Kirby Struggles. 6 Happenings. Elon Musk. Ivy League Madness. 79th Day. IDF Sacrifices. Wind Up President.

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John Kirby Struggles to Name a Single Biden Foreign Policy Achievement

By Sarah Arnold
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Americans Are Tired of Joe Biden's 'Retiree' Lifestyle
By Sarah Arnold

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Before the war episode with Hamas is over many things may happen and they will all be bad not only for Israel but for future world peace.

First, Biden purposely wants America's borders to remain porous in the belief/hope Democrats will overwhelm Republicans at the polls and America can be turned into a socialist state and Muslims will eventually rule.  This has always been Obama's goal.

Second, Hamas will be allowed to remain a damaged but viable terrorist organization.

Third, a version of Hamas, that is allegedly said to be more liberal, will be installed to rule Gaza and the Palestinians will concur.

Israel may have little say in this matter and does not wish to be involved by re-entering Gaza.

Fourth, Bibi will try and expand the war by destroying Hezbollah and crippling Iran's nuclear facilities because he has no other option.  Biden will do everything to stop this because Obama's operatives, who remain in government,  want Iran and Hezbollah to remain functional/viable.

The most Bibi can hope to achieve is a neutral border zone of say 8 miles so over 100,000 Israelis have the option of returning to their homes, farms and livelihood, etc.

Fifth, the world will not understand the consequences of what this means both to Israel and the future of peace.

Sixth, if the 2024 election returns a Democrat to the presidency (Biden and/or Newsom) the future of America will be seriously in doubt.

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Media Bias

Washington Post Publishes Speculative Hit Piece to Muddy the Waters of Israel’s Shifa Hospital Raid

A November Washington Post op-ed headline read: “Evidence confirms Israel’s al-Shifa claims, so critics move the goal posts.”

Now, a WaPo investigation into the “assault on Gaza’s largest hospital” appears to have taken that headline as a challenge as they lay out the case that “evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the [al-Shifa] hospital as a command and control center.”

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Why Elon Musk Won’t Stop Talking About a ‘Woke Mind Virus’

The billionaire’s attacks against Disney are just the latest in a battle with what he sees as political correctness and overzealous progressive ideals

By  Tim Higgins

The question to Elon Musk was a long time coming: What is the “woke mind virus,” anyway? 

For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.

When it comes to how he defines that threat, however, he has been vague in public—painting a picture of something akin to hysterical groupthink by liberals against merit-based achievement and free speech, a catchall for what he expresses disagreement with. 

Musk has lately expounded more on what worries him, including earlier this month, when he was asked directly what he means by WMV and continued to attack 

A person in a suit holding a microphone

“The woke mind virus consists of creating very, very divisive identity politics…[that] amplifies racism; amplifies, frankly, sexism; and all of the -isms while claiming to do the opposite,” Musk said at an event in Italy. “It actually divides people and makes them hate each other and hate themselves.”

A few weeks earlier, during an appearance on a podcast, Musk summed it up simply as “communism rebranded.” 

Understanding what Musk means when he talks about WMV takes on greater importance as his stated concerns increasingly hang over any number of his actions—from how he manages X and positions the platform against the likes of Disney, to how his views might affect policies and customers at the other companies he runs. 

In apparent expansion of his anti-WMV views, Musk is now taking aim at a management effort known as diversity, equity and inclusion, or, DEI. “DEI must DIE,” he said in a tweet this month. “The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.”

Musk’s WMV fixation aligns with many of his supporters but has left even some of them frustrated. They say he has lost focus on other ambitions—such as transitioning the world to renewable energy with the EV maker 

—while some of his more provocative comments have fueled criticism suggesting that his actions are themselves divisive and hurtful. 

During the past two years, he has tweeted about the “mind virus” at least 27 times, and that doesn’t include interviews in which he has referenced WMV, such as on a recent Joe Rogan podcast, when he called it “a death cult.” 

Among the mentions in spring 2022, he tweeted that WMV was making 

Netflix

 “unwatchable” and later pointed at Yale University as the “epicenter of the woke mind virus attempting to destroy civilization.” Subsequently, Musk said the WMV was to blame for San Francisco’s social problems and warned that unless it is stopped, “humanity will never reach Mars.”

Yale and Netflix didn’t respond to requests for comment.

During an April appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” however, Musk appeared to struggle with a clear definition when asked its meaning. 

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is antimeritocratic and anything that…results in the suppression of free speech—so you know those are two other aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous,” Musk said. 

Musk identified colleges and high schools as a breeding ground, recounting a story he said he heard from a friend in San Francisco who claimed his school-age daughter only knew that the nation’s first president, George Washington, was a slave owner and nothing else. 

“Parents are just generally not aware of what their kids are being taught or what they’re not being taught,” Musk said. “Slavery is obviously a horrific institution, but we should still know more about George Washington than that.” 

Given all of the attention on Musk’s WMV warnings, MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan thought Musk’s definition was a little vague. “Maybe, just maybe, if you cannot coherently define the woke mind virus that you’ve been obsessing over for a year or more, perhaps you were the one who’s got it,” Hasan concluded of Musk during a broadcast in May.  

A book by the biographer Walter Isaacson released this year suggested that Musk’s antagonism toward progressives was triggered in part by one of his children’s transition to female and her embrace of Marxist politics—which the billionaire partly blamed on her high school in Los Angeles. 

Earlier this month in Italy, Musk added, “You want to have people succeed based on how hard they work and their talents, not who they are, whether they’re man or woman, what race or gender, that stuff is all…artificial, mental civil war.” 

His stance against what he deems political correctness has won him new fans in conservative circles. The term “woke” is one thrown around a lot on the campaign trail by GOP candidates these days to negatively paint liberal beliefs. Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis adopted Musk’s WMV parlance when launching his bid for president. 

“The woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it’s an attack on the truth,” the Republican governor said on Fox News. 

Adoption of the “woke mind virus” was a natural step for DeSantis. He had already been lobbing attacks at Disney, accusing the company of advancing “the woke political agenda,” after the large Florida employer was critical of an education bill signed into law in 2022 by the governor that opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

Increasingly, the Mouse House is looked at through a political lens, with certain groups critical of diverse casting picks in its productions and programming choices seen as leaning liberal. In late October, those decisions were highlighted in the bawdy, animated show “South Park,” which took a satirical look at the cultural war around Disney. The episode, titled “Joining the Panderverse,” dealt with recasting the show’s white male characters with women of color.

Asked at a conference last month about claims that Disney has gone “woke,” Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger defended its positions on issues including immigration and the environment as good for business and said DeSantis was trying to impinge on Disney’s free speech. 

Iger, who returned to Disney as CEO last year, also suggested that the company’s content had gotten away from its entertainment focus. “Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” he said. “If you can infuse it with positive messages and have a good impact on the world, fantastic. But that should not be the objective.”

A self-described “South Park” fan, Musk quickly touted the Panderverse episode in several tweets, including one calling the episode a bellwether.  

“The great wakening from woke has happened,” Musk said. “This is good for civilization.”

Several weeks after the episode aired, Disney was in Musk’s crosshairs when the company joined several big-name brands in cutting ad spending on X following a tweet by Musk that promoted anti-Semitic vitriol and a report that some ads were running next to Nazi content. 

While Musk might have been angry at them all, he got personal with Disney, calling for Iger to be fired. And he continued the attacks against Disney earlier this month in Italy. 

“Disney is deeply infected with the woke mind virus,” Musk said. 

Disney didn’t respond to requests for comment on Musk’s Italy remarks.

On the Italy stage, as he talked about the WMV, Musk hit on perhaps the most offensive part in his view: “Woke mind virus and fun are incompatible.” 

“Who wants to be scolded?” he added. “It’s no fun.”

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A Haven From the Ivy League’s Madness

Catholic schools like Assumption offer the education Jewish tradition prizes.

By 

Greg Weiner

The debate over antisemitism at elite universities has largely missed the point. The most important question isn’t how academic administrators respond to antisemitism but why the educations they provide seem to foster such hatred. For American Jews, the question cuts deeper: Given our traditional love of learning, do we care about the quality of education or only the prestige of the institutions providing it?

Former President Liz Magill can hardly be blamed for the failures of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution she led for barely a year. Neither can Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, whose tenures began in July and January, respectively. That lawmakers had to ask about students’ genocidal sympathies at all reveals that some of our most prestigious universities are abjectly failing to cultivate virtue or wisdom.

Menacing mobs on campus suggest an absence of what has, since Socrates, been recognized as the essential prerequisite for learning: a readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Students once aspired to learn what they didn’t know. At some institutions, it now appears the purpose of education is to express views of which the putative learners are already certain.

Universities that take seriously their duty to teach will turn out students ready to grapple with difficult moral and political questions that can’t be reduced to slogans. That our elite institutions are producing students who think otherwise is a more acute embarrassment than the failure of college leaders to condemn the predictable result.

American Jews thus must re-evaluate whether elite institutions—whose obsession with selectivity perversely grounds their prestige in the proportion of students they refuse to teach rather than how they actually educate—truly reflect our belief in the importance of learning. These institutions have largely abandoned their responsibility to form morally circumspect and intellectually curious citizens by engaging the permanent questions of the human condition.

Those tending the lamp of this education are often Catholic, such as Assumption University, where I serve as the first Jewish president of a Catholic college in the U.S. Most of us aren’t elite by common metrics, and many effectively combine the liberal arts with professional preparation. These institutions haven’t, by and large, been scenes of raging antisemitism. That isn’t because Catholic schools oppose bigotry or because their intellectual traditions share many premises and sources with Jewish ones, though they do.

Rather it’s because they avoid the heat of contemporary events and instead fix their attention on enduring questions. Their students are invited to ancient and continuing conversations about the true and good. They confront challenging books, not politicized mobs.

There are, to be sure, a variety of Catholic universities. Some emphasize social justice while others prioritize religious observance. A smaller but crucial cohort express their Catholic identity in how they educate. These institutions don’t indoctrinate students politically or religiously; they seek truth by giving and listening to reasons for identifying it.

The Catholic intellectual tradition is one of open inquiry. Like its Jewish counterpart, it sees human beings as oriented toward reason expressed in language with one another. In the Torah, words are the instrument of creation. God doesn’t simply create light: He says, “Let there be light.” Similarly, in the Gospel, St. John retells the creation story of Genesis by stating that “in the beginning was the word.” In the original Greek, “word” is logos—the idea of reason expressed in speech, one of the foundations of Catholic education.

These traditions value open inquiry. Yet there is a significant difference between this and a college whose idea of academic freedom exclusively prizes freedom of expression. Academic freedom should protect speech, but speech without open inquiry is prone to arrogance. Those engaged in inquiry do so because they assume they can learn from one another. That leads to genuine friendship rooted in a shared pursuit of truth. By contrast, when elite universities become incubators of activism and gateways to privilege, they inevitably produce excessive moral certainty.

For Jews in the U.S., admission to elite universities has historically meant a hard-earned entry into the American mainstream. Now that we are finding we are less welcome than we had assumed in these universities and the mainstream, we might consider which institutions will fulfill our traditional love of learning. American Jews will find fewer markers of social prestige on the Catholic liberal-arts campuses that take their mission seriously. But we may also find better education and, united in a love of truth and an openness to learning, more reliable friends.

Mr. Weiner is president of Assumption University.

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Israeli military assassinates top Hamas weapons smuggler with airstrike: IDF

https://nypost.com/2023/12/23/news/israeli-military-assassinates-top-hamas-weapons-smuggler-idf/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

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Because Biden wants BIBI to restrain air attacks, to protect Palestinians,  the IDF sustained it's worst casualty number this week and lost 12 soldiers over the weekend alone. Multiply by 34 for an American equivalent.

With friends like Biden who needs enemies. Nor is Biden aware he has blood on his hands.  The man is a wind up president.

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Israel’s 79th Day of War

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Day 79 of the war and the fighting in Gaza continues unabated.  Israel’s military leadership visited the northern Gaza operations earlier today and continues its attacks in the south where it is believed the Hamas leadership is headquartered, moat probably underground.   The Israel Air Force carried out the successful killing of Hassan Atrash, Hamas’ key weapons smuggler in an air attack on the vehicle in which he was traveling. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Biden held a 45-minute-long conversation yesterday.  The President asked Israel to phase back the fighting to a smaller scale but did not call for a cease fire.

12 additional deaths among Israeli troops were announced over the weekend here with the casualty count of soldiers killed now at 153. The IDF and the Israel Air Force completed their attack on a series of Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, reported the IDF Spokesperson's Unit on Sunday. Terrorist infrastructures, military buildings, and launch positions were hit in the attacks. 

This evening Egypt proposed a new outline for a hostage deal that would see Hamas release 40 Israelis taken into the Gaza Strip in exchange for a 14-day truce, Israeli and foreign media reported.  As per Cairo's proposal, the IDF would halt all military and intelligence operations in the Strip for two weeks in exchange for the release of 40 hostages. The Egyptian deal, reported by foreign media citing Palestinian officials to be a "three-stage" plan to end fighting Gaza, also includes the release of 120 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. 

The second stage of the Egyptian proposal includes negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in hopes of establishing an emergency security government in Gaza involving different Palestinian factions.

The third stage, as per the reports, includes a prolonged period of ceasefire, the return of more hostages from Gaza, and an eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the coastal enclave.  Following the publication of Egypt's proposal, an Israeli source told Maariv that some elements of the proposal were unacceptable. However, they added, "the Egyptian initiative could lead to negotiations."

The United Nations Security Council on Friday adopted a resolution that would allow more aid to reach desperate civilians in the Gaza Strip, ending nearly a week of intense diplomatic wrangling intended to prevent the United States from blocking the measure. But the resolution stopped short of past attempts to impose a cease-fire.  The vote was 13 to 0, with the United States and Russia abstaining.  The resolution was adopted after diplomats repeatedly delayed the vote this week and reworked the measure in heated negotiations aimed at winning support from the United States, which previously vetoed two resolutions that called for a cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas.  The measure does not impose a legally binding cease-fire and instead calls for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses and corridors throughout the Gaza Strip for a sufficient number of days to enable full, rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access.” 

It also dropped from earlier drafts demands for the “urgent suspension of hostilities,” replacing them with more watered-down language that recommended creating “the conditions for a sustainable cessation of hostilities.”

As Christmas eve begins here in Israel, Bethlehem, normally bustling with activity is totally quiet with the stores closed, no Christmas decorations, no tourists and very little activity.  Palestinian president Abbas today said Israel ruined Christmas this year as if the war against Hamas was our initiative.  Nevertheless, it is sad to see the absence of tourists everywhere in Israel.

Former Prime Minister Bennett was interviewed late last week on BBC’s hard talk in a particular aggressive questioning by the host.  You can see the show here…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=togLIOLYxT0&t=87s

It is not one of Bennett’s best performances but he did well under the rat-a-tat questioning via videoconference.

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The revival of an ancient calumny

In response to the genocidal Hamas agenda, churches have turned on its Jewish victims. Opinion.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.

(JNS) There’s an unmistakable drumbeat to the antisemitism that’s erupted across the West in the wake of the Oct. 7 pogrom. In response to the genocidal Jew-hatred fueling Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs, an even older form of the oldest hatred has surfaced—Christian hostility to the Jews.

The wholly unwarranted Western condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces for causing an allegedly disproportionate death rate among Gaza civilians echoes the ancient Christian calumny that the Jews are killers motivated by revenge and blood lust. The churches themselves are explicitly fueling this demonization.

Last Saturday, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem claimed in a statement that “a sniper of the IDF murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish in Gaza, where the majority of Christian families has taken refuge since the start of the war. No warning was given, no notification was provided. They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish, where there are no belligerents.”

This incendiary allegation was repeated uncritically as fact across the Western media.

The following day, however, Fox News reported an IDF statement that an incident took place instead “near the Latin Church in the Shejayia area,” a different church altogether in another part of Gaza where IDF troops had “operated against a threat that they identified in the area of the church.”

The Elder of Zion website reported that this didn’t stop The Christian Post from claiming the IDF had “confirmed” it had shot and killed the two women “on the grounds of Gaza City’s only Catholic church.” Yet confusingly, the paper also said the IDF had “confirmed” to Fox News that the incident took place near the church in the Shejayia area of Gaza during an operation against Hamas terrorists.

The Christian Post, whose report has been removed from the web, may have been confused by the IDF mistakenly referring to the Shejaiya church as Latin. Shejaiya is the location of a Greek Orthodox and an Episcopalian church; the Holy Family church, in Rimal, is the only Gaza parish under the Jerusalem Latin Patriarchate.

On Monday, Israel ended any such confusion when the Prime Minister’s Office stated categorically: “There was no fighting in the Rimal neighborhood on Saturday where this Catholic church was located.”

Yet that same day, the Pope’s message-board Vatican News not only repeated but even embellished the original accusation. The Israeli military, it said, had “entered the compound of the Holy Family Catholic Parish in Gaza, shooting at anyone leaving the church.”

On top of this fresh and unsubstantiated allegation, which ignored the Israelis’ flat denial that they had been operating anywhere near this church, the Vatican then upped the ante and framed this as a religious war by claiming: “Israelis have opened fire on Gaza’s Christians.”

This hysterical and vicious misrepresentation of Israel’s desperate battle to destroy Hamas reflects the moral bankruptcy of Pope Francis himself.

Not only did he claim that Israel was subjecting unarmed civilians to bombings and shootings and that “this even happened inside the parish complex of the Holy Family,” he has also repeatedly described Israel’s war to destroy Hamas as terrorism.

In October, he reportedly held a fraught phone call with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whom he told: “It is forbidden to respond to terror with terror.”

Equating the attacks by Hamas with the attempt to destroy its capacity to repeat them is to strip Israel of the legitimacy of its defense against genocide.

The church has simply lost its moral compass.

Although it condemned the Oct. 7 pogrom, it has rendered this worthless by attacking the victims of Hamas’s genocidal agenda. This inevitably calls to mind the shocking record of the Catholic church during the Holocaust, when Pope Pius XII turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities.

The same prejudice has been on copious display in the liberal Protestant churches led by the Church of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said: “The relentless bombardment of hospitals and civilians in Gaza is intolerable. It’s against international humanitarian law—it must stop and stop now. The misuse of hospitals by Hamas does not justify attacks by Israel. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Welby conspicuously failed to acknowledge that that under international law a hospital can be attacked if it is being used as a terrorist command center or ammunition store, as Gaza’s hospitals have been.

Moreover, for the leader of Anglicanism to represent the battle between civilization and barbarism as “two wrongs” reveals a church that has lost all claim to moral authority.

Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, blamed what he described as “this new cycle of violence” on “decades of occupation.” Even though Israel left Gaza in 2005, both the Catholic and liberal Protestant churches believe that Israel is illegally occupying the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Totally ignoring the brainwashing of the Palestinian Arabs to hate and murder Jews and drive them out of the whole of Israel, and refusing to acknowledge the relentless attacks on Israelis who live in the disputed territories in accordance with international law, the churches have swallowed the left-wing view that the Palestinians are victims of Israeli oppression.

This unholy upending of truth and morality results from the synthesis of an ancient Christian calumny with Palestinian propaganda.

Some Christians are among the most committed supporters of Israel in the world. Nevertheless, the deepest root of many churches’ hostility to the Jewish state lies in the resurrection of the previously discredited doctrine of “replacement theology,” also known as “supersessionism.”

This doctrine, which holds that because the Jews denied the divinity of Jesus they were stripped of God’s favor so that Christians became the “new Israel” while the Jews were damned, was the source of centuries of Christian atrocities against Jews until the Holocaust drove it underground.

It was given new life by Palestinian Christian “liberation theology,” which falsely states that the Palestinian Arabs were the original possessors of the Land of Israel. This invested the Palestinian claim to the land with the status of Christian writ, turning Israel into an ungodly interloper and its defenders into God’s enemies.

It is a variant of liberation theology, the doctrine propounded in the 1960s to suggest that socialist revolution was the proper fulfilment of the Christian duty to the poor—a doctrine of which Pope Francis is a leading exponent.

In its anti-Israel iteration, Jesus becomes a Palestinian Arab (a historical impossibility, ed.)persecuted by the Jews while Jesus’s “descendants” become today’s Palestinian Arabs, crucified in the very land that was supposedly promised to them. Their liberation would, of course, require the dissolution of the Jewish state.

This ludicrous and lethal fiction has been pumped out for decades by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Its founder, Father Naim Ateek, is a close friend of many senior Anglican bishops. Sabeel, used as a major resource by Anglican clergy, aid agencies and pilgrimage companies, is a crucial source of systematic, theologically based lies and libels about Israel.

Meanwhile, Christianity is under actual assault all over the world from radical Islam. Last April, churches in Pakistan and Uganda were attacked and burned by Muslim mobs. In the same month, dozens of Christians were murdered in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The vicar of Babwisi parish said: “In one night of unfathomable horror, men, women and children were slaughtered like chicken.” In Nigeria, more than 52,250 Christians have been butchered or hacked to death since 2009.

Yet on this worldwide Christian persecution, the churches are all but silent. Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians are safe. Yet the churches dump on Israel while genuflecting to Islam.

In this terrible war against the forces of evil in Gaza, the Christian church is once again tragically turning on its Jewish parent while embracing its Islamic assassin.

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Iran’s nuclear breakout: ’Twas the night before Armageddon

By Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/24/opinion/irans-nuclear-breakout-twas-the-night-before-armageddon/

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