Iran, the Fulcrum of Mideast Violence - WSJ
The Editorial Board
Israel’s 90th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
The IDF notes that 175 Israeli soldiers have died since the incursion into Gaza began on October 27th. 519 soldiers and police have been killed since the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct 7th, that resulted in over 1200 Israelis massacred and 242 kidnapped. 133 still remain prisoners in Gaza.
Stage three of the war in Gaza has begun, according to Ynetnews. "This stage will take six months. Some of the soldiers will be kept on duty in case of an escalation against Hezbollah in the north on the Lebanese border.” According to the report, the IDF will withdraw 5 brigades from the Strip, Palestinians have reported seeing tanks withdrawing from several areas of Gaza City.
Reuters said, that an Israeli official confirms there is a transition to a more focused phase, which he says will still be intense: "No one is talking about the flight of The Dove of Peace over the Shejaia refugee camp.” The source stated that some of the fighters who will leave the Strip will be prepared for a scenario of escalation in the north: "The situation there cannot continue, the next six months will be a critical period
Each Brigade consists of 2,000 - 8,000 troops. and includes infantry, armor, artillery and reconnaissance units.
Reportedly, the US has been pressuring Israel to scale down the fighting in Gaza and focus more on specific areas in the Gaza strip. The US is concerned about civilian casualties in the densely populated areas of Gaza, especially for those who fled to the south to escape the fighting in the north.
According to Amos Yadlin, former head of the Ministry Intelligence, speaking on Channel 12TV, “We are now in the third phase.” Yadlin said that the US wants Israel to withdraw and only strike at specific points. The IDF has a different view. “And as to the rebuilding of Gaza,” Yadlin said, “Israel will not rebuild Gaza before we rebuild Kibbutz Beeri, and other communities destroyed by Hamas.”
Controversy arose after Minister of Intelligence Gila Gamliel, of the Likud Party, said that she has been in talks with the Congo and other African nations for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. Gamliel insists that only resettlement outside of Gaza will stop Hamas from eventually again firing rockets into Israel. This follows statements by ultra-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotritch that Gazans should be relocated outside of Gaza. However, Matthew Miller, a US state department spokesman said, “This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible.”
Israel has been accused by Hamas of the assassination in Beirut of Saleh Arouri, the most senior Hamas member to have been killed so far in the war. Arouri was second in command to Hamas politburo leader Ismail Haniyeh who is based in Doha, Qatar. Hamas had dubbed Arour "The Architect of October 7,”
In the north, Hezbollah has continued to fire rockets at Israel on a near daily basis. Residents of Israel’s north have mostly been evacuated due to the incessant rocket fire. Four Israeli civilians and nine IDF soldiers have been killed in the exchanges in the north since Oct 8th.
According to Ohad Hemo, Arab affairs reporter on Channel 12TV, Hamas can still fire rockets, even from the Jabaliya refugee camp in north Gaza. He also said that Hamas’ still has the ability to govern Gaza. Hemo said that the Health, Interior and other ministries are still functioning.
As we end the work week here it is interesting to note there are really two different societies operating in Israel right now. There is a society composed of people who have suffered direct loss or angst as a result of the war. That society includes parents, grandparents, spouses, children and siblings of the now thousands of Israelis who have either died, suffered serious injury as a result of the war or whose relatives are still or were hostages, and whose lives will forever be changed.
The other society is composed of the rest of us who know people in the above category and sympathize with them as best we can, but who also go about our daily lives in some respects as if there is no war. Affected, yes. Impacted, yes. But still doing the things we always did, but perhaps less joyful, more worried for the future and, somewhat ashamedly, grateful that we are not in the “other” category.
Yet there is unity among both segments of society and a joint wish for the war to end, the troops to come home, the injured to recover, the remaining hostages to be released, and what passes for normal life in this part of the world to return. May it be so, sooner rather than later. Shabbat shalom.
And:
IDF SOLDIER"S MESSAGE FROM GAZA
If you want to understand the fighting spirit of our holy IDF soldiers in Gaza today, watch and listen to this powerful message.
This is the fighting spirit of the modern, yet ancient, indigenous Jew, once again home in our ancestral and indigenous homeland.
Am Yisrael Chai!
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Victor Hanson: The Utter Insanity of Joe Biden's Open Border If The Amorality of illegal immigration were not so deleterious to Americans, its absurdity would be laughable.
Posted By Ruth King
There have been more than 8 million illegal entries into the United States since Joe Biden was elected president. He appointed Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, whose apparent prime directive was to destroy the southern border.
That task is precisely what Mayorkas has now accomplished. The result is that the border is neither “porous” nor “problematic,” but nonexistent, kaput, vanished—and by design.
In one of the most surreal experiences in the history of the United States, each night Americans see video clips of thousands of foreign nationals crossing the border en masse with complete impunity—as if the entire corpus of federal immigration law has been dynamited.
But by whom? And why?
As millions of citizens watch this travesty, they hear only from Mayorkas, Biden, and his Pravda megaphone, Karin Jean-Pierre, that the border is “secure”—a Baghdad Bob narrative that they know that we know is an utter lie.
Surely, this deliberate effort to destroy an entire border, to invite in millions of unchecked illegal aliens, and to violate oaths to execute faithfully the laws of the land are impeachable offenses for both Biden and Mayorkas. If not, what are?
Stranger still, Americans have no real idea why these revolutionaries are destroying our border.
Are they nineteenth-century anarchists who want to undermine the United States itself? Are they cynical “Demography is Destiny” and “The New Democratic Majority” leftists who need new dependent Democrat constituents to find votes for agendas that most Americans reject?
Do they want to create billions of dollars in new entitlements and subsidies to grow government, hike taxes, and make the upper middle class pay, as Biden puts it, “their fair share?”
Whatever the cause of this nihilism, there are at least 10 ways their open border is insidiously destroying the United States.
Legal immigration
Does legal immigration still exist? Are we still requiring those who would enter the U.S. legally to provide required documents, undergo audits, and complete background checks?
Is not the current policy de facto punishing those who follow the law by tying them up in bureaucratic red tape for years as we reward unlawful behavior by greenlighting amnesties for lawbreakers?
Is the Biden administration’s policy designed to deflect those from South Korea with MDs, or from Mumbai with PhDs, or from Taiwan with MBAs, by putting their applications on a slow, second-track pathway? Is DEI at work in the sense that America does not want here the accomplished who earned degrees and possess vital skills, as if they are thereby condemned as “privileged?”
Does Biden realize that his legacy of inviting in “surging” millions, in contradiction of the law, will soon erode all support for immigration, legal or otherwise?
Lawless US
Does the utter lawlessness at the border contribute to the general coarseness and current mockery of the rule of law in general—an epidemic that plagues our cities with homelessness, smash-and-grabs, car-jackings, and random assaults?
Is the rationale that if you can walk freely past border security guards, who cares whether you ignore a summons, throw away a traffic ticket, or skip reporting some income?
Dependency
If the first thing a foreign national does is to violate the law by crossing the border without permission, and the second is to reside illegally in the US, and the third is to apply for some sort of food, housing, medical, legal, or educational subsidy, then is that really the type of new resident we desire?
Apparently, what the United States does not want is the immigration model of old, one in which immigrants applied legally, came here lawfully through authorized ports of entry, and were self-supporting upon arrival.
In other words, it may be hard to shake from Biden’s likely 10 million illegal aliens their initial assumption that, 1) in America, the laws do not apply to them and, 2) their new naïve or guilt-ridden hosts, not themselves, are responsible for their welfare.
Cui Bono?
We suspect the Left and employers welcome illegal immigrants; the more en masse and without audit, the better.
But how do millions simply leave their homes, cross international borders, and get waved on to El Norte? What is the mentality of Mexico that facilitates this mass exodus northward from its neighbors and from itself?
Is Mexico a frenemy?
Do we even care that some $60 billion leaves the U.S. as remittances into Mexico, mostly by illegal residents here who are on state and local subsidies to free up their billions of dollars to support people inside Mexico that Mexico City has no intention of helping?
Is such a gargantuan cash outflow, then, Mexican socialist President Obrador’s cynical idea of payback for supposed historical Yanqui sins? Does he think a new, huge expatriate community will continue to lobby for Mexico to do what it pleases on our side of the border? Does illegal immigration warp U.S. foreign policy itself?
Cartels
Does anyone worry that among the millions moving northward are hundreds of Mexican cartel functionaries loaded with tens of thousands of pounds of dangerous drugs, fentanyl most prominently?
Do we even care that the U.S. is enriching the cartels through its tolerance of drug importation and alien smuggling? With open borders, are we not abetting the annual 100,000 or so deaths of Americans through overdoses, often by the counterfeiting of fentanyl to resemble less toxic illicit drugs and prescription tranquilizers, sedatives, and painkillers?
Is there any other enemy in the world—Russia, China, or Iran—that has helped kill more Americans than the cartels, along with the culpable Mexican government that deflects cartel criminality and violence northward?
Trashing Citizens
Illegal immigration is insidiously diminishing citizenship by equating illegal aliens with, if not making them preferable to, American citizens. Is there anything an illegal alien cannot do in Biden’s America—work in a campaign, vote in some elections, serve in the military, receive government subsidies? Crisscross international borders without a passport?
To put it another way, why did we expel 8,400 US military personnel for the “crime” of passing on the required but experimental mRNA vaccinations (most of the discharged had natural immunity from prior COVID infections), while we let in millions of foreigners without worrying whether any have been vaccinated for anything, much less have had COVID tests?
Why are we forcing every American to recalibrate, at great expense, their identification to a “Real ID” to ensure security within our airline industry while putting tens of thousands of illegal aliens, without any documents, on flights throughout the country?
Does the Biden administration policy translate into something like, ‘We know and therefore don’t trust Americans, so we must apply airline boarding standards to them that we certainly do not need with more reliable and trustworthy illegal and unaudited aliens?’
Why, in bankrupt cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, where social services are overwhelmed with thousands of needy citizens, are we imploding such facilities with influxes of illegal aliens?
Do we prefer the latter to the former? Does the Biden administration’s message again read something like, ‘We care more about the health status of those south of the border than our own citizen poor in our own inner cities, so please surge on up?’
Who Pays?
At $34 trillion in debt, and with budget deficits normalizing at near $2 trillion a year, where does America find the hundreds of billions, if not eventually trillions of dollars, to welcome in millions of the unaudited—all in need of immediate no-questions-asked entitlements, and for some years on end?
Is California the model, where currently an estimated half of all illegal aliens reside and 27 percent of the resident population was not born in the U.S.?
California, while experiencing hundreds of thousands of new illegal entries and a $70 billion annual budget deficit, just extended free health care services to non-citizens who entered unlawfully. More than half of the state’s births are already paid for through Med-Cal. One-third of Americans living on assistance live in California. A fifth of the population struggles below the poverty line while the state runs up a $70 billion annual deficit with the nation’s highest income taxes and gas taxes and among the highest sales taxes.
No wonder over a quarter-million upper-middle-class taxpayers flee the state each year, unable to endure a 13.3% non-deductible, top state income tax rate on top of the 37% of their income that goes to the IRS.
No wonder there is a catastrophic current 25% drop in California income tax revenues when a single 1% of households pays 50% of all state income taxes—and is stampeding out of state. Is Governor Newsom federalizing California, or spreading the idea that far too privileged Americans owe the poor of the world massive subsidies as a reward for breaking their laws in coming here?
Ending Deterrence?
There are many reasons why foreign thugs are testing the United States—Putin in Ukraine, the Chinese with a spy balloon over our native soil, Hamas by murdering Israelis, Iran’s satellites by rocketing our military installations and ships abroad.
No doubt our woke, manpower-short military that fled from Kabul, leaving a multibillion-dollar trove of weapons, has lost the ability to deter opportunistic belligerents.
The Biden administration’s obsequious courting of Iran, contextualizing Chinese aggression, and announcing our reaction to a Russian invasion of Ukraine would hinge on whether it was “minor” have all eroded deterrence. Now, in circular fashion, President Obrador no longer fears any reaction to millions from his country swarming into the United States, as he had in the past when Trump pressured him to control his side of the border. That he helped to blow up the border with impunity also, in turn, reminds aggressors abroad that a nation too afraid to protect its own sovereignty can hardly defend that of its allies.
The DEI Narrative
We, the hosts, no longer believe in the melting pot. Instead, cultural Marxists divide America into the automatically victimized, by nature of their nonwhite status, versus the victimizers defined by whatever “white” is conveniently classified at the moment.
Class, history, and individual merit matter not so much in this 24/7 effort to reduce everyone to either oppressed or oppressor.
Under this racist binary, 99 percent of illegal aliens—who will be instantly categorized as the so-called nonwhite—will enter the U.S. with innate claims against the majority. Thus, they will become instantly eligible for everything from affirmative action preferences in hiring and admissions (the Supreme Court ruling will be a minor inconvenience for the Left, in the manner of the easily ignored California Prop 209) to race-based targeted equity programs and subsidies.
And the message we send to the illegal immigrant? Certainly not unity, integration, and assimilation. Instead, we emphasize ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic differences and fuel such divides. Such separatism pays cultural, social, and economic dividends in such a way that assimilation and integration earn rebuke, if not ridicule.
Cruel Irony?
The woke Left defines America as incurably racist. So how could the nonwhite in the millions possibly flee their home countries, where they compose a majority of the population, only to seek out the one country in the world where they are told toxic “white privilege” is unsurpassed?
Did the millions swarming the Rio Grande not listen to the horror stories of Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib? Do they not read the warnings of systemic this and that from Professor Kendi? Have they been briefed on endemic something by Ta-Nehisi Coates? Are they unaware of the messaging from BLM and Antifa? Were they not warned by President Obrador of the Inferno waiting ahead to the north?
None of the millions apparently wished to be diverted to a quite diverse India, or China, a land of mandated equity, or the inclusionary lands of the homogenously Islamic Middle East.
If the amorality of illegal immigration were not so deleterious to Americans, its absurdity would be laughable.
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The silent death by a thousand cuts in manufacturingIn Case You Missed It | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Iran has been at war with Israel and the U.S. for decades but October 7th began a multifront escalation that appears to be a turning point in its willingness to fund, train, and weaponize regional terrorism at an alarming rate and level. Iranian-backed terrorists across the region - Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria - present national security challenges not just for Israel but also the U.S. Why is Iran suddenly feeling emboldened enough to continually attack U.S. assets in Iraq and Syria, how close is it to obtaining weapons-grade uranium and ultimately a nuclear weapon, what can be done about the Houthis aggression in the Red Sea, and will a new war break out on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah? These are just some of the issues that we’ll be discussing with Iran-expert, Behnam Ben Taleblu, and we hope that you can join us for this in-depth and informative conversation. About the Speaker: Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) where he focuses on Iranian security and political issues. Behnam previously served as a research fellow and senior Iran analyst at FDD. Prior to his time at FDD, Behnam worked on non-proliferation issues at an arms control think tank in Washington. Leveraging his subject-matter expertise and native Farsi skills, Behnam has closely tracked a wide range of Iran-related topics including nuclear non-proliferation, ballistic missiles, sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the foreign and security policy of the Islamic Republic, and internal Iranian politics. Frequently called upon to brief journalists, congressional staff, and other Washington audiences, Behnam has also testified before the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament. His analyses have been quoted in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Fox News, The Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse, among others. Additionally, he has contributed to or co-authored articles for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Fox News, The Hill, War on the Rocks, The National Interest, and U.S. News & World Report. Behnam has appeared on a variety of broadcast programs, including BBC News, Fox News, CBS Interactive, C-SPAN, and Defense News. Behnam earned his MA in International Relations from The University of Chicago, and his BA in International Affairs and Middle East Studies from The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I disagree. Some may be in retreat but it is America that is in retreat. Biden must go if America is to survive and the current Democrat Party with him. +++ US Jews in retreatWaking up to an American nightmare. Opinion.This is so unjust You fall asleep with an American Dream, and wake up with an American Nightmare. The image that haunts me is the sight of Jewish college students who rush for safety in the school library for fear of being attacked by a mob of misfits. That was how we closed out the year 2023, and in 2024, it starts all over again. Happy New Year. No doubt we are in the midst of a confounding paradox. On the one hand, the rise in antisemitism, here in the USA and around the world. But at the same time, two movies about Jewish men of distinction, J Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, have been enjoying buffo box office success. So, which is it…they love us or they hate us? My guess is that those who love us are a generation that goes. The snot-nose haters are a generation that comes, to borrow phrasing from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and to realize that as the newly minted Pharaoh “knew not Joseph,” so too the clueless generation that produced Harvard’s Claudine Gay know not Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, or Bernstein. American maestro sui generis. Gay has finally resigned, over alleged plagiarism. But the odor of antisemitism still hangs over Harvard and the rest of the Ivy Leagues. So, nor do they know Salk, Einstein, and certainly not Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine. Maybe they know, but like the Pharaoh, they’d rather not know the Jewish contribution to Western Civilization…which won 214 Nobel Prizes. The same cannot be said for those, like SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine, who do much of the instigating, bullying, and terrorizing, and who came here, and stayed here, to turn America into a separate country, a place to foster intolerance, a land to sow ancient grudges, taught in universities that were bought by Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Many have overstayed their visas, but will not be sent back. We should be so lucky. Their contributions to our culture? Zero…or nothing much that we can find. Nor did they light up Broadway, or create Hollywood, as did the Jews. Yet they get to run the show, from the streets, to the media, to the ivory towers. Even Jewish students…do they know their own legacy? Surely, they do. But they have been struck mute by the lack of knowledge of what it is like in a street fight. They have been raised to obey the rules, to be polite and well-behaved, all the Old School virtues, but so out of style in a country, and a world, that makes way for the crude and the rude, and where a snotty turn of phrase is lauded and applauded. “Nice guys finish last,” wisely spoke Leo Durocher. From Krav Maga, we are taught that in an alley scuffle, forget Marquis of Queensbury Rules. When it is you or the other guy, all bets are off, and Dirty Fighting is permitted. Dirty Fighting is not known to the Jews of America. Instead, what we’ve got are the traditional “Nice Jewish Boys and Girls,” an honorific which has lost its appeal. No compliment that; not anymore in these days of mindless brutality. Here we know it on the campuses. In Israel, they know it in the caves. Too true that our kids lack the fighting spirit. They were raised to make Mom and Dad proud, and this goes way back. “You must know everything.” So Isaac Babel got it from his mother. “Not good enough, Jascha,” as Heifetz heard it from his mother when he was five. All that is good. All that is wonderful. It’s what made us tops in so many fields. But something is missing. “We’ve become soft,” says a Harvard grad who wrote to me. He admits that he is afraid to attend class. “Pro-Palestinian” and “Pro-Hamas’’ hooligans rule the roost. Indeed, the campus has become a war zone. So, it’s time… time to quit hiding and trembling. They will find you anyway. Learn from your brothers and sisters in Israel. Grow a pair and become brave. New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva. He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ America might even be better off without a reconstituted Harvard. Great one liner—- Harvard should replace Gay with Mayorkas who will let everyone in. +++ Bill Ackman: How to Fix HarvardClaudine Gay’s ouster won’t change things. The college needs a complete overhaul, starting with a resignation of the board and the removal of DEI from every corner of the institution.In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about. I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts. How could this be? I wondered. When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students. A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant. I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology. Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy (and even climate change, due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc., that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist—in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization that has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology. In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local, and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one. After the death of George Floyd, the already-burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question that challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label that could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation, and more. Being called a racist got people canceled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear. The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, canceled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk. The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly acquired worldviews. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and canceled. These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country, since its founding, has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society. The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country. You can say things about white people today in universities, in business, or otherwise, that if you switched the word white to black, the consequences to you would be costly and severe. To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous words are instructive: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to affect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless), and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed. And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed. America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism—another word for an equality of outcome system—will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times. Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history—a fact that is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors—it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people, generations after the abolishment of slavery, should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists. An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the disadvantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups. The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity (i.e, fairness) in how DEI operates that contributes to this resentment. I was accused of being a racist by the president of the NAACP among others when I posted on X (formerly Twitter) that I had learned that the Harvard president search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former president Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring. When former president Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I, too, celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community. I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities, including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more. I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1 percent or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities. In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history, with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20 percent share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock. Compare this approach to the traditional one, where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees—they aren’t given that opportunity—yet they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It creates only resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action. While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon, so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks. I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to be the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am. All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role. This appears to have been the case with former president Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7, but there were many signs before then when she was dean of the faculty. The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay. One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of DEI ideology into the corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent. As a side note, unrelated to the DEI issue, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable businesspeople for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a dean of the faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management. The president’s job—managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management—are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president. Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the university is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5 percent annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets. The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades (I believe it has grown about 7–8 percent per annum), and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school. The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20 percent. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20 percent in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices? In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems that I have identified above. The corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the university since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department. The board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus, exposing the university to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students. And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the New York Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues. It was only after getting the story canceled that the board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms (i.e., “duplicative language”) to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility. The board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” (that to this day remain unnamed) who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the university and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower, and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter. According to the New York Post, the board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the university’s whistleblower protection policies. Despite all of the above, the board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the board. In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them. The corporation board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure that enabled them to obtain their seats. The board chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board. The board should not be principally composed of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be composed of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure. The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy. Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible? Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution that does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment that welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences. Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus. Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy. These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done. A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution, which can be found here, and that has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president. A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect. Today was an important step forward for the university. It is time we restore veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves. We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
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