ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Northwestern Shows Universities How to Fight Jew-Hate An 88% drop in documented incidents of anti-Semitic discrimination. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/northwestern-shows-universities-how-to-fight-jew-hate/

Not all universities have been as lackadaisical or uncaring as Columbia and Harvard in fighting antisemitism on their campuses. Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for a hearing on antisemitism almost a year ago. This was the same committee that heard the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. Now, the university released a report in late March describing a decrease in antisemitic incidents.

More on this development, and how the Northwestern example deserves to be emulated, can be found here: “Northwestern touts 88% drop in reports of antisemitism,” by Duncan Agnew, Evanston Round Table, April 1, 2025:

Nearly a year after Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on antisemitism, the university released a report Monday touting an 88% drop in documented incidents of antisemitic discrimination from November 2023 to November 2024.

NU, facing an active Trump administration investigation over alleged antisemitism on campus, said in the update that “like many universities across the nation, Northwestern was not prepared for the antisemitism that occurred last year.”

Among other things, since last summer, the university has revised its handbook and code of conduct, created a new Display and Solicitation Policy banning “unauthorized 3D installations including tents and structures” and updated the Demonstration Policy to limit how, when and where protests may be conducted.

In February, Northwestern also launched an antisemitism training module that is mandatory for all students and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: University of Illinois-Chicago Hamas activists call for intifada while professor is suspended for law exam question. Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-university-of-illinois-chicago/

During the weeks and months following Hamas’ horrific October 7th massacre of innocent Israeli Jews, the University of Illinois-Chicago, like many campuses across America, played host to pro-Hamas protests and riots that created a hostile climate for Jewish students on campus.

In March of 2024, campus demonstrators deliberately targeted the university’s Jewish population by holding a rally in front of the campus Chabad house and chanting genocidal slogans including “There is only one solution; Intifada, revolution” and “We don’t want no two states; we want all of [19]48.”

At another rally held the following month, pro-Hamas activists chanted “Resistance is justified”—an endorsement of terrorism—and held signs with the genocidal message “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for the elimination of Israel and the slaughter of its Jewish population.

A third demonstration featured blatantly anti-Semitic signs accusing the Jews of blood libel and invoking one of their most sacred symbols to do it. “There is blood on your hands” read signs at the event with a Star of David replacing the “A” in “hands.”

Faculty and staff at UIC also promoted Jew hatred. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) and the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC hosted an event titled “UIC Art and Love Fest for Palestine.”

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Robert VerBruggen Will Universities Embrace Class-Based Preferences? A new book makes the case for considering applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/richard-kahlenberg-class-matters-book-universities-affirmative-action

Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard Kahlenberg (PublicAffairs, 384 pp., $26.99)

Richard Kahlenberg is an old-school liberal, committed to narrowing the gap between rich and poor. He’s also one of the leading critics of racial preferences in college admissions, having served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that effectively ended the practice. In his new book, Class Matters, Kahlenberg lays out the connection between these commitments.

Notably, Kahlenberg’s opposition to affirmative action doesn’t seem to be rooted in instinct or ideology. His concerns are practical. First, racial preferences divide the working class, making political solidarity harder to achieve. More significantly, the gatekeepers at selective colleges seem far more invested in race than in class—eliminating racial preferences, he argues, might finally force them to focus on economic disadvantage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

If U.S. Gets Hit By Recession, Will Voters Blame Trump Or Biden? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/14/if-u-s-gets-hit-by-recession-will-voters-blame-trump-or-biden-ii-tipp-poll/

Both online and print media are full of talk about an economic recession, one that’s either already here or ready to hit. How much of the recession angst is driven by the media? Are Americans worried about a recession now, and if so, who will get the blame? The I&I/TIPP Poll sought answers to these questions in its April survey.

The national online poll, taken by 1,452 adults from March 26 to March 28, first asked this:

“A recession is traditionally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. In 2022, this happened — but many in the media denied it was a recession under President Biden. Was the media justified or not?”

Among those taking the poll, 31% responded “Yes, other factors meant it wasn’t truly a recession,” while 34% selected “No, they covered for Biden despite meeting the definition.” A significant number — 23% — answered “I didn’t follow it closely,” while 10% said the were “Not sure.”

But, as usual, political affiliation (a key determinant in past surveys of how people feel about media bias overall) shows significant differences.

Among Democrats, 43% said the Biden downturn wasn’t a recession, while just 28% of Republicans and 22% of independents agreed. Meanwhile, only 18% of Democrats felt the media “covered” for Biden, versus 51% of Republicans and 35% of independents.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI analyst targeted in Kash Patel’s book placed on leave Ken Dilanian

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.aol.com/news/fbi-analyst-targeted-kash-patels-180323914.html

The FBI has placed an analyst on leave whose name was on a list of alleged “deep state” actors in a book written by FBI Director Kash Patel, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This was first reported by the New York Times. It’s unclear what reason the FBI gave for the move, and the agency declined to comment.

Brian Auten, a Russia expert, was the employee who was placed on leave. He was also among the FBI employees recommended for internal discipline by former FBI Director Christopher Wray over mistakes made in connection with the 2017 investigation into links between then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russian government.

A later review by the Justice Department inspector general found no evidence that any FBI employee acted out of political bias in the Russia investigation.

Patel included Auten on a list of roughly 60 alleged “deep state” actors in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” Patel denounced the FBI analyst by name, writing: “The fact that Auten was not fired from the FBI and prosecuted for his part in the Russia Gate conspiracy is a national embarrassment.”

Patel also accused Auten of downplaying information found on the laptop of former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The FBI director has disputed that the list in his book is an enemies list.

Patel has his own links to the 2017 investigation into ties between President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Revisiting Revisionism Diana West

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/revisiting-revisionism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

There was always something serendipitous if not downright miraculous in the fact that Ronald Radosh failed to receive his review copy of American Betrayal in a timely fashion. He asked for one early enough to have been out of the box with his “take-down” as the book came out in the spring of 2013; however, despite St. Martin’s and the US Mail’s best efforts, he didn’t get his book (and was too cheap to buy one, thank goodness!) until the summer. That gave the book a little over two months to be read and reviewed and talked about, and me plenty of time do a number of interviews and appearances and write some articles before the campaign of lies began. (Newcomers can catch up on this shocking history in The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners.)

So, in the history of American Betrayal, there is a period that predates the the Disinformation Campaign which began in earnest on August 7, 2013 with “McCarthy on Steroids” at Frontpage magazine.

There is a three-hour-interview I did with Brooks Agnew from this early period. It was on the night of June 2, 2013 when the book was barely a week old. That show came to mind recently, what with all the talk of revisionism and Churchill and Hitler and Joe Rogan and Darryl Cooper, and, now, Douglas Murray and the “experts,” including Andrew Roberts. I had thought the audio was lost but I find that some very dear person unknown to me uploaded the interview in hour-long segments to Youtube (links below). For added context, I will close with an email I received after the interview, as quoted in a post published at my dear old “cancelled” website, dianawest.net in which I linked to the Brooks Agnew interview.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Defending Israel and Western Civilization More Urgent than Ever by Guy Millière

Posted By on April 13th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21548/defending-israe-western-civilization

[A]ll Hamas needs to do to prevent this destruction is return all the hostages it should not have kidnapped in the first place. Amnesty International has served up a remarkable inversion of facts.

“What’s shocking is that people in the Cease-Fire Now crowd don’t appear to have much interest in making any demands of Hamas equivalent to those they make of Israel. They want Israel to stop firing. But do you often hear them insisting that Hamas return the favor? They want Israel to provide Gaza with humanitarian relief in the form of electricity, fuel and other goods. But I haven’t seen those protesters in the street demanding that Hamas provide Israel with humanitarian relief in the form of immediately freeing all hostages…. For Israelis, what ‘Cease-Fire Now’ means is ‘Surrender Now.’ No wonder they decline to heed the call…. Whatever else one thinks of Israel, no country can be expected to sign its own death warrant by indulging those who, if given the chance, would annihilate it.” — Bret Stephens, New York Times, November 21, 2023.

Clearly a massive dark-money problem obscenely exists within far too many universities and cities both in the US and Europe.

It is also important to highlight the unabashedly toxic role of the United Nations…. [T]he United Nations quickly became the world’s leading organization for, among other unsavory practices, propagating hatred of Israel and a general hatred of Jews.

The Palestinian Authority to this day pays its citizens to murder Jews — the more Jews, the larger the payments.

In Europe, organizations that fight anti-Semitism…. Often left-wing, they primarily denounce far-right anti-Semitism, but never far-left anti-Semitism, and never ever Islamic anti-Semitism — currently the only form of anti-Semitism in Europe that attacks and kills Jews. Most Jewish organizations in Europe support Israel, but more often than not advocate for dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and still support the mirage of a “two-state solution.”

The vast majority of Israelis seem finally to have understood that the goal of Palestinian organizations is not to create a state living in peace alongside Israel, but to destroy Israel.

In the mainstream European and American media, the unspeakable October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel seems largely forgotten. The media rarely describe Hamas as a terrorist organization with genocidal aims. When the word “genocide” is used, even by self-described “human rights organizations,” it is to accuse the victim of the attacks, Israel.

Israel forcibly removed every Jew from Gaza in 2005 – long before the October 7, 2023 massacre. Nevertheless, one of Amnesty International’s current campaigns, “End Israel’s Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” continues to refer to the “occupied Gaza Strip.” Gaza has not been occupied for twenty years; it is not occupied now. Gaza is the theater from where Palestinians are still firing rockets and missiles at civilian targets in Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Trade Morality for Madness By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on April 13th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/democrats_trade_morality_for_madness.html

New York City has a mayoral election later this year, and the two leading candidates right now are former governor Andrew Cuomo and a state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani.  The latter has gained traction in the polls by promising to build city-run grocery stores that “will operate without profit motive” in order to combat “the outrageous price of groceries.”  Leave it to the residents of Gotham to pin their hopes on either the guy who turned nursing homes into COVID death traps or a proud communist who is blithely unaware of the Soviet Union’s history with breadlines.  

In response to Mamdani’s plan for government-run grocery stores, John Catsimatidis — the über-successful owner of New York’s Gristedes and D’Agostino food chains — has offered the mayoral candidate one of his supermarkets to test his ideas in practice.  The offer comes with one stipulation: The city must eat all shoplifting costs.  

Mamdani does not appear eager to accept Catsimatidis’s proposal.  After all, New York City is in the middle of a shoplifting crisis today, and mayoral-wannabe Mamdani wants to replace traditional policing with a “Department of Community Safety” that empowers “dedicated outreach workers” to handle “the failures of our social safety net.” 

Something tells me that Mamdani’s vision for New York will turn grocery shopping into even more of a nightmare.  His city-run stores will become magnets for mass theft, and responding community “outreach workers” will be more concerned with criminals’ “preferred pronouns” than stopping armed robberies.  Shelves will be empty.  Food prices will go up.  New York City’s budget problems will get exponentially worse.  It’s all entirely predictable, but plenty of Democrats will vote for this government-engineered catastrophe anyway.

Chalk this up to Democrats’ persistent unwillingness to live within the outer perimeters of reality.  When they see grocery prices rise, they blame “greedy” business owners.  When those business owners explain that out-of-control shoplifting is a major cost responsible for price increases, Democrats insist that insurance covers such losses.  When business owners explain that insurance rates have spiked as a result, Democrats blame “greedy” insurance companies.  For a political party obsessed with diagnosing the “root causes” of every societal problem, the Democrat party sure is incapable of connecting the dots between runaway crime and business closures.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It’s Not Easy Being Green Climate alarmism, cloaked in pseudoscience and moral posturing, masks a deeper agenda of power, profit, and control—often at the expense of truth and prosperity. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/13/its-not-easy-being-green/

Writing recently in The Spectator World, Joel Kotkin noted, “The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics.” You can say that again. The physics part has to do with “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a very high energy density; solar and wind power, not so much. Kotkin quotes Christian Bruch, the CEO of Siemens Energy, who estimates that green energy “requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” The ineluctable pressure of that physical fact leads to subterfuge, fantasy, and outright lying. Kotkin also quotes John F. Clauser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, who tartly observed that “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Indeed. In 2019, the commentator Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs,” beliefs that confer social status because only the well-off can afford to entertain them. “In the past,” Henderson wrote, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” A belief that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency” is one such belief. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, can pretend that the sky is falling and promise to lead Britain into the promised land of “net-zero” emissions by 2050. But he won’t have to worry about heating his house or the cost of petrol for his car.

Al Gore can lecture the world about “inconvenient truths,” but cynics note that one major effect of his proselytizing on behalf of climate extremism has been to line his own pockets with that other green stuff, US dollars, and plenty of them. In 2000, Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million. By 2012, he had amassed a fortune of some $250 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Regular readers may recall my fondness for the philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s observation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Professor Mansfield delivered that mot more than thirty years ago. It seemed almost quaint at the time. It was, I thought, a comparison that had the advantage of being both true (environmentalism really did seem like a religion for certain leftists) and amusing (how deliciously wicked to put a bunch of white, elite, college-educated leftists under the same rhetorical light as the Bible-thumpers they abominated). Ha, I mean to say, ha!

Well, I am not laughing now. In the intervening years, the eco-nuts went from being a lunatic fringe to being lunatics at the center of power. Forget about Al Gore (if only we could): sure, he was vice president, but that was in another country (or so it seems) and besides . . . I trust that many readers will catch the allusion to Marlowe via T. S. Eliot. Despite his former proximity to the seat of power, Al Gore is relevant these days partly as comic relief, partly as an object lesson in the cynical manipulation of public credulity for the sake of personal enrichment. The collections come early and often in the Church of Gore. Who knew that pseudoscience, wrapped in the mantle of anti-capitalist moral self-regard, could pay so well?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Don’t Waste Your Time: Iran’s Mullahs Will Not Abandon Their Nuclear Program by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21546/iran-will-not-abandon-nuclear-program

Tehran has played this game before: Agree to talks. Make vague promises. Extract sanctions relief. Then quietly continue nuclear development under the radar. This formula has worked for more than two decades. Right now, the only reason Iran is talking is to stall, to promise just enough to prevent America from striking it — “We are almost there!” — to keep its regime and avoid seeing its uranium centrifuges and enrichment sites blasted to rubble. The regime does not want war — but it also cannot accept total nuclear disarmament.

The Islamic Republic has smoothly outmaneuvered every administration. It has accepted deals to avoid confrontation, then quietly violated them. With each round of negotiations, Iran gained what it needed — time, money, legitimacy — and gave away nothing it could not reverse.

Worse, Iranian officials have themselves confirmed what skeptics have long argued: that the regime’s nuclear program was always military in nature. Former parliamentary speaker Ali Motahhari openly admitted in an interview that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities were initially designed to build weapons, not generate electricity. That was not a slip of the tongue. It was a rare moment of honesty from a system built on lies.

[W]orse yet, [the regime] could announce one day that it already possesses several nuclear bombs — and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Will the world then be forced to live with a nuclear-armed theocracy that sponsors terrorism, oppresses its people, and seeks to export its ideology across the region? That does not sound like a cheery future to accept.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. It has lied, manipulated and deceived at every turn. Hoping for a different outcome, unfortunately, is self-deceptive make-believe.

Negotiations only serve to give Iran what it wants: time and space to complete its nuclear project. Axios reported on April 10 that “sources said the Iranians think reaching a complex and highly technical nuclear deal in two months is unrealistic and they want to get more time on the clock to avoid an escalation.”

After watching what happened to Libya after it gave up its nuclear weapons program, and to Ukraine when it gave up its warheads. Iran’s regime could hardly have any intention of abandoning their quest for the bomb. Diplomacy will not stop them. Appeasement will not deter them. The only solution, sadly, seems to be force. If the US and Israel fail to act now, we will soon be facing a world where the Islamic Republic of Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and commands its bombs. Then what?

Negotiations for Iran’s mullahs are simply a sign of strategic necessity. The regime needs breathing room — and, most importantly, it needs to preserve what it sees as its ultimate insurance policy: a nuclear arsenal.

The Trump administration is once again engaging with the Iranian regime, this time in Oman, to encourage it to end its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs the way Libya’s late leader Muammar Ghaddafi did. As US President Donald J. Trump transparently put it: “I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”