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The NYT's Reporter, Rick Rojas, wrote about my former Synagogue's Civil Right's Museum and, in my opinion, did a very surface job. Emil Hess certainly deserves credit, was a dear friend as is his family but there is so much more to the essence of the story and he failed to report it in its entirety but the NYT's no longer is a great paper.

A New Civil Rights Exhibit Asks: Honestly, What Would You Have Done?

An exhibit at a synagogue in Birmingham, Ala., argues that listening to people who stay on the periphery can deepen our understanding of the past, and the present.

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People look at old photographs that are in a suitcase.

A new civil rights exhibit at Temple Beth El, the historic synagogue in Birmingham.Credit...Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

By Rick Rojas

Reporting from Birmingham, Ala.

The contents of the suitcase, more or less, told Emil Hess’s life story.

A report card from the University of Pennsylvania, dated 1939. A photograph of him in his Navy uniform during World War II. An advertisement for Parisian, the department store that he owned in the center of Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city.

And a recording from his son, describing how his father, in the face of competing protests from Black customers fighting for equality and white patrons opposing it, had moved to desegregate the store.

The suitcase is now part of a new civil rights exhibit at Temple Beth El, the historic synagogue in Birmingham. It was handed to a group visiting the exhibit, along with a challenge: Figure out why he heeded the activists’ call when many others did not.

Did he have a genuine desire for fairness? Did he simply fear a boycott? Or did his intentions even matter NT

“Because now you’re in the fight,” said Melvin Herring, one of the visitors, raising the point that whatever the reason, Mr. Hess, who died in 1996, had aligned himself with the civil rights protesters and had become invested in their mission. Eventually, his stores were among the first to hire Black salesmen. “He said, ‘We’re going to stay in the fight.’”

Dr. Herring was part of a group from the Black-Jewish Alliance of Charlotte, an organization created to forge friendships between the two communities. The group had come to Birmingham for what has become an increasingly common pilgrimage in the South, making stops at museums and landmarks associated with the region’s civil rights history.

The exhibit at Temple Beth El was designed and organized by Tyler Jones, a Birmingham filmmaker, along with Melissa Young, Margaret Norman and others in the congregation. Credit Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

Many of those places expose the horrors of the past or celebrate the activism that rose up in defiance of it. The exhibit at Temple Beth El is concerned less with villains or heroes than with the great many who fell somewhere in between. It is built on the premise that history is the sum of infinite numbers of small decisions that gradually coalesce into profound change — decisions like the one Mr. Hess made to integrate the Parisian.

“What we’re doing is trying to show the messiness,” said Melissa Young, a historian who helped organize the exhibit. “We’re trying to show how complicated history is.”

Listening to the rationales and the regrets of those on the periphery of the fight has value, organizers argued. Participants might be forced to confront their own ambivalence or the worries that keep them from speaking up about injustices unfolding in front of them now.

“Rather than judging history between the good and the bad, or assuming we would have been on the right side,” said Margaret Norman, the synagogue’s director of programming, “what can we learn by taking a more nuanced look at understanding how people responded with the resources they had?”

The exhibit, the Beth El Civil Rights Experience, started giving tours in January to students from Jewish schools and groups from other faith-related and civic organizations. Although it examines this history through a Jewish lens, organizers see it as just as applicable to a broader audience. A sorority in Nebraska recently called to ask for a tour.

The Beth El project was conceived in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd provoked a sprawling reappraisal of the reach of systemic racism and the endurance of inequality. The congregation, for its part, wanted to explore how Jews figured into the tandem legacies of racism and activism that have shaped Birmingham.

“This is such an active piece of memory here,” Ms. Norman said of the civil rights movement. “It’s not something at arm’s length.”

But by the time the exhibit opened, the dynamics of race and identity had shifted.

A backlash to the racial reckoning of 2020 has led Alabama lawmakers to pass legislation to strip public funding for diversity, equality and inclusion programs and limit what can be taught about “divisive concepts” in schools. Acts of antisemitism have surged in recent years, including bomb threats at synagogues in Alabama. Deep divisions have emerged over the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, the ferocity of Israel’s response in Gaza and demands for a cease-fire.

The change in climate, organizers said, has made the exhibit — and the discussions it might stir — all the more urgent.

The exhibit was designed and organized by Tyler Jones, a Birmingham filmmaker, along with Ms. Young, Ms. Norman and others in the congregation. The tour is guided by congregants who studied this history for months.

It was planned with the understanding that many, if not most, of its visitors were not coming to Alabama just to visit the synagogue. (The state’s Tourism Department even offers a civil rights trail itinerary.)

Members of the Black-Jewish Alliance of Charlotte, an organization created to forge friendships between the two communities, came to Birmingham to see the exhibit.Credit...Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

The organizers saw the exhibit as a complement to the other far more well-known destinations: the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, for instance, where law enforcement officers violently confronted peaceful protesters in 1965, and more recent creations in Montgomery, like the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to victims of lynching.

In fact, the group visiting from Charlotte had stopped in Atlanta that morning to tour sites connected to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In Birmingham, the program began with a film that explains the congregation’s own brush with the racial terror that gripped the city for years as segregationists detonated explosives at houses of worship and the homes of activists.

In 1958, an 18-year-old custodian named James Pruitt found 54 sticks of dynamite at the synagogue that had failed to detonate. (Mr. Pruitt visited the exhibit last month.)

“It’s an event that didn’t happen — it’s a bomb that didn’t go off,” Ms. Norman said. “But still, at the same time, it’s something that clearly had this ripple effect.”

Many Jews had been consistent allies to Black civil rights activists. Dr. King commended Jewish people who had “demonstrated their commitment” to the cause, “often at great personal sacrifices.”

The kinship was based on shared histories of discrimination, suffering and perseverance. But the exhibit examines the limitations of that association.

The program includes footage of Suzanne Bearman, a longtime congregant, at a public forum as a young woman, describing the need for laws to enforce desegregation because good intentions were not enough.

The exhibit at Temple Beth El is concerned less with villains or heroes than with the great many who fell somewhere in between. Credit...Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

“I grew up in a white world and didn’t really know what it took to be an advocate,” Ms. Bearman said decades later, in the film shown in the exhibit.

“If you want the honest truth, I got involved with this committee,” she went on, referring to her involvement in the exhibit, “to make sure it was telling the truth about what we did in the ’60s, because I don’t think we did enough.”

As the participants broke up into smaller groups, Dr. Herring and two others were given the suitcase filled with newspaper clippings and mementos from Mr. Hess’s life.

They debated whether he would have gotten involved if the threat of a boycott had not loomed over his business.

“It’s kind of unspoken,” said Dr. Herring, a professor of social work at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte. “But I wonder if prior to the boycott, Emil recognized that this was wrong, but he didn’t know how to get engaged or whether or not he should get engaged.”

Ultimately, they decided Mr. Hess had been in a tough spot. But as a prominent businessman, he also had power. And, at last, he used it.

The takeaway: “How am I the Emil Hess to someone else’s oppression?” Dr. Herring said.

“Now, it’s immigrants,” said Andy Harkavy, another member of the group. “Now, it’s L.G.B.T.Q.-plus. It’s still Jews and Black people and Muslims — and, and, and.”

“It’s not like it’s that far off,” he said of the discrimination and bigotry documented in the exhibit, “and it’s also not disappearing. So, yeah, what do we do?”

Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South. More about Rick Rojas

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Caroline Glick: The Jewish vote is up for grabs, and it may decide the US election

The White House and its supporters are using Muslims in Michigan to justify a slew of deeply hostile policies against Israel. Will that matter come fall? Op-ed.

(JNS) A few weeks ago, a sermon by Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in New York, shocked millions from that city to Tel Aviv. Standing at his pulpit, Hirsch delivered a stern warning to the Democrats.

Noting that he is someone “who is finely attuned to American Jewish sentiment,” Hirsch told Democratic elected officials: “Do not take American Jews for granted.”

Hirsch explained, “I have spoken to many American Jews in the past few months who have surprised me with their anxiety about developments in the Democratic Party, and their perception that it is becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and tolerant of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in its own ranks.”

“Be careful,” Hirsch warned. “The results of the upcoming election do not only depend on Michigan.”

Many dismissed his remarks with a shrug of their shoulders. For decades, Republicans have asked conservative Jews to explain how it is that American Jews vote for Democrat Party candidates even though Republicans are so much more supportive of Israel. The question comes so frequently that most conservative Jews can give the answers in their sleep.

First, most American Jews see themselves first and foremost as Democrats or liberals, not as Jews. They love Israel, but it’s not really a voting issue for them. And second, the Jewish vote doesn’t matter because most American Jews live in deep blue states that will never tilt Republican.

The Muslim vote, on the other hand, is always in contention. For the past decade or so, Muslim Americans have demanded that Democratic candidates earn their votes in every electoral cycle by adopting hostile positions on Israel and opposition to tough counterterror laws. Beginning in 2006, anti-Israel activists from the Marxist-Islamic bloc have repeatedly ousted pro-Israel Democrats from office and replaced them with virulent opponents of the Jewish state.

Ahead of the 2024 elections, the Marxist-Islamist alliance in Michigan has been insisting that Biden’s re-election is dependent on their votes. And so they used the Democratic primary on Feb. 27 to try and demonstrate their power. Led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the alliance’s “uncommitted” campaign called for Israel haters to vote “uncommitted” in the primaries to show the White House that U.S. support for Israel will cost Biden the swing state of Michigan.

In the event, the “uncommitted” campaign was a dud. Biden won 81.1% of the vote. The “uncommitted” ballots comprised a mere 13.2% of the ballots. While the media, Tlaib and her cronies presented 13.2% as a major accomplishment, it was a failure. Around 10% of Michigan Democrats habitually vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries. Ahead of the 2012 elections, 11% of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against then-President Barack Obama.

Yet rather than recognize that Biden’s troubles in Michigan have more to do with his energy policies and his electric-car mandate, which have adversely affected the auto industry, than with his tepid support for Israel, Biden and his advisers have maintained faith in the claim that his presidential hopes depend on Dearborn’s Hamas-supporting imams. The White House and its supporters use the Muslim vote in Michigan to justify a slew of deeply hostile policies that the administration has adopted against Israel. Administration apologists in the media have also used Michigan’s Muslim voters to explain the administration’s refusal to take any effective action to protect the civil rights of American Jews on college campuses. And, of course, they also insisted that Trump’s advantage in most of the Michigan presidential polls owes to the Muslim vote.

‘The current U.S. position on Gaza is backwards’

This brings us back to Hirsch’s warning. Is the Jewish vote really in danger for Democrats? And does it matter?

There haven’t been any public polls taken of Jewish voter sentiment since November, when Biden was widely viewed as the greatest friend Israel had ever had in Washington. But anecdotal evidence is piling up that the Jewish vote is in contention like it hasn’t been in more than 40 years. Moreover, American Jewish voters may well turn out to be the demographic that determines the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

The Jewish Electorate Institute’s poll of Jewish voters in November showed that the intensity of concern about antisemitism had increased sharply since the previous poll in June 2023. Moreover, American Jews were increasingly anxious about antisemitism. Given that the antisemitic onslaught against American Jews has grown exponentially since November, it can be assumed that the numbers are even higher now.

Moreover, perhaps buoyed by this week’s Harvard-Harris poll that showed massive majorities of Americans supporting Israel and its war aims, including its planned conquest of Hamas’s final outpost of Rafah, establishment American Jews are beginning to openly criticize the Biden administration’s hostile policies towards Israel.

On Thursday, Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote a long post on X sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s refusal to support Israel’s planned operation in Rafah. The Washington Institute has long been viewed as AIPAC’s think tank, and its views are perceived as representative of the liberal American Jewish establishment. It is hard to think of any instance where its senior leaders have openly rejected a Democratic administration’s positions on Israel.

Satloff wrote that “the current U.S. position on Gaza is backwards.” He then explained that the administration’s opposition to Israel’s planned operation in Rafah is “a lose-lose-lose-lose proposition. It has the unintended effect of keeping the hostages in captivity. It isn’t achieving a ceasefire that would open the door to an Arab role in Gaza. It runs out the clock on the potential for a Saudi-Israel-U.S. blockbuster deal. And unless the [administration] thinks that Rafah will never happen, it likely extends the Gaza conflict into the summer and perhaps autumn, which the White House should see as disastrous for POTUS’s re-election chances.”

As one Washington insider quipped, “If Satloff is advocating in public what is subtly but clearly a sharp break from the administration over Hamas and Rafah, then it is a strong sign the political winds have shifted in the Jewish establishment and bodes very ill ultimately for the Democrats.”

Other anecdotal evidence is less cerebral. Reports are multiplying daily of young, middle-aged and older Jewish Democratic voters who never considered voting for Republicans announcing to their families or whispering to their lone Republican associate that they are voting for Trump, or will stay home or vote for independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., but will never vote for Biden.

So if the Jewish vote is in contention like never before, if liberal Jews join conservative Jews in voting “as Jews” rather than as Democrats or liberals in November, will it matter?

According to Richard Baehr, co-founder and former political correspondent for American Thinker, not only does the Jewish vote matter, it could easily be decisive. It is true that New York and California have the largest Jewish communities, and they remain firmly in the Democratic column. But four swing states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona—may well be decided by their large Jewish communities.

Baehr explains that the Jewish vote in all four states is larger than the margins of victory in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential races. In 2020, Baehr notes, the final margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 80,000 votes. It was 33,000 in Nevada, 10,000 in Arizona and 12,000 in Georgia. According to the World Population Review, in 2022, Pennsylvania’s Jewish population stood at 434,165. Georgia’s numbered 141,020. There were 123,725 Jewish Americans in Arizona and 79,800 in Nevada.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter won 71% of the Jewish vote in his race against incumbent Gerald Ford. In 1979, Carter mediated the peace accord between Israel and Egypt. Despite his peacemaker role, Carter’s rhetoric and policies overall were hostile. He facilitated the passage of anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N. Security Council; he flirted with Palestinian terrorists; and he generally accused Israel of being responsible for the pathologies of the Arab world. So in the 1980 election, large numbers of American Jews walked away from him. Carter’s share of the Jewish vote plunged to 45%. Independent candidate John Anderson won 15% of the Jewish vote, and Ronald Reagan won 39% of the Jewish vote—and the presidency.

American Jews are frightened

As more than 100 university campuses across the country are aflame with anti-Israel and anti-Zionist fervor, and Jew-hatred has now become mainstream in Democratic politics, Jews are reconsidering many of their basic assumptions about their position in America generally and the Democratic Party specifically.

After refusing to come out with a full-throated condemnation of the onslaught against Jewish students and faculty for weeks, on Thursday, Biden made a statement on the events on U.S. campuses and again failed to give an unqualified denunciation of the trampling of the basic civil and educational rights of Jewish students and faculty, and the delegitimization of the State of Israel. And it’s not just that he can’t say the word “antisemitism” without saying “Islamophobia” in the next sentence, even though Jews aren’t harassing Muslims and Muslims are waging a massive campaign against Jews.

The real problem is that Biden is propagating blood libels against Israel directly by accusing Israel of excessive killing of civilians in Gaza and accusing Israel of preventing innocent civilians from receiving adequate food and medicine. These are slanderous claims, and they are fueling the assaults on the campuses. Biden could stop them tomorrow simply by telling the truth. Instead, he is doubling down.

With even dovish, Netanyahu-hating generals now beginning to acknowledge that the administration is siding with Hamas against Israel in the war, and Jewish establishment figures openly denouncing the administration’s anti-Israel policies, it is obvious that it would be foolish for Democrats to take Jewish voters for granted. And it would be equally foolish for Republicans to dismiss the importance of their votes.

The data show that Jews are a big enough demographic to move four swing states away from Biden. Both statistical and anecdotal data make clear that Rabbi Hirsch was correct. Democrats don’t just have a problem with Jews; they have a problem with Jewish voters.

There is a profound opening here for Trump and for Republicans more generally. If Trump forcefully and consistently condemns the antisemitism on campuses, in corporate boardrooms—wherever it is found—and if he stands forthrightly with Israel and denounces Biden for standing with Hamas and trying to overthrow the Israeli government, with his record as president, he may convince many Jews that were never considered even vague prospects for Republicans to vote for him. This is true for Senate races as well.

The Jews of America are frightened by what they are seeing and experiencing. They are frightened for Israel’s future, and they are frightened about their future in America. Until now, they had taken their civil rights and equality before the law for granted. Until now, they had taken their equality of opportunity for granted. None of this is true any longer. The fear may make them quiet. But it isn’t paralyzing them. They won’t show up at Trump rallies, and they won’t wear MAGA hats. But they will vote. And when they vote, they will be voting as Jews.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of Statesmanship.

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Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader:

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Judenrein in America

By Dr. Berenhaus

Please note that the posts on The Blogs are contributed by third parties. The opinions, facts and any media content in them are presented solely by the authors, and neither The Times of Israel nor its partners assume any responsibility for them. Please contact us in case of abuse. In case of abuse,

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George Washington statue defiled on GW University campus.

“Judenrein”, the German word for an area “cleansed of Jews” used by the Nazis to describe their ultimate goal, is alive and well in America. On college campuses, if a Jew does not conform to a certain ideology, they are not allowed in – they are not welcome. And that is the state of affairs in now numerous American college campuses today. There are blocked off zones that are cleansed of Jews or Jew-Free.

Lost on politicians, college administrators, and some Americans is that if this occurred with any other ethnic or racial group, this would be widely abhorred, without debate. However, it seems to get a free pass while being done to the most persecuted people in the history of the world – the Jews. How do we know this? Few seem to be in a hurry to stop it. These ethnically cleansed college zones continue and are metastasizing. So much for the selective “Inclusion” part of the darling progressive initiative across America known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI. DEI has done nothing for Jews but let them down. The ethnic group that makes up 2% of the American population is the “benefactor” of more acts of hatred against it than all other religious groups combined. Fathom that! Moreover, it dwarfs the other groups, since October 7th.

The legacy media portrays pro-Hamas activists as a legitimate resistance movement against a war half-way across the world. Never mind that there have been casualties in a plethora of other wars that have had exponentially more deaths, and no one made a peep. The largely passive response of our political leaders, judicial system, and campus administrators has been reprehensible setting a horrible precedent. It is widely known by historians, and even casual observers, that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.

In my recent visit to George Washington University, I saw the defiling of our founding father with anti-American decaled slogans, a keffiyeh covering his face and a Palestinian flag wrapped around him. Books like “Global Civil War” adorned the demonstrators’ book tables. Other university protests have had chants of “Death to America”.

What is also a stunner is that student protestors and college administrators seem to forget that Hamas is holding six Americans hostage. Here are their names – they must be in our thoughts: Keith Siegel age 62, Sagui Dekel-Chen age 35, Itay Chen age 19, Edan Alexander age 19, Omer Neutra age 22, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin age 23. It’s still quite hard to imagine that there are so many on the side of those that hold American’s hostage.

Yet we need to make no mistake in the gestalt of what is going on in and around our country. These protests serve as a litmus test for America. Even a non-political junkie knows that this coming presidential election in November will be contentious – to say the least. These protests and disturbances are a trial run. Disruptors – both professional and amateur – will have learned what worked and what didn’t. The impact that they had in major (and minor) cities across America was significant. Protestors closed bridges, tunnels, thoroughfares, disrupted government proceedings, shut down campuses. And this was just a warm-up!

They are honing their skills. Our leaders have failed us miserably in their feckless response to what could essentially be called a minor revolution. For all those down players and deniers of this, taking down the American flag and putting up a foreign flag is just that – this is not hyperbole.

We need to get this dangerous situation under control. We must protect our Jewish minority. We should investigate who is behind this obviously coordinated campaign. And finally, we must make sure it doesn’t happen in the future – especially the near future in November.

Dr. Michael Berenhaus is a freelance activist who works to combat anti-Israel bias in the media. He has been widely published in news sources such as The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Berenhaus has worked tirelessly as a watchdog for anti-Israel bias in the media. His efforts monitoring and responding to false media reports on Israel have compelled several news organizations to retract inaccuracies and publish letters clarifying the truth about Israel. He has been published widely in highly distributed newspapers and online publications including The Washington Post, The NY Times, The Economist, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Jewish Week, and The American Thinker. He is a crusader in online/social media working to educate the general public as an advocate of Israel and against anti-Semitism. Dr. Berenhaus is a co-founder of ‘Boycott The Post’ and of ‘Eye on the Post’ - two non-profit organizations that monitor media coverage to ensure accuracy, fairness and truth as it relates to Israel. He is also a founder of The Pakistan Israel Peace Forum, an organization dedicated to creating peace between Muslims and Jews. Although many people in the Washington Jewish community know Dr. Berenhaus for his work in journalism, most don't know how generous he is to the Jewish community with both his time and money. Dr. Berenhaus has spent countless hours throughout the years volunteering for Israel and Jewish organizations. He went to Ethiopia and worked with the last remaining Ethiopian Jews. He has lectured to Interns and community groups providing direction and techniques for Israel Advocacy in the media. Currently, Dr. Berenhaus is working with JSSA to coordinate and donate eye glasses to the entire Washington DC region of needy Holocaust Survivors. That effort has now been expanded nationally.

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They are out there just not here.

We are stuck with a schmuck!!!!!

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/09/milei-is-absolutely-killing-it-in-argentina-n4928888

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Consul Update (edited.)

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Operational Updates

Southern Gaza Strip

Earlier today, three IDF soldiers were moderately injured as a result of the explosion of a booby-trapped shaft in eastern Rafah. The soldiers were evacuated to the hospital to receive medical treatment. Their families have been informed.

Northern Arena

Earlier today, several launches were identified crossing from Lebanon toward several locations in northern Israel.

A number of hits in the area of Shlomi were identified. As a result, a fire broke out in the area. Israel Fire and Rescue Services are operating at the scene. No injuries were reported.

A short while ago, IAF fighter jets and the Aerial Defense Array successfully intercepted two UAVs in Lebanese territory.

Furthermore, , IAF fighter jets struck Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure and a military structure in the area of Ayta ash Shab.

Hamas Terrorists Launch Rockets at Humanitarian Aid Crossing a Second Time

Yesterday (May 8th), the Hamas terror organization launched a rocket attack against the Kerem Shalom humanitarian aid crossing a second time. The first attack took place on May 5th, when Hamas terrorists launched numerous projectiles at the crossing, killing four IDF soldiers. Like the first, the second attack involved the firing of numerous projectiles at the crossing and consisted of two waves of launches. In the first wave, none of the rockets crossed into Israeli territory and fell inside the Gaza Strip. In the second wave, eight launches were identified crossing from the area of Rafah into the area of Kerem Shalom. As a result of the launches, an IDF soldier was lightly injured. The soldier received medical treatment at the scene.

The Hamas terror organization continues to deliberately endanger Gazan civilians by carrying out terror attacks from within civilian areas in order to harm Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Moreover, the terror organization continues to fire launches from populated zones in the area of Rafah toward the Kerem Shalom Crossing to kill IDF troops and impede the coordination and distribution of humanitarian aid.

NGO Releases Gazans' Testimonies Indicating UN Palestinian Agency Workers are Stealing Humanitarian Aid from Civilians

Yesterday (May 8th), the UN Watch Watch published a report containing the testimonies of multiple Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The civilians' testimonies indicate employees of the UN's Palestinian Agency, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), are stealing international humanitarian aid meant for Palestinian civilians, and are then selling the aid for profit. Click HERE to read the report.

Palestinian Human Rights Activist: "Hamas Is to Blame for Israel's Rafah Operation"

In , THIS ARTICLE, Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid explains the objectives of the IDF's precise operation in Rafah, and why the Hamas terror organization is to blame for its initiation.

Operation: Swords of Iron Humanitarian Update

Click HERE for today's updates regarding the IDF's humanitarian efforts during Operation: Swords of Iron.

British Author on the Resilience of the Israeli People Post-Oct. 7th

Recently, British author Douglas Murray received the Manhattan Institute's Alexander Hamilton Award. During his acceptance speech, Murray opened up about his recent visits to Israel following Hamas's brutal terror attack on Oct. 7th, 2023. Murray was struck by the resilience and strength of the Israeli people, "who in the face of death, choose life." To read Murray's full speech, click HERE.

Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee Issue Proclamation in Support of Israel and the Jewish People

Our Consulate was honored to host Dr. Laralyn Wiverwind of the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee in Atlanta earlier this week. Dr. Wiverwind was accompanied by her husband, Chief Joseph Riverwind of the Arawak Taino. Dr. Wiverwind presented Consul General Sultan-Dadon with a "Proclamation of Support for Israel, Jerusalem, Moint Zion and the Jewish People." The proclamation "acknowledges the Indigenous Rights of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel and the right and responsibility of your government and military forces to protect your land and people from enemies." Below is the full text of the proclamation:

Thank you to the Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee for your incredible support of Israel and the Jewish people, especially appreciated at this difficult time.

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Haim Saban slams 'bad, bad, bad' decision to freeze weapons shipments

Israeli-American billionaire and Democratic megadonor warns US President, 'there are more Jewish voters who care about Israel than Muslim voters who care about Hamas.'

By Haim Saban

Israeli-American billionaire and Democratic megadonor Haim Saban published a personal letter this evening (Thursday) to US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in which he protested the Biden Administration's decision to stop arms shipments to Israel.

"WE, the US, as you stated numerous times, believe that Hamas should be defeated," Saban's letter began.

"We, the US, in this case YOU, Mr. President, have decided to stop sending munitions to Israel to achieve the goal that WE/YOU have set up for Israel and ourselves," he said.

Saban warned, "Even beyond Israel, this sends a terrible message to our allies in the region and beyond, that we can flip from doing the right thing to bending to political pressure."

He further cautioned the President not to forget "that there are more Jewish voters who care more about Israel, than Muslim voters who care about Hamas."

Saban called the move to freeze the weapons shipments a"bad, bad, bad decision on all levels and called on Biden to "please reconsider" the decision."

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Critical social justice K-12 education and anti-Semitism

All programs that cast the Jews as intersectional “oppressors” must be eliminated.

By Steve Rosenberg

In recent years there has been growing concern over the infiltration of critical social justice ideology into K-12 public schools and its correlation with rising antisemitism.

While critical social justice frameworks aim to address systemic inequalities, their implementation typically leads to unintended consequences, including the reinforcement of anti-Semitic stereotypes and attitudes. Administrations and school boards across the country must examine this complex intersection and take measures to combat it.

If they do so, I believe they would conclude that critical social justice programs must be eliminated.

Critical social justice in education is rooted in the belief that societal structures perpetuate inequities based on such factors as race, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic status. Advocates argue for an examination of power dynamics and the dismantling of oppressive systems to achieve social justice. While the intentions behind this approach may be noble, it is fundamentally flawed; mainly because the world is too complex to be simplistically divided into two categories—oppressed and oppressor. Nor are those casting judgment on who belongs in these categories qualified to serve as judge or jury.

Worse still, under the oppressor/oppressed framework, Jews are often categorized as oppressors due to their perceived socioeconomic privilege. This disregards historical and contemporary experiences of anti-Semitism.

In an effort to prioritize the narratives of historically marginalized groups, critical social justice education erases or minimizes Jews and the Jewish experience. This not only perpetuates ignorance but also creates fertile ground for the propagation of antisemitic stereotypes. Moreover, to act as if the Jews have never been -ated or oppressed is to propagate a lie of historic proportions. We should not teach our children lies under any circumstances.

Because of their simplistic understanding of power dynamics, critical social justice frameworks frequently fail to recognize the complexities of Jewish identity. Jews, like any other ethnic or religious group, encompass a diverse range of experiences, including those of marginalization and persecution. Ignoring this complexity erases Jewish voices and experiences in educational spaces.

Intersectionality, a concept central to critical social justice, theorizes that all forms of oppression are interrelated. In practice, however, it is weaponized against Jews, particularly in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Critics have convincingly argued that critical social justice education is consciously biased against Israel and that its advocacy of Palestinian nationalism frequently crosses the line into anti-Semitism, demonizing Jews and denying their right to self-determination as a people. Students are sometimes taught that any support for Israel is inherently oppressive, which is a defamation of Jewish identity that perpetuates anti-Semitic tropes. Jewish students who express support for Israel or question anti-Israel narratives often face ostracism and hostility, creating a hostile environment that stifles diverse perspectives. This is unacceptable in any educational environment.

Moreover, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is often championed in critical social justice spaces. This movement has been credibly accused of promoting anti-Semitism through the double standard of singling out Israel for condemnation while ignoring much more serious human rights abuses in other countries. By aligning with BDS and similar movements, educational institutions risk legitimizing anti-Semitic discourse and alienating Jewish students and faculty.

To combat the intersection of critical social justice and anti-Semitism in K-12 education, several steps must be taken:

Schools must incorporate accurate and nuanced curricula on Jewish history, culture and experiences. This includes addressing the complexities of antisemitism and combating anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Critical social justice education should be completely reimagined or eliminated. Whatever remains should reject theories of intersectionality and adopt a more nuanced understanding that recognizes the diversity of Jewish identities and experiences. Jewish voices must be included and valued in discussions of oppression and social justice. If they are not, critical social justice frameworks should be completely eliminated from educational settings.

Educational institutions must implement robust measures to identify and address anti-Semitic incidents promptly. This includes training staff and providing resources to students that will help them recognize and combat anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviors. Institutions must also officially adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of anti-Semitism.

Schools should create spaces for constructive dialogue and debate on issues related to Israel. Encouraging respectful discourse and diverse perspectives can help counteract polarization and hostility.

Critical social justice educational philosophy has failed to promote criticism or social justice in K-12 education. It has been implemented without careful consideration of its implications and has contributed to the proliferation of antisemitism. By centering Jewish perspectives and actively combating anti-Semitism, educational institutions can work towards creating inclusive environments that uphold the values of genuine social justice. Hate should not be tolerated, nor should critical social justice ideology’s inherent anti-Semitism.

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Hysterics for Hamas

Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos?

Eye on the News / Education, The Social Order

By Heather Mac Donald

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. “Trigger warnings” were implemented to protect female students from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.

Par for the course, then, when the editors at the Columbia Law Review (majority female) adopted the rhetoric of trauma in demanding that Columbia Law School hand out a universal pass for Spring 2024 coursework. A May 1 action by the New York Police Department to evict violent trespassers from an administration building had left them, they wrote, “highly emotional,” “irrevocably shaken,” “unwell,” and “unable to focus”—in other words, displaying all the symptoms of Victorian neurasthenia.

It was not too long ago when a predominantly female professoriate, student population, and bureaucratic apparatus embraced the idea that students’ “safety” should be protected against the “hate speech” that allegedly jeopardized it. (Males, by contrast, place greater emphasis on academic freedom and truth-seeking, regardless of the alleged emotional consequences of intellectual inquiry.) Examples of dangerous speech included arguments that racial disparities are not caused by racism and that human beings cannot change their sex by proclamation.

Now, while still asserting their own unsafety, the pro-Hamas protesters have done an about-face when it comes to political disagreement and “safety,” at least where pro-Israel students are concerned. Nas Issa, a Palestinian alumna of Columbia University, told the New York Times that she saw a difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling that you are in danger. Challenges to your identity or political ideology “can be personally affecting,” said Issa. “But I think the conflation between that and safety—it can be a bit misleading.”

It was also not too long ago when college campuses were shutting down or locking students in their dorms as an anti-Covid policy, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence showing that adolescents faced virtually no chance of serious Covid complications. This zero-risk policy, in its inability to balance costs and benefits rationally, was quintessentially female. It is fitting, therefore, that N95 masks have been repurposed as go-to accessories for the most up-to-date anti-settler-colonialist look. Females at the Columbia rally in front of Butler Library passed out the masks to the few participants not already wrapped up like mummies. When asked what the point was, one distributor answered, “to protect against Covid”—an answer that, sadly, could as easily be sincere as duplicitous.

Assuming the latter to be the case, hiding one’s face to escape accountability for one’s actions is the antithesis of manly virtue. The swaddled students would say that they have been forced into such precautions by the risk of “doxing.” But while a home address is properly private and should not be disclosed without permission, a face is public, and participation in public protest fair game for political accountability. The muffled freedom fighters are also aping Third World terrorists, of course, but the worst that might befall these revolutionary wannabes is rejection from their favored investment or consulting firm, not execution.

The dead white males emblazoned on the frieze of Columbia’s Butler Library would not have been surprised by the scene below them. Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and Virgil knew a thing or two about herd behavior and the irrationality of the mob, even if the students knew nothing about the great minds etched above. Our classical forebears developed philosophy, history, and the arts of persuasion to overcome the mind-numbing conformity on display at the greensward.

The founders of Columbia University would have been alarmed, however, to see students illegally colonizing campus grounds and vandalizing college buildings. They would have been dumbfounded to learn that university administrators were meekly negotiating with the vandals and that faculty in neon vests were protecting the trespassers. The idea that student demands should set the school’s agenda would have struck any nineteenth-century academic as surreal.

Universities now assume that students have the right (some would say the duty) to disrupt the system; they bow before students’ every whim. The pro-Hamas protests have unleashed a wave of 1960s nostalgia. They remind Serge Schmemann, a member of the New York Times editorial board, of those “stormy, fateful and thrilling days” of 1968, when Columbia students took control of campus buildings and held an administrator hostage for 26 hours. A front-page Times article on campus activism claimed that college protesters bring “fresh thinking . . . to the world’s most difficult questions.”

Actually, the pro-Hamas encampments have little to do with “thinking,” fresh or otherwise. Like the spread of trans identity among young females, the tent eruptions are a case of social contagion. No change in Israel’s tactics in the Gaza Strip over the last two months explains the ubiquity of encampments now. Rather, they are copy-cat behavior, like the early 1960s hula-hoop craze among teenyboppers—accelerated by the fact, so galling for the participants, that they are about to lose their sympathetic administrative foils come summer vacation.

Schmemann enthuses that disruptive student protests are an “extension of education by other means.” If so, that education now means refusing to engage with contrary viewpoints. At the April 29 protest at Columbia, a masked marcher was wearing a “Fags for Palestine” (not a typo) t-shirt. Asked how far he thought he would get organizing a gay-pride demonstration in Gaza, he stormed off and declined to answer. Every other question posed to the zombie file, such as whether a black protester knew anything about the long history of Arabs enslaving black Africans—a practice ended only by Britain’s naval vigilance—or was aware of current racial views among Arabs, was met with a similar stony silence.

Two days before the march, Iraq passed a law imposing up to 15 years’ imprisonment for gay sex. One of the chants whined out by Columbia’s female chant-callers was:

Hands off Iran, hands of Iraq and the Middle East;

We want justice, we want peace.

The protesters’ demands for LGBTQ justice extend only to docile Western powers. They give their Middle Eastern idols’ overt homophobia a free pass—if they even know about it.

Theater requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But to take seriously the narcissistic melodramas played out on campus quads today requires active commitment to untruth—the untruth that the students know enough about the world to deserve attention from adults; the untruth that they are engaged in heroic behavior, when their brightly colored tents resemble nothing so much as childhood forts, well provisioned with cookies and comic books; the untruth that the trespassers and vandals possess any bargaining leverage independent of what the university voluntarily confers on them; the untruth that an American college could have any effect on Middle East politics. These mediagenic morality plays are well-rehearsed; they spring from hundreds of such theatrical interactions over the last several decades between self-involved students proclaiming various forms of victimhood and co-dependent student-services bureaucrats who need performative conflict to justify their jobs.

But while the “uprisings” will have no effect on the Middle East, administrators’ prolonged paralysis in dealing with them, only now cracking up here and there, will confirm their participants’ self-importance—what Schmemann calls the “frightening and beautiful . . . faith that mere students could do something about what’s wrong with the world.” Graduates will take this self-importance with them into what used to be called the real world, now being remade in the image of intersectional theory, with the same teary, excitable females leading the way.

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Media Falsely Blame Israel for Rejecting Hamas’ Ceasefire “Proposal”

Shortly after Israel started attacking Hamas’ last stronghold in Rafah on Monday, May 6, the terror group suddenly announced that it had “accepted” a proposed ceasefire deal from Arab mediators.

With few exceptions, media outlets rushed to echo Hamas’ claim in uncritical headlines that painted Israel as the aggressor and the terrorists as peace-seeking doves.

Israel Must Act: Leaving Hamas In Rafah Is Simply Not An Option

There is no viable alternative to Israel’s planned operation into Rafah. Eliminating Hamas will be a brutal operation with heavy casualties and unavoidable collateral damage, but it is also a necessary step on the path to a better world. Israel deserves our support.

By Vice Admiral Michael Connor, USN (ret.), Lieutenant General Eric Fiel, USAF (ret.), and Lieutenant General Richard Mills, USMC (ret.)

(May 1, 2024 / 19FortyFive) Attention is focused on Iran after its massive drone and missile attack against Israel on April 13, and Israel’s subsequent limited strike inside Iran. But lost in this exchange, and one reason that Israel’s response might have been narrow, is that it still has a threat closer to home to finish dealing with: Hamas.

Six months after its barbaric attack, Israel has the terrorist group cornered in Rafah and is preparing a ground incursion into the city. The United States, however, is urging Israel to call off its Rafah operation. But to prevent another October 7, eliminate an Iranian proxy right on its border, and free Gazans who have lived under Hamas’s boot for two decades, an Israeli ground operation is absolutely critical.

Over months of intense fighting, the IDF has destroyed 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, each composed of some 1,500 fighters, starting in the north of the Strip and grinding their way south. Now, the remaining strength of Hamas—4 battalions worth—presumably including the majority of Hamas’s senior leadership and the hostages they abducted, is holed up in Rafah. Israel has planned a ground operation to clear this last terrorist stronghold.

The United States has expressed reservations about this plan not on strategic grounds but humanitarian ones. Biden administration officials previously supported Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas as a military force but they have voiced concerns about the potential humanitarian costs of a ground maneuver into Rafah. More recently, President Biden has called for an “immediate ceasefire.”

As Gazan civilians have fled other parts of the Strip ahead of IDF operations over one million of them have coalesced on Rafah. While these civilians remain in Rafah, U.S. officials believe, an offensive into the city cannot be safely conducted. Yet, they also seem convinced that the civilians have nowhere else to go, therefore concluding that no operation into Rafah is possible and Israel should pursue alternate means to finish off Hamas. Although U.S. and Israel officials have discussed possible alternatives, no one has publicly said what they might be.

That is likely because there is no strategically sound alternative for dismantling Hamas other than a ground incursion into Rafah. And over the past five months of fighting in Gaza, the IDF has proven that it can execute such an operation effectively, efficiently, legally, and while taking due care to get civilians out of harm’s way.

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Finally:

From a very dear, gutsy friend and fellow memo reader:

Whether Iranian moles or Obama's sappers, the new Biden slogan drops during election season: Death to Israel

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/report-biden-admin-issued-sanctions-waiver-on-arms-sales-to-arab-states-day-before-withholding-weapons-from-israel/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/president-bidens-biggest-blunder.html?unlocked_article_code=1.q00.zc-t.mnP9CXKKQgLx&smid=url-share

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Report: This is the Hamas demand Israel rejected

Officials with knowledge of the Cairo hostage talks reveal Hamas demand for potential ceasefire as terror group refuses to commit to releasing 33 living hostages.

pictures of hostages held in Gaza

The Hamas terrorist organization demanded that Israel agree to a 12-week ceasefire instead of six weeks during the hostage negotiations, CNN reported this morning (Sunday).

In the report, three sources familiar with the discussions were cited who said that Hamas forwarded the demand in question to mediators in its latest counter proposal on the issue. According to the sources, Israel strongly opposes the extension of the ceasefire.

A senior American administration official was quoted in the report as saying that Israel made it clear that it wants to maintain its right to dismantle the four remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah.

The source stated that Israel would not be able to carry out the move in Rafah if the first six-week ceasefire period spilled over into the next phase, in which, according to Hamas' proposal, "permanent silence" would apply.

The Saudi Asharq News channel reported that the Israeli delegation in Cairo demanded that Hamas release 33 living hostages alive in the first stage - as opposed to Hamas's proposal that the hostages would be released "alive or dead."

Hamas announced this morning that its delegation had returned to Doha, and blamed Israel for the lack of progress on the ceasefire talks: "The occupation raised objections on several key issues. We are sticking to the clauses we agreed to."

https://www.inquirer.com/news/live/upenn-encampment-disbands-israel-gaza-protests-20240510.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alerts_05_10_2024&int_promo=newsletter&utm_term=News%20Alert

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Lindsey Graham Rips Into Lloyd Austin Over Halted Arms Shipments to Israel

By Matt Vespa

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Former US army chief: The United States killed a lot of innocent people

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/389714

Watch: Ret. Gen. Mark Milley hits back at those who criticize Israel's actions in Gaza, says the US has committed many war crimes over the years.

Retired General Mark A. Milley, who served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 2019 to September 29, 2023, hit back at those in the United States who have been critical of Israel’s operation in Gaza.

Speaking at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington D.C., Milley said, “Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel is doing, and I feel horrible for the for the innocent people in Gaza that are dying, but we shouldn't forget that we the United States killed a lot of innocent people in Mosul and Raqqa, that we, the United States, killed 12,000 innocent French civilians and here we are on the 80th anniversary of Normandy…we destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered people in massive numbers - innocent people who had nothing to do with their government – men, women and children.”

“War is a terrible thing but if it's going to have meaning, if it's going to have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose and it must be achieved rapidly with the least cost and that you do by speed,” he added.

Firing back at so-called “peace activists” who are criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza, Milley said, “They're out there supporting a terrorist organization, whose very written charter calls for the death of all Jews - not just in Israel, worldwide. I mean, come on now. If you're going to support that, you're on the wrong side.”

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27-year old Eva Vlaardingerbroek gave a heartfelt speech ten days ago at CPAC, which YouTube banned as hate speech and will not allow on its platform. You can read about her and scroll down to her speech, available only on X, thanks to Elon Musk. It has over 54 million views so far.

Well worth your time to listen to her, since we're facing a similar crisis in America.

https://www. hungarianconservative.com/ articles/current/eva_ vlaardingerbroek_youtube_hate_ speech_cpac_hungary_2024/

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Is the End Near? Victor Davis Hanson Ponders Threat of Annihilation

By Rob Bluey

Victor Davis Hanson tackles a topic related to military history in his new book, “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.” (Photo courtesy of The Heritage Foundation)

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE EBOOK

Victor Davis Hanson is well known for his intelligent commentary and astute analysis of current events. But for his latest book, he tackles a topic related to his work on military history. It’s called “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend Into Annihilation.”

Hanson studied four historical examples of wartime extinction that he features in the book. Then he applies those lessons to contemporary society to examine our own vulnerabilities. The book is on sale today, and Hanson spoke with The Daily Signal to share his observations along with some advice about what’s at stake for the United States in the short term.

Listen to the full interview on “The Daily Signal Podcast” or read the transcript—edited for length and clarity—below.

Rob Bluey: Could you share with our listeners your motivation for doing this book?

Victor Davis Hanson: I’ve written a lot of books on military history and I’ve come across cases where the defeated didn’t just become occupied or surrender unconditionally or have change of governments or suffer grievous losses, but they were completely wiped out.

And by that I mean, it wasn’t just their physical space, their populations—of course, in the ancient world, they enslaved anybody, they didn’t kill—but their language, their culture, their civilization, their religion disappeared within a generation. So, for today, we don’t know much about Punic culture in North Africa or the Aztecs in Mexico.

It didn’t happen frequently, but what were the conditions under which it occurred? And then, I have a long epilogue trying to speculate if that could still happen given that the agents of annihilation—nuclear, bio, chemical, [artificial intelligence]—are much easier to use than muscular labor of the past.

Bluey: In what ways are we today vulnerable to the threat of extinction?

Hanson: I tried to look at a pattern—if there was a pattern. In all these cases, these societies did not realize they were in decline. They did not realize that, in the past, when they had wars, there were usually negotiations between the victor and the defeated, they had no idea who Cortés was, who Scipio was, who Mehmed II was, or Alexander, that these were killers, and they were different sorts than they had encountered before.

They also had this kind of naive egocentric idea that allies would come to their rescue—the Spartans will come and save us, the Venetians will come to Constantinople, the Macedonians will attack the Romans from the rear. And they didn’t really understand that all allies are self-interested.

And then, finally, they didn’t understand that these killers, the destroyers, were not like Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, they were men of education. Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. Scipio Aemilianus had Polybius, had his side, the great Roman historian, when he destroyed the city. Mehmed had the largest library in the Islamic world. Cortes was a man of letters.

So, they didn’t realize that they had thought deeply about how to destroy. They didn’t just come in, kill, rape women, and leave. They really had an existential plan to erase these cities.

And when you look at today, there’s the same idea that no one would ever do that, it couldn’t happen here, this is in the past.

So, I went through in the epilogue and looked at all the threats of extinction that we have seen in, say, the last 15 years. I was shocked.

It wasn’t just Kim Jong Un saying that he wanted to wipe out South Korea, and he would, but it was people like [Turkish President] Recep Erdogan, he has threatened, he said not too long ago, about eight months ago, that the Athenians, the modern Athenians, would wake up one morning and there would be a barrage of rockets to wipe them out. That was anger over his attempt to take back islands that are Greek off the coast of Turkey.

He said to the Armenians at Nagorno-Karabakh—a year ago, they ethnically cleansed every Armenian out of Azerbaijan. And they had been there for a thousand years. And he said, “We are going to deal with Armenia itself in the way that our grandfathers did.” And that was, of course, the destruction of Armenian culture in Turkey.

Victor Davis Hanson, a bestselling author, columnist, and scholar and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, speaks with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts in April 2024. (Photo courtesy of The Heritage Foundation)

We know what the Iranians have said. There was a very controversial statement by [Former Iran President Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, about 20 years ago, but more, that’s been reiterated lately, in a variety of contexts, that the idea of Israel is the home of devout Jews is actually a gift to Iran because it concentrates devout Jews in one place.

Half the world’s Jewry is now in Israel, but more importantly, these are the observant Jews, and they are at what Rafsanjani called a one-bomb state, that one nuclear weapon could erase Jewish civilization itself.

[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, of course, says that Ukraine is an aberration that doesn’t really exist, it was a province of the Soviet Union, and the language should be obliterated, it should be reincorporated into Russia. I’ve counted about 16 statements in the press that Russian generals, Russian media, or Russian government officials have said if the war were to continue, they would use nuclear weapons.

In the case of China, they have threatened to wipe out Taiwan and destroy the bastard idea of a Taiwanese civilization, they say it doesn’t exist. And they’ve threatened to nuke, as well, Japan if it aids Taiwan.

I only mentioned that because I’ve had pretty good luck with Chinese publishers buying books on military history. I wrote a book on World War II they purchased, but they sent a letter to my publisher and basically said if I didn’t take that sentence out of the book, then they were going to cancel the publication agreement. And, of course, I couldn’t take it out. Instead, I sent back, not just one threat of Taiwan, I found about 15 others, and I said, “This is ridiculous, you’ve done this more than—” And so, they’ve canceled the Chinese translation. But it’s pretty prevalent.

And also, the denial. People on the walls of Constantinople said, “We can work with a sultan. He won’t kill everybody.” And people said, “Alexander the Great is a philosopher, he won’t obliterate us like Philip did,” … or something like that.

And when you see the same denial, people get very angry when you mention Putin’s threats, they say, “Oh, he’s just bluster. He would never do that.” And, “Kim Jong Un would never do that.” And, “I’m not sure that’s true.” History says that the odds are they won’t, but it’s happened and there’s no second chances when that happens.

Bluey: What role do you think technology is playing in either facilitating or even exasperating the potential for these actors to destroy other societies?

Hanson: I think we learned with COVID gain-of-function research that the technology was accelerating much more rapidly than the social, political, economic, cultural analysis of how to handle it. And there were people who were freelancing, like EcoHealth, for example, that was giving expertise to the Wuhan lab. I think the same thing is true of AI.

Unfortunately, I work at Stanford right next to Silicon Valley, so when I go out and eat dinner at night, I often listen to conversations of techies and I know people who give to Stanford, etc. I have very little confidence on their moral sense. I have a great deal of confidence that they’re very adept in high-tech research like AI.

So my point is that when we see things like the FBI hiring Twitter contractors to suppress news about a laptop in the last election, these are the same people, the same mentalities that will be in charge of AI.

And there was, I mentioned in the book, a Pentagon simulation in which they used a computer launch completely directed by an AI program. And so, they sent a missile on a computer and they programmed every defense mechanism in it possible. So as it went into the computer, they launched computer simulations of air attacks from aircraft, from anti-ballistic missile systems, weather problems, etc. And then, when it was almost over, they had the computer kill the launch because it was over.

Well, the launch didn’t kill, it turned around and went back at the launch person because it had been programmed to think spontaneously about a threat. So the person who launched the missile had never thought that the missile would attack him.

And so, they shut down the entire experiment because they realized that they didn’t have the capability in the real world of ensuring that an AI couldn’t reason or analyze a threat, including the person who launched the missile, which would be the greatest threat of all if he canceled the missile and aborted it.

So things like that are pretty scary, just like the COVID and the biochemical, etc.

And I think if you look at what these people said in the past, I was just shocked about the denial.

Montezuma said, “We’re going to be here forever.” He had visions of the Cortes were some type of deities maybe, but he thought he could appease them.

And the same thing was true of the Carthaginians, they said, “You know what? We will give up our elephant. We’ll do everything. The Romans won’t do this.” And they had no intention of doing anything else other than destroying them.

So I do think there’s people—like the Chinese Communist government, like the government in North Korea, like the government in Turkey, like the government in Iran—who are in a whole different moral universe than what we think they’re in.

Bluey: Do you think that some of that denial exists here in the United States today?

Hanson: Absolutely.

I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.

They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States, if 1% are engaged in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155 mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So, we are not armed and yet, our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military, never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of those numbers are the same, it’s the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this third and fourth generation are not joining up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics—72% to 74% of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.

And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year.

Bluey: What do you suggest that societies today, including the United States, learn from those historical examples you gave us earlier in the interview to maybe mitigate some of the risks that we might find ourselves in in the future?

Hanson: I would not put much confidence in international bodies or even in so-called close allies. The Spartans came all the way up to the Thebans and they heard the Macedonians, they turned right back. On the last day of the existence of Constantinople, they were looking out at the walls at the Hellespont thinking that Venetian galleys en masse would come up and save them.

So don’t.

I support NATO. I don’t really think the [United Nations] is of much value. The only thing that will say the United States is a deterrent military, and we don’t have that now, an overwhelmingly large, successful, smart military. And if we don’t have that, we’re going to see more of what we saw in Afghanistan, what we saw with the Chinese balloon, what we see in Gaza.

And I think Americans don’t realize that we’re on a back of a tiger and we can’t get off because we set up the postwar world, and we had the pretensions of saying to the world, “You can go in the Red Sea, you can go in the Black Sea, you can go in the Strait of Hormuz, you can do all that and you won’t be injured.” That was a wonderful thing to do. But if you’re going to have those pretensions that you’re going to have a postwar order, you have to have a military that, from time to time, takes care of the Houthis or gets rid of Soleimani.

And it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a neocon interventionist, but I think under [former President Donald] Trump and [former State Secretary Mike] Pompeo, they had a, I guess you would call it a Jacksonian idea that there would be no better friend than United States and no worse enemy. And we did not want to get involved in optional military adventures, but we would be very, very tough on our enemies. And then, the tougher we were, the less we would have to do it once we reestablished deterrence.

So, we’ve lost deterrence, and that can be achieved militarily, economically, politically, but we’ve lost it in every category and it’s going to be very, very dangerous to reestablish it.

Bluey: How much is at stake this year as it pertains to the future of this great country?

Hanson: Everybody says each election is the most important, but I can tell you that this election is more important than 2016 and 2020 because, in my lifetime, we’ve never seen the Democratic Party—they always say the Republican Party was taken over MAGA, but you look at 90% of the MAGA agenda, and it’s traditionally low taxes, small government, strong defense, closed borders.

But the Democratic Party, as we’re seeing with Columbia [University] and all these student protests, they are a revolutionary party. It’s not that they believe in a porous border, they believe in no border. It’s not that they believe in light sentencing, they don’t want to sentence anybody. They don’t want to have bail. They don’t believe that there is such a thing as deterrence, the way we got out of Afghanistan. They believe in radical climate change. You can show them data, you can show them all sorts, they don’t care, they want to ban combustible engines, they don’t want fossil.

So, this is a group of people, as we’re seeing in this split screen with Donald Trump charged with these ridiculous misdemeanors bootstrapped onto felonies. At the same time, people are entering with violence into a Columbia building. And as one of them said the other night, “They will be out in 24 hours.” I don’t think they’re even in jail as we speak, they’re already out.

I guess what I’m saying is we’re in a revolutionary Jacobin period, kind of a Reign of Terror. And I don’t see it stopping unless—I don’t think the election of Donald Trump will be enough. You’ll have to elect the Senate, Donald Trump, and enlarge the House majority. And then, they’re going to have to act very quickly to stop it, to restore the border, to restore deterrence, to restore deterrence against criminals, to get back our preeminent position economically, to stop this $1 trillion borrowing every 100 days.

We’re in bad shape in every category. And I think, whether we like it, I know there’s a lot of Never-Trumpers out there, but whatever problem they have with Trump’s temperament, it just pales in comparison with the ideological revolutionaries that are in there now … .

If [President Joe] Biden is reelected, what we saw the first term will be nothing, it’ll be enhanced to a magnitude, it’ll be so much greater. So, I’m really worried about this election, especially the integrity of the balloting and turnout and all of those other issues.

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MIDDLE EAST

Netanyahu Says Israel Will ‘Stand Alone’ If Needed After Biden’s Threat

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Philly Police have cleared Penn’s Pro-Palestinian encampment and arrested 33 protesters

By Susan Snyder

Police detain 33 protesters at the University of Pennsylvania campus, on Friday.

Police on Friday disbanded the 16-day old pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, less than 24 hours after Gov. Josh Shapiro called for its removal and over the objections of free speech advocates.

By the time they were done, 33 people had been arrested without incident and cited for defiant trespass, a university spokesperson said in a statement. Penn did not give a breakdown on how many of those arrested were students, faculty or others. Two faculty members originally detained, one with handcuffs, were let go.

» READ MORE: Live updates: Police disband Penn protest site; students and teachers detained

Penn police began the process at 5:30 a.m. with support from the Philadelphia police department and gave those at the encampment multiple warnings to leave and avoid arrest, the university said.

“Our community has been under threat and our campus disrupted for too long,” Penn leaders said in an email to the campus Friday morning. “Passion for a cause cannot supersede the safety and operations of our University”

In the email, President J. Larry Jameson, Provost John L. Jackson Jr. and Craig R. Carnaroli, senior executive vice president, said access to College Green, where the 35-tent encampment had been set up, would be restricted until further notice.

Philadelphia police dressed in riot gear with zip ties and shields stood alongside Penn police as dozens of protesters chanted with their arms linked around the base of the university’s iconic Benjamin Franklin statue, as the dismantling got underway.

On Thursday, Shapiro speaking at an event in Westmoreland County called on Penn to remove the encampment.

“Over the last 24 hours ... the situation has gotten even more unstable and out of control,” Shapiro said during an event in Westmoreland County on Thursday. “More rules have been violated, more laws have been broken. That is absolutely unacceptable.”

Penn, however, had made its decision to move on the encampment before Shapiro’s comments. Such a large tactical effort would be hard to organize in less than 24 hours. The university’s decision was triggered shortly after the encampment expanded on Wednesday.

Penn also received a petition last week with more than 3,000 signatures from faculty, students and alumni calling on the university to take the encampment down. Others have urged the university not to use force.

The protesters are part of a national movement on U.S. college campuses calling for universities to disclose their funding sources and divest their endowments from entities benefiting from the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll for Palestinians has surpassed 34,000 following the Hamas attack on Israel in October, which resulted in deaths and hostages being taken.

At Penn, protesters are also calling on the university to provide amnesty for pro-Palestinian students facing discipline over past protests. Penn has so far placed at least six students on leave and evicted one of them, an international student, from campus housing for participating in the encampment.

Tulia G. Falleti, chair of Penn’s faculty senate, announced her resignation as chair, saying she is “heartbroken” at the university’s decision to forcefully dismantle the pro-Palestinian encampment.

“I am…no longer confident of my ability to work collaboratively with our administration that has sent in the police to arrest its own students, staff, and faculty for participating in a non-violent protest,” wrote Falleti, in a three-page letter explaining her decision.

Falleti, who will maintain her position as a political science professor and director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, noted that the faculty senate executive committee on Thursday agreed to encourage the administration and encampment negotiating team “to keep negotiating in good faith, to de-escalate, and to seek a peaceful resolution.”

Members of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine were outside the encampment area Friday morning as police told protesters to leave and began arresting people. ”One word, abhorrent,” said Dagmawi Woubshet, an associate professor of English, who is a member of the group. He said faculty members would be assisting students who have been arrested. ”We can’t get in,” he said at 6:45 a.m. “All the entrances are blocked.”

He said Penn should have followed the lead of other universities, including Rutgers, that came to peaceful agreements with their protesters.

Chi-ming Yang, an associate professor of English, who is also a member of the faculty group, said it is particularly upsetting that the forceful dismantling occurred amid negotiations between the students and the administration. Three sessions had been held.

“It’s completely immoral,” she said. “There’s no question that students from the beginning wanted to negotiate in good faith.”

Woubshet, who is Black and was one of the faculty members originally detained by police, said he was handcuffed for several minutes, while his female colleagues, who were white and Asian, were not handcuffed.

“I started asking, ‘I am a faculty member. Why am I being handcuffed?’ I heard another officer in a hushed tone say ‘take it off. take it off.”

Amy Offner, an associate professor of history and president of the Penn chapter of American Association of University Professors, called the move to arrest members of the Penn community “cowardly and appalling,” asserting that the faculty and students were engaged in nonviolent antiwar protest.

“We condemn the university administration, we demand the immediate release of all our students and colleagues, and we demand the reversal of all discipline and charges against students who have been the victim of the university administration’s own violation of its Guidelines on Open Expression,” she said in a statement.

But others in the Penn community were supportive of the move.

Benjamin Abella, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, wishes Penn had acted earlier to dismantle the encampment but also said he “respected the fact that this is a delicate situation.”

Abella was one of the leaders of the petition that called on Penn to remove the encampment. He and others delivered the petition to Penn president J. Larry Jameson last week.

“It’s sad that it came to this,” he said. “Ultimately, the administration and the police acted professionally and calmly and certainly did the right thing.”

“What makes me sad is that so many in our Penn community were willing to conflate free speech with inappropriate protest that violated Penn policies, disrupted university business and caused enormous distress to many and glorified both hate speech and violence.”

He does not expect this will be the end of tensions on campus over Israel and the war in Gaza.

“Unfortunately, I think there is much more work to be done,” he said.

University leaders said they could not permit further disruption of Penn’s academic operations.

“The protestors refused repeatedly to disband the encampment, to produce identification, to stop threatening, loud, and discriminatory speech and behavior, and to comply with instructions from Penn administrators and Public Safety,” they wrote. “Instead, they called for others to join them in escalating their disruptions and expanding their encampment, necessitating that we take action to protect the safety and rights of everyone in our community.”

The university said it could not allow students to be prevented from studying certain places, attending their final exams or participating in commencement, scheduled for May 20 at Franklin Field.

Penn leaders said they could not acquiesce to protesters’ demands, including granting amnesty to those participating in the encampment.

“Penn remains unequivocally opposed to divestment, and it is unlawful for institutions receiving funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” the university said, referring to protesters’ demands that Penn divest from companies profiting from the military efforts in Gaza.

The university offered other ways that the protesters could continue raising their objections without an encampment, the leaders said.

“We proposed, and still hope to deploy, Penn’s academic resources to support rebuilding and scholarly programs in Gaza, Israel, and other areas of the Middle East,” they wrote.

Escalating tensions between protesters and the Penn administration, the encampment had expanded Wednesday night as a large crowd gathered and the Benjamin Franklin statue was again defaced. On the statue’s forehead, protesters drew an inverted red triangle, which has conflicting meanings as a reference to a Palestinian flag and the target markers used in Hamas’ tactical videos. The triangle appeared to have been washed off of Franklin’s forehead by Thursday morning.

But on Friday morning, two small red triangles appeared at the statue’s base, with the words “intifada until victory” and a Palestinian flag was hung around the statue’s neck.

In recent days, others colleges, including Columbia, have used police to forcefully remove pro-Palestinian encampments. Also early Friday morning, police in riot gear removed an encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Boston Globe reported. More than 2,900 protesters have been arrested across 100 campuses nationwide, according to The Intercept.

Earlier this week, there was a unified front among city leaders — including Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, and District Attorney Larry Krasner — that the encampment in its current form should not be disbanded using force, and that Penn should resolve the matter peacefully.

Whether this will be the end of encampments at Penn for the semester remains to be seen. At some other universities, they were re-erected after arrests.

“Anything is possible,” Yang, one of the professors with Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said when asked if there would be an attempt to reinstall the encampment.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Middle East and Other Musings

Thursday, May 9, 2024

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