Bill Maher again bravely taking on the powerless on behalf of the cruel and powerful. He’s so bold and brave! Omg, it’s finally someone in mainstream media standing up for Israel. 😂 He says no one likes protesters for Palestinians. Yes, in your super-rich, elitist, war-mongering…
— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) April 28, 2024
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Also Criminal, But That's Another Issue
Friday, April 26, 2024
Feelings on Campus
Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.
Well, of course not. They have failed to train their students to do so because of the current emphasis not on what is actually said or done but upon the impact of statements or actions. Packer explains
The muscle of independent thinking and open debate, the ability to earn authority that Daniel Bell described as essential to a university’s survival, has long since atrophied. So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.
Right-wingers could gloat that colleges, especially of the elite nature, what Reverend Jeremiah Wright (also Frederick Douglass and the Apostle Paul) have said in a different context: Whatsoever you sow, that you also shall reap. However, most of them, ironically pro-Israel (rhetorically pro-Jewish), ,have embraced the same reasoning. One of the most prominent:
Texas Governor Greg Abbott urges swift punishment after police arrested more than 20 people while dispersing an anti-Israel protest that pro-Palestinian demonstrators held at University of Texas in Austin.
“These protesters belong in jail,” Abbott writes on social media.
“Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”
The statement from the President of the University of Texas was excellent. At least as quoted, the governor of Texas did not urge swift punishment of individuals because they broke any laws or disrupted operations of the university or of its students. He condemned them for "joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests."
It appears that Abbott's ire was invoked not because student protestors misbehaved or committed criminal offenses but because their words were hateful and bigoted. The greatest crime is not to be wrong or illegal but to be insensitive. This has been the guiding principle of much of the woke left for several years but gained energy during the black lives matter protests in the summer of 2020. A report from that time noted
A statue of Confederate soldier John B. Castleman was removed from the Cherokee Triangle neighborhood in Louisville on June 8. According to a report by the Courier-Journal, the city plans to move the statue to Cave Hill Cemetery, where Castleman is buried.
The University of Kentucky in Lexington said on June 5 that
a mural, which has previously been a source of controversy on campus, will be
removed. Students have protested racist images of black people and Native
Americans in the mural.
The mural may have been bigoted and/or may have painted a false image of blacks and tribal peoples. Yet, that apparently was not the basis of the decision. Instead
In an email to students, the university’s president, Eli Capilouto, recalled “a conversation with one student about the mural who stopped me cold with the observation that every time he walked into a class in Memorial Hall, he was forced to reckon with the fact that his forebears were enslaved.”
The university president did not want to hurt the student's feelings, did not want him to take offense. He believed that the problem was not the mural itself. It was in the response, justified or not, to the art.
Universities have been particularly partial to these priorities and so have been prone to punish speech more readily than behavior. And now the right, as represented by the governor of Texas, denounces protesters not for their actions but because some of their language is anti-Semitic and hateful. It makes individuals feel unsafe, apart from being unsafe, and is disagreeable and discomforting, perhaps even painful. That should not be the primary issue but, for institutions of higher learning, what goes around, sadly comes around.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Double Standard
One of my pet peeves- one of your pet peeves- seems to be that, you know, 2,000,000 people have been killed in the Sudan civil war. I haven't seen a protest at NYU for that. Assad killed 500 Arabs. I didn't see colleges burned down. Five hundred thousand Arabs killed by Assad. Sadaam Hussein killed over a million Muslims in wars- gassed them. I didn't see protests there.
Two million killed in the civil war in Sudan is an exaggeration. However, according to The Guardian in February, "tens of thousands" have been killed in the civil war begun in 2023." A report the same month by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted there "multiple indiscriminate attacks by both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in densely populated areas... between April and December 2023" and there had been "more than eight million" people displaced by the conflict. (No doubt the number has since increased.) Even as of mid January, an estimated 500,000 people had fled Sudan into eastern Chad.
The slaughter of Sudanese should bring to mind the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy noted the "terrorists perpetrated hundreds of individual, purposeful acts of barbarism- executing babies, murdering parents protecting children, raping women as corpses of their friends lay beside them."
While Israel, in response to that devastating attack, is recklessly accused by its critics of committing "genocide," actual genocide is transpiring in Sudan, Attacks often have appeared to be indiscriminate." In one atrocity last year, "six Arab paramilitary commanders and militia leaders" are believed to have "directed their forces to shell densely populated displaced-persons camps and districts in the city with "rockets and mortars," much of it "directed at the ethnic African Masalit tribe," then the majority of the city of El Geneima.
Scarborough continued
Yet, your school is shut down now because Israel is responsing to the worst attack against Jews worldwide since the Holocaust. Help us sort through that. Again, I don't know algebra but I'm pretty good at the common denominators here and why there's no common denominators in all of them, just that it's Jews defending their homeland because if you look at the numbers, they don't add up.
They don't add up in part because of the enormity of the attack of October 7, in which Hamas "killed more than 1300 Israelis and third-country nationals, including at least 29 Americans, in a country whose population is less than 10 million. In America, that would be equivalent to killing nearly 40,000- 13 times more than the number of Al Qaeda victims on 9/11." Recognizing the importance of context:
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) April 23, 2024
“2,200 American servicemen killed at Pearl Harbor. We [America] go on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 Americans in 9/11. We [America] go on to kill 400,000 people in… pic.twitter.com/nnalzWaUHa
As author Dara Horn explained three years ago in "People Love Dead Jews"
the last few generations of American non-Jews had been chagrined by the enormity of the Holocaust- which had been perpetuated by America's enemy, and which was gross enough to make antisemitism socially unacceptable, even shameful. Now that people who remembered the shock of those events were dying off, the public shame associated with expressing antisemitism was dying, too. In other words, hating Jews was normal.
It is not only American non-Jews who were shocked by the Holocaust who are dying off. It is also American Jews who were shocked (and beyond) by the Holocaust who no longer are alive. The mixture of young, ignorant American non-Jews with the naivete of young Jews, who have grown up in the safety and security of American society, is proving very toxic.
Monday, April 22, 2024
No Self-Awareness
It’s definitely the fault of Walgreens that they’re shutting down their stores in black majority neighborhoods. Right. pic.twitter.com/NBPmJpa2vX
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 21, 2024
Nearly four years in from the demands the attack on the "carceral state" and demonization of law enforcement, Representative Pressley again appeared on the House floor and remarked
Mr. Speaker, Walgreens is planning to close yet another pharmacy in the Massachusetts 7th, this time on Warren Street in Roxbury, a community that is 85% black and Latino. This closure is part of abandonment of low income communities by previous closures in Mattapan and Hyde Park, both in the Massachusetts 7th.
When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt an active community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications and of course, jobs. These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.
They are acts taken reluctantly because the stores no longer generate a reasonable profit, perhaps any profit, in their location(s). The company is in business to make a profit and if they could do so, even by increasing security or other significant changes, they would remain.
Medicaid reimbursement for prescription medicine, critical in low-income areas, is lower than for many private prescription plans. Nonetheless, with Walmart and Target, as well as Walgreens, citing losses from theft in decisions to close stores in urban (generally low-income, majority-minority) neighborhoods, it is blaringly obvious that shoplifting has materially harmed poor people.
Difficulty staffing police departments, prompted by the black lives movement and exacerbated by the pandemic, has played a role, as have lax prosecutors and lenient judges. Yet, Pressley and fellow radicals will not acknowledge what through most of the country has become increasingly obvious: the movement they championed in the months following the murder of George Floyd has unleashed ugly consequences.
These include a backlash among voters who, against evidence, believe that violent crime has burst out like spring. And it includes also a rise in theft which plagues communities that can least afford it, which particularly need the baby products and prescription medication Pressley cites. If she acknowledges the error of her rhetoric of 2020-2021, she should be welcomed back as if the prodigal son. Ideology, however, is more likely to remain a stumbling block.
Saturday, April 20, 2024
One of Our Own, Or So He Says
Thursday, April 18, 2024
Overwrought Reaction
>— Justice Democrats (@justicedems) April 16, 2024
This Republican Congress and the Democrats that enable them, week after week, are a joke. https://t.co/tLf4g6tQk2
After twenty-nine invocations of "whereas," the House of Representatives resolved that
the slogan, "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," is outrightl (sic) Anti-Semitic and must be strongly condemned; this slogan is divisive and does a disservice to Israelis, Palestinians, and all those in the region who see peace; this slogan rejects calls for peace, stability, and safety in the region; this slogan perpetuates hatred against the State of Israel and the Jewish people, and anyone who calls for the eradication of Israel and the Jewish people are Anti-Semitic and must always be condemned.
The phrase is "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is not a call for a pluralistic society. The Palestine national movement aims for a Palestinian state, not for intermingling of races, nationalities, or for individuals of varied religious faith. It is a fairly explicit call for the land of Palestine to be strictly for those supporters consider Palestinian, for a land which is judenfrei. It is clearly anti-Jewish or, in the words of the House of Representatives, anti-Semitic.
Words have meaning. In asserting that the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" must always be condemned, the House is not demanding that any individual must be stopped from using the slogan nor punished for doing so. It is not an abridgement of "free speech." The resolution is inconsistent with the cause of free expression but the First Amendment is silent on the issue of "free expression," mandating only free speech. If freedom of expression were constitutionally protected, a lot of public colleges and universities would be in more hot water than they are.
Fortunately, the use of the noxious- albeit clever and rhythmic- phrase cannot be prohibited or penalized with this resolution. The legislative action is non-binding. It is tantamount to an expression of support for Israel as a Jewish state against those who would like to see it eradicated. .There are bigger fish to fry for the radical left, including attacks on colleges and universities in the name of combatting anti-Semitism.
Merely symbolic and virtually meaningless, it is at worse, it is virtue-signaling; at best, it is virtue-signaling. Yet, Justice Democrats choose to blow smoke up the rear end of the public and claim the phrase merely calls for "freedom" which, ironically is in greater abundance for Palestinian residents of dreaded Israel than for Palestinians virtually anywhere else in the Middle East. The organization should have given the House resolution only the attention- none- it deserves, suck it up, and reserve their dishonesty and hatred for something substantial.
Monday, April 15, 2024
The Simpson Verdict Was a Manifestation of Inequity
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Shedding Tears Over the Death of Orenthal James Simpson
Bob Costas recalls someone once asking him how he could possibly believe OJ did it, and responding: "Because I live on this planet. The evidence just adds up to nothing else." pic.twitter.com/4sIT9gNx0U
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) April 11, 2024
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Blind Obedience
The coordinated effort by Schumer, Pelosi, and other Dems to undermine Netanyahu is all about trying to keep the Democrat party’s base together in November. Make him the bad guy to try and keep the pro-Hamas crowd happy. It’s total insanity. https://t.co/lBbDcx2h2G
— Mike Lawler (@lawler4ny) April 9, 2024
In his speech in the House chamber on March 14, Majority Leader Schumer
-called on "the Israelis, the Biden Administration, the Qataris, the Egyptians, and anybody else at the (negotiating) table" to "continue doing everything possible to get to a deal" which would include freeing every hostage;
-encouraged the USA to "provide robust humanitarian aid to Gaza and pressure the Israelis to let more of it get through to the people who need it;"
-urged the Israeli government to "prioritize the protection of civilian casualties when identifying military targets;"
-noted "Hamas has heartlessly hidden behind their fellow Palestinians by turning hospitals into command centers and refugee camps into missile-launching sites" whose "soldiers use innocent Gazans as human shields"- and berated "most media outlets covering this war and many protesters opposing it" for placing "the blame for civilian casualties entirely on Israel;"
-recommended "a negotiated two-state solution- a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity ,dignity and mutual recognition;"
-criticized as "a fatal impediment to progress" those Palestinians who "don't acknowledge how their insistence on an unequivocal 'right of return' is a fatal impediment to progress;"
-lamented that "many people, especially on the left, seem to acknowledge and even celebrate this right to statehood for every group but the Jews;"
- recognized that "Israel moving closer to a single state entirely under its control would further rupture its relationship with the rest of the world, including the United States;"
-noted that the "four major obstacles to peace" are "Hamas and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways; radical right-wing Israelis in government and society; Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu;
-urged "all sides" to "reject from the river to the sea thinking;"
-suggested "there is enough strength in the Arab world to get President Abbas to step down and to support a gradual succession plan for responsible Palestinian leaders to take his place;"
-advocated "normalization with Israel" by "Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations" as "the foundation of a grand bargain in the Middle East that will finally make meaningful Palestinian statehood a reality;"
-proposed that the USA "demand that Israel conduct itself with a future two-state solution in mind;"
-asserted that "holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the post-war future"- but that the USA should not try "to dictate the outcome."
It's a long list- but that's the point. All you hear from Republicans such as Lawler is that Chuck Schumer wants the Israelis to interfere with the affairs of another nation and remove Benjamin Netanyahu. To some, recommending that Israel have another election- after the war starts to wind down- is to overthrow a legitimate leader and 1/6/21 was a mere riot. And what you hear from the media when Republicans simply and trivialize this speech in this manner is.... nothing. No correction or even a follow-up question.
The speech of Majority Leader Schumer was not anti-Israel, as Mike Lawler and some other Republicans have portrayed it. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu facilitated the funding of Hamas by Qatari for several years. it obtained more than a year before 10/7/23 what The New York Times terms a "blueprint" which was followed "with shocking precision." Last July, Israel's signal intelligence agency "warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint."
That warning was rejected by the military as Qatar continued to prop up the government in Gaza. However, Netanyahu was obsessed with hatred of the Palestinian Authority and the possibility of creation of a Palestinian state.
It's not clear that the likes of Lawler and Donald Trump are particularly fond of Israel. But Benjamin Netanyahu is indicted for fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate instances. And he has been trying to limit the power and oversight of the judiciary in order to centralize power in the office of Prime Minister. And he laid the groundwork for the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history.
The Senate Majority Leader had the temerity to suggest that the Israeli voters have a chance- sometime in the near future- to render their judgement on their Prime Minister. However, many Republicans are fiercely loyal to Netanyahu, who undoubtedly reminds them of their own party's beloved leader. That may not fully explain the fondness toward the Israeli Prime Minister but it certainly seems to be a worthy point of inquiry.
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Tuesday, April 09, 2024
No Joke
Woody Johnson: Trump is extremely compassionate. People don’t know that. He’s extremely funny. People are starting to appreciate his sense of humor pic.twitter.com/cA0Xb2zX43
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2024
“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters, when pressed on whether his comments at a campaign event Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., were intended as a joke.
“We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases,” he continued.
Administration officials as high ranking as Vice President Mike Pence have scrambled in recent days to clean up Trump’s statements from his weekend rally, where he reprised his dubious logic regarding testing rates before an arena of supporters.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said during the rally. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
I don't kid. Die-hard Trump voters know that; it's one of the reasons they're not Haley or Pence or Tim Scott or Doug Burgum voters. They're confident he says what he will do and will do what he says. He's authentically loud, mean- and serious.
When Donald Trump says he'll be a dictator on Day One. Steve Bannon asserts "this is just not rhetoric. We're absolutely dead serious." Kash Patel, undoubtedly on Trump's short list for Attorney General, states "yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who rigged presidential elections.." And Trump himself has made clear his intention to weaponize federal law enforcement and prosecute political opponents, Joe Biden and others.
Take Donald Trump literally and seriously. He's not joking.
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Ceding Leverage
Well, you know, this is such a painful, staggeringly indescribable odyssey that we are on. And, as you said, you can't imagine. I often say, oh, I also can't imagine what we're going through. And, yes, we are going to be returning to Washington tomorrow to have meetings with different people in the administration. And we really want to understand what is happening to ensure that these people - and remember, Margaret, we have eight American citizens who have been held for 184 days, and we are feeling extreme desperation, despair. And we've had wonderful access and sympathy and open doors and lots of hugs from everyone in the U.S. government, but this is a very binary situation. We want our people back. Period. And that's what we're going to be talking tomorrow about is, what is actually going to be happening? What leverage? What levers need to be pulled in order to make this happen? Because six months is actually a complete failure on everybody's part.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son, Hersh, is being held hostage by Hamas, says six months without the release of all hostages is a "complete failure on everybody's part."
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) April 7, 2024
"I have not been able to save my son...I feel that I have failed, and I feel our governments have failed." pic.twitter.com/JMoMUVCXfn
It's not a failure on Hamas' part. The terrorist organization has played very well its role as hostage-taker, to hold on to individuals until it believes it has squeezed from the victimized party the maximum it's likely to achieve. Hamas did this when in 2011
Gilad Schalit, a former IDF soldier, was released from Gaza after being held captive there by the terrorist group, Hamas, for five years. He was only released when Israel agreed to a prisoner swap that involved the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including those responsible for killing Israelis in terror attacks.
On the day of his release, Egyptian military officials received Shalit from Hamas control on the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and updated the IDF command post at the Kerem Shalom crossing of the transaction earlier on Tuesday morning.
As a result, Israel transferred all the Palestinian prisoners to be released to Gaza and the West Bank to Red Cross buses.
Upon passing into Israel, Shalit was guarded by soldiers of the Israel Air Force's 669 unit, who accompanied him until he was home safe in Mitzpe Hila.
As part of a carefully orchestrated prisoner swap, Israel freed 477 Palestinian prisoners on that day, with a further 550 set for release at a later date.
It was not vey long before the deal started paying dividends- for Hamas. As we learned in July of 2015
The suspected mastermind behind a deadly West Bank terror attack last month was among 1,027 Palestinian inmates freed by Israel in exchange for the release from Gaza of the captured Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.
On Sunday, the Shin Bet announced it had detained four members of a seven-member Hamas cell who allegedly opened fire on a car near the settlement of Shvut Rachel in June, killing Malachy Rosenfeld, 25, and wounding three others.
Rosenfeld was the sixth Israeli to be killed in attacks carried out or planned by Palestinians released under the Shalit deal since April 2014.
And that's not all because
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, is widely believed to have helped mastermind the unprecedented Hamas attack that changed the course of Israeli-Palestinian history.
He spent more than two decades behind bars in Israel, before being freed 12 years ago in a hostage ransom deal his brother helped negotiate. In early October, Sinwar outsmarted Israel with the same hostage-taking tactic — resulting in Israel's deadliest day on record.
Israel believes in the value of human life, to the extent of releasing 1,027 terrorists, criminals, and those suspected of violent behavior in return for one human being. Hamas believes in death, destruction, and and annihilation. That's not merely annihilation of the Jewish state- if the Muslim nation-state of Gaza, is completely demolished, all the better to the terrorist group.
There is in Israel a growing movement to get the hostages, not all of them Israeli, back with or without defeat of Hamas.. "We want our people back. Period," says Rachel Goldber- Polin, reflecting the mounting sentiment.
It is also dangerous. When Hamas hears this, they justifiably hear "anything you want; period." When the Israelis gave up 1,027 prisoners for one Israeli in 2011, they bought themselves more terrorist attacks. After the remarks noted above, Goldberg-Polin added
And I include myself in that as a parent, that I have not been able to save my son. And I don't know – I think that you're a parent, anyone who is a parent, can appreciate our job is to keep our children safe. And when they get in a situation when they're not safe, our job is to save them. And I feel that I have failed and I feel that our governments have failed and I feel that all the parties at the table have failed to get these 133 souls back home.
The job of the parents is "to keep our children sage" and otherwise "to save them." But that is not the sole job of a government, especially one that accepts not only the importance of making whole the families of 100+ hostages but also the short-term and long-term welfare of the nation itself.
Goldberg-Polin probably is not naive. She is focused on what she needs to be focused on. However, the military and political establishment has a broader mission. This includes return of the hostages, an aim hampered throughout this war by global pressure for a lasting ceasefire, the hostages whatever. More obviously, if a permanent ceasefire is imposed prematurely, Hamas will live to fight another day.
Also Criminal, But That's Another Issue
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