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Friday, April 26, 2024
Will there be a Biden-Obama Ticket? More.
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Protester with 'final solution' sign that threatens
extermination of Jews spotted at GWU
Inbox
From Dr David Stein
At least he is honest
https://nypost.com/2024/04/26/us-
news/protester-with-final-
solution-sign-that-threatens-extermination-
of-jews-spotted-
at-gwu/
Horror as GWU protester carries sign with Nazi ‘final
solution’ call for extermination of Jews
By Megan Palin
An anti-Israeli protestor has sparked horror after being photographed at George Washington University with a sign calling for the “final solution,” the Nazi plan to exterminate all Jews.
The unidentified man was seen mingling among students on the Washington, DC campus carrying a huge Palestinian flag — and the sign with the expression Adolf Hitler used to sum up his plan for the “annihilation of the Jews.”
The image quickly sparked outrage from many shocked at a symbol used during the holocaust.
“The parallels between this movement and actual Nazism is real and scary,” one X user wrote.
Another posted: “Just pure hatred.”
“Not a peaceful protest at all,” a third person wrote.
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A man can be seen holding a sign that reads “final solution” at the GWU protest. X / @zach_kessel
The image emerged as hundreds of anti-Israel protesters occupied George Washington University’s campus Thursday, one of many schools swamped by such action.
According to university’s newspaper, the GW Hatchet, students are “demanding that GW divests from companies tied to Israel, drop the alleged charges against pro-Palestinian student organizers and disclose all its endowments and investments.”
The DMV Coalition of Students for Justice in Palestine claims to be the organizer of the protest Thursday, joining colleges across the country in protest, Fox 5 reports.
GW requested assistance from D.C. police to relocate the “unauthorized” protest, according to a statement from GW, adding that it “will not allow students from other local colleges or unaffiliated individuals to trespass on our campus.”
“The encampment, unlike some demonstrations in the past, is an unauthorized use of university space at this location and violated several university policies,” said GW.
“Occupying campus grounds, establishing outdoor encampments, and blocking access to buildings create safety concerns and can disrupt learning and study, especially during this critical final exam period.
“Such activities are inconsistent with the university’s mission, values, and commitment to providing a safe environment for all students and employees.”
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Might change if Trump is elected. If Biden runs and wins it
really won't matter because America will be the forgotten
republic and no longer worth living here. Just give the key
to the radicals and turn out the lights.
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If Prof. Dershowitz is just half right; our descendants are in for a damn bumpy ride...
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Report: Biden Admin. won't sanction Netzach Yehuda Battalion
US Secretary of State Blinken writes to House Speaker Johnson that in light of Israeli commitment to fix issues in battalion accused of human rights abuses, the battalion will not be sanctioned.
The Biden Administration has backtracked and will not impose sanctions on the IDF's Netzach Yehuda Battalion, ABC News reported this morning (Friday).
According to the report, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson explaining that the decision was made in light of Israel's commitment to addressing concerns over human rights violations by the IDF in Judea and Samaria.
According to Blinken, the administration's concerns over alleged human rights violations by the Netzach Yehuda Battalion "will not delay the delivery of any U.S. assistance and Israel will be able to receive the full amount appropriated by Congress."
On Wednesday, Ynet reported that Israeli officials believed that the US would not follow through on its announcement of its intention to impose sanctions on the Netzach Yehuda Battalion. According to that report, the administration was pressured to reverse its decision from all sides of the political spectrum.
Secretary Blinken said on Monday that there would not be an announcement regarding sanctions against the IDF’s Netzach Yehuda Battalion, but told reporters they should “stay tuned.”
Yesterday (Thursday), US Senator Marco Rubio warned that the decision to impose sanctions on the IDF battalion "helps Israel's enemies.
I oppose plans by the Biden Administration to impose sanctions on the commanders and troops of the Netzah Yehuda battalion," Rubio said.
He noted, “This unit has been on the frontline against Hezbollah, which is terrorizing Israelis in Judea and Samaria, and it is now working to dismantle Hamas brigades in Gaza. In the last year, this unit has neutralized more than 30 terrorists, destroyed 69 terrorist structures, including sites used by Hamas to launch rockets at Israeli citizens, and located 3 underground sites in Gaza."
“These impending sanctions are an effort by President Biden to appease Israel’s enemies, including the anti-Semitic mobs terrorizing college campuses across America. But it will stigmatize the entire IDF and encourage Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime,” Rubio concluded.
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From a very dear friend and fellow memo reader.
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I wake up many mornings thinking of the hostages in
Gaza. It would be interesting to drive one of those
sign trucks with a good sound system around the
Upper West Side for a few days playing the raw 10/7
video.
A good meme would be side/side pics of little kids
training with rifles and anti-tank weapons in the early
2000's and the savages coming over in powered
parachutes: "It's the same picture..."
https://x.com/karol/status/1782382667289301433?
s=46&t=UKXO38RhBpK5y4MY5xV34g
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HOOVER DAILY REPORT
| by Chester E. Finn Jr. via Thomas B. Fordham Institute How about a ceasefire in the civics wars? Possibly even a peace treaty? This could turn out to be easier to achieve than pausing the conflict in Gaza (or Kashmir or Sudan or…). The world’s big fights generally arise from opposed interests and disputes over fundamentals ++++ |
The NYT's reported Biden had accepted the challenge to debate Trump. The White House staff must be cringing. Perhaps, instead of debating Trump, Biden will carry out his threat to take Trump behind the school house yard and beat him up like a youthful school boy that he ain't.
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The Counter-Revolt Finally Begins
Columbia, Yale and NYU camp out while the rest of the U.S. flees from wokeness.
By Daniel Henninger
Wonder Land: Columbia, Yale and NYU camp out while the rest of the U.S. flees from wokeness. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
Before this column ends, we’ll get to the unmissable fact that anti-Israel, often antis-Semitic, protests are proliferating at what we amusingly choose to call our most “selective” universities—Columbia, Yale, New York University, Stanford, Berkeley. For the moment, add these North Face tent protests on $75,000-a-year campus quads to the sense among the American public that their country is running off the rails.
A list of the phenomena laying us low includes: wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), defund the police (a depressing subset of wokeness), conspiracy theories, head-in-the-sand isolationism and a self-centered political polarization typified—from left to right—by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
Ironically this time of year is associated with hope, amid spring and college graduations—except at the University of Southern California, which, fearing trouble, canceled its commencement speakers and told honorary-degree recipients not to show up.
Setting silenced USC aside, a hopeful note one hears at college commencements is that the American system is self-correcting, that despite recurrent stress, it always rights itself. Opinion polls suggest few believe this anymore but—happy spring—it looks as if we may be on the brink of a real counter-revolt against the craziness.
Last week in the hopelessly gridlocked House, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, facing threats to his job from the chaos caucus, cast his lot with the enough-is-enough caucus. The House passed bills to sustain allies in Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Congress isn’t dead—yet.
Blue states and cities that looked willing to collapse rather than defend their citizens have begun to push back against progressives’ pro-criminal and antipolice movements.
At the urging of Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York’s just-passed state budget includes measures to crack down on shoplifting. Assaulting a retail worker will be a felony. Larceny charges can be based on the total goods stolen from different stores. Progressives in the state’s Legislature opposed the measures. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, elected in January on restoring law and order (yes, it can be a Democratic issue), last week announced a plan to support policing in the most crime- and drug-plagued neighborhoods.
March seemed to be a tipping point. The hyperprogressive Council of the District of Columbia, in a city that had become an embarrassing carjacking hellhole, passed an array of anticrime measures. Oregon’s Legislature voted to reverse the state’s catastrophic three-year experiment with drug decriminalization. San Francisco voters approved two measures proposed by, of all people, Mayor London Breed, to ease restrictions on policing and require drug screening for welfare recipients. The results in Los Angeles County’s primary for district attorney strongly suggest progressive George Gascón will be voted out in November.
In all these places, the reversals by elected officials are driven by the prospect of voters’ turning them out of office. That is the U.S. political system trying to right itself.
In California, a safety coalition has collected about 900,000 signatures to reverse parts of Proposition 47, the state’s now-notorious 2014 decision to reduce some theft felonies to misdemeanors. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic to overturning a Ninth Circuit decision that bars cities and towns from enforcing vagrancy laws. Though the case emerged from Grants Pass, Ore., which is trying to ban homeless encampments, about three dozen elected officials and organizations in California filed briefs arguing that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling made cleaning up the streets almost impossible.
News stories since the start of the year have noted that many private companies are rethinking policies on DEI, partly under legal pressure, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down the use of race in college admissions.
Some in the corporate DEI movement thought they were immune to restraints. No longer. Companies are rediscovering that the constituency most needing inclusion is their customers. The loudest shot across the bow came last week, when Google fired 28 employees after some staged sit-in protests at its New York and California offices over a contract with Israel’s government. Google’s firing statement describes “completely unacceptable behavior.” No one saw that coming.
All this adds up to a nascent counter-revolt against America’s lurch toward self-destruction. The exception is elite U.S. universities. Their leadership has seen itself as answerable to no one and politically immune.
Robert Kraft, a Columbia grad and owner of the New England Patriots, said this week he will no longer give the school money “until corrective action is taken.”
If big donors ever regain control of these so-called selective schools, a suggestion: Firing the president won’t close the barn door. Instead, fire the admissions office. What a tragedy to think how many serious high-school students were rejected by Columbia, Yale and NYU, edged out by non-useful idiots whose chosen major is the political structure of re-education camps.
Someone has to be a lagging indicator, and these schools are it.
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Normally, I have an opinion about America's future which may or may not prove correct. Today I am confused about the future but predicting what will happen, in either case, is easy. If the radical haters win, our republic is over. However, if the radicals lose our republic America will never return to what it is was meant to be, and once was, because too much water has been spilled.
It is ludicrous to believe the world will follow our nation as before. The mass media is untrustworthy, education, at all levels, has been destroyed, every institution has either been corrupted or taken over by neo-Marxists. Corporate America has given up on capitalism and America's upbeat attitude has been crushed.
Tornados prove how quickly what takes decades to construct can be destroyed in the blink of the eye. Franklin has been proven omniscient. because we thought we could defy the phrase:
"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."
This phrase starkly highlights the modern tendency to expend our energy and potential in the pursuit of material gain. This observation emphasizes how individuals channel their time, effort, and creativity into accumulating wealth. In this sense, Wordsworth showcases the paradox of materialism.
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Will there be a Biden-Obama Ticket allowing Obama to become president for a third term because there are no constraints on Obama serving as Vice President and then becoming president by way of the office of the Vice President should Biden win and then resign?
Wild? Yes. But Democrats will stop at nothing and with Obama on the ticket he could change the election results by beating Trump.
Basically, Obama is already running The White House through his staff surrogates.
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China Is Winning The Higher Education Battle. Much More.
If we had an independent and honest Department of Justice and FBI they would be investigating Soros, his son and their respective organizations regarding the financing of anarchy.
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Some Anti-Israel Protesters Are Paid
Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses.
By Ira Stoll
Since at least the Vietnam War, exasperated observers of student protests have rolled their eyes and thought: Get a job. In some cases today, activism is a job. Two of America’s largest philanthropic foundations are behind a group that has paid some of the anti-Israel activists for the kind of antics disrupting campuses across the country.
Consider Malak Afaneh, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, and Craig Birckhead-Morton, a senior at Yale. Ms. Afaneh went viral this month for disrupting a dinner at Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. This week the Yale Daily News reported that Mr. Birckhead-Morton had been arrested for trespassing—and then re-emerged to address an anti-Israel crowd blocking an intersection in New Haven.
Ms. Afaneh and Mr. Birckhead-Morton have both been “youth fellows” of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, whose website identifies them by their first names. As of April 4, the campaign was soliciting applications for a new cohort, whose “campus-based fellows” would receive stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 for three-month terms of roughly eight hours of work a week. That “work” could include aiding campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”
The corporate entity behind these fellowships is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Where does it get its funding?
George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation has put $700,000 into Education for Just Peace in the Middle East since 2018, most recently with a two-year grant in 2022, according to the Open Society Foundation’s website. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Education for Just Peace in the Middle East $515,000 since 2019, most recently with a three-year grant for $225,000 awarded in August 2023.
While some policymakers have wondered whether activists receive money from overseas, it turns out that there’s a clear paper trail of funding at home. That ought to have policy implications. In considering whether to discipline students for rule violations, university administrators might more harshly punish activism done, at least in part, for pay.
Do the Rockefeller and Soros families want their money to be used to advocate for Hamas’s war aims? They should consider that themselves. Meantime, Congress and the Internal Revenue Service might want to examine whether the grants fit the charitable purposes defined in the tax code.
Mr. Stoll writes at TheEditors.com.
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Women are all about abortion but seem not willing to defend their sex from being raped by men who claim they should be allowed to compete with women in sports, invade their privacy etc.
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FAIR News: Title IX's Shift and What It Means for Women's Sex-Based Rights
Newsletter
Dear Friends of FAIR,
On April 19, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education released its final regulations under Title IX, which will take effect on August 1, 2024. These extensive revisions are likely to significantly affect students across K-12 and higher education, particularly in public and federally-funded private institutions.
You may recall that FAIR previously filed public comments on two proposed Title IX rules: one governs sex-based discrimination in educational programs in general; and the other governs sex-based discrimination in the context of sports. You can read those public comments here and here. In order to provide a timely update to our community, we have drafted an info sheet on the Final Rule, which includes our brief explanation of the history of Title IX, as well as the portions of the Final Rule that we feel will be of the greatest interest to our members.
Originally designed to combat sex-based discrimination, Title IX's new scope now includes protections against discrimination based on gender identity. This shift away from the Act's original framework raises significant concerns about the implications for sex-segregated spaces and activities, potentially requiring schools to allow access based on gender identity rather than biological sex.
Key changes include possible compelled speech regarding preferred gender pronouns, integration of sex-specific facilities, and significantly less robust due process protections for students accused of discrimination. These issues touch on deep legal and ethical questions, particularly regarding safeguarding women’s rights and protecting freedom of speech.
We will explore these topics further in a webinar on April 30 from 6-7pm ET with experts in law, education, and civil rights. We encourage you to participate and bring your insights as we discuss the comprehensive impact of these new rules. You can register for this free virtual event here.
In light of the new Title IX regulations, FAIR is exploring a host of legal advocacy projects aimed at upholding the constitutional rights of all students, and we need your help! If you or someone you know is concerned about the changes to Title IX, and meet any of the following criteria, we want you to reach out to us:
Females involved in high school or collegiate sports who have been required to compete with or against a male;
Any student who has been forced to share a bathroom or locker room with a student of the opposite sex at a public or federally-funded school;
Any student who has sincerely-held beliefs that prevent him/her from announcing their “chosen” or “preferred” pronouns;
Any student who has been accused of misgendering or “dead-naming” another student at a public or federally-funded school;
If you or your child(ren) meet any of the above criteria, please email our Director of Legal Advocacy, Leigh Ann O’Neill, at leigh-ann.oneill@fairforall.org.
Your engagement is vital as we address these critical changes and continue our advocacy for lawful educational practices.
Warmly,
The Team at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism
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‘Pro-Palestine’ campus mobs think Jew-hatred is progressive
Student protesters don’t really care about Palestinians or human rights. They are indoctrinated sheep who have been taught to think that Israel and Zionism are evil.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Ideas that reduce complex problems into simple mantras are always popular. But those
hat cloak a political ideology in the sort of language and symbolism in sync with the cultural fashions of the movement and allow people to imagine themselves on the right side of history can spawn world-changing movements. When young people especially are indoctrinated with such notions—the idea of correcting a historical wrong—the results can produce the shocking surge that’s unfolding right now on U.S. college campuses.
The spectacle of a critical mass of this current generation of American college students—egged on by many of their professors and even administrators—chanting slogans about erasing the State of Israel from the map (“from the river to the sea”), cheering on Islamist terror against Jews everywhere (“intifada revolution” and “globalize the intifada”) and speaking openly about banning the presence of “Zionists” from their midst, if not condoning violence against them, has shaken many Americans. That is especially true for liberal Jews and others who believe that antisemitism is primarily if not solely a problem on the political right.
Yet the most important part of this story is what hasn’t happened. Instead of a united nation responding to these expressions of hate and bigotry with one voice, many declarations are being heard in defense of what are, for all intents and purposes, a burgeoning mass movement supporting the Hamas terrorist movement that carried out the manifold atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Toxic leftist ideas
How is it possible for what is supposed to be the best and the brightest of American students—those who attend Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell and many other elite universities where the “pro-Palestine” protests have sprung up—to embrace such a profoundly evil cause?
The simple answer for what should be seen as responsible points to the intellectual fashion of the day, which, for lack of a better term, we are forced to call “woke” ideologies. The toxic ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality, which teach that the world is permanently divided between “white” oppressors and people of color who are their victims, have decided that Israel and the Jews belong to the former, and Hamas and its mass of Palestinian supporters are among the latter.
These ideas have been mainstreamed of late in America’s educational system and culture. Since the moral panic about race that occurred in the Black Lives Matter summer after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in May 2020, they have become the new orthodoxy against which dissent is not permitted in U.S. leading institutions.
While some of us have been pointing out for years that the BLM movement and the ideas behind it grant a permission slip for antisemitism, this has only become obvious to most people in the last six months. To the horror of many Jews, the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t engender sympathy for Israel or the Jews. Instead, it provided the spark for a surge in antisemitism around the world almost immediately after Oct. 7.
Many Jews believed they could always count on enlightened liberal opinion in this country not only to condemn expressions of right-wing Jew-hatred in the strongest terms but to also isolate it. Instead, they have watched with amazement and concern as the mobs engaging in anti-Semitic invective have been defended or rationalized in mainstream liberal media like The New York Times and MSNBC as idealists or, at worst, emotional kids whose actions are an understandable reaction to Israeli atrocities. In doing so, those who are taking this line aren’t just repeating and spreading Hamas propaganda and blatant falsehoods. They are accepting the premise that opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow the natural political position of those who call themselves progressives.
‘Very fine people’
Indeed, much like the BLM riots that wreaked havoc in American cities in the summer of 2020, the campus protests are being described as “mostly peaceful.” The narrative about the campus mobs in much of the corporate media is that they are merely “pro-Palestine” and that any antisemitism is merely the excessive behavior of a few marginal people who don’t represent the true spirit of the protests.
Almost as troubling is the fact that even when the anti-Semitic nature of the protests is recognized, the core problem is ignored. It’s not just that those taking part are engaging in demonstrations where Israel and its supporters are demonized, Jewish rights erased and Jews are being threatened. It’s that the people doing this don’t think they are wrong. They are convinced that they are speaking up for a righteous cause. Not only is that false premise being reinforced by mainstream press coverage, but it is also being upheld by leaders of the political left.
Indeed, the most outrageous example of that didn’t come from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who is notorious for her own anti-Semitic statements and who showed up on the Columbia campus this week to show solidarity with the “pro-Palestine” mob in the company of her daughter, a student at Barnard College who had been suspended for her role in violating the school’s rules.
The best encouragement the students received was from President Joe Biden, who, when asked about antisemitism on college campuses, condemned it but then added that he was just as concerned about “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” It was, as Alan Dershowitz and Andrew Stein wrote in The Wall Street Journal, a “very fine people” moment for the president.
That referenced the infamous claim that former President Donald Trump had said that there were some “very fine people” among those who gathered in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 for the neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally. Of course, Trump didn’t say that since he was referencing those who opposed the taking down of Confederate statues, and not Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan.
While that distinction was ignored in the media scramble to condemn Trump, Biden is largely getting a pass for his own effort to treat the cause that the anti-Semitic agitators are supporting as valid. The point being is that much of the media and leftist opinion are treating those yelling slurs at Jews as “very fine people” who are just going a little too far in their advocacy.
In the wake of Columbia University president Minouche Shafik’s ambivalence about enforcing the school’s rules against illegal demonstrations and hate speech, the narrative in the liberal media has again flipped with The New York Times concentrating on what they see as a wrongheaded decision to call in the New York City Police Department to remove the pro-Hamas encampment (though the tents returned the next day). Indeed, the paper’s urban affairs columnist Ginia Bellafante wrote that the main problem isn’t campus antisemitism but the willingness of administrators to punish the antis-Semites, who she and those reporting in the news section analogized to the anti-Vietnam war and anti-South African apartheid demonstrators of the past.
A movement steeped in ignorance
What is lacking in the coverage and most of the discourse is that—as interviews with them show—most of the students even at a school like Columbia can’t really explain why they are against Israel except by mindlessly repeating slogans about racism and oppression that have nothing to do with the facts on the ground in the Middle East or patent falsehoods about “genocide” in Gaza. They don’t know the history of the conflict and seem to think that Israelis and Jews are, as Palestinian propagandists claim, settler/colonialists in the one country in the world where Jews are, in fact, the indigenous people. Their demands for university divestment from Israel are based on intersectional ideology in which the century-old Arab war to deny Jewish rights is falsely depicted as analogous to the civil-rights movement in the United States.
The ignorance of these young adults is pathetic, as is their absurd cosplaying in which the wearing of keffiyehs has become campus terrorist chic. Lacking their own strong identity, they are adopting one that they perceive will give them some cachet as supporters of an embattled though fashionable cause. But having been spoon-fed the same lies that spawned the BLM movement throughout their educational experience, in which anti-Semitism has been redefined as progressivism, no one should be surprised by any of this.
Nor should we accept the claim that they are merely demonstrating sympathy for Palestinians or shock at human-rights violations. Far greater losses of life in wars in the Congo or Sudan—and an actual genocide in Western China where Beijing has put an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps—haven’t moved them to utter a single word. If they really were for peace or the theoretical cause of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they would be in favor of eradicating Hamas, which is opposed to any peace that doesn’t involve the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its people.
The sad truth is that massive numbers of students at elite schools and elsewhere have been taught to adopt the Hamas Charter, whether they understand what they are supporting or not. If you think that Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people—is racism, you are denying rights to Jews that no one would think to deny to anyone else. That is antisemitism. If you are advocating for a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to get away with mass murder, you are supporting Hamas. And if you think Israel is illegitimate and should be destroyed, you are also supporting Hamas terrorists, and their genocidal plans and actions.
Tolerating the intolerable
People who advocate for hateful ideologies—whether they are directed at African-Americans, Jews or anyone else—have a First Amendment right to express their views. But they don’t have a right to be tolerated in educational institutions or treated as principled dissenters in the Times. We all know that there is zero tolerance for neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist Jew-haters at American universities or in the liberal media. But because these institutions have been captured by woke ideologues and mainstream politicians like Biden fear their wrath, their moral equivalents on the left demonstrating on college campuses to “free Palestine” are tolerated, rationalized, excused and even lauded as heroes. In doing so, we are being asked to tolerate the intolerable.
To be “pro-Palestine” today is not to stand up for oppressed people. To the contrary, it is an expression of solidarity with latter-day Nazis and a willingness to mainstream hatred of the Jewish people, not just Israeli policies. But to condemn them is not enough. The only way to explain what has happened and to do something about it is to roll back the woke tide and purge schools, cultural institutions and the mainstream media of those spreading racialist ideas that foment this toxic hatred. Until the “progressive” ideas at the heart of the problem are dismantled, all the hand-wringing and expressions of concern about campus anti-Semitism will be meaningless.
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Why don't Israeli's, who want the hostages back, go to Rafah where the hostages, are being held captive and protest. They might be more effective and quit strengthening Hamas' hand. Hamas is not going to release any hostages and give away their leverage.
All these Israelis are accomplishing is weakening their own government. BIBI has enough on his hands. Why do they add to the mishegas that confronts him?
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China has won in terms of the destruction of America's higher education system. China was ahead when it came to a rigorous education and education is the key to a technological future and we are losing it.
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More Accumulated Pesach Memos.
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It is pretty evident, what is happening in America is tragic but, for me, not unexpected.
The question is, what, if anything, will ultimately be done about what is being allowed, by a weak president, to occur?
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Tom Cotton Is Right. Again ‘Pogrom’ is an accurate description of what we’re seeing on campuses.
By Noah Rothman
Posted Ruth King
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/tom-cotton-is-right-again/
There’s something about Senator Tom Cotton that drives his critics to madness. That condition becomes particularly acute when he’s obviously correct. Indeed, Cotton’s correctness maintains a directly proportional relationship with the degree to which he compels his detractors to abandon their good sense.
The latest example of this phenomenon comes to us via Mediaite’s Michael Luciano, who accused the senator of indulging in “hysteria” in his recent comments about the ongoing convulsion of nominally anti-Israel but functionally pro-terrorist demonstrations on some of America’s most elite college campuses.
“Whatever scant coverage these abominations were receiving in the U.S. press has been supplanted by abject hysteria about anti-Semitism supposedly running amok on college campuses – particularly Columbia University,” Luciano wrote. He accuses the press of promulgating lurid tales of protesters shrieking xenophobic attacks at their Jewish classmates, some of which “did not actually occur on campus.”
True enough. When, for example, Jewish students were attacked at Tulane University last year for objecting to the burning of an Israeli flag, leaving one traumatized student to reflect on the “Jewish blood on my hands,” defenders of the current campus culture were quick to note the event occurred just outside the campus’s property line. Presumably, those who raise this objection believe it to be indisputably dispositive of . . . something.
But this was not Cotton’s sole offense. In what became an indictment of the Israeli government and the “war crimes” he believes it has committed — the lack of evidence notwithstanding — Luciano attacked the senator for indulging in hyperbole.
“I do agree that if Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD to protect these Jewish students, if Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to protect these Jewish students from what is a nascent pogrom on these campuses,” Cotton told Fox News this week. “These are scenes like you’ve seen out of the 1930s in Germany. They should never be witnessed or tolerated here in America in 2024.”
To give you some clue as to how far gone Cotton’s prosecutor is, Luciano attributes Cotton’s rhetorical excesses to the hothouse atmosphere cultivated as much by Fox as the New York Times. Regardless, it was that “absurd” phrase — “nascent pogrom” — that seemed to set Luciano off. But it’s Cotton who has the firmer grasp on events here. The only thing “absurd” about the senator’s remark was his judicious decision to append “nascent” to his assessment of what America is witnessing on our campuses.
The Russian word “pogrom” refers to an organized effort to displace Jewish populations from the spaces in which they reside by force. That is precisely what we’ve seen on far too many college campuses since the October 7 attack.
That’s what we saw at Cooper Union, where a braying mob of what we’ve been assured are only anti-Israel protesters threw themselves at the doors of a library in which a handful of Jewish students took refuge. Chanting “globalize the intifada,” in reference to the outbreaks of violence that targeted Israeli civilians with murder, the demonstrators terrorized their Jewish colleagues and compelled them to evacuate their refuge under guard. The Jewish students are suing their school for “being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews.”
Similar language could be used to describe the successful effort to scare Jews away from campus facilities at Cornell University. Following an outbreak of threats to “shoot up,” rape, and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior,” and “kill jews,” the school threw up its hands. Cornell advised its Jewish matriculants to avoid the campus’s Kosher dining hall lest they risk bodily harm. Of course, those students heeded their school’s warning.
“What shocked me the most,” said one witness to Rutgers University’s conciliatory attitude toward its agitated pro-Hamas contingent, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.” The event that so enraged the anti-Jewish protesters was only a banal effort by university president Jonathan Holloway to hold an event in which students could ask questions about the war in Gaza and the school’s approach to it. “Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos,” Zach Kessel reported for NR.
And at Columbia, host to the recent spasm of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Cotton to call for reinforcements, the threat of violent antisemitism has forced many Jewish students off campus. The activists who called Jews “inbred,” demanded they “go back to Poland,” and chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” somehow managed to convince their Jewish colleagues that they meant business. Columbia administrators appeared to agree. It facilitated their flight to the shadows by moving classes to a “hybrid” setting so Jews could continue to study out of the sight of their tormentors.
These and many more incidents like them suggest the rabble’s aim is to harass and intimidate Jews into hiding. The college administrations that have catered to this mob have assisted in the evacuation of their Jewish populations to safer redoubts. We can call this many things, but Russian linguists already provided us with one descriptive word for it. It’s a fine word, and its use in this context is woefully appropriate.
So, too, is Cotton’s outraged response to what we’re witnessing. His critics object not to the senator’s accurate assessment of what we’re all seeing but the fact that his indictment of both the mobs and their coddlers on America’s campuses also impeaches those who would tolerate these grotesque displays. If those who would defend these menacing hordes cannot separate their anti-Israel advocacy from calls for violence against Jews, why should Senator Cotton? Indeed, why should any of us?
Cotton was as correct today as he was in 2020, when he called for the deployment of the National Guard to the American cities besieged by violent rioters — a call that led left-wing activists to purge from the New York Times masthead anyone who dared countenance Cotton’s advocacy. The Left would have been better served had it taken his advice in 2020, and it would do well to heed his admonitions today. The only “hysteria” to which we are privy is the sort on display from those who don’t want to recognize the true nature of the mobs to whom they’ve ceded America’s colleges.
Posterity vindicated Cotton once already. We don’t have to wait for the verdict of history to prove him right again.
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Hezbollah’s vast subterranean network in Lebanon is in a different league
Brig. Gen. (res.) Ronen Manelis says the tunnel system is ’10 levels above anything we have come across in Gaza.’
By Nadav Shragai, 4/25/24
WATCH: IDF pounds Hezbollah weapon depots
April 25, 2024
Mass exodus of Gazans from Rafah as IDF operation looms
200,000 Gazans have evacuated Rafah as IDF prepares to enter final Hamas stronghold.
By David Rosenberg, 4/25/24
WATCH: NYU professor – ‘Israel isn’t allowed to win a war’
NYU professor Scott Galloway slams the ridiculous double standards applied only to Israel, Jews, and the IDF.
April 25, 2024
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From Herbert Marcuse to Jew-hatred
By Richard Berkowitz
We have come a long way — and all in the wrong direction, from religion being protected to being penalized.
How did this happen? A reading of Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution is most insightful.
Rufo begins by describing a person, totally unknown to me, by the name of Herbert Marcuse, who is behind the cultural revolution that has gripped America since 1967. Marcuse was convinced America had become a repressive, intolerant society that promised freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly while depriving citizens of the mechanism for making those rights meaningful.
Eventually, Marcuse’s writing became the blueprint for the “New Left,” as the new proletariat substituted race for class in preparation of the revolution, which became an instant success.
The next phase of the revolution became known as the “Long March” through America’s institutions. What began at the university and college level spread like wildfire and came to encompass virtually all of society, including the corporate and media world, reaching the pivotal conquest of The New York Times.
Even bureaucrats working in government agencies, unions, and the military have now come under the sway of CRT and DIE as the new ideological philosophy driving our institutions. Because the long march was subtle, it also went unnoticed.
After capturing the various institutions enumerated above, the long march began to infect the state. Grant-making in education, humanities, sciences — i.e., the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Arts — also became infected. This was happening while I was a Board of Advisers member of the State of Georgia’s Museum of Art. Though I knew we could use the money, I was opposed to the concept because I also knew tax money was being used and would eventually be spent with abandon. Nothing in government ever stops. It simply grows, like “Topsy.”
Even worse, the bureaucracy eventually does what it wants because its members cannot be fired. Over time, politicians come in and out of office, giving “worker bees” power over the “queen bees.”
How did CRT and DIE sneak into the corporate world of capitalism? Rufo believes corporations no longer reside in the domain of the conservative establishment. He writes culture captures the mind, and politics follows. Because business always knew there was a cost, executives now treat it as simply another innocuous cost of doing business, but such a cavalier attitude fails to recognize how serious the ultimate effect is when the lines of demarcation are ignored. As for the university, Rufo suggests it no longer exists to discover knowledge, which has been replaced by “critical consciousness.” The profit motive is out the window and has been replaced by “diversity and inclusion.”
Woe is Us!
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Someone Has to Be the Adult in the Room: Clear the Quad and Expel Them All
By Derek Hunter
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Dear Dick,
The threats of violence against Jewish students that we have recently witnessed on campuses across the country are signs of a moral darkness spreading out across the land. It's alarming enough to those Jewish students at Columbia, Yale, and the dozen other campuses where activists have established encampments from which they hound and harass the Jews in their midst. But the presence of these activists—and the universities that accommodate them—is an evil loosed upon all Americans. One of the lessons of Jewish history is that once a society allows anti-Semitism to metastasize, more rapid social decline will soon follow.
But in the face of this vile assault on our values and institutions—greatly worsened by the moral cowardice and confusion of so many university leaders—Tikvah students and alumni are courageously standing up for Jewish dignity.
At Columbia, opposition to the insanity and essential reporting on it has come from sophomore David Lederer. David got the attention of the media when he posted on X the results of a "social experiment": He took an American flag to a New York "pro-Palestine" rally to see what reaction he would receive. See for yourself what happened.
Also at Columbia, junior Michael Lippman took his school's president to task in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and Dore Feith, in National Review, clarifies the larger menace these protests pose beyond the Jewish community.
At Yale, Sahar Tartak and Gabe Diamond have been at the forefront of the fight. You can see Sahar argue her case on Piers Morgan and read the harrowing account of the assault she suffered in the Free Press. You can hear Gabe's account of the rot at Yale in the Wall Street Journal and, in a piece that anticipated the latest swell of anti-Jewish terror weeks before it broke out, in the pages of the Hill.
Daniel Samet, in National Review, warns activists against trying to sow disorder at his campus, the University of Texas at Austin, as they've already done elsewhere.
At Princeton, Alexandra Orbuch and Darius Gross explain the effects of anti-Semitic hysteria on the educational purposes of the university.
At George Washington University, Sabrina Soffer—who months ago gave an unforgettable speech at the March for Israel in Washington—continued her prolific writing about the state of the American campus with her own recent piece in the Hill.
And at Cornell, Ari Kapelyan helped organize the Jewish Unity Rally that took place on April 14.
These young women and men exemplify Jewish moral confidence and bravery in the face of intimidation. They embody Tikvah at its best—alumni of our Beren Summer Fellowship, members of our Beren Collegiate Forum, attracted to Tikvah by their desire to learn about Jewish history and the majesty of Jewish civilization, and now in the arena of action rising to Jewish responsibility.
Tikvah's opponents know this about us. I happened to see Tikvah singled out by the anti-Semitic activists at, of all places, Princeton University. On their list of demands, here we are, at #8:
"Princeton must stop sponsoring and facilitating Birthright Israel trips and Tiger-Trek Israel, and end its relationship with the Tikvah Fund."
What our critics fail to grasp is that our calling and our purpose is defined by education, not activism. And one habit we've learned from wrestling with great texts and big ideas is to seek out the truth. These students, and many others in our network, have come to cherish what they have inherited as Jews and Americans. They have come to see the truth about how precious these inheritances are, and that is why they are moved to defend them.
Alongside moral formation and civilizational inspiration, we're working hard to make sure that these students don't feel alone on their campuses. The purpose of the Beren Collegiate Forum is to link up the many Tikvah students at various institutions, and to help forge the bonds of friendship among them. We've now got Tikvah chapters up and running at over twenty campuses, and we plan to expand to 50+ chapters in the year ahead. We will always stand behind our students, wherever they are.
Yet we also wonder: Hasn't the time come for Jewish talent, energy, money, creativity, and leadership to build new and better institutions of higher learning, or to migrate to those citadels that value what the Jewish people have meant to Western civilization? Hasn't the time come for a new exodus?
With best wishes for a Shabbat Shalom and a happy rest of Passover,
Eric Cohen
CEO, Tikvah And:
My fellow Americans:
This is Vivek Ramaswamy. I hoped to email you on a lighter note but I didn’t have another choice with everything happening right now.
The unholy alliance between Joe Biden, the corrupt Deep State, the DC Swamp, the Liberal Media, and the Radical Left Democrats is a national disgrace.
We, the American People, will never forget what they’ve done to us. Luckily, we have a plan to stop these radicals who:
– Desecrated Easter Sunday with wokeism
– Arrested the leader of the Republican Party
– Removed Trump from the ballot in key states
– Raided Mar-a-Lago with armed agents
– Censored Conservative voices
– Spied on Catholic worshippers
– Gutted election integrity measures
– Peddled the Russia Hoax for years
– Threw open our border to illegals
– Abandoned Americans in Afghanistan
– Caved to the Chinese Communist Party
– Moved to pack the Supreme Court
– Forced propaganda into classrooms
And the list goes on and on and on! Never before in the history of the world has a truly great country fallen so far from grace in such a short time. If the Radical Left Democrats somehow win control of the White House, the Senate, and the House… America will be lost forever.
I know this to be true. You know it too. But when everything is on the line, moments like this separate the strong from the weak. And make no mistake – the future of our country hangs in the balance.
That’s why I’m partnering with Majority Leader Steve Scalise for the FIRST TIME. Together, we’re rallying the STRONGEST American Patriots from across the country and building the biggest surge of grassroots support this country has ever seen.
If you consider yourself a strong American Patriot – like the two of us do – I’m personally asking for your full commitment right here and right now.
The resources we collect today will help build the largest GOP voter turnout operation in history, deploy an army of volunteers in swing districts, run hard-hitting ads in battleground states, harvest ballots where it’s legal, and help make this the most secure election EVER.
THAT is how Conservatives will win in a landslide…
THAT is how we take control of the White House, Senate, AND House…
THAT is how we stop the Radical Left Democrats from destroying America…
THAT is how we save our country as we know it…
AND THAT is how we send shockwaves through the heart of the Deep State, DC Swamp, and Liberal Media…
I’m asking for 100% participation from every strong American Patriot reading this. If that’s you, we need your help for the sake of the country. It’s the only way we win. So what do you say? Can we count on you?
If you can’t afford to pitch in $100 or $50 right now, I understand completely. If you can spare JUST $5 or $10, it will still go a long way in the fight for what we believe in. I only ask that everyone contributes SOMETHING.
No matter what, I’m honored to fight alongside you.
Thanks for all you do,
Vivek Ramaswamy
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And:
Consul Update Edited
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