Kafka at the International Court of Justice
‘The Trial’ was angst; this is evil
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WSJ: UNRWA payroll includes 1,200 people with ties to terror groups
More details are emerging about the extent to which UNRWA staff participated in the October 7 massacre and are tied to Palestinian terror groups in Gaza.
Today a new Wall Street Journal report cited Israeli intelligence that 1,200 UNRWA employees – 10% of the agency’s staff – have ties to either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The report revealed that 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the massacre, including by helping to kidnap Israelis. About half of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza reportedly have at least one close relative with ties to the terror groups.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the report "highly, highly credible." Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said the new intelligence "proves once more that UNRWA is part of the problem and cannot be part of any future solution in Gaza. It’s time for the UN to answer tough questions about how one of its agencies became so deeply connected to terrorist organizations."
Read The Wall Street Journal story here (paywall) and a piece in The Times of Israel here.
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No Task Force Can Save Harvard
What hope is there for an institution where nobody can be fired for promoting antisemitism and other stupid and wicked ideas?
Mr. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history. He calls Israel a “settler colonial” state and compares the Jewish state’s establishment to France’s colonial takeover of Algeria. In August he signed an academic petition called “The Elephant in the Room.” It endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Netanyahu government’s proposals for judicial reform mask a plan to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” It asserted that Israel imposes a “regime of apartheid” on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and accused the country of “Jewish supremacism.”
“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.
The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.
Then Ms. Gay told lawmakers that calling for the genocide of Jews was sometimes acceptable at Harvard, depending on the “context.” The head of the advisory committee, Rabbi David Wolpe, resigned. He said Harvard was gripped by an ideology “that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil.” Like a real president sending in the Navy SEALs, temporary president Alan Garber launched the task force, jointly commanded by Mr. Penslar and a social scientist from Harvard Business School who researches driverless cars.
I’m an inmate of the open-air asylum that is Cambridge, Mass., and some of my best friends are professors. All of them are from the shrinking minority of classical liberals and liberal conservatives. We meet in private, lest their colleagues spot them. They know the battle of ideas is lost. The ship of fools was hijacked decades ago by the radical left. It floats down the River Charles on a tide of donor cash, dissenters thrown overboard.
Like the real America, Harvard is federal by design but paralyzed by the administrative state. Each of its undergraduate colleges and professional schools has its own fundraising machinery and endowment. Each has its boutique DEI commissariat that corrupts the academic hiring process and pollutes the intellectual atmosphere with what Rabbi Wolpe calls the “toxicity of intellectual slovenliness.” The president and the Harvard Corp. resemble the U.S. government before the creation of the Federal Reserve and the New Deal: strong enough to speak on everyone’s behalf but struggling to impose their orders.
I’m told that Mr. Penslar’s faculty colleagues are rallying in his support and preparing that deadliest of academic weapons, a letter that everyone signs to prove his independence of mind. I’m also told that when the advisory committee asked for data on anti-Jewish speech and conduct at Harvard, none was available. The same went for “Islamophobia,” which is obligatorily regarded as being a problem of equal magnitude, even though it isn’t.
Here are a couple of questions for the task force to investigate. Among all America’s sectors of public life, only its elite universities feature mass protests, incitement and even physical assaults against Jews. Could this be related to the subversion of the academy by the left? Is there a correlation between high levels of foreign donations and the addition of Jew-baiting to the curriculum?
In Florida, Republicans have used their funding leverage to expel the DEI merchants from the temple of learning at Sarasota’s New College. Market forces are closing liberal-arts colleges whose ideological mania outstrips their endowments and brands. But as Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, the rich are different. At Chrysler, Iacocca worked with the federal government on a bailout, then rapidly rebuilt the company from the bottom up.
Harvard knows better. It already takes hundreds of millions from the federal government, but it can’t rebuild itself quickly. Its reputation sinks, but it is buoyed by its wealth. Donor campaigns can pressure some of Harvard’s schools to raise standards in hiring. Administrations can tell professors to keep politics out of the classroom, but they can’t keep the professors out. Radical politics are now as much a part of the job as the tweed coat and pipe used to be.
In the old days, ships were quarantined for 40 days in times of plague to avoid infecting the landlubbers. Harvard needs to be quarantined for 40 years. That’s how long it’ll take for the latest recipients of tenure to vacate their plush perches. They might be fired for making students feel “unsafe” by suggesting that a man can’t become a woman. They can’t be fired for promoting stupid or wicked ideas. Their colleagues gave them tenure for doing just that. It’s Claudine Gays and Derek Penslars all the way down.
I paid good money for my Harvard master’s degree. My principal is dwindling by the day. My children aren’t applying to Harvard or Yale. Don’t send your kids and your checks. Do your homework. Invest in new institutions whose curricula give real value. If your alma mater has become the mother of all leftists, practice some tough love. Truth is the daughter of time, but investor preferences can hurry it along. As the Gandhi bumper sticker on the professorial Subaru Forester says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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Nikki Haley Needs a Rationale
Republican voters are open to voting for someone other than Trump—but why her?
By Kimberley Strassel
From the sound of a vituperative Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Nikki Haley is doing something right. From the look of those South Carolina polls, she isn’t doing nearly enough. Now is the moment to see if a Trump challenger can hit on a magic formula.
The notion that this contest is already over is absurd. Only 434,000 voters in two states have so far recorded a preference for a Republican nominee—about 1.4% of the 31 million who took part in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. In the race to secure 1,215 delegates for the nomination, Mr. Trump leads Ms. Haley, 32 to 17. That Haley number is almost exactly what Mr. Trump had after the first two races in 2016, the year he won.
Math can hold a dubious place in politics, but time is also on this competition’s side. It’s a month before the South Carolina primary, and we’re in an anything-can-happen political era—buffeted by prosecutors, leaks, bizarre scandals, Supreme Court moments and elderly candidates. Ms. Haley needs only one thing to keep this a live fight—money—and she’s got plenty of it. Mr. Trump knows this, which explains his irate Truth Social threat to bar permanently “from the MAGA camp”—“from this moment forth”—anybody who “makes a ‘contribution’ to Birdbrain.”
Ms. Haley’s donor loyalty isn’t the only thing crawling under Mr. Trump’s skin. After months of rivals’ tiptoeing around the putative incumbent, Ms. Haley in the days leading to New Hampshire sharpened her criticism—raising concern about Mr. Trump’s age, lumping him in with Joe Biden, reminding Republicans of his record of losing elections. Attacking Mr. Trump can be risky, for fear of alienating voters already fed up with the left’s lawfare assault on the former president. But factual criticisms are digestible, even persuasive, and Ms. Haley’s emerging formula helped boost her to 43% of the Granite State vote—7 points higher than polls predicted.
Ms. Haley has money, she has a two-person race, and she has arguments for why Mr. Trump would be the wrong nominee. What’s missing is the case for why she’d be the right one. “Stand for America” and “Generational Change” aren’t going to set the masses alight, at least not to the degree she needs to start winning.
Campaign slogans can be overrated, but they can also capture a national desire. Liberals wield the shorthand “MAGA” as a term of scorn, but don’t forget its actual promise—make America great again. Mr. Trump still uses his catch phrase to great effect, animating his audiences with a promise of a “movement” that is “pro-border, pro-jobs, pro-freedom” and “100% pro-America.” This time around he doesn’t even have to bother with policy specifics; voters know what he did last time and simply expect a repeat.
Ms. Haley doesn’t have that luxury. She certainly has reform specifics—on taxes and education, healthcare and entitlements. But outside her in-person events, or the occasional debate minutes devoted to substance, few hear them. Most of her TV ads feature anodyne promises to “fix the economy,” “beat China” and “strengthen the cause of freedom”—promises that could as easily feature in a Biden ad.
Mostly she lacks an animating rationale for her candidacy, one that can be articulated in a few words, then illustrated and propelled by a handful of hard-charging policy priorities. MAGA resonates, but there are other ways to speak to today’s bipartisan American frustration. This column last week described the tens of millions of Americans who feel impotent against a ruling elite. And there’s no lack of recent prior examples of Republicans tapping into parts of that rage. Glenn Youngkin channeled parental anger over the education machine. Ron DeSantis tapped into voter disgust with corporate social engineering. Vivek Ramaswamy initially got traction with his calls for deep-state overhaul.
A fruitful and unifying kernel (a basis for that Haley rationale) rests in the simple word “freedom,” a word that is bigger even than MAGA, and has grown more powerful during three years of stifling Biden rule. Average Americans want to be free again—free from failing teachers and diversity mandates, from
censorship and three-hour wash cycles, from IRS complexity, smash-and-grab robberies and unchecked illegal immigration. They want a candidate who promises to guarantee that freedom by going to war with spenders on both sides, tyrannical bureaucrats, ivory-tower institutions, and bad guys around the world.That’s a movement that’s even bigger than MAGA, especially if it could be harnessed by someone who doesn’t have Mr. Trump’s baggage or alienating ways. It’d take some thought and prioritization—and require a reboot by Ms. Haley’s campaign. But what she needs most right now is to capture attention in a big way.
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