Monday, December 11, 2023

12/11 Links Pt2: Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals; The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7; What Hamas can learn from Hanukkah

From Ian:

Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals
The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933, however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.

The Holocaust remains an exceptional historical crime—distinct from other acts of organized lethal violence directed against other minorities—precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities. That is why American universities cannot regard antisemitism as just another expression of “hate,” no different from, say, Islamophobia—a neologism that should not be mentioned in the same breath. That is why Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible.

That is why rational minds recoil from her argument that antisemitism on the Harvard campus is tolerable so long as genocide is not being perpetrated.

Well, the backlash against our contemporary treason of the intellectuals has finally arrived.

Donors such as the chief executive of Apollo, Marc Rowan (a Penn graduate), Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman (Harvard), and Stone Ridge founder Ross Stevens (Penn) have each made clear that their support will no longer be forthcoming for institutions run in this fashion.

On Saturday, Penn president Liz Magill stepped down, along with the chair of the Penn board of trustees, Scott Bok. Perhaps others will follow.

Yet it will take a lot more than a few high-profile resignations to reform the culture of America’s elite universities. It is much too entrenched in multiple departments, all dominated by a tenured faculty, to say nothing of the armies of DEI and Title IX officers who seem, at some colleges, now to outnumber the undergraduates.

In La trahison des clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions. . . owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.

Only if the once-great American universities can reestablish—throughout their fabric—the separation of Wissenschaft from Politik can they be sure of avoiding the fate of Marburg and Königsberg.
The Things I Never Thought Possible—Until October 7
I witnessed antisemitism for the very first time at school in Germany, when classmates taunted a Jewish girl I was friends with just for being Jewish. I saw pictures from Auschwitz for the very first time when the television series Holocaust showed images of the mass murder and the dead bodies piled up there.

On my first trip to Israel, I wept while talking to German Holocaust survivors who, despite their concentration camp tattoos, still felt homesick when speaking of the country they were born in. Then I went to Auschwitz for the first time because I wanted to gain a better understanding of how people could do such inhumane things to their fellow humans, and because I wanted to see the ruins of the gas chambers, a place that symbolizes the collapse of civilization.

From then on, I felt certain—or wanted to feel certain—of one thing: that antisemitism would be fought against successfully in Germany if it ever again raised its ugly head beyond the criminally fanatical right-wing extreme.

I also thought Israel’s right to exist in the democratic world was nonnegotiable and nobody—except for the extremist mortal enemies of Israel—would ever think otherwise. And that if worst came to worst, we could always rely on America, with its love of freedom, to stand at Israel’s side.

The last few weeks have shown every one of my assumptions to have been sadly mistaken. Since October 7, anything is possible.

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that, immediately following the terror attacks on Israel—after a pogrom, a genocidal offensive in which more than a thousand Israelis, among them women, elderly men, children, and babies, were shot, stabbed, raped, burned, and beheaded by Palestinian terrorists, and recordings of these horrors were disseminated with triumphant words—that Salafists would be handing out candy on the streets of Berlin and celebrating this successful antisemitic attack without anyone stepping in to stop them from doing so.

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that the reaction to this war in Europe and in the U.S. would be so ambiguous, and that there would be no unequivocal gesture of solidarity with the victims. Seldom has the reason for a war—namely, to prevent the threat of peace in the region—been so clear. Seldom was the question of who began it all—namely, Hamas—been so easy to answer. Seldom was it more obvious who the perpetrators were and who the victims were—namely, Hamas as the attacker and Israel as the defender.

Seldom has the cynical propaganda of a warring party been as easy to see through as Hamas’s. The organization uses its own population as human shields, hides its cache of arms below hospitals, and misuses its own children to kill Jews or to be hit by Israeli bombs at strategic points to generate images for use in the propaganda battle on social media.

I didn’t want to believe it was possible that so-called quality media outlets like CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, and AP would use photos from “journalists” who were most likely informed of Hamas’s murderous plans beforehand and who “just happened” to be standing at the exact right spot on the border to Israel on October 7, meaning the photographers were not there to shed light on the situation, but as accessories to terror.
Jeff Jacoby: What Hamas can learn from Hanukkah
A FEW years ago, with good intentions but woeful misjudgment, the Catholic News Service tweeted out a greeting for the Jewish festival of lights.

"Hanukkah began at sundown," it read. "Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate!" Accompanying the tweet was a photograph of the Arch of Titus in Rome, which celebrates the defeat of Judea and the sack of the Temple in Jerusalem by Roman legions in 70 CE. A relief on the arch shows soldiers triumphantly holding aloft artifacts plundered from the Temple, most prominently its great golden menorah.

The news service quickly realized its blunder. Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the Temple during a much earlier conflict — the Maccabean revolt against the religious tyranny of the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BCE — so an image of the Temple's later devastation was wholly inappropriate. The tweet was deleted and the news service apologized.

Yet in retrospect the Arch of Titus does symbolize a key message of Hanukkah, one intensely relevant amid today's rising tide of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel: However genocidal and powerful their enemies, the Jews and the Jewish faith have endured. Under Antiochus IV, the Seleucids (also called Syrian-Greeks) were determined to replace Judaism with the pagan culture of Hellenism; under the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, Jewish ties to the Jewish homeland were to be crushed forever. Two millennia later, those emperors are dust and their grandeur lies in ruins. But the Jews and their religion still live, and their bond with the land of Israel is as indissoluble as ever.

Hanukkah arrives this year amid a terrible eruption of Jew-hatred. The horrific pogrom of Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists murdered, tortured, raped, and kidnapped some 1,400 residents of southern Israel, was the bloodiest massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust. The reaction in much of the world, and especially in many bastions of elite culture and higher education, has been an unprecedented wave of antisemitic vituperation, intimidation, menace, and glee. The director of the FBI testified on Oct. 31 that antisemitism in the United States was reaching "historic levels," and the crisis has only worsened since then. In many US communities, on college campuses, and overseas, Jews feel threatened to a degree unprecedented in generations.

In a Capitol Hill hearing room Tuesday, there was a particularly chilling indication of how normalized antisemitism is becoming.


A Symphonic Version of Terror
Regardless of the obvious contextual differences between the Mumbai events and the October 7 attack on Israeli kibbutzim, towns and cities by Hamas, the two operations share the same symphonic characteristic mentioned above.

If anything, Hamas composed its symphony on an even grander scale by adding rocket and drone attacks, deploying airborne units and using flanking moves from the sea. Here, we saw a variety of themes developed at the same time, at times in apparent contradiction with one another but eventually coming together in a grand deadly finale.

The Mumbai events could be seen as terrorism using elements of classical warfare while the October 7 attack may look more like a military operation with standard themes of terrorism woven in filigree.

A new form of militarized terror or a variety of warfare using elements of terrorism?

It is too early to know whether the Hamas attack will end up producing the same result that the Mumbai operation did.

The Mumbai operation forced India to abandon its tit for-tat policy regarding armed terrorist opponents, that is to say liquidating all those who carried out any given attack.

In an interview I did in 1996 for Asharq Al-Awsat with them Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee he said "opponents" trained, armed and sent around 2,000 "terrorists" to India. "We kill them bit by bit but they are quickly replaced by others," he said.

The Mumbai attack changed that approach as India, after 2008, decided to go for a no-holds-bar strategy, trying to wipe out all the "enemy groups" where they were located. That was the end of an-eye-for-an-eye tradition of retribution.

Using terror operations on a small scale is an effective means of making life difficult for a much stronger opponent and may even force it to offer some concessions. But grand dramatic attacks such as 9/11 against the US, the Mumbai campaign and the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel raise the stakes to symphonic level that those targeted cannot simply grin and bear it.

9/11 forced the US to invade Afghanistan and destroy al-Qaeda, something it had not contemplated doing even after the massacre of 241 US military personnel in Lebanon. After the Mumbai attacks, India made sure something like that could never happen again.

In those cases, an initial victory for the attacker proved to be a prelude to his annihilation.

Between 2007 and 2023, prior to October 7, Hamas had carried out scores of "3 unities" style attacks on Israel, with Israelis responding in similar low-intensity counter-attacks, both engaged in a slow but bearable danse macabre.

October 7 stopped that and started a new movement in a symphony whose finale is hard to predict.
Israel's Critics Want to Cancel a Whole Country
The obsession of the West with identity politics seems to stem from understandable shame at the fact that much of the West was built on white colonization. Israel has attracted ire because many of its critics think it's a colonization project that can still be stopped - a whole country that can be cancelled. That is the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea" - the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of its Jews.

There are plenty of arguments about why this is wrong. History has been one long power play. Pretty much every modern country is the product of conquest and injustice. Not knowing this is infantile; picking on Israel only is unfair.

Moreover, Israel was created by a large Jewish migration to an ancestral homeland in which Jews had lived throughout. The same cannot be said of the Anglo arrival in Australia and New Zealand, the Iberian invasion of Central and South America, or the 7th century Arabian invasion of the Levant - which includes the Holy Land.

Those now advising Israelis to "just go back to their home countries" should recall that the vast majority of Israel's 7 million Jews were born there. The countries from which their ancestors came to Israel in some cases include Arab ones that remain inhospitable to Jews. In many cases these ancestors were kicked out of those countries and their property stolen.
Jake Wallis Simons: Anti-Semitism is being normalised in British life
In 1144, the murder of a tanner’s apprentice in Norwich was blamed on French-speaking Jews, birthing a shameful tradition of blood libel that ascribed to Jews a penchant for murdering children.

As the unknown person who recently scrawled graffiti outside my house put it: “think Gaza”. Are the Israelis trying to kill infants? Of course not. They understand that every death is a victory for Hamas in the international arena.

The ease with which so many reach for Jewish malevolence to explain the Palestinian tragedy has roots reaching back to East Anglia. But no longer do the good people of Norwich throw Jews down wells. Rather, the local council equivocated this week about the public Chanukah lighting.

Foremost in their minds – these were the claims of officials and who are we to doubt them – was a single concern. What if the candelabra was vandalised? One might have thought that this was a matter for the police. Is it “inclusive” for minorities to hide for their own safety? And if officers could not be persuaded to protect Jews, I’d take the threat of vandalism above the life of the medieval Marranos, forced to observe Judaism in secret.

But the council failed to buck up. Eventually, after pressure from The Jewish Chronicle, officials decided to hold the celebrations, but in a less prominent location and for one night rather than the traditional eight. So the observances of the world’s oldest monotheism were rewritten at the stroke of a municipal pen.

Chanukah marks the miracle in which a single day’s oil lamp remained alight for eight days, following the destruction of the Jewish temple more than 2,000 years ago. It represents defiance and survival. The prayers recall how numerous attempts at genocide failed to extinguish the Jewish spirit. Reduce it to one night and it represents nothing.

A small story, I suppose. But the way officials so casually relegated the rights of Jews speaks of the new normal in Britain. Mobs holding anti-Semitic signs and bellowing genocidal slogans have become a weekly fixture. If the police had enforced the law after October 7 by arresting those supporting Hamas, the protests could have taken on a more moderate tone. But officers aren’t used to taking on fashionable causes.
Brendan O'Neill: The staggering naivety of the Israelophobes
We can now see that one of the key drivers of anti-Israel hysteria is historical naivety. It’s the luxurious moralism of privileged Western millennials who have never had to fight for anything. It’s the pampered arrogance of Western radicals who hate war while being blissfully ignorant of the fact that every freedom and comfort they enjoy is a gift of those who were prepared to fight in wars. A gift of earlier generations who took up arms against fascism, despotism, slavery, tyranny, and in the process made life better and freer for us all. The upper-class Israel-bashers live in liberty and peace thanks to men who did what Israel is currently doing. The cognitive dissonance is off the scale. If your forebears had not likewise rounded up suspected fascists, you would not enjoy the freedom to idle away your days defaming Israel.

The mollycoddling of the new generation has blinded them to the truth that sometimes a society must fight for its survival. Unlike Israel, these people have never faced an existential threat. Their greatest torment is being misgendered or having to see Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity…. They pose as anti-fascists but have no idea what it’s like to be attacked by fascists, as Israel was on 7 October. They have no idea what it’s like to fight in close quarters against a racist army that wants to erase your entire way of life. They have no idea what it’s like to face down a foe that hides among ordinary citizens. Yet they feel qualified to condemn the country that currently faces this extraordinary dilemma.

It isn’t morality that drives Israelophobia – it’s moral defeatism. It isn’t anti-colonialism – it’s an ironically neocolonial disgust for a small state that is daring to do what our own larger states did decades ago. ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things’, said John Stuart Mill. ‘The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.’ Absolutely. Which is why the self-satisfied, performative angst over the rounding up of men in Gaza horrifies me more than the rounding up itself.
The disturbing rebirth of Holocaust denial
Today, this process is largely complete. The Holocaust has become one of the most overused metaphors for evil in contemporary times. Animal-rights activists in Canada refer to a Holocaust of seals. Anti-abortion campaigners in the US have denounced a Holocaust of fetuses. There is talk in Australia of a Holocaust against Aboriginal people. The label ‘Holocaust’ has been appropriated to denounce just about any bad thing, from the erosion of biodiversity to a loss of jobs.

This development has come at a huge cost. The expansion of the Holocaust as a metaphor has diminished the significance of the Holocaust as an actual event. Worse still, this has encouraged cynicism and scepticism about what actually happened during the Nazi era. As far back as 2004, 35 per cent of those surveyed in nine Western European countries stated that Jews should stop playing the role of Holocaust victims. It was only a matter of time before the obsessive institutionalisation of the Holocaust would create a situation in which scepticism towards Jewish victimhood would turn into outright disbelief.

Holocaust scepticism and denial have grown significantly since the 2000s. And they have done so as attempts to memorialise the Holocaust have also grown. By 2017, Nicholas Terry, a history lecturer at Exeter University, was warning that there were thousands of casual Holocaust deniers online. At about the same time, the top hit on Google in response to the question ‘Did the Holocaust happen?’ was a link that claimed that the murder of six million Jews was a hoax. This level of scepticism and denial would have been inconceivable in the recent past.

The Holocaust has become thoroughly decontextualised today. So much so that, after the 7 October pogrom, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters began playing the Holocaust card to call into question Israel’s right to defend itself. Marches regularly feature placards showing the Star of David inside a swastika or comparing Israel’s siege of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps. The ease with which Hamas and its Western supporters have turned the memory of the Holocaust against its historical victims – the Jewish people – is a tragic consequence of the endless weaponisation of the Holocaust.
Are Canadians going to stand up to Jew hate?
Are Jews hated because it is easier to see us as aggressors — as the opposite of what we actually are — because our unrelenting humanity challenges the world to achieve a spiritual standard that seems unattainable?

On Oct. 7, humanity commenced teetering on the cusp of a new existential age. The winner of this war of good versus evil will determine the future of civilization as we know it.

Every Canadian has a choice to make.

Are you going to permit Jew hate to flow in our streets, or are you going to take a stand against all forms of hate against any people and protect our Jewish communities?

Are you going to stand with Israel, the country fighting our war against jihadism, and help innocent Palestinians by freeing them from the terrorist regime that runs Gaza, or are you going to blame Israel and continue to funnel support into the pockets of a handful of thugs who will do nothing to improve the lives of their people, but who instead will continue building tunnels and waging holy war against western civilization?

Are you going to continue to think there is a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas because you want to be impartial or politically correct, at the expense of the truth?

Are you going to support a world view that justifies chopping off heads and baking babies alive? Or one that cherishes the life of every single living thing?

Are you going to see that Jews were chosen as front-line executioners of evil because we are among the most merciful of nations?

Are you going to finally accept and embrace us with an open heart?

It’s time for Canadians to take a page from the Jewish book and realize that each and every soul — what we think, and what we do in this world — matters.
Bari Weiss: How to Really Fix American Higher Education
Eliminate the Ideology That Replaced Truth as Higher Education’s North Star

What is that ideology? And how did it come to supplant truth—the very mission of higher education? Don’t ask me. Ask current Harvard president Claudine Gay, who laid out her vision for institutional transformation, now on full display, when she was dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In a memo to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered.” More: “I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”

It’s really worth reading the whole thing to understand how things like the pursuit of “antiracism” and the study of “indigeneity” and “migration” and other fringe topics became core to Harvard’s mission. If you wonder how it is that Harvard gave 79% of students As (at least as of 2021) consider that grades at such institutions are no longer a measure of excellence or learning, but a measure of political adherence.

The point here is that even if Claudine Gay follows Liz Magill’s lead and resigns, it won’t make a difference if the person who replaces her upholds the same ideology so powerfully captured in Gay’s own memo.

Fixing what’s broken is one solution. The other solution is to build new things.

Two years ago, Pano Kanelos, then president of St. John’s College, picked up and moved his family to Austin to build a new university. He announced the audacious project in our pages:

“At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse,” Kanelos wrote. “But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.”

Last week I toured UATX’s building in downtown Austin. From an idea to breaking ground in under two years. That is what a small group of very determined people can do.

In 2024, the school will welcome its first class of undergraduates. Some of the most impressive young people I know are applying. More than 6,000 academics have inquired about jobs.

So there is some light in these dark days. Let those astonishing congressional testimonies be an opportunity not for bemoaning what’s been lost, but for resolute commitment to fixing what’s broken and building anew.
The Ouster of Penn’s President Won’t Fix the Problem
University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill should not have been forced to resign Saturday. In fact, her resignation is a blow to academic freedom. It amounts to little more than a cave—yet another prominent American institution succumbing to the angry mob.

It will also do nothing to make life happier or “safer” for Jewish students on campus upset with Magill for not taking a more forceful stance against antisemitism. It will make it worse by making an already illiberal academic environment even more illiberal: Jews always fare better in liberal, pluralistic environments that reward meritocracy.

However, Magill’s resignation will make it easier for Penn to raise money, which is the real reason she’s out. The job of the modern university president is not to cultivate souls or elevate educational offerings. It is to reel in huge donations, and that’s harder if your brand is tainted with Jew-hate.

Yes, I understand why the powers that be wanted her out: she stood up for free expression and, in this case, that meant defending the rights of antisemites. (And let’s be clear: the students and professors shouting “intifada” are antisemites or, at best, useful idiots.)

We have to move beyond the moronic juncture we have arrived at in America in which people are severely punished for offending other people. This is a cancellation, and all cancellations are lamentable—an undermining of the republic.

The problem here is Magill faced an impossible dilemma that, to be fair, was not of her own making: for years, universities—lots of them, not just Penn—have been chipping away at the freedoms of students and professors. Case in point: since 2018, Penn has been trying to punish law professor Amy Wax for comments considered racist. When Magill became president last year, she showed no signs of pushing back against the status quo. So the question naturally arises: Why is defending the free expression of Jew-haters suddenly so important when it wasn’t until about five minutes ago?
Heather Mac Donald: Right Deed, Wrong Reason
Ironically, however, it was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. However woodenly they asserted their alleged reason for not shutting down the pro-Hamas demonstrations, that reason should have been controlling. Speech should be protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence. Student parroting of Islamist slogans does not meet those tests. Allowing a central authority to ban speech that it declares injurious to the common good is a license for precisely the abuse of power that has been the norm throughout human history, a norm that the Founders were so insistent on overturning. Moreover, it has been in the name of creating what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive” campus “climate” that universities have suppressed unwelcome facts and unpopular speakers.

Of course, even the presidents’ explanation for why they tolerate the pro-Hamas demonstrations is likely a lie. The real reason for their equivocation is fear of the campus Left—or, in the case of the diversity bureaucrats who often took the lead in responding to the terror attacks—agreement with the campus Left that anti-Israel terrorism is merely a matter of Palestinian self-defense.

Critics of the American university have seized on what they perceive as the most efficacious means for discrediting academia. But though accusations of tolerance for the genocide of Jews guarantees the most media coverage, conservatives are making a mistake in highlighting that alleged tolerance as the main reason to revamp the university. This mistake will come back to haunt them.

Absent a complete turnover of university personnel, a renewed authority to limit speech will be used overwhelmingly against conservatives. Even now, Penn is weighing sanctions against law professor Amy Wax for her challenges to campus orthodoxy. Had the public consensus been that the universities’ mistake was in not extending the same tolerance they showed to the pro-Hamas demonstrators to dissenters from leftist nostrums, Wax could have argued that she is entitled to the same protections for controversial speech. Now, with renewed support, even from the right, for student “safety,” Penn can argue that its newfound concern for Jewish student safety requires it to intensify its solicitude for the “marginalized” groups whom Wax allegedly jeopardized with her contrarian opinions.

A colleague of Wax’s has published an op-ed in the Washington Post unironically headlined: “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” “Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?” asks law professor Claire Finkelstein. However fanciful the question’s premise—that universities currently honor academic freedom—it is chilling that the answer is increasingly affirmative, even from many on the right.
Douglas Murray slams 'moral rot' in US universities as they refuse to condemn anti-Semitism
Author Douglas Murray has slammed American universities as “less moral than AI” after several college presidents refused to label calls for the genocide of Jews as harassment before the US Congress.

Mr Murray described the situation as the result of “decades of moral rot in universities”.

“These people were talking like ChatGPT – they were just rolling out this answer. And as it happened, I actually asked the same questions these leaders of major universities in America were asked,” Mr Murray told Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi.

“I asked the same question to ChatGPT and ChatGPT got it right – so actually calling for genocide is regarded as being unacceptable.

“Here’s the interesting thing, we’ve got to such a stage in our universities that the people who lead the universities in America are actually less moral than AI.”


It’s Time for Congress to Open Harvard’s Books
In their congressional testimony last week, the presidents of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania refused to denounce terrorism or explain whether calls for the genocide of Jews represent harassment or bullying on their campuses. Parents who watched this spectacle are wondering where the $80,000 a year they pay in tuition is going, and whether the “education” their children are receiving is worth the price tag. American taxpayers who can hardly afford an Ivy League education but are equally disturbed by the moral rot they’re seeing might be even more alarmed to discover that they are personally underwriting it.

While parents should be free to pay for any form of education they want, the fact is American taxpayers contribute more to Harvard than the parents of Harvard students do. Prohibitively expensive universities that turn out students who believe that open antisemitism and championing terrorism are forms of “social justice” do so on the taxpayer’s dime. That’s because they all enjoy tax-exempt status as “educational” public charities. But are these institutions in fact serving the public interest? And how much are the lessons that students are learning at these wealthy “public charities” costing the American taxpayer?

The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit government-spending watchdog which I direct, examined 10 universities—the Ivy League, plus Stanford and Northwestern. We found that during a five-year period from 2018-22 these wealthy universities collected $45 billion in taxpayer subsidies, special tax treatment, and federal payments. In fact, these universities collected a stunning $33 billion in federal contracts and grants. It therefore seems these schools are more federal contractors than educators—with federal payments exceeding undergraduate student tuition.

Additionally, the universities we surveyed profit handsomely from “nonprofit” tax breaks amounting to a benefit of roughly $12 billion. Wealthy universities pay only a 1.4% “excessive endowments” tax on their gains whereas wealthy individuals pay up to 23.4% on their capital gains.

The University of Pennsylvania, whose then-president (she resigned on Saturday), Liz Magill, seemed to smirk at the idea of being questioned by Congress, collected $3.7 billion in U.S. government grants and contracts, mostly for research, between 2018 and 2022. Over the same five-year period, Penn’s endowment ballooned to $21 billion from $13.4 billion.
Seth Frantzman: Reporter’s Notebook: Life in northern Israel amid Hezbollah tensions
Rain and cold lashed the coast of Israel on Saturday. Haifa Bay was deserted save for a group of surfers and fishermen who decided to go down to Kiryat Yam to see if they could take advantage of the weather.

The North has been under constant threat of Hezbollah attack since the launch of dozens of rockets, as well as drone mortar and anti-tank missile fire, directed at border communities over the last two months. Last week an Israeli civilian was killed in Mattat, a community near the Lebanon border. A trip to the north

I drove up north for Shabbat. On Saturday I approached the border region from where 40 Israeli communities were evacuated in October. These included small locales on the border itself, many of them on the heights overlooking Lebanon, a stone’s throw from the border fence – villages such as Shtula, whose residents, mostly Jews of Kurdish origin, were evacuated.

Nevertheless, Hezbollah has continued to target these areas, firing at the communities and targeting cars that approach the border. They also target IDF forces.

The evacuations affected all the communities along the border, from Kiryat Shmona, a city of some 23,000, to Rosh Hanikra on the coast.

As one approaches this area the military presence is clear; there are more checkpoints and shelters on the road. The area feels ghostly, the low hanging clouds and rain contributing to this feeling. The threat to the North has significantly changed areas that rely on tourism. Businesses are shuttered and livelihoods have been challenged.

I drove from Nahariya toward Rosh Hanikra, stopping to walk on the beach. Some people came up here to exercise and search for shells deposited by the storm. Some people were fishing.
Meet the Iranians supporting Israel

J Street Lobbies Against Israeli War on Hamas

Biden Admin Pays Anti-Israel Group That Spreads Lies About Gaza War To Fight 'Disinformation'

Egypt cancels Hanucah, while Morocco celebrates it

Moroccans Demand Halt to Ties with Israel

South Africa Cancels Hanukkah Celebrations, Welcomes Hamas Visit

Filmmakers Behind Israel’s 2024 Oscar Submission Focus New Film on All-Female IDF Tank Unit That Battled Hamas

Tom Gross on BBC Arabic: ‘Israelis just want a government in Gaza that doesn’t fire rockets at them’



SNL tries and fails to mock Elise Stefanik's successful blasting of Penn's president

SNL’s Antisemitism Sketch Was Hateful and Not Funny

Jewish students at UPenn say Magill's resignation isn't enough

GWU faculty ignore Hamas atrocities, defend attack on Israel: ‘Right of resistance’

Jon Gabriel: Harvard, other schools fixate on 'safe spaces' while they ignore calls for genocide

Billboard trucks deployed to Harvard demanding president Claudine Gay be fired>

More than 500 Harvard faculty sign letter supporting prez despite calls for her firing over handling of campus antisemitism

Ivy League Presidents Were Defending Bullying Against Jews, not Speech

Magill Defender Overseeing Search for Penn's Next President

Stanford’s antisemitism committee co-chair aligned with anti-Israel groups, concluded antisemitism wasn’t a problem on campuses in 2017 paper

UNC Has Become a Beacon for Jew Hatred; No One Seems to Care

Two universities strip titles from academic who called for Jewish conference to be ‘blown up’

Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez attend comedy night for Gaza charity
Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne attended a philanthropic event hosted by Ramy Youssef’s comedy club in Brooklyn which raised funds for Gaza, according to numerous media reports from December 10.

Indian daily newspaper The Statesman reported that the famous trio was later accompanied by Anya Taylor Joy and Zoë Kravitz.

Ramy Youssef, an American-Egyptian comedian, confirmed on his Instagram page that funds raised by the comedy show would be entirely donated to American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA.)

What is ANERA?
The charity, which began its work in 1968, describes itself as having no political or religious affiliation. They claim to “mobilize resources for immediate emergency relief and for sustainable, long-term health, education, and economic development.”

Despite their claims of having no affiliations, NGO Monitor has described the charity as highly political, evidenced by “ANERA’s reports and newsletters present a highly biased view of the conflict, ignoring any Palestinian responsibility for hardship and contributing to the demonization of Israel consistent with the 2001 Durban strategy.”

ANERA President Peter Gubser in reports, according to NGO Monitor, has also failed to acknowledge Palestinian attacks against Israel and only looks at Israeli military response.


Columbia University Students Organize ‘Tuition Strike’ to Force Divestment From Israel

GUARDIAN CONTENT CONTINUES TO SERVE HAMAS’S PROPAGANDA GOALS

The Eight Categories of Media Bias

Palestinian Detainee Images Spark Furor and Misinformation in Mainstream & Social Media Palestinian woman been attacked by Jewish man? Or......

Hanukkah Coverage Keeps Jewish Connection to the Land of Israel in the Dark

The Meteoric Rise of Jackson Hinkle: How Hateful Influencer Became Internet’s Biggest Hamas Fanboy

PMW: Hamas leader: “We need the blood of the children, women, and elderly”

PMW: Abbas’ antisemitic advisor: Quran teaches that Jews can’t be trusted, so we don’t trust Israelis Abbas’ advisor: Israel used Hamas’ massacre on Oct. 7 as an excuse to launch “preplanned war”

Abbas’ advisor: Israel’s goal is “to uproot and erase the Palestinian people”

Fatah official claims US is “encouraging” the Israeli “aggression” against Hamas

Hamas official promises worse attack on Israel than Oct. 7

MEMRI: Antisemitic And Anti-Israel Content In Qatar's Education System: Jews Are Enemies Of Allah; Palestine Stretches From The River To The Sea

Khaled Abu Toameh: Hamas Creates New Terrorist Group to Destroy Lebanon
On December 4, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas announced the establishment of a new terrorist group in Lebanon....

Hamas, in short, is saying that it is planning a similar invasion of Israel, but this time from Lebanon.

Lebanese journalist Tony Bouloss warned that Hamas's intention is to establish a new terror group in Lebanon that could... turn it into "Hamas Land." "Hezbollah wants to turn Lebanon into a new Afghanistan, attracting all terrorist organizations in the world so that Lebanon becomes an alternative homeland for rogue groups." – Tony Bouloss, X (Twitter), December 4, 2023.

According to reports, Hezbollah recently permitted the deployment of 400 Palestinians affiliated with Hamas along the border with Israel. The coordination between the two terror groups is taking place under the direct supervision of their masters in Iran....

Ultimately, the war Israel is currently waging against Hamas will weaken the Iran-led axis of evil in the Middle East; embolden Arabs to speak out against Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror groups, and finally hugely improve the lives of all the Arabs and Palestinians in the region by working toward peace with Israel.


Iranian ambassador's chilling anti-Israel tweets - including calls to destroy Jewish state and horrific photos of dead children

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Says Iranian People Will Prevail Against Rulers

'Person of interest' in Samantha Woll murder case taken into custody by Detroit police
A new “person of interest” was taken into custody in connection to the murder of Detroit synagogue leader Samantha Woll on Sunday, a month after a different person was taken in and questioned by investigators, but later released, according to police and reports.

“[The Detroit Police Department] can confirm that a person of interest has been taken into custody in furtherance of the investigation into the murder of Samantha Woll,” the department said in a statement to The Post.

“In an effort to ensure the integrity of this ongoing investigation, no further details will be released at this time. Additional information will be released in the near future.”

Woll, president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Detroit Synagogue, was found stabbed to death outside her home on October 21.

A suspect was taken into custody in November but was later released without being charged.
Germany: Shocking Rise in Left-Wing Antisemitic Acts

Man charged with hate crime for allegedly robbing, assaulting LA Jewish man on Shabbat

Austria nabs teen for allegedly planning terror attack on Vienna synagogue

Minnesota Vikings kicker wins game with 'I stand with Israel' boots ‘Too Many Decent People Are Quiet’: Rallies Against Rising Antisemitism Held in Berlin, Brussels



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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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