From Ian:
Douglas Murray:
International Criminal Court’s vicious smear tactics against America’s allies
Of course, this whole thing is a fantastic moral inversion. It is not the Israelis who are committing war crimes.
It was Hamas who committed war crimes — live on camera — on Oct. 7.
Will Khan prosecute the leadership of Hamas?
Good luck to him if he tries.
It seems unlikely that the terrorist group will suddenly come out of their hostage-surrounded tunnels in southern Gaza or their luxury penthouses in Qatar and fly to The Hague.
One thing you can say with confidence about Hamas is that they’re not big “laws of war” guys.
And good luck to anyone who tries a citizen’s arrest.
Vladimir Putin will benefit from this, naturally. It would be a big win for him if he could point to the Israeli PM and say, “You see, the ICC tries to prosecute everyone.”
Such a move would also be a huge blow to all the internationalists who want to see an international court with some legitimacy.
Khan’s move — if he goes ahead with it — would blow up this infant global project at its foundation, making Republicans and Democrats alike become its biggest enemies.
And of course, such a disgraceful step would not stop the war in Gaza.
The Israeli war cabinet has made it clear they want nothing short of total victory.
That means the destruction of Hamas and the return of all remaining hostages.
If the ICC and others want to stop this war, they should focus on achieving that.
The fact they can do no such thing shows them up as the partisan eunuchs that they actually are.
But if they try to make this move against the Israeli PM and others, Khan and the ICC won’t delegitimize Israel — as they hope.
The court will simply delegitimize itself.
And vindicate the view of patriotic Americans of both political parties that this country should have no part in the farce at The Hague.
Douglas Murray on Iran attack, anti-Israel marches, and Israel’s resilience
A Labour victory, which has many Muslim voters, would likely not be better for Israel, but he expected it to be similar to Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s policy but weaker.
He credited Labor leader Keir Starmer for his work to improve the party and “lancing the worst of the antisemitism” but the foundations of the political movement were still radical.
Cameron “has been pretty bad as a friend of Israel during this conflict. His own anti-Israel sentiment seeps out fairly regularly.”
“I don’t think there’ll be that much difference to begin with,” said Murray. “The problem is always whenever a conflict emerges with Israel involving any of Israel’s neighbors, it doesn’t matter what size the conflict is, actually.
The responses to it get more and more vicious. And that’s something I’ve noted for a long time now, and I’m deeply concerned. This is a relatively large war compared to previous Gaza wars, but it’s not a large war compared to some others in Israel’s history. How the Labour Party will behave when they’re in government, we’ll see.“Back in the UK after almost six months in Israel, Murray said he was struck by how Israelis had met the challenges before them, but also how they were still dealing with the societal tremors of October 7.
“I’m deeply moved and inspired, really, by the young men and women of Israel,” said Murray. “I think they’ve been absolutely remarkable. I think the question which every society that isn’t completely asleep always asks itself is, ‘Would we be what our fathers or grandfathers or forefathers were in the time of trial?’”
He said that in the West, they had not been tested in such a fashion in a long time, and some older Israelis doubted the newer generations’ ability to stand fast. He said the older generations were no longer worried.
He met many soldiers serving in the Gaza and West Bank arenas, and in his eyes, “this generation of Israelis has stepped up to a historical moment, and they’ve been shown to be magnificent and brave and courageous.”
As he told President Isaac Herzog in a recent meeting, “They don’t do any of it out of hatred. They do it out of love. Love and the desire to defend their loved ones, their families, their people, their nation, their home. I see no hatred in the hearts of the young soldiers I meet. I see just the desire to live in peace and the knowledge that in order to live in peace, you must sometimes wage war, especially when war is waged upon you.”
While the soldiers fought, the country still grappled with a trauma that Murray said is still being processed. It was a trauma that many in the world did not understand.
He had spoken to Nova massacre survivors and their therapists, and they told them it was too soon to talk about PTSD.
“This country is still in the trauma,” said Murray. “I think that will be the case for a long time to come. The trauma being the deterrence that Israelis have believed they had for 50 years now broke down.”
Some of the wounds could be healed to a certain extent “with the return of any hostages that can be returned, but also with the reestablishment of Israel’s deterrence in both the military and intelligence fields. I think that’s the real end to it, to this conflict. The real end is when Israelis in the North and the South know that they can sleep safely in their beds. I spent many months living with the displaced people from Kiryat Shmona and elsewhere. I think of these people every day. Even when I’m not with them. They have to be allowed to return to their homes in safety.”
Seth Mandel:
Hamas Propaganda Gets a Pass from ‘Disinformation’ Watchdogs
So why is Jankowicz back in the news? To combat the type of misinformation and disinformation spread by Hamas through Christiane Amanpour? Of course not. Through her dark-money group called American Sunlight, unnamed donors have funded her new crusade to investigate how Republican legislators have made it easier to be mean to women (read: Jankowicz) on the Internet.
The sad part about the disinformation scam is that disinformation does exist, you just wouldn’t know it by the attempts of progressive political activists who, like Jankowicz, have turned its pursuit into a McCarthyite partisan campaign. Indeed, the entire Israel-Hamas war since Oct. 7 has been infused with reporters’ startlingly unethical allegiance to obvious Hamas propaganda. That propaganda benefits progressive allies of the “disinformationists,” so it gets a pass.
As exposed repeatedly at major U.S. outlets, Hamas has created a network of fixers who have used their access to pose as photojournalists and shape the war narrative. Al Jazeera has now been caught credentialing several members of Gaza-based terrorist groups. And influential celebrity pundits like Amanpour have seemingly been successful in pressuring their networks to ease up on the fact-checking process that could filter out Hamas-planted stories. Obviously manipulated casualty statistics put out by Hamas have now made their way into regular media use without the disclaimer that used to accompany them. The filter is gone.
The result of all this is the spreading of physical violence against Jews around the world and the corruption of diplomacy by Westerners who have been reading from an Iranian script and occupying college campuses in deference to Iranian militias.
It’s fertile soil for aspiring watchdogs and disinformation researchers, if only we could find them.
From Ian:
Josh Hammer:
Restore Order and Crush the Campus Jihadist Thugs
n his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington reached a stirring conclusion: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."
Washington is rolling in his grave right now at Mount Vernon.
Jews are so "afraid" at Columbia University that an Orthodox campus rabbi recently urged students to "return home as soon as possible." The situation at many purportedly "elite" universities is dire, as jihadist mania supplants Black Lives Matter as the vogue, faux-moral cause rotting the minds of impressionable Gen-Zers.
Hamas' useful campus idiots are, at best, blithering morons. They do not realize that Zionism—the Jewish people's national liberation movement in their ancestral homeland—is the quintessence of the very "anticolonialism" and "indigenous people's rights" they claim to champion. They are clueless about international law and how the doctrine of uti possidetis juris establishes that Israel has the best legal claim to Judea and Samaria (i.e., the "West Bank"). They know nothing about warfighting; John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at West Point, has demonstrated that Israel's combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza since the war began is "historically low for modern urban warfare."
Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of the thrill one feels for supporting a chic social justice movement ... er, genocidal terrorist organization?
The activism now upending Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and other morally bankrupt institutions is done in explicit support of a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. Keffiyeh-wearing mini-jihadis at Columbia recently chanted "We are Hamas!" and "Long live Hamas!" Other agitators at Columbia called for Tel Aviv—a liberal secular city that will remain in Israeli hands under any possible future settlement with the Palestinian-Arabs—to be "burned to the ground." At the University of Michigan (where my speech in November was shouted down by a pro-Hamas mob), student Hamasniks distributed a pamphlet that says "Freedom for Palestine means Death to America."
Give them credit for the candor.
Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke
It wasn’t long ago when the activist Left had a whole laundry list of systems and impersonal forces that it was battling against: sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, ableism – you name it. The Millenial Left may have nodded along to Bernie Sanders’ old labour-Left leanings. Still, they largely abandoned the class struggle of old for a struggle against boutique oppressions that were contingent but intersecting, hence the rise of so-called “intersectionality.”
That’s the once-trendy academic philosophy that relies on a view of power relations of society, where advantages and disadvantages are filtered primarily through identities: race, gender, and sexual orientation. But intersectionality is old hat. It’s not revolutionary enough anymore now that it’s been mainstreamed and gotten absorbed and institutionalised by the blob of liberal media and corporate institutions – including, believe it or not, the Scottish government.
So, in the wake of the shock of the massive Israel-Hamas war since October 7 and a lack of purpose after the political failures of Left-wing populism – the Western Left has found a way to get its groove back by simplifying yet expanding its moral framework.
Goodbye, intersectionality – hello, “It’s All One Thingism.”
In this nebulous new cosmology, Palestinians – even Hamas themselves – aren’t just engaged in a specific geopolitical fight over territory and resources. No, they’re the tip of the spear of a perceived collective liberation against the West, the Global North, “colonisers,” whatever you want to call the Bad Guys. It’s a magical world in which all politics and world affairs once seen through intersectionality’s colourful prism have been flattened into (somewhat ironically for self-proclaimed atheists) a more Biblical view of the world: black-and-white, good and evil.
“Palestine is every single issue in one issue,” wrote Scarlett Rabe, a singer-songwriter who describes herself as an anti-racist mother and an abolition feminist/womanist, in a viral tweet in February. “It’s reproductive justice. It’s social justice. It’s climate crisis… It’s not just one issue; it’s all the issues in one.”
All One Thingism explains why a group of a few hundred masked protestors who chanted “Death to America” and “Hands off Iran” this week also employed the relatively meaningless slogan “From Chicago to Palestine.” Or that another viral post on Instagram by a person wearing a “Fatties for a Free Palestine” T-shirt insisted that “Palestinian solidarity is not a niche issue. Fat liberation and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand.”
George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests
George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.
The protests, which began when students took over Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus lawn last week, have mushroomed nationwide.
Copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia — all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — and at some, students have clashed with police.
The SJP parent organization has been funded by a network of nonprofits ultimately funded by, among others, Soros, the billionaire left-wing investor.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
It has three “fellows” who have been major figures in the nationwide protest movement.
Nidaa Lafi, a former president of the University of Texas Students for Justice in Palestine, was seen at an encampment at UT Dallas Wednesday making a speech demanding an end to the war in Gaza.
Lafi, a former legislative intern for the late Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, graduated from the school last year with a degree in global business and is now a law student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In January, she was detained for blocking the route of President Biden’s motorcade after he arrived in Dallas for the funeral of Johnson, her former boss.
At Yale, USCPR’s fellow Craig Birckhead-Morton was arrested Monday and charged with first-degree trespassing when SJP’s branch, Yalies4Palestine, occupied the school’s Beinecke Plaza, the Yale Daily News reported.
Birckhead-Morton — also a former intern for a Democrat, Maryland rep John Sarbanes — emerged from custody to address a sit-in blocking traffic in New Haven.
The most high-profile of the fellows is Berkeley’s Malak Afaneh, co-president of the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine.
She has been a serial speaker at an anti-Israel protest on the campus this week — which came after she first shot to prominence by hijacking a dinner at the law school dean’s home to shout anti-Israel slogans, then accused the dean’s wife of assaulting her when she asked the radical to leave.
From Ian:
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938
If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?
NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.
Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.
However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.
Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.
At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.
Israeli and U.S. flags have been set ablaze.
“We are Hamas!” one protester yelled, just outside the campus gates, while banging a pot against a police barricade.
“You guys are all inbred,” one protester screamed at sophomore Jonathan Lederer and some 20 Jewish students singing songs of peace on campus Saturday, just before the pro-Hamas faction threw water in their faces and hurled projectiles at Lederer’s head and chest.
The anti-Semites also chanted: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” Also: “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
“Go back to Poland!” another pro-Hamas thug screamed at a Jewish student. “We all know how things turned out the last time the Jews were in Poland,” he said on Fox & Friends yesterday morning.
“The environment at Columbia University is absolutely dreadful,” graduate student Xavier Westergaard said Monday on America Reports. Campus police may not do anything “when presented with issues ranging from ‘I’ve just been spat on,’ ‘I’ve just been yelled at,’ ‘I’ve just been kicked.’ People are yelling, ‘Jewish students die,’ ‘Jews go back to Poland.’ This is insane. It feels like anarchy, and we are not being supported by our university.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
The Contagion of University Pro-Hamas Protests
The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts.
A Very Brief History of the University:
The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a University, but they did a much better job than we do today. Over time, led by the Germans, universities became multiversities, where scholars ceased to attempt to build a comprehensive view of the world, instead locking themselves in siloed sub-fields.
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Next, American universities led the transition away from scholarship and towards professionalization. People started studying “business arts,” as if business were the same sort of activity as the pursuit of truth for its own sake. I have nothing against business. Making a good living for one’s family is noble. But insofar as it is an art, it is a servile one, not a liberal one. Accompanying professionalization was, paradoxically, radicalization. People who wanted to get on with life started studying to be accountants and engineers; radicals took over what remained of the liberal arts. This decay is best chronicled by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, a book I encourage you all to read.
Now we are witnessing the completion of the university’s unraveling. We hardly even produce professionals now, but activists who take a few Zoom classes on racialized communism and spend the rest of their time scrolling TikTok and indulging resentment. Middle managers may not be philosophers, but at least they do something useful. A degree in Queer Theory prepares you for no life beyond perpetual adolescent whining. The professors of the 60’s gave up the classics to focus on changing the world. Well, they succeeded. Moral formation has been replaced by sweet, glorious self-pity and the narcissistic pursuit of utopia. Beauty is something to be deconstructed by art and architecture students in ever-uglier buildings. And truth? In their minds, there is no such thing. Only power remains. How terrible it must be to see the whole of existence through culturally Marxist eyes! Terrible, but, at least, cognitively undemanding.
The radical cultural Marxists weakened universities and, by extension, society. They also made it easier for radical Islam to infiltrate universities, filling the moral vacuum the radicals created with their hazy relativism. This unholy combination of radicals and Islamists then preyed on the impressionable elite students entrusted to the universities. Long story short: We have future graduates of Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and beyond bleating Pro-Hamas slogans spoon-fed to them by hardened extremists. Students who fancy themselves freedom fighters shouting “Intifada and martyrdom.” In their obnoxious gullibility they fail to see what those slogans would mean if applied to their young lives. If you’re wondering, look at what happened to the Israeli students at the Nova festival on October 7th. So ignorant and out of touch are these Ivy League scholars that they do not know that the kids dancing at that ill-fated festival were young, liberal peaceniks.
Seth Mandel:
Dr. Snowflake and Mr. Intifada
Unhoused, unfed, and even temporarily unschooled, this freedom fighter would have her story told. Except, it wasn’t actually her story. In fact, Isra Omar and her peers were warned explicitly of the consequences of their Hamasville tent city, which they set up the same day Omar’s mother browbeat the president of the university from which Omar was threatened with suspension. It’s just that Omar genuinely could not imagine that she personally would face consequences—as if she were just any other kid. Her mother the congresswoman worked very hard to intimidate Columbia President Minouche Shafik on television before Congress, and yet she was given no special treatment.
Ilhan Omar’s fellow squadnik Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has her back. She worried about “violent” cops at Columbia (of which there have been exactly zero), demanding to know why “counterterror units” were on the scene. That is, she worried that people who pledged their sympathy to a terror organization and then called on that terror organization to come kill Jewish students on campus might be made to feel unsafe by the presence of antiterrorism police.
Back to that hearing: Shafik was asked why Columbia hired as a visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who was repeatedly, vocally supportive of Hamas and their Oct. 7 slaughter of innocents. Shafik wavered on what Abdou was doing on campus at the moment, but she swore he’d never teach his “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition” class at Columbia again. (Which didn’t answer the question of why he’d been hired in the first place.) This week while reporting on the protests at Columbia, Free Beacon reporter Jessica Costescu noticed Abdou hanging around the encampment and started filming the scene. She was approached by a student who told her to stop filming for “safety” reasons.
So you see, these students and their congresspersons aren’t heartless monsters. They care deeply—for themselves. They just want to feel safe to threaten some Jewish students and to physically assault others. And of course, if there are Jews who want to join them in pledging fealty to Hamas, they will advocate for their safety too. It’s a big tent city.
From Ian:
Ben-Dror Yemini:
Hamas loses war in Gaza but wins it in US, West
Hamas' ideology is the elimination of Jews.
Hamas is part of the global jihad that declares its goal as taking over the world to establish a dark Islamist imperialist vision.
Those leading the student protests on campuses support genocide.
They started burning Israeli and American flags and waving Hamas and Hizbullah flags, while supporting the Houthis and Iran.
The axis of evil led by Iran and jihad has wide support.
The protesters seem to think they want to stop the war. They're only fueling it.
Hamas arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar looks at these students and enjoys every moment.
Hamas may be beaten in Gaza, but it's winning in the U.S. and the West.
Never in history have so many turned themselves into useful idiots for an axis of evil and terrorism.
They think they're enlightened. They're not. They're causing more and more casualties.
PMW:
Why does the US criticize its ally while supporting those who demonize it?
Why are Hamas’ allies, who are terrorizing and threatening supporters of Jews and Israel on campuses around the US, also in the same breath screaming “death to Israel” and “death to America”?
The answer is that while the US is the driving force pressuring Israel to accept PA rule in Gaza and while the PA welcomes US aid and quietly thanks it for life-saving support, the PA simultaneously demonizes the US incessantly. The PA goes so far as to claim that Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza is actually an anti-Arab and anti-Islamic US war in which Israel is merely the American tool. And now, PA-driven anti-US hate has reached the US in full force.
We are witnessing a recurring pattern. For years, Palestinian Media Watch has been warning about the PA’s Islamist Antisemitism, but the West has been ignoring the issue and on the contrary, it continued funding the PA’s Nazi-like demonization of Jews. That Islamist Antisemitism has now established itself among the mainstream of Palestinian supporters in the US and is echoed by Palestinian supporters worldwide.
One of the PA’s prominent mouthpieces, the PA’s official daily columnist Muwaffaq Matar, regularly accuses America of colonialism and of making Israel its pawn in the Middle East.
“We always emphasize that our main problem is with the US and the colonialist states that planned and actively contributed to establishing Israel, and they established it on the Palestinian people’s homeland (Palestine) [parentheses in source] with the rank of their main worker in the region! As long as this is the situation, [Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben Gvir will continue as he does to knead [US President Joe] Biden’s flour with the blood of the Palestinian people in general, and of the hundreds of thousands of hungry in the Gaza Strip in particular.”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 3, 2024]
Matar was particularly triggered of late by the US veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling to provide the PA with full UN membership. In response, he lashed out at the US, labeling it “the mind behind the conspiracy against the Palestinian people”:
UN fails to black list Hamas for rape, Israel condemns decision while US is silent
The United Nations omitted Hamas from its blacklist of state and non-state parties guilty of sexual violence in 2023, due to a lack of what it deemed to be credible evidence.
The blacklist was part of a larger annual report on sexual violence authored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, which was completed this month and debated Tuesday at the UN Security Council.
Guterres’s April report described sexual violence in 18 conflict settings or situations of concern, including the Hamas-led October invasion of Israel and Russia’s war against Ukraine.
But it found that credible evidence that met UN criteria was strong enough in only 11 of those situations such that it could blacklist the responsible parties. Neither Hamas nor Russia were among those parties that met that criteria and were not included on the list.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz said he was “disgusted” by the report in a statement released to the media, while the UNSC debate took place on what would have been the first day of Passover in the US.
'Secretary-General sides with Hamas'
Katz called it a “failure in a long series of failures” by the UN and its institutions, which had not once condemned Hamas for the October 7 attack in which over 1,200 people were killed and 253 hostages were seized.
“Guterres has turned the UN into an extremely antisemitic and anti-Israel institution during his tenure which will be remembered as the darkest in the organization’s history,” Katz said.
He added that he was convinced that if the UN had existed during the Holocaust and in the lead-up to it, and “if the crimes of the Nazis had come up for debate, he [Guterres] would have refused to denounce them if it suited his political interests.”
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield welcomed the report and mentioned its inclusion of the Hamas-led October 7 attack when she addressed the UNSC on Tuesday.
“From Nigeria to Israel, Myanmar to Sudan, Haiti to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we have seen terrorist groups, criminal gangs, and non-state armed groups abducting and sexually exploiting women and girls. We’ve seen rape being used as a tool of war.
“And I’ll note that the report calls for the release of the nearly 3,000 Yazidis who are still missing, as well as hostages kidnapped by Hamas and other terrorist groups from Israel on October 7. We know from UN reporting that many of these hostages have experienced sexual violence while in captivity,” she said.
But Thomas-Greenfield did not mention Hamas’s omission from the blacklist of perpetrators attached to the report.
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
A howl of rage against civilisation
Media-elite sympathisers with Columbia’s Gaza camp claim these pro-Hamas cries, these demands for the obliteration of Israel and this hanging of target signs around the necks of Jews are rare occurrences in an otherwise peaceful protest. Plus, it’s mostly outsiders doing this stuff, they say. I call bullshit. If you create a space in which anti-Semites feel comfortable, so comfortable that they’re happy to openly glorify Hamas’s cosmic racist violence, then that’s on you.
What’s more, the insistence that it’s ‘only’ a few voices celebrating 7 October, just a handful of agitators who are are cheering the rape, kidnap and murder of Jews, is desperate bordering on sick. That there are any such voices in and around one of the highest seats of learning in modern America should be viewed as unsettling in the extreme. Anyone who cares for the future of academia, and for the future of the West, should be alarmed that at Columbia, the college of Alexander Hamilton, of Amelia Earhart, of Barack Obama, people have been heard saying to Jews: ‘[7 October is] going to be every day for you.’ President Biden is right: this is ‘blatant anti-Semitism’.
We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.
More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.
How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Openly Jewish
Western societies need to realize – need to remember what we all once knew – that peace, order, and lawful freedoms all need to be actively and publicly maintained. This maintenance needs to come from the state, from civil society, and from all citizens as free individuals. We can no longer afford that tired old liberal myth of a neutral public space.
We cannot pretend that there is no difference between peaceful protests and those which come with a threat of Islamist violence. We cannot pretend that there is no difference between different conceptions of the good, of the just society, of human dignity.
We cannot be blind to the way that some Islamist groups – Hamas and Al-Quds supporters among them – have a pretty good grasp of how to wield power in the public square. They know how to exert pressure on agents of the state, and how to project political strength on the streets. This isn’t a naive phenomenon.
Islamism is a world where the minaret towers over all. It’s the burka’s flowing tendrils blanketing women like an invasive vine in a once-flourishing garden. It’s the gathering in the square that proclaims “this is our space now.” It’s the adhan blasted loudly at the Christian or Jewish – or secular! – part of town. Until, one day, there are no non-Muslim parts of town left. The Christians of Istanbul and the Jews of Baghdad found this out the hard way. I pray the monied agnostics of Mayfair and Chelsea never do.
And they may not have to! That is, perhaps the British state can learn to differentiate between legitimate protests (however misguided), and marches that proclaim conquest.
The West needs to recover and to actively, publicly promote some basic ideas about our shared public peace. About the common allegiances and responsibilities of citizens. The public square can certainly be tolerant of a great range of political and religious groups, but it can’t be neutral. Attempted public neutrality is a vacuum that less-than-benevolent groups are always ready to fill.
In a free and democratic society, the day-to-day politics of domestic government, foreign activities, finance, etc., must constantly be debated. This is right and just. But at the same time, Western democracies must demand – in the public square – loyalty not to wispy, vague ideas of procedural neutrality and skin-deep inclusivity. Instead, we need to be a lot better at articulating the importance of public peace, the legitimate authority of our states, mutual fraternity with our fellow citizens, respect for the law, and the dignity of all human beings.
This isn’t a big ask, and it isn’t bigotedly intolerant. A country can be sure of itself and of its fundamental requirements, and still accept newcomers or visitors. Bluntly, people should normally be free to protest against a government’s foreign policy, or to stand in solidarity with those they think are oppressed overseas. But the political deal needs to be clearer, and straightforwardly articulated: the rejection of intimidation, violence, anti-Semitic extremism, and the pursuit of power by unconstitutional means. It’s the difference between having a law-abiding, European-style social democratic party in a country’s parliament, and tolerating organized political violence or state espionage by Communist groups. Western states sometimes benefit from the former, but must have the self-assurance to stamp out the latter.
If we don’t get better at doing this, our public square will be more and more vulnerable to hostile takeover. The present moment is a canary in the coal mine. If we don’t get better at doing this, we risk seeing more of our fellow citizens grimly warned of the dangers of being “openly Jewish.”
Why Anti-Israel Protesters Won’t Stop Harassing Jews The movement’s ideological character invites rage and violence.
The anti-Israel movement exists in the United States as a result of a decades-long conflict in the Middle East, the cause of which is complex and has faults on many sides. It was both inevitable and necessary for the United States to have a pro-Palestinian movement. The makeup of that movement is the contingent, tragic factor that has made its activities so ugly and routinely bigoted.
The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets:
Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
SJP likewise directed its members to join the struggle directly: “This is a moment of mobilization for all Palestinians. We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of Palestinians on the ground.”
When you consider this kind of violent rhetoric in the context of slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” especially when you consider the lack of authentic Israeli military targets outside of Israel, then the pattern of harassment and violence that follows from this propaganda is inevitable.
A second group that has helped organize the demonstrations at Columbia is called Within Our Lifetime. Like SJP, WOL takes an uncompromising eliminationist stance toward Israel, even calling for “the abolition of zionism.” If you suspect it would be difficult to exterminate an idea peacefully, you are correct. WOL, like SJP, endorses all violent attacks on Israeli Jews: “We defend the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”
More pertinently, WOL “reject[s] all collaboration and dialogue with zionist organizations” as “normalization,” which is to say it believes people anywhere in the world who wish to see a Jewish state survive in any form should not be permitted to live normal lives. If there is a theoretical distinction between this doctrine and direct advocacy of systematic harassment of mainstream Jewish people and organizations, it is paper thin.
From Ian:
With empty chairs and forlorn homes, Israelis prepare for solemn Passover
Jewish people mark on Monday the start of Passover, a celebration of freedom, and around many holiday tables in Israel chairs will stand empty for hostages still held captive in Gaza.
The weeklong Jewish festival, also known in Hebrew as the “holiday of freedom,” celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery, as told in the Bible.
Passover is traditionally observed with a Seder: a holiday feast when families eat symbolic foods and read the Haggadah.
The text, which is nearly 2,000 years old, recounts the Jewish people’s Exodus from Egypt and their ties and yearning for the Holy Land.
For many this year, Passover will be stained by absence and anguish, particularly for the relatives of the hostages, grieving families, and more than 120,000 Israelis displaced from their homes in the north and south of the country because of the war in the Gaza Strip and ongoing hostilities between Israel and the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“All of the symbolic things we do at the Seder will take on a much more profound and deep meaning this year,” said Rachel Goldberg-Polin, whose son Hersh is being held hostage in Gaza.
These symbols include “the bread of affliction, the bitter herbs, the saltwater that represents the tears of the Jewish people when they were in captivity, in slavery,” she added.
Undoubtedly, millions will sing that verse this year with intense emotion, closed eyes, clenched fists, and the thought going through their minds that we are just reliving a scene played out time after time. It’s the same idea to destroy the Jews – only the actors on the stage have changed.
Someone will read this text somewhere and say, “Once it was Pharaoh, then Haman, then Torquemada, then Chmielnicki, then Hitler, now Sinwar and Khamenei.” Someone argumentative around that table will ask how one can compare Sinwar to Hitler, to which he who made the comparison will reply: “The intent is the same, only the capabilities are different.”
Some will read or sing that verse and be depressed by the thought that this is the fate of the Jewish people – that in every generation, someone will, indeed, rise up to destroy us. Others will focus on and take solace in the last part, that we will be saved from their hands.
That thought that we will face troubles – terrible troubles – but in the end will prevail is a powerful idea that has sustained the Jewish people throughout more difficult days than these. And it will sustain us during these trying times as well.
There are those on the outside looking at Israel’s current situation – the hot war in Gaza, the war of attrition with Hezbollah in the north, the terrorist war in Judea and Samaria, the frontal confrontation with Iran – and wonder how, and if, Israel will survive.
But Jews sitting around the Seder table laden with the bread of affliction and the Cup of Elijah will think to themselves, yes we will.
They will think: This is the promise. We have been here before, survived, and flourished, and we will do so again. It says so in this timeless text right here, a text Jews have been saying every year for centuries and whose optimism, as if by osmosis, they have internalized. Yes, they will rise up against us generation after generation. We have seen that in the past; we are living it today. But in the end, we will prevail. That, too, we have seen in the past and are living today.
Or, as a more contemporary source – Meir Ariel – wrote in an iconic 1990 song, “We survived Pharaoh, we’ll survive this as well.”
“Today we are slaves,” the Haggadah opens on a down note, but then quickly contrasts it by saying, “next year we shall be free; now we are here, next year in the land of Israel.”
That, too, has been internalized by the Jewish people. An eternal hope and belief that things will get better; that Jewish history has an upward trajectory; and that next year we will be in a rebuilt, peaceful Jerusalem.
Prime Minister’s Office: ‘No family in the world should celebrate like this’
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a video on Sunday, ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, to raise awareness in the United States about the hostages whom Hamas terrorists continue to hold in Gaza.
“All of the various holiday meals around the world are characterized by values of families, closeness and warmth,” the office’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate stated.
“The ‘Empty Chair’ campaign draws attention to the absence of our beloved hostages, who have been held by Hamas for 198 days,” it added. “The campaign shows festive family gatherings and set tables around the customary holidays in the American tradition. Around the table is an empty chair, that breaks the festive atmosphere and around which the family observes sadly.”
“The video ends against the backdrop of a seder night meal with the message that the hostages will not be able to celebrate the Passover holiday with their families, and the call: ‘Let our people go,'” it added. “No family in the world should celebrate like this.”
The video will run on North American digital platforms and online television, per the Prime Minister’s Office.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
United States of Charlottesville
Because this racial hierarchy is fundamental to its proponents’ worldview, opposition to coexistence with Jews is global. The skinheads in Charlottesville weren’t deterred from their version of this ideology just because they live outside of Germany. Similarly, those who chant “Palestine is Arab” subscribe to this racial hierarchy wherever they are. That this chant was delivered outside the White House, for example, is not a protest of Israeli policy but rather a challenge to the foundational ideas and values of the United States.
Although the expression of this worldview isn’t limited to college campuses, those campuses are the main reason we are now witnessing three Charlottesvilles a day. After all, it means students are paying attention in class.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” is a direct application of the popular academic theory of the day, “decolonization.” The idea of Jewish self-determination in Israel being a settler-colonialist project might be a flat-earth level of historical crankery, but it is all the rage—and I do mean rage—in the classrooms of our esteemed institutions of higher learning. Teaching young minds that Jews must be supplanted from their homes because they represent a race that belongs elsewhere has a long history of inspiring those students to carry out what they’ve been taught. It is no surprise that Jews at Columbia over the weekend were told to “go back to Poland.” The racial ideology at the heart of decolonization theory demands nothing less. As a now-infamous Twitter/X post, amplified by a writer and editor at the Washington Post among others, asked in celebration of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and sexual torture spree: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
And that helps us understand the look of absolute despondency on Columbia President Minouche Shafik’s face throughout her congressional hearing this week. She, and many of her peers at other institutions, are facing two problems. The first is the violence and harassment targeting visibly Jewish students. Contrary to various media figures’ attempts to spin recent events, this is absolutely taking place on campus and these violations absolutely are being committed by students. They are also, however, taking place outside of campus as part of the same demonstrations a few feet away. It’s not either/or. The campus-organized protests are spreading and so is the violence they incite.
The second problem is the ideological fuel for the violence, which is being pumped from the colleges themselves. It is much easier to increase the police presence on campus than it is to change a culture cultivated purposely and with great enthusiasm over the course of decades. These schools are churning out people who have extraordinarily sick and violent beliefs toward Jews. Those sick and violent beliefs earned them good grades at these same schools.
There has not yet been a solution proffered by any of these campus administrators that would fix the broken, anti-Semitic culture of these schools, just as figures throughout history have struggled to convince the sun not to shine.
At Columbia I Am Told: ‘Go Back to Poland’
Since the first protest on Columbia’s campus in support of a “Free Palestine” on October 12, I have committed, along with my twin brother and a number of our friends, to show up at these protests with our Israeli and American flags.
There are often hundreds of people chanting for “intifada” and a handful of us. Suffice it to say, I can think of more pleasant ways to spend a New York City night. We do it for a simple reason: we want to tell Jews at Columbia—and around the world—that we refuse to be bullied off of our own campus.
For nearly seven months, I have been asked the same question by many people in my life: “Do you feel safe on campus as a Jew?” I wear a kippah—I can’t pass. And I have always maintained the importance of standing our ground rather than letting fear drive us away.
Nothing will stanch that pride, but the situation at Columbia has escalated to a point where my physical safety is in danger.
That is not a metaphor, nor an expression of safetyism. On Saturday night, April 20, I was assaulted and harassed repeatedly inside the gates of Columbia University.
For five days now, protesters have been camped out on Columbia’s South Lawn demanding financial divestment from Israel, an academic boycott of Israel, a call for cease-fire, and an end to Columbia’s real estate purchases. Their newest demand is to defund Columbia’s public safety, the only people on campus supposedly tasked with keeping us safe.
On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.
For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.
Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
Brendan O'Neill:
A howl of rage against civilisation
Indeed, the anti-militarist mask has well and truly come off this movement. The Columbia camp makes clear as day that Israel-haters want more war, not less. ‘Burn Tel Aviv to the ground’, some bigots chanted. ‘Go Hamas, we love you’, said others. Nothing better captures the crisis of Western civilisation than this vision of trust-fund genderfluid blue-haired kids singing the praises of a movement that would hurl them from a top-floor window given half a chance. In one especially nauseating incident, a white girl in a keffiyeh was seen holding a placard with an arrow saying ‘Al-Qassam’s next targets’, referring to the al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The placard’s arrow was pointed towards Jewish students waving the Israel flag. Shorter version: Hamas, kill these people. How swiftly the anti-fascists became fascists.
Media-elite sympathisers with Columbia’s Gaza camp claim these pro-Hamas cries, these demands for the obliteration of Israel and this hanging of target signs around the necks of Jews are rare occurrences in an otherwise peaceful protest. Plus, it’s mostly outsiders doing this stuff, they say. I call bullshit. If you create a space in which anti-Semites feel comfortable, so comfortable that they’re happy to openly glorify Hamas’s cosmic racist violence, then that’s on you.
What’s more, the insistence that it’s ‘only’ a few voices celebrating 7 October, just a handful of agitators who are are cheering the rape, kidnap and murder of Jews, is desperate bordering on sick. That there are any such voices in and around one of the highest seats of learning in modern America should be viewed as unsettling in the extreme. Anyone who cares for the future of academia, and for the future of the West, should be alarmed that at Columbia, the college of Alexander Hamilton, of Amelia Earhart, of Barack Obama, people have been heard saying to Jews: ‘[7 October is] going to be every day for you.’ President Biden is right: this is ‘blatant anti-Semitism’.
We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.
More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.
How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.
From Ian:
Biden’s ‘starvation politics’ help with his base
In recent weeks, massive amounts of humanitarian aid have entered Gaza in hundreds of trucks. Around 500 trucks are entering the strip daily. What is particularly irksome to Israelis is the fact that this abundance is being showered on the Gazans, who democratically chose Hamas, have never revolted against it, and still support the horrific massacre - all while our captives languish in Gaza's tunnels, enduring unimaginable torture.
According to Israeli experts, Gaza is receiving far more than it needs, and the Americans know this down to the smallest details. The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) has presented data to the Americans that 21 bakeries are operating in southern and central Gaza and another three in the north. They bake millions of pitas daily. The amount of water produced in the strip exceeds 5 gallons of drinking and cooking water per person per day. There have been 3,350 coordination efforts made between the IDF and aid organizations to facilitate the entry of aid.
This picture is well known to the official American representatives. Yet, they are hounding the Israeli leaders with endless demands. Everyone dealing with the issue knows that Israel is allowing far more than Gaza can absorb. "The Americans are driving Minister Ron Dermer crazy 24/7 with all these things, knowing there's no need for them. The UN inside Gaza is failing to distribute what's coming in. So why is more needed?" asks an Israeli who is privy to the data.
The American pressure results in an increasing burden for the IDF. Soldiers are required to secure the massive supply convoys, the construction of the seaport on the Gaza coast, the laying of a new water pipeline to the strip, and the opening of a crossing in the north. Defense Ministry inspectors spend nights and days examining the contents destined for the enemy, even though the enemy itself doesn't need it.
Meanwhile, the U.S. administration is tacitly endorsing, and sometimes explicitly using, the blood libel about "starvation in Gaza." Yet its officials are well aware that there was never any danger of starvation. Israel has been monitoring the humanitarian situation in Gaza from day one and would never allow this. Yet, the official and deliberate U.S. message is "immediate risk of starvation" - a lie that fuels the anti-Israel propaganda machine, which has been spreading the falsehood of "genocide in Gaza" around the world for months now.
One Israeli official said, "In direct conversations with the Americans, you see they are well-versed in the data. We, inside the room, wonder where they're getting these statements from. They know what's happening. They have an interest in not presenting what they know, and not affirming what Israel is saying. They should be saying, 'There is no starvation in Gaza, and Israel is doing everything it can to get food in. The bottleneck is not its fault.' But they choose not to say that."
Israel Is Hamas’s Most Potent Weapon
Sinwar took this strategy to a new level by building a massive underground city that would suck Israelis into killing Palestinians. Armaments, missile launchers, and terrorist command posts were positioned under hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential buildings, forcing Israelis to kill civilians, whether by airstrikes or in any conceivable ground operation if they were ever to stop the attacks. Sinwar, whose life was saved by Israeli medical intervention during his time in prison, knows that Israel does not execute even convicted murderers of Jews. His goal in provoking Israel into retaliation was to create and keep worsening Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” and the toll of civilian casualties, thereby eliciting liberal sympathy for the Palestinians and international calls for an advantageous ceasefire while, most crucially, demoralizing the Israelis who must sacrifice their soldiers in a war they would have done anything to avoid.
Has the genius of Israel met its match in the genius of evil? Other commanders in the history of war have been known to sacrifice tens of thousands of their soldiers rather than surrender, but no invader ever turned his enemy into his primary weapon. Sinwar intends never to surrender, hoping that Israel will be forced to kill most of the population of Gaza in order to stop Hamas. The genocide of Jews that he undertook to engineer has already been equalized to a genocide by Jews against the innocent, harmless Hamas electorate.
When Golda Meir famously told Anwar Sadat, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children,” she divulged Israel’s greatest weakness. Coexistence is to Judaism as conquest has been to Islam, requiring the former to seek accord from the latter. Hamas was first to fully to exploit this political contrast. Liberal democracies are generally loath to go to war, but a look at the Middle East map shows why Israel—when you can find it there—has the ultimate disincentive for military action against neighbors whose acceptance it seeks. As a minority by choice, Jews have always been at the mercy of imperial powers, of which Iran with its proxies is currently the most threatening. To succeed, the aggressor has learned—and demonstrated—that he must come in the form of a victim.
Meir was wiser when she said, “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.” The defeat of Hamas is the necessary precondition for that day, though not yet its guarantee.
And now that sizable numbers of pro-Hamas sympathizers and belligerents are already active in this country, testing its freedoms and liberal virtues, we are seeing whether Americans learn enough from the war in Israel in time to prevent the brewing war against them.
‘Assume Hamas leaders receive UNRWA funding’
People can be excluded from refugee status if they violate the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, per UNHCR’s Resettlement Handbook.
More specifically, those about whom there are “serious reasons” to believe they committed a “crime against peace, a war crime or a crime against humanity” or a “serious non-political crime outside the country of refuge” prior to being admitted to that country as a refugee or who have “been guilty of acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations,” can be excluded.
Elsewhere in the handbook, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees notes that most acts of violence commonly called “terrorism” qualify, “particularly if they indiscriminately endanger or harm civilians.”
The 1951 convention, which the handbook cites, states that “This convention shall not apply to persons who are at present receiving from organs or agencies of the United Nations other than the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees protection or assistance.”
The United Nations has come to interpret that clause very broadly to include Palestinian “refugees” as “not only persons displaced at the time of the 1948 and 1967 hostilities, but also the descendants of such persons.”
Funding terror
“If UNRWA were truly applying universal principles, they would certainly remove anyone who belongs to Hamas from their employment from their staff but, in addition, deny them refugee status,” Neuer, of U.N. Watch, told JNS. “I’m not aware that’s ever happened.”
UNRWA has only suspended or removed an employee for belonging to Hamas in very rare instances, according to Neuer.
“I’ve never heard of anyone, though, including some of the chief terrorists, who are denied refugee status or denied aid,” he said. “We can assume that many, if not all, of the Hamas leaders are on the rolls as UNRWA refugees and are receiving funding in one form or another from UNRWA.”
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin:
The illiberal crusade to defend antisemitic mobs
Just as troubling is the willingness of many in the chattering classes to defend the protesters and pretend that expressions of antisemitism are a matter of free speech rather than hate. The Guardian’s Moira Donegan attacked Shafik in a column for what she described as “colluding with the far right” by calling in the police to enforce the university’s rules. She treated the entire idea that antisemitism was present as a right-wing talking point rather than an awful reality for Jewish students, whose plight interested her not at all.
The Times’ Michelle Goldberg sounded a similar theme in her denunciation of both the House committee investigating antisemitism and Shafik.
Both quoted comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a committee member whose questions were aimed at denying the antisemitic nature of the mobs that had transformed Columbia into a hotbed of Jew-hatred. That someone who has been censured by the House for her own repeated antisemitic rhetoric should sit on such a committee (or in Congress itself) is an irony completely lost on leftists. Both Donegan and Goldberg thought it was an outrage that Omar’s daughter—a junior at Barnard College—was among those participating in the pro-Hamas demonstration and rightly suspended from the school, though that piece of information was not generally known when Omar was trying to sabotage the hearing.
As with the rest of the debate about whether the antisemitism being vented on college campuses in the six months since Oct. 7 should be protected free speech, most of the arguments in defense of these mobs are disingenuous. The notion that the pro-Hamas activists are defending free speech is risible considering that most of their efforts are focused on silencing defenders of Israel and the Jews. These are not idealists acting out their sympathy for Palestinian victims but, rather, ideologues who have embraced the cause of a terrorist war to destroy the Jewish state.
What must also be acknowledged is that the crusade on the part of much of the liberal commentariat to defend or rationalize this epidemic of antisemitism is profoundly illiberal. This applies to those who, like the Times’ foreign-policy columnist Nicholas Kristof, have sought to mainstream blood libels against Israel. Their goal is to change the conversation about the war against Hamas from a necessary campaign to eradicate terrorists to an effort to legitimize a genocidal movement and its Western apologists.
The saddest aspect of this debate is the way it has been politicized by the left to make it appear that the fight against antisemitism is a Republican issue. It is deeply unfortunate that much of the liberal activist base of the Democratic Party that has been captured by advocates for critical race theory and intersectionality has taken sides against Israel in the war against Hamas. It’s also true that—as the daily drumbeat of incitement against Israel and its Jewish supporters in the Times, The Washington Post and MSNBC show—left-wing journalists are doing their utmost to legitimize anti-Jewish hate.
The effort to curb the surge of antisemitism in this country should not be conducted along party lines. Democrats and Republicans, liberals as well as conservatives, should be lining up against those who agree with Omar and her cheering section that antisemitic mobs are principled idealists rather than self-entitled hate-mongers. All decent Americans should—if not agreeing with Cotton about roughly preventing illegal protesters from taking over our public squares—be actively seeking to treat these antisemitic agitators with the disdain and punishment they deserve. If the defenders of the mobs prevail, the alternative is a nation where antisemitism is mainstreamed and Jewish safety a thing of the past.
Andrew Pessin:
The Indelible Stain of Antisemitism: The Failed Practice of ‘Jew-Washing,’ Part 2
The most famous here are perhaps the Neturei Karta, a fringe group whose members appear at anti-Israel events worldwide.[10] They are ideal for Jew-washers, since, in their ultra-orthodox appearance, they are quite visibly Jews—and what could better exonerate an Israel-hater from charges of antisemitism when such clear Jews hate Israel too? Yes, they are a small group, but they are real, and they do derive their anti-Israelism from their Judaism: the Hebrew Bible as they read it teaches that Jews will legitimately re-form their political collective in the Land of Israel only by divine means, upon the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The contemporary State of Israel, then, is a religious abomination. The fact that the state and its overall culture are largely secular—surely only worse. No wonder they have 3-D hatred toward it.[11]
But does the existence of Neturei Karta successfully exonerate the non-Jewish anti-Israelist from the charge of antisemitism? (Henceforth we focus only on the “invoking authority” mode of Jew-washing.)
To see why not, consider a distinction made by former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who famously described campus attempts to boycott and divest from Israel as “antisemitic in effect if not intent.” Effective antisemitism will roughly be any position, policy, or behavior that de facto discriminates in some negative way against Jews, whatever its actual content or intent. Intentional antisemitism is much harder to define, but doing so should not be necessary for our purposes. Suffice to note that sometimes a person’s intentions can absolve even his effective antisemitism from counting as antisemitism simpliciter.[12]
Neturei Karta’s ideology does seem to be effectively antisemitic, after all, for it discriminatorily denies to the Jewish people (pre-Messiah) the same right to political self-determination in their ancestral homeland that presumably all other peoples enjoy in theirs. Members of the group themselves may escape the charge of being intentional antisemites (or antisemites simpliciter), however, since they sincerely derive their position from bona fide Jewish principles.
But the same is simply not true for the non-Jewish Israel-haters who Jew-wash with Neturei Karta. They share the group’s effectively antisemitic doctrine that the Jewish state is illegitimate while not sharing precisely those intentions that would exonerate their antisemitism.[13]
So Jew-washing with Neturei Karta fails. Neturei Karta provide an illusory cover for Israel-haters’ antisemitism, but they do not remove it.
We turn in the next part to what we might call “ultra-non-orthodox Jewish anti-Israelism.”
Gaza cease-fire alone won’t repair larger enduring rift, political scientist says
Calls for a cease-fire in Gaza may be well-intentioned, but a halt to the current fighting will not repair the enduring rift between Israelis and Palestinians. That can only happen once the Palestinians abandon an ideology that rejects the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state, said Israeli political scientist Einat Wilf ’96.
During a conversation Friday with Tarek Masoud, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and faculty director of the Middle East Initiative at HKS, Wilf spoke about the war in Gaza and why she thinks there’s been so little progress reaching a resolution over the years. The talk was the fifth in an ongoing Middle East Dialogues series at Harvard Kennedy School, organized by Masoud, which aims to showcase a range of viewpoints on the current crisis and promote informed dialogue.
Describing herself as “the poster child of the Israeli Two-Stater Left,” Wilf served in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 2010 to 2013 as a member of the Labor Party, which supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state. She said she still favors such a goal, but no longer believes the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is just about land.
“I voted for [Yitzhak] Rabin; I voted for [Ehud] Barak,” she said of the former Labor prime ministers. “I was euphoric in the ’90s, like many Israelis … when Barak goes to Camp David,” she said. “I believed in the vision of a new Middle East.”
But in 2000 and again in 2008, she watched Palestinian leaders refuse the terms of proposals from the Israelis for a state in the West Bank in Gaza.
“And I began to ask myself, ‘What is going on? What do the Palestinians want — because it’s clearly not a state,’” said Wilf, a former intelligence analyst. “They could have had that, and they walked away” without being criticized by the Palestinian people.
She came to that realization after conversations she’s had with many highly educated, moderate Palestinians over the last 20 years. “They basically tell me things like, ‘The Jewish people are not a people. You’re only a religion. This idea that you have a connection to this land, you invented it to steal our own,’” she said.
“And I realized from the conversations with them that how they think about the conflict, and how I think about it, don’t even meet. For them, the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state is illegitimate.”
From Ian:
The Rape Denialists
Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.
The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.
But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.
The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”
One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”
Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”
Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”
Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.
Seth Mandel:
Progressives’ Pro-War Protest Movement
Yesterday’s protests at Columbia highlighted a key difference between the left-wing protests of generations past and the current demonstrations: While both cheer America’s enemies, the 2024 version is ostentatiously, undeniably pro-war.
I used to shake my head when people would accuse others of being “warmongers,” because the term was so often reserved for people who very obviously did not fit the bill. If you want to know what a warmonger actually is, check out those who have for six months cheered rabidly for the very concept of war itself. Anti-war protesters usually lose interest when the U.S. isn’t involved. But personal interest has no role here; these protesters live vicariously through any fascist with a gun, drone, or rocket launcher.
“Never forget the 7th of October,” they shouted at Jews at Columbia last night. “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, not 10,000… The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.”
This kind of enthusiasm for the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, complete with sexual torture and the dismemberment of young children, is important to note for several reasons, only one of which is that it highlights these protestors’ uncontrollable urge for the Mideast war to go on forever. It’s also notable because it’s honest: The Hamas-a-thons all around the country have been clear about what their participants want. Screeching bloodlust so explicit it would have made Nazis blush has become the ticket to ride in progressive activist circles.
“Iran, you make us proud!” they cheered in New York City, after the Islamic Republic launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones from its territory aimed at Israel, in what was an unprecedented region-wide act of war.
In January, another chant became popular at such gatherings: “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud; turn another ship around!” This was a reference to the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen who declared war on civilian ships traversing the Red Sea. Though the Houthis talk mostly about their hatred for Jews and America, their victims so far have been Vietnamese and Filipino. The Iran attack, lauded by Khamenei fans in New York City, badly injured one person: a young Arab girl. But it doesn’t matter to these psychos whose blood you draw so long as you pair your war strikes with demented comments about Jews.
Iran follows footsteps of Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia
Iran’s case is different, and yet the principle – that aggression contains the seeds of its own defeat – applies to it all the same.
Iran’s aggression is unique both technically and substantively. Technically, unlike Germany and Japan, it is endowed with natural resources, and in this regard resembles the Soviet Union. However, unlike the other great aggressors, all of which were driven by secular ideas, Iran is driven by religion.
The ayatollahs believe Iran should dominate the Middle East, Shi’ism should dominate Islam, and Islam should dominate the world. This is what made Tehran spend billions on the creation of militias that destabilize the Middle East, this is what made them dispatch terrorists from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, and this is what now makes them help Russia confront the West in Ukraine.
The free world’s response to this aggression is the same as it was in all three previous cases: strategic reluctance and psychological denial.
It’s easy to say this in hindsight, but the fact is that Germany’s aggression could have been preempted militarily, had the free world not lied to itself that Hitler’s appetite begins and ends in the Sudetenland. Similarly, in May 1939, when Soviet and Japanese armies clashed in Mongolia, the democratic powers could have sided with Moscow, and thus prevented the following summer’s Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and also the subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor.
That, of course, is not how democratic statecraft works. Just like for fascists war is a national value, a moral ideal and a political weapon of first resort, for us democrats it is anathema, trauma, and a weapon of last resort.
That is why the free world in 1956 abandoned Hungary to its Soviet masters’ devices rather than help its anti-Soviet revolt, even after Budapest declared its desire to join NATO.
That is why there was nothing surprising about this week’s pleas to Israel from both Europe and America to avoid a grand retaliation against Iran.
It’s a time-honored tradition in which everyone plays their part: the aggressors keep upping the ante, the free keep denying aggression’s threat, and history, while leading the aggressor to its dustbin, keeps raising freedom’s price.
So yes, the Islamic Republic of Iran, like Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia, will sooner or later collapse. The only question is whether that will happen because of the free world’s conduct, or despite it.
From Ian:
Iran, not Israel, is escalating this war
The West’s admonishments of Israel certainly cannot be put down to simple wavering on Joe Biden’s part. Despite his oft-professed claim to be a staunch supporter of Israel, he has been equivocal in backing Israel in its war against Hamas. Crucially, he has also avoided discussing the Hamas-Iran connection despite it being transparently clear. As Gadi Taub, a veteran Israeli journalist, noted last year: ‘From the get-go, the US denied Iran’s fingerprints on the Hamas attack. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan said there was no “direct” evidence of Iranian involvement.’ That was despite the fact there was ample evidence, including public statements by Hamas leaders thanking Iran for its support.
Last month, the Biden administration approved a sanctions waiver worth $10 billion to Iran – a nation it has publicly declared to be a state sponsor of terrorism. America could have chosen to suspend or discontinue this waiver in the wake of Iran’s assault on Israel, but it has not done so. That it remains in place is all the more remarkable given that a drone attack by an Iranian-backed group recently killed three American soldiers and injured 30 others in Jordan. You don’t have to support the sanctions to notice the wide gap between America’s words and its deeds when it comes to Iran.
Biden’s relatively soft stance on Iran is actually in line with a political realignment among Democrats dating back to the Obama administration, when Biden was vice-president. As Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, has noted:
‘Those policies began in the week after President Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009. In one of the 44th president’s first acts of foreign diplomacy, Obama sent an offer of reconciliation to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That June, in his historic Cairo speech, Obama became the first president to refer to Tehran’s regime as the Islamic Republic of Iran – legitimising the oppressive theocracy – and stood aside while that republic’s thugs beat and shot hundreds of Iranian citizens protesting for their freedom.’
There are two distinct motivations for America’s long-term attempt to tilt away from Israel and towards Iran. The first is geopolitical and the second lies in the sphere of domestic politics.
Where geopolitics is concerned, the Democrats are keen to draw the Islamic Republic, a regime that has condemned America as the ‘Great Satan’, closer into the US’s orbit. Officially, the US has not had diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980, the year after the Islamists took power in the Iranian Revolution. They have instead tried to maintain relations by other means. These have included the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), unofficially known as the Iran nuclear deal, promoted by Obama and later by Biden.
This is all part of a broader US strategy known as the pivot to Asia. The aim is to reorient American foreign policy away from the Middle East and towards East Asia. Its priority is to contain China.
The Biden administration’s hope is that defusing tensions with the hostile forces in the Middle East will make its pivot to Asia easier. Yet since the pivot was announced, the US has found itself dragged into further conflicts in the Middle East, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. America has also found itself reluctantly drawn into the periodic conflicts between Israel and Hamas. Biden wants to untangle America from this bitter strife as much as he possibly can. This means downgrading its commitments to Israel.
What’s more, the Biden administration, like Obama before it, is increasingly influenced by domestic identity politics. Many grassroots US Democrats see the conflicts involving Israel in simplistic black and white terms. Israel is today portrayed as a regional bastion of privilege – supposedly akin to those who enjoy privilege at home in America – with the Palestinians representing the oppressed. The involvement of Islamist movements in the region, which have pledged to destroy Israel, is ignored or at least downplayed. The activists who hold this view have placed considerable pressure on Biden to withdraw support for Israel.
There are also notable overlaps between the Islamist worldview and the woke worldview. Both tend to see Israel representing the side of evil. Both fail to distinguish between the Palestinian people and Hamas, with its goal of an international Islamic order. And both also tend to downplay or even dismiss the role of anti-Semitism as a key motivating force in the current conflict.
Today, Israel faces not just the wrath of its genocidal enemies – from Hamas to Iran and its other proxies. It also has to contend with its increasing isolation from the West. This is a dangerous moment.
Bernard-Henri Lévy:
Israel Must Respond Forcefully to Iran’s Attack
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not just a failed regime, economically ruined, disavowed by its youth, women, and its living elements, revealed to have the force of a paper tiger.
It’s also a country that—like the USSR of recent times, where there coexisted both a real country devastated by economic misery and public demoralization, and decoupled from that, an ultramodern military-industrial complex able to compete with the United States—established a secret but effective nuclear industry.
It’s a country whose programs in that area have only grown and prospered as America changed course, over the last 15 years, oscillating between Obama’s ineffectual and misbegotten policy of détente and, under Trump, ineffectual ranting.
And, as for Iran’s nuclear programs, their sites have been moved and often buried over the years; their centrifuges have become capable of producing enough enriched uranium to build stockpiles 22 times above the limit authorized by the 2015 nuclear deal; IAEA inspectors no longer have meaningful access to them. These sites have become giant black holes, off the radar, from which the world could learn, in six months, in a year, suddenly, that Iran has been allowed to join North Korea and Russia in the club of dictatorships capable of setting the planet on fire …
I’ll add that the same Iranian drones that, with the exception of a young girl in the south of the country, systematically missed their targets are the very ones that Putin has used, for two years now, to ravage Ukraine.
And I’ll add that the same Iran that was mocked, this Monday morning, for its pathetic failure in the face of the solidity of the Iron Dome, recently engaged, in the Persian Gulf, in joint naval maneuvers, largely unnoticed, with the Russian and Chinese navies.
Let’s imagine, then, that the Iranian regime emerges unharmed from this adventure.
Let’s imagine that it sees this adventure not as a lamentable defeat, but as a dress rehearsal. And let’s suppose that they repeat it, six months, a year from now, with faster and more accurate drones and missiles, equipped with operational nuclear warheads.
That, for Israel and, beyond, for the region, is a terrifying prospect. It is a clear existential threat.
And that is why it feels unreasonable to me that “cowardly relief” reigns among Israel’s allies and dictates, everywhere, the same recommendation for “de-escalation” and “restraint.”
Iran has declared war.
There is no other choice, alas, but to retaliate.
Victor Davis Hanson:
Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End?
Before the Biden appeasement of Iran, the Trump administration had isolated and nearly bankrupted Tehran and its proxies. Its Revolutionary Guard terrorist planners proved to be easy targets once they operated outside Iran.
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce.
Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shia neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States?
Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon—as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to kill thousands of Jews?
In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression—and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.
Friday, April 26, 2024
