of World War II.