05/03 Links Pt2: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Lawyer behind push for Netanyahu’s arrest defended Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks; Red Cross official exposed as Hamas stooge

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Bibi Between a Rock and a Hard Place

On a recent episode of the COMMENTARY podcast, Tablet’s Noam Blum made an astute point about Benjamin Netanyahu’s staunchest critics: Some of them dislike Bibi so much that they have convinced themselves he has dictatorial powers that mirror those of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas terrorist leader on the other side of the hostage negotiations. According to this line of thinking, anything that happens—or doesn’t happen—can be blamed on Netanyahu, who governs according to his own will.

The May 2 Wall Street Journal gives us a perfect example of what happens when observers buy into that fallacy. The rather amazing headline is: “Fate of Gaza Cease-Fire Talks Hangs on Two Hard-Liners: Netanyahu and Sinwar.”

The article text is more nuanced, but it still follows the same flawed logic. Here is the crux of the argument as it relates to Israel’s prime minister: “Netanyahu, who faced criticism within Israel over the security and intelligence failures around Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war, has seen his sinking polling numbers stabilize as the conflict drags on….He is now concerned about the possibility that the International Criminal Court could indict him for alleged war crimes, an outcome he has rejected as an assault on Israel’s right to self-defense. Stopping the fighting risks a political reckoning that could eventually push him from power.”

It’s true that “stopping the fighting” would start the clock on a wave of political pressure and possibly an election season, if the coalition dissolves. But this framing puts Bibi between a rock and hard place: If he had finished off Hamas already, he would have done so over the objections of the Biden administration. In patiently placing the overall war on pause in order to get more humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip and to maximize the chances at a deal with Hamas, Netanyahu (along with the war cabinet) is doing what every world leader, but especially Biden, wants him to do. Yet in acquiescing, he is accused of drawing out the war so that he doesn’t have to face a “political reckoning.”

Meanwhile, virtually everyone involved is making it harder for Israel to actually get a deal in place. The anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel have come to serve as a release valve for a public stuck in a limbo mostly of Joe Biden’s making. Those protesters, as Blum mentioned, assume Netanyahu is the obstacle to a deal. But in fact, it is Hamas that has continually walked away from objectively generous deals and appears to be doing so again. Simply as a matter of strategy, the protests arguably contribute to the negotiating stasis, because Hamas interprets them as a destabilizing force in domestic Israeli politics. And Israel’s threats to go into Rafah, the last major Hamas redoubt in the Strip, are consistently muffled by the sound and fury of the Biden administration’s opposition to such an operation, making it less of a credible threat. Hamas can be forgiven for thinking time is on its side.

Seth Mandel: The Fight to Define Anti-Semitism

In January, the Forward carried a head-scratcher of a story: The Nexusites were—in the midst of a global hurricane of left anti-Semitism, no less—building a political operation to challenge IHRA and ensure not only that the American Jewish community spends resources fighting amongst itself but that this intra-communal fight would take on a political shade.

Now, when you read about the Jewish community preparing to punch itself in the stomach, the first question that comes to mind is, of course: How is J Street involved? And the answer is Kevin Rachlin, who announced he was stepping down as a top J Street lobbyist to take the helm of Nexus’s newly formed political operation.

“We’re not anti-IHRA,” said Rachlin about the organization created solely and specifically to oppose IHRA.

In any event, Democratic politicians loved the idea of being able to hand out “get out of anti-Semitism free” cards to party members who were poised to be like teenagers speeding down the highway with a PBA card in the glovebox. In December, reportedly on the advice of Nexus-affiliated activists, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) led a Democratic revolt against Republicans’ attempts to slap down rising anti-Semitism dressed up as criticism of Israel. I explained at the time how Nadler’s own argument disproved the point he was trying to make, but the effect was clear: Whatever semblance of a truce the American Jewish community had going since Oct. 7 was off. We’d been agreeing with each other far too much and it was giving Jerry Nadler indigestion.

Lawler’s bill, helped by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s efforts, today overcame Nadler’s disapproval to advance a common understanding of anti-Semitism at a crucial time. But the Democrats have been unnerved by the so-called “tentifada”—the various Jew-baiting encampments springing up around college campuses—and a number of powerful politicians are very clearly terrified of the quad-dwellers occupying buildings and making demands.

The hope is that the bipartisan IHRA support can outrun its challengers, or build up enough momentum to shame Nexus into finding better things to do with its time and resources than politicize anti-Semitism and re-divide the Jewish community at a moment when doing so would be especially damaging.

Jonathan Tobin: The House bill will hinder campus antisemitism, not free speech

Faced with an opportunity to do something that would actually help give the federal government the ability to punish American universities that have let their campuses become hotbeds of antisemitism, a bipartisan majority of Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives did the right thing and passed a bill that can make that possible this week by a vote of 320-91.

But the number of “no” votes was still discouraging for two reasons.

It showed that 21% of House members aren’t willing to act on antisemitism, even in the face of the surge of prejudice and even violence against Jews especially on college campuses that has been on display since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

Just as troubling is the fact that significant portions of both the Democrat and Republican caucuses opposed the act for different, albeit equally specious reasons. The strength of the opposition—both from politicians and pundits on both ends of the political spectrum—is problematic because it demonstrates how distorted the debate about the issue of antisemitism has become. Even worse, the fact that 70 of the 91 voting against it were Democrats may make it unlikely that the self-anointed shomer, or “guardian,” of Israel and the Jewish people in the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will allow the law to come to vote in the upper body.

Civil rights also apply to Jews
The Antisemitism Awareness Act builds on the historic executive order issued by former President Donald Trump in December 2019 that echoed the past rulings of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and accepted in principle by the Biden administration, about dealing with Jew-hatred.

Trump mandated that the government extend the Title VI anti-discrimination in education protections in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews and other minorities. He also took the important step of also ruling that the U.S. Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism when deciding whether to sanction schools that violate the rights of Jewish students by cutting off their federal funding. And that funding is the leftist educational establishment’s Achilles heel, since without it all but the wealthiest institutions would be brought to their knees.

While the Education Department has conducted a series of investigations into schools for such violations, which have grown in number and severity over the last two decades, to date no institution of higher education has yet received the ultimate penalty for violating the civil rights of its Jewish students by enabling an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, intimidation, harassment and even violence against Jewish students by woke leftist mobs of students, professors and professional agitators have become endemic. With many school administrations, especially at elite institutions, paralyzed by their fear of offending the mobs and often seeking to appease them in ways that will only make the problem worse, stopping federal funding may be the only way to fix the problem in the short run.

Inside the College Democrats’ antisemitism problem

As anti-Israel encampments on college campuses sprung up at dozens of universities last week, the national leadership of the College Democrats of America (CDA) asked the group’s Jewish and Muslim caucuses to draft a statement condemning the antisemitism that was quickly appearing among some protesters.

The byzantine process that followed would lead the College Democrats’ top Jewish leader to accuse the influential organization of ignoring antisemitism at campus protests to further a one-sided, anti-Israel agenda, after the organization’s leadership nixed the inclusive statement that had been created by the top Jewish and Muslim activists in the group.

Allyson Bell, chair of the CDA’s national Jewish caucus and an MBA student at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., got to work writing a statement about antisemitism with Hasan Pyarali, the Muslim caucus chair and a senior at Wake Forest University. The two of them turned in a draft of a statement detailing antisemitism at Columbia University and stating that the College Democrats “absolutely and irrevocably denounce the antisemitism that has taken place at Columbia University and other college campuses over the past week,” according to a document shared with Jewish Insider.

But College Democrats’ national leaders weren’t pleased with this draft, Bell stated. “They wanted us to write a 50/50 approach, to both protect the peaceful side of the protesters and stand against antisemitism,” Bell told JI on Wednesday night. So she and Pyarali gave it another stab. (“It’s been really tough for people to work together on this issue, so I’m so glad that we’ve been able to work together,” Pyarali told JI.)

This time, the draft statement began with a denunciation of antisemitism and a statement of support for the “broad and interfaith coalitions of students who call for a ceasefire, release of the hostages, and a two-state solution where both Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace.” This too, was voted down.

The statement that was ultimately released by the College Democrats on Tuesday ignored the middle path proposed by Bell and Pyarali. Instead, the statement described “heroic actions on the part of students around the country to protest and sit in for an end to the war in Palestine and the release of the hostages.” It called Israel’s war against Hamas “destructive, genocidal, and unjust” — language that Bell had never seen. An Instagram post with the statement touted the endorsement of Pyarali and the Muslim caucus, with no mention of the Jewish caucus — except a comment on the post from the Jewish caucus’ own Instagram account.

“This should not have ever been released without Jewish students’ support. Protect Jewish students, do better,” the College Democrats’ Jewish caucus commented.

“It’s a hurtful thing, not only to not feel heard, but also to know that the organization you’re in doesn’t believe that the antisemitism is happening and doesn’t care enough about it to even include the factual things that we’ve seen on video,” explained Bell.

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05/03 Links Pt1: College idiots calling for ‘Intifada’ have no idea how many innocents have died from that word; Where’s Biden’s Anger at the Feckless Universities?

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: College idiots calling for ‘Intifada’ have no idea how many innocents have died from that word

This one is for the morons.

For the students busily cosplaying at being terrorists on our city’s campuses.

The automatons whose new radical-chic uniform is an Arab keffiyeh.

Specifically to the ones who have decided to chant for “Intifada” and unveil a vast banner down the side of Hamilton Hall at Columbia this week.

“Intifada,” the banner said, in huge letters as the mob below shrieked approval.

Most of these students weren’t born when the Palestinians last had an “Intifada.”

So although youth and ignorance aren’t any real excuse, perhaps I can educate these students about what they are actually calling for.

I invite them to “do the work” of understanding what it means when people call for “Intifada” and what it actually means.

In June 2001, the Intifada that Palestinian clerics and politicians had called for was in full flight.

Every day Israelis boarding buses had to look around in case one of the other passengers was wearing a suicide vest and about to turn the vehicle into a charnel house.

On June 1, young people in Tel Aviv were enjoying a beautiful summer evening.

Many of them were milling around a nightclub much like those that the students at Columbia go to on a weekend.

But this one was more beautifully located, sitting on the city’s beachfront.

The Dolphinarium club was packed that night.

Outside were crowds of young people hoping to get in.

The Hamas terrorist detonated the bomb amid the queue of young women who were hoping to get into the club.

He killed 21 young people.

Sixteen of the victims were teenagers. Not even college age yet.

The youngest of them was 14-year old Maria Tagilchev.

Many of the victims were children of parents who had emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union.

Their parents fled one totalitarian regime only to lose their children to terrorism in Tel Aviv.

Eyewitnesses described the limbs of the young women lying strewn across the road.

Some of the bodies were lying in piles.

This is what Intifada means.

But perhaps the students at Columbia don’t care about those 21 people who never grew up.

Abigail Shrier: There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way.

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either.

My Friends Wish I Was Dead

What does it mean to be a Zionist student on a college campus today? I have friends at schools all over the country who are struggling. People who are afraid to wear their necklace with a Star of David for fear of repercussions. To be a Zionist is to be an outcast. Classmates think that you are supporting a genocidal, apartheid state. They don’t care enough to hear your story. They don’t care that you lost dear friends and are mourning the pre-Oct. 7 Israel that will never exist again. They turn a blind eye to facts and choose to look only at social media posts that support their antisemitic narrative. What’s the point of arguing with such people? I am reminded of Golda Meir’s line, “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.”

Now they have come for me. The antisemitic posts began on Oct. 7, and swung into a higher gear after I spent a week volunteering in Israel over Bates College’s spring break in late February. I pulled three choice quotes of what my fellow students had to say about me. Spoiler: They apparently wish me dead.

“Big nose mafia going to cancel me but man you know who should’ve finished the job.”

“Phoebe Stern did [go to Israel] … She fat and ugly anyways … just because she supports genocide doesn’t mean we get to be misogynistic.”

“She’s a racist bigot and the only question we should be asking ourselves is if she really believes the violent, racist lies she’s been spreading.”

My mind was reeling. Other Jewish friends at Bates were also attacked. They were accused of being racists and bigots, in writing, both online and on their dorm doors. One post from a Bates classmate advocated that “Hitler should’ve finished off the job.” People were using the anonymity of social media to spread lies and put words in my mouth, that I was going around campus telling people that my Arab peers want to kill me—a sentence that I have never uttered in my life, and wholeheartedly disagree with.

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05/02 Links Pt2: Why Biden Is Saving Hamas; And the Prize for Photography Goes to ... Hamas?; Israel's Citizen-Soldiers; This year, Eurovision actually matters

From Ian:

Lee Smith: Why Biden Is Saving Hamas

Crucially, the Abraham Accords also ignored the Palestinians. After all, the Palestinians could never normalize relations without forfeiting their ability to project power and demand tribute. Like Sadat, Trump and his diplomats understood that peace could only be made by sidelining the Palestinians and whoever was sponsoring them, in this case Iran.

Naturally, the Abraham Accords were repugnant to the Obama faction. The normalization deals undid Obama’s balance of power project—i.e., strengthen U.S. adversaries at the expense of allies—and pushed the left’s longtime darlings, the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic to the margins. Accordingly, the Biden administration unfroze money to fill Iran’s war chest and undermined regional normalization under cover of expanding it to Saudi Arabia. Any direct talks between Israel and Saudi, the steward of Islam’s holy shrines, would, if only for the sake of protocol, have to involve the Palestinian cause. Thus, the Biden administration put the Palestinians at the center of the region again.

That’s how we got to Oct. 7. Contrary to the Biden administration’s talking points, the Iranians didn’t see Saudi-Israeli normalization talks as an existential threat; rather, they correctly saw it, and other Biden moves, as an invitation to disrupt and destabilize the regional order that Trump had rebuilt. Subsequently, in traditional regional fashion, the Iranians mobilized their Palestinian proxy.

And yet for many good-faith observers, it remains a mystery why Obama and then Biden sought to undo the U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and strategically vital region relatively stable. Is it ego alone that requires Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?

The key fact is this: The regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way, the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.

The Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents “domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or actual violence. Among other devices to transform America, the Biden administration has opened the border to at least 7 million illegal aliens (and counting), many from places in the Middle East where Hamas is revered, and for whom political violence means steady, well-paid work.

It’s not the traditional U.S.-led order in the Middle East that the revisionist faction, Obama’s faction, is most determined to dismantle but rather the existing order in the U.S. And it’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust, but America. For the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians must win.

Eugene Kontorovich: Already a Travesty, the ICC Eyes Charges Against Israel

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is reportedly considering arrest warrants against Israeli leaders for alleged war crimes. This would be the first time the ICC has taken this step against a liberal Western democracy. Such charges would allow unaccountable bureaucrats in The Hague to put Israel's elected officials on trial for decisions they made to defend the Jewish state against Hamas.

The charges alone would harm Israel by serving as a diplomatic catalyst for sanctions and boycotts of the Jewish state. But the diplomatic damage depends on a mistaken view of the ICC's legitimacy. It isn't some grand "world court." The countries most likely to use military force have chosen not to join. Despite a $200 million annual budget, the ICC has convicted only six people of the mass-atrocity crimes it was created to adjudicate in 2002. Incumbent dictators such as Russia's Vladimir Putin have simply ignored ICC indictments.

The ICC can't deter dictators and warlords. The likeliest outcome of an ICC charge against Israel would be to make it harder for small democracies to defend themselves from aggressive neighbors. In 2020, the ICC prosecutor shelved an investigation into allegations of torture by U.S. troops in Afghanistan when President Trump imposed sanctions on her and a colleague. After the Biden administration lifted those sanctions in 2022, the ICC promptly reopened the investigation.

J’Accuse: The antisemitic lies of 2024

The Jewish people are used to lies being spread about them. Nearly a millennium ago, the first of many blood libels accusing the Jews of murdering gentile children to consume their blood emerged. This was joined by accusations that Jews committed ‘host desecration,’ the supposed mistreatment of Communion Bread, and the accusation that Jews poisoned wells causing the Black Death.

Each of these false accusations led to massacres of innocent Jews. Unfortunately, lies about Jewish evil did not end with the enlightenment, nor did their deadly consequences.

The false charges against Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s, the publishing of the antisemitic forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ by the government of Tzarist Russia in 1903, Henry Ford’s diatribes against the ‘international Jew’ in the Dearborn Independent, and of course, the originators of the ‘big lie,’ Adolph Hitler and his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, whose lies dehumanized the Jewish people enough for the Holocaust to be committed.

As the world’s only Jewish nation, it is not surprising that Israel has frequently been the victim of many ‘big lies’ designed to foment hate and justify the murder of its citizens.

American readers will remember how in 2000, the Associated Press wrongly captioned a photograph of an American Jewish student, Tuvia Grossman, who had been beaten by Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem as a Palestinian, leading readers of the New York Times and other newspapers to conclude that Israeli police had beaten an Arab man when the police had saved the American citizen.

This was nothing compared to the ‘big lie’ that was told two years later, when, after 30 people were murdered in a suicide bombing at a Passover Seder in Netanya, the IDF went into Jenin to put an end to the terrorism plaguing Israel’s streets. The Palestinian Authority and so-called human rights NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused the IDF of “war crimes” and a “massacre” of as many as 500 people. These claims were reported without question by British media such as The Guardian and the BBC, which worked to spread the ‘big lie’ of the non-existent massacre. In reality, about 55 Arabs were killed in the battle, most of whom were combatants, and 23 IDF soldiers were killed, in part because of the IDF’s efforts to prevent civilian casualties. But a ‘big lie’ turned an otherwise unremarkable military engagement into a crime that justified any actions taken against Israel, Israelis, and Jews.

The sheer abundance of lies about Jews throughout history makes it easy to draw comparisons to past instances where such lies led to Jews being murdered. It is common nowadays to look at the horrific scenes on American college campuses, the intimidation, threats, and assaults against Jewish students, the open calls for genocide against Jews, and the failure of college administrations to combat this hate, and say that we are now living in a repeat of 1938 Germany.

The current situation could also be considered reminiscent of France during the Dreyfus Affair. Indeed, one of the chief propagators of the ‘big lies’ against Israel deliberately invited such comparisons soon after the Hamas massacre of October 7.

In late November, less than two months after the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese published a book she titled 'J'Accuse: The 7 October Attacks, Hamas, Terrorism, Israel, Apartheid in Palestine and the War.’

‘J'Accuse,’ meaning “I accuse,” was the title of an open letter published by the journalist Émile Zola in the L’Aurore newspaper on January 13, 1898 in which he laid bare the facts of the conspiracy to frame Alfred Dreyfus for treason and to protect Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, the man who had actually committed the crime for which Dreyfus was falsely accused.

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05/02 Links Pt1: The ivory tower jihad; Herzog issues ‘urgent’ message of support for Diaspora Jewry; Hamas' Education of the Ivy League

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ivory tower jihad

More fundamentally still, the shocking scenes on campus are the outcome of the West’s willed educational collapse. The understanding of education as the transmission of a culture to the next generation was junked decades ago in favor of a propaganda narrative of Western oppression.

This opened the way for the colonization of curricula by anti-Western ideological causes. The admission of students selected on the basis of identity politics rather than intellectual ability further reduced education standards to positively infantile levels.

This was illustrated at Columbia by the keffiyeh-clad Johanna King-Slutzky, who spoke to the media on behalf of the encampment. Jaw-droppingly channeling Hamas’s strategy in Gaza, she stated that the university had an obligation to bring in food and water to the illegal encampment, demanding, “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation? … This is like basic humanitarian aid.”

Her remarks attracted widespread incredulity and ridicule. But so should Columbia’s educational standards.

In her biography on the Columbia website, now deleted, King-Slutzky describes her dissertation as “a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism … theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.”

This gobbledygook is beyond parody. Alas, it’s all too typical of what now passes for higher education in America and Britain. The universities, the supposed crucibles of knowledge, intellectual challenge and open minds, are now in the business of propaganda, dumbing-down and the closing of the mind. They have become the principal vehicles for coercing cultural conformity to hatred of both Israel and the West.

In the appalling scenes on campus, a number of monstrous chickens are now coming home to roost.

Jonathan Tobin: Don’t compromise with pro-Hamas students; expel or suspend them

Shafik and her board deserve little credit for her decision to act. She had tolerated an intolerable situation on the Manhattan campus for weeks. During that time, Jews on campus were subjected to an unprecedented atmosphere of intimidation and threats from students, faculty and others spouting lies about Israel committing a Palestinian “genocide” and who made no secret of their identification with the Hamas terrorists responsible for the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Rhetoric about not tolerating the existence of “Zionists” had become normative, as had advocacy for antisemitic BDS resolutions that seek to target Israelis and Jews for discrimination.

Buying quiet on campus
But as appalling as Shafik’s performance has been, it was far better than what happened at Northwestern University and Brown University. In both cases, the schools gave in to student demands and allowed them a say in whether these institutions would implement divestment from Israel in exchange for quiet on campus.

For those administrators, it seems like a good bargain; they probably thought that they bought peace rather cheaply. After all, implementing boycotts at these schools will be a long, drawn-out affair and may not ultimately lead to the discriminatory agenda the pro-Hamas students seek. Among other complications, the state laws of Illinois and Rhode Island rightly hold BDS to be a form of illegal discrimination.

Opponents of Israel, however, have reason to celebrate both the weakness of those school’s administrators and the willingness of mob leaders to take “yes” for an answer. Many of the protesters, outside agitators and their funders think that the ongoing spectacle of shutting down campuses and crowds at major institutions cheering on terrorists helps their cause. Some may even believe that outcomes in which the protests are ended by police action also turn them into martyrs or help make them appear sympathetic to liberals who view student demonstrations from the Vietnam era with nostalgia.

But the object of all the post-Oct. 7 protests is to mainstream the demonization of Israel and Zionism, and to essentially ostracize and silence Jewish students who refuse to bow to fashionable opinion on campuses and join the mobs. Schools that make these sorts of concessions only make that problem worse.

Authorities are not wrong to view the anti-Israel demonstrations as a challenge to the normal functioning of institutions of higher education as well as to public order. For example, Columbia’s very liberal regulations allow all sorts of protests but still require that, among other things, demonstrations be conducted in a manner that does not impinge on the rights of other students. Such rules cannot be flouted with impunity if the university is not going to be ruled by the whims of radical mobs assembled at the behest of any cause.

Nor should any university permit libraries to be commandeered by protesters, which occurred at Portland State University in Oregon. Or, in the case of the University of California, Los Angeles, its sprawling anti-Israel encampments made it difficult or impossible for students to access classes or parts of the school grounds.

At its heart, this nationwide struggle is not just a matter of preserving law and order on college campuses. It’s about a sinister movement whose aim is to single out Israel and Zionism—the national liberation movement of the Jewish people—for opprobrium, isolation and destruction. It is nothing less than a 21st-century variety of antisemitism rooted in woke ideology that grants a permission slip for Jew-hatred. If any other minority group—African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians—were being treated in the way that Jews are now being hounded on campuses, there would be no debate about the necessity of a zero-tolerance policy for such behavior. Those who have broken school rules or gone so far as to commit violence to further their hateful cause should be suspended and expelled, not coddled as misunderstood idealists. Universities that tolerate this behavior and allow hostile environments for Jews to be imposed by campus radicals should be stripped of federal funding for violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Statements from President Joe Biden that create false moral equivalencies to media coverage that legitimizes the protests or concessions from universities to the anti-Israel protesters, must all be seen as part of the same moral failure on the part of much of our political and educational establishments. Toleration of antisemitic mobs will only lead to more antisemitism.

Washington Free Beacon Editors: The Invisible President

For more than a week now, the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests convulsing university campuses have been the biggest news story in the country.

The protests, in many cases abetted by university faculty, have put a national spotlight on the illiberalism and intellectual rot at the heart of American "higher" education and the DEI regime that makes it hum.

We’re not in the business of offering political advice to President Joe Biden, but it is hard to miss his absence from the situation. The New York Times calls him a "bystander," and the president has forsaken the bully pulpit for strongly worded statements meted out through various spokesmen. "The president believes that forcibly taking over a building on campus is absolutely the wrong approach," the spokesman, John F. Kirby, told reporters hours before officers cleared the hall. "That is not an example of peaceful protest."

Good to know. The chaos engulfing the campuses is but a first foretaste of the bitter cup which will be proffered to Biden at the Democratic convention this summer, when the same protesters, with degrees from the same "elite" institutions bring their "peaceful" protest tactics to Chicago intent on wreaking havoc.

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

Biden is, of course, not taking a strong stand because the left wing of his own party, already inflamed by his mealy-mouthed support for Israel, is actively participating in these protests. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) dropped by to fist bump the Columbia campers. Biden can’t afford to alienate them further, and like Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik, will soon realize you can’t reason or negotiate with a mob.

The president’s choice is to act in the national interest and pay a political price or to continue to hide under his desk and be forced, like Shafik, to pay the same price later—with interest.

Biden: 'People have the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos'

President Biden delivered unscheduled remarks on Thursday morning from the White House in his first public condemnation of the escalating protests sweeping college campuses across the country.

Biden inserted himself at a pivotal moment in the anti-war, pro-Palestinian movement that's now seen several nights of violent clashes between students and heavily armed law enforcement called in by university administrators to dismantle Gaza solidarity tent encampments.

On Wednesday, for the second night in a row, riot police in tactical gear stormed the encampment on UCLA's campus, where local reports estimated 300-500 people were gathered. More than 2,000 supporters were standing outside of the encampment when California Highway Patrol moved in to start arresting protestors who refused to disperse.

Photos captured the standoff between police with shields and batons across from students wearing hard hats and Keffiyehs.

Reporters pressed the White House to hear from Biden all week as this scene played out not only in California but in Texas, Georgia, and New York.

The White House has carefully choreographed its response to balance calling for the rule of law with supporting First Amendment rights. Balancing free speech with rule of law

"We've all seen the images, and they put to the test two fundamental American principles," Biden said on Thursday. "The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld."

The US is not an "authoritarian nation," and peaceful protest is the best tradition for Americans to respond to consequential issues.

"But neither are we a lawless country. We're a civil society, and order must prevail," Biden said. "Throughout our history, we've often faced moments like this because we are a big, diverse, free-thinking, and freedom-loving nation."

Biden said this is a moment for clarity - not politics.

"So let me be clear: Violent protest is not protected. Peaceful protest is," Biden said.

He added vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, instilling fear in people, and shutting down campuses are against the law and not peaceful protest.

"Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the right of others so students can finish the semester and their college education," Biden said.

People have the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos, Biden said, adding that people have the right to get an education and walk across campus safely without fear of being attacked.

"Let's be clear about this as well: there should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism, or threats of violence against Jewish students," Biden said.

Biden said there is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it's antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

"It's simply wrong," Biden said. "There's no place for racism in America. It's all wrong. It's un-American."

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05/01 Links Pt2: Addition by Subtraction at the State Department; Answering Tom Friedman's binary options for the Middle East; Enlightenment and Conspiracy

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Addition by Subtraction at the State Department

Although defections and resignations can come in waves, the extent of opposition to President Biden’s policy of favoring Israel over Hamas has yet to kindle much of an exodus from his administration. Mostly we’re subject to a lot of whining from people who continue to accept a paycheck from the man they claim is genociding Palestinians.

That tells you something about how many of the complainers actually believe the rhetoric they’re parroting. It also provides a clue as to the cynical motivations of the few who actually resign.

Josh Paul was the first to do so, back in December, to great media fanfare. Paul, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee, was in charge of arms transfers. He could abide those weapons going to many governments around the world, but not Israel’s.

At the time, I detailed the distortions in Paul’s explanation for his resignation. These in part had to do with Paul’s refusal to read past the headline of a news story about a sudden lack of donkeys in Gaza. I had hoped that he would devote his newfound free time to reading the rest of the article on the donkeys, but it appears he had other plans. He has resurfaced at DAWN, a nongovernmental organization called Democracy for the Arab World Now. The director of DAWN is none other than Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Human Rights Watch official who was found to have been raising money from Arab governments by complaining about the need to battle pro-Israel (read: Jewish) money in U.S. politics.

Funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others, DAWN is a fierce advocate of boycotting Israel and of pressuring Israel’s fellow democracies to enforce an arms embargo against the Jewish state. It also opposed the Abraham Accords—that is, it is opposed to peace in the Middle East. Josh Paul will fit right in.

Then in March, there was Annelle Sheline, who worked for the State Department for a year before leaving. The State Department has a Dissent Channel through which employees can raise concerns about policy with protection from professional retribution, and Sheline utilized the channel. But she gave up after a year because her bosses wouldn’t change their policies to fit her ideological worldview.

In Sheline’s (very limited) defense, she was used to working for a employers who were more receptive to her anti-Israel activism. Sheline came to the State Department from the Quincy Institute, whose executive vice president is Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council. NIAC is a major pro-Iran pressure group with influence in Democratic Party policymaking circles. Also at Quincy are such international-relations luminaries as John Mearsheimer, mostly infamous for his campaign against American Jews’ participation in the democratic process. This includes the book he co-authored with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy—a shoddy work of agitprop aimed at raising suspicions against Jewish political activists. Mearsheimer is also a proponent of the “good Jew/bad Jew” worldview, wherein non-Jews decide which Jews can be trusted and which cannot. Judging by Sheline’s hero worship of Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force service member who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., she must have been quite comfortable at Quincy as well.

Answering Tom Friedman's binary options for the Middle East

Two years ago, I published an analysis of a news article by The New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem for bias, and he promptly complained to my editor. Today, I will tackle the Times’s opinion writer, Thomas Friedman, and his recent column, “Israel has a choice to make: Rafah or Riyadh,” for factual context and even-handedness.

In his latest column, he said the Biden team demands Israel make a choice: go into Rafah, where the last organized brigades of Hamas are, or choose the benefits of normalization with Saudi Arabia.

Friedman paints a binary picture: Israel accepts what the Biden administration wants – no Rafah operation – while creating a path for Palestinian statehood; otherwise, Israel becomes an international pariah with the acquiescence of America, with the US restricting arms shipments as punishment for its choice.

Friedman puts the onus on Israel to abandon its campaign to rid the area of the implacable Hamas army, not mentioning that the Biden administration asks, on the other hand, very little of the Palestinians.

The ultimatum is for Israel to create a “political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians.” It sounds reasonable to the uninformed, but Friedman doesn’t mention that Israel has offered a state five times over the last 75 years.

In 2008, the Israelis offered 100% of the West Bank and Gaza with land swaps and Jerusalem as their capital, supposedly everything the American negotiators believed the Palestinians wanted. Unfortunately, the current Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas never responded.

Those who push for a two-state solution at this time seem oblivious and insensitive to the fact that this would represent to everyone the greatest reward possible for the Hamas massacre, especially with hostages still in captivity and their sexual abuse being exposed. Calling for a reformed Palestinian Authority sounds nice but the fact is that free elections would almost certainly bring Hamas to power.

Friedman says Israel’s strategy is “revenge.” Israel’s strategy is to end the presence of terror organizations on its borders that strive tirelessly for the genocide of the Jewish people, with the backing of Iran.

There are no explicit agendas provided of what PA reform means, an essential point if you want them to take over the West Bank and Gaza. Should Israel be forced to begin a path to statehood without America demanding first that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year paid by the PA to convicted terrorists and their families end?

The PA has also said they would pay Hamas terrorists, excuse me, martyrs. There is an American law, the Taylor Force Act, which demands the withholding of US aid to the PA until they end these payments. Mr. Friedman, are you OK beginning your path to Palestinian independence with this hideous practice left in place?

Enlightenment and Conspiracy

As many of the Yale students I spoke with pointed out, Israelism is so one-sided and so certain of its own virtue and rightness that critique seems almost beside the point. Palestinian activists (Sami Awad, in particular) come across as deeply humane, and their characterizations of Israelis and the conflict are never challenged. An immigrant Jew, for instance, is described by Awad as a foreigner who “just moved here to join the army and play cowboys and Indians.” And the only Jewish settler who appears in the film is callous and unlikeable.

So certain are the filmmakers that the entire history of the conflict can be summed up as one in which the Israelis are simply and only the oppressors that we are informed, “In 1967, the State of Israel managed to complete its control of Palestine by taking over the territory of the West Bank and Gaza.” No mention is made of Egypt, Syria, or Jordan, or the circumstances of the Six-Day War. Similarly, the Second Intifada goes unnamed in the film except as “a battle for Jerusalem.”

In short, what is important to note about Israelism is not its historical distortions or polemical tricks but the myth it constructs of Eitan’s and Simone’s—but especially Simone’s—journey to enlightenment. What did Simone see that the American Jewish establishment—personified in the film as an elderly Foxman rambling on in his elegant glass office high above Manhattan—didn’t want her to see, and how did it change her?

Whether the film is conscious of it or not, the archetype here is Paul, who had been the Pharisee Saul until he had a vision on the road to Damascus, not too far from the one Simone had on the streets of Bethlehem. Paul’s vision transformed him from a self-described persecutor of Christians to Christianity’s first great evangelist. He went from being fierce, ignorant, and sad to happy, articulate, and liberated, as, the film shows us, has Zimmerman. Like Paul, Simone’s conversion moved her from a self-interested cloud of particularism to a vision of spiritual universalism—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” Paul tells the Galatians.

The appeal of Paul is understandable, especially for those of us who grew up in America. The Pauline tradition brings some of the best of Jewish universalism and offers a shortcut to the theological endgame, skipping over particularism and otherness. It is easier for diaspora liberal Jews today to imagine that the Jewish people can finally achieve our place in the world, and retain our moral character, by subordinating our nationalism rather than trying to compete for a place in a world of nations, and the occupation proves the point.

The Pauline trope helps explain two key dimensions of the film. Its insistence that young American Jews are lied to makes sense once one understands that the Jewish community has placed scales upon their eyes. And once the scales fall away and the truth is revealed—once one sees the horrifying truth that has been hidden—one must become an evangelist and bear the tragic burden of preaching the gospel, even at the cost of alienation from the community one seeks to transform.

To be clear, I am not suggesting, as some advocates of Israel unfortunately have, that Zimmerman and her allies are no longer Jews (or are now “Un-Jews”). Zimmerman and her allies believe that their critique of our community comes from their Jewishness—and they make no claims to be leaving. In fact, by the end of the film, the gauzy sequences of protests by IfNotNow (which Zimmerman cofounded) and others portray a different vision of Jewish particularism: the dissidents proudly wear tallitot and kippot; they sing Jewish songs. But identifying the Pauline trope that underlies the film helps us understand the story that its protagonists and creators want to tell about their journey from ignorance to enlightenment, from obscurantism to moral grandeur. This is not really a political story—one learns almost nothing about the history and politics of the conflict from this film—it is a story of personal spiritual transformation. Movie poster from the film Israelism. (Courtesy of Tikkun Olam.)

For the enlightened, everything that runs counter to their new narrative must be a lie. This naturally gives rise to conspiracy theories. How else can one explain how the plain truth has been hidden, except through the perfidy of deception? This assumption helps explain the surprising plot turn of the second half of Israelism. The film argues explicitly that the rise of Donald Trump, and therefore the emboldening of the white supremacist antisemitism, is the fault of the pro-Israel community in America. The rationale for this claim is offered by Simone at the film’s midpoint, when she concludes that the Jewish community believes that “the only way we Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe.” Ultimately, the film argues, this belief has led the Jewish establishment to trade our safety in America for the safety of Jews in Israel, because President Trump could be counted on to support the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians.

This argument blames the Jews for their own victimization and begins to make the film, in the words of a friend, “epistemically antisemitic.” Plenty of Jews blame other Jews today for the rise of antisemitism, so the argument here is not novel. The only irony here is that polarization in America has driven the rise of the antisemitism in America on both the right and the left, and the film is only too eager to help that trend along.

As a liberal Zionist, I aspire to be what Michael Walzer has famously called a “connected critic,” and I struggled watching Israelism and its translation of complexity into conspiracy. Entirely missing from the film was the majority of Jewish leaders and educators in America who know and teach about Palestinians and occupation, neither lying to their students nor concluding that Israel’s challenges require them to abandon their loyalties. Where, in Israelism’s world, are the majority of American Jews—and the majority of Israelis—who know the present is untenable but fear the alternatives? Or the parallel majority on the Palestinian side, who know that the path toward mutual safety and security lies in recognizing our inextricability? And what happens to us in this desperate attempt to generate mass appeal for the most populist and partisan version of our impossible story?

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05/01 Links Pt1: The breathtaking denial of anti-Semitism at Columbia; They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats; Astroturfing Exposed: The Coordinated Anti-Israel Protests and the Power Behind Them

From Ian:

The breathtaking denial of anti-Semitism at Columbia

Like all good social-justice warriors of a certain age, Reich harkens back to the romantic 1960s, recalling the campus protests against segregationist governors George Wallace and Ross Barnett, and against the Vietnam War. Reich writes: ‘If Columbia or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations accepted; argument invited; differences examined.’ Ah, those halcyon days of campus kumbaya.

Maybe Reich hasn’t noticed, but today’s protesters have no desire to debate or examine differences. This is not about two-state solutions or how to arrive there. Read the placards or listen to the chants and you will see that this is all about a world without Israel and eradicating the Jews. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out recently on spiked: ‘Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made clear… “We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!” That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist.’ I challenge Reich – or indeed anyone – to find one poster in all those photographs of the Columbia protests calling for peace, negotiations or an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist. Just one.

Much of what Reich writes is fantastical. ‘The atrocities committed by both sides’, he writes, ‘illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity and show the vile consequences of hate. For these reasons, it presents an opportunity for students to re-examine their preconceptions and learn from one another.’ Yes, perhaps a morning teach-in on the campus green, where everyone can share their thoughts on anti-Semitism. After lunch, calls for the extermination of the Jews.

To be fair to Reich, he is merely a conspicuous representative of America’s elite academic class. There are plenty out there who are as clueless as he is. Some are active participants in the hate. Others are fellow travellers in the Palestine cause who do nothing to speak against the anti-Semitism in their movement. For decades, they have been marinating in the social-justice language of the left: whiteness, colonialism, systemic racism and so on. And now, they are so thoroughly immersed in so-called progressive ideology that they are oblivious to their surroundings. Like the honchos at National Public Radio, who deny their woke bias even when their employees point out obvious examples, these leftists and liberals have become disconnected from the reality around them.

Protesters at Columbia have been chanting: ‘Remember 7 October? That will happen not one more time, not five more times… but 10,000 more times.’ Yet still Reich claims that this does not express anti-Semitism. You couldn’t find a better illustration of George Orwell’s observation on the ignorance of intellectuals: ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.’

They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.

We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.

Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?

But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.

So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.

At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.

Prominent rabbi asks anti-Israel activists to stop singing his song at protests

A New York rabbi is reiterating his call for his music not to be sung by anti-Israel demonstrators, after students at Yale University used his song during protests there.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor said he was “distraught” to learn that “Olam Chesed Yibaneh,” a song he wrote after 9/11 that has become a mainstay of progressive Jewish activists, was sung at the conclusion of a seder held by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace on Yale’s campus. Yale is one of dozens of schools where anti-Israel protest encampments have sprung up in recent weeks.

“Let me be clear: I vehemently object to the song being used in any context that is against Israel or the Jewish people,” Creditor said in a statement. “Those who are using the song in these protests are misappropriating its message of love and support for Israel. I cannot accept its use by the protesters, whose beliefs could not be further from my own.”

Creditor, the rabbi in residence at UJA-Federation of New York, first called for his song not to be sung at pro-Palestinian protests in November, a month after the start of Israel’s war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza, which began after thousands of invading terrorists slaughtered some 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, and seized 253 hostages, most of them civilians.

At the time, a member of the anti-Zionist group IfNotNow said the group would stop including “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” and a song written by another Jewish musician who objected to its use in national actions calling for a ceasefire, though a national spokesperson declined to answer questions about the songs’ use.

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04/30 Links: Why Are Women in America Cheering for Hamas and Iran?; VDH: Iran just pulled its own nuclear teeth; The Al Dahdouh clan – kings of the two industries in Gaza

From Ian:

Walter Russell Mead: Hamas' Passionate Campus Supporters' Incoherent and Unrealistic View of the World

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is barnstorming the Middle East to develop plans for a ceasefire and for postwar reconstruction in Gaza. American national interests demand that the U.S. resist Iran's drive to disrupt what is left of the post-Cold War order in the Middle East. Failure to stabilize the region could lead in the short term to inflationary gasoline price spikes, and in the longer term could seriously weaken Washington's position in the contest with the revisionist powers seeking to overturn the American order worldwide.

Many of Hamas' most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population - white settlers who should go home to Poland. They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who "gets serious" with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants.

They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of "progressive" movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. But the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn't craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.

Victor Davis Hanson: Iran just pulled its own nuclear teeth

Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.

It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.

The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines.

Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.

Iran must now fear that if it launched two or three nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.

Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder.

It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear.

It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies.

It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.

Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.

And the long-suffering Iranian people?

The truth will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.

This Is No Genocide

As I write, students in universities across the U.S. are occupying their campuses in protest at what they consider to be Israel’s genocide against the Gazan people. Unlike the Met Police who freeze at the prospect of arresting pro-Palestine demonstrators guilty of breaching the peace, the American police have no such hang ups and are arresting protestors in large numbers for their illegal encampments. So far, around 120 students have been arrested at Columbia University alone.

What makes these illegal occupations particularly contemptible is the antisemitism of some of those taking part. Jewish students and university staff have been harassed with taunts of “Go back to Poland” and “October 7th is about to be every day for you”.

These barbs are not only revolting, they also display the monumental moral stupidity of those conducting this harassment. How can a person demonstrate against what they think is a genocide in Gaza whilst calling for the genocide of Jews? But what did we expect – irrationality is integral to extremism.

But there is also the empirical question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza actually are a genocide. It is time to listen to an expert rather than students who mentally and emotionally are still in nappies. Enter John Spencer, the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point and a former infantry soldier of 25 years’ service.

In an article for Newsweek, Spencer, who studies and advises the American military on the kind of warfare in which Israel is currently engaged, namely urban warfare, argues that no other nation in history has shown as much concern to protect civilians as the Israeli Defence Force has done in Gaza. If the IDF were carrying out a genocide, civilians would be targeted too, but they are not. Yet still the international community does not acknowledge Israel’s concern for non-combatants and continues to scold it for failing to protect them. So exemplary has the IDF been in minimising civilian casualties, it is Spencer’s opinion that the U.S. ought to learn the IDF’s methods.

What is more remarkable according to Spencer is that Israel’s concern for Gazan civilians defies military orthodoxy regarding offensives. According to the theory and praxis of manoeuvre warfare, the attacker must smash an enemy morally and physically with surprise, overwhelming force and speed, and destroy political and military centres. Warning civilians to evacuate is forbidden as enemy forces would learn of the coming attack.

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04/28 Links: Natan Sharansky: The Fight for Freedom, from Exodus to Gaza; The Ignoramuses of Hamasville; Progressive Racism; The perils of a bad deal

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: The Fight for Freedom, from Exodus to Gaza

On the first night of Passover, Jewish families around the world read the Haggadah, which tells the story of our people's Exodus from Egypt and the beginning of our history as a free people. The conclusion that emerges is that we will always have to fight for our freedom each day and in each generation.

When I attended my first seder in Moscow 50 years ago, everyone gathered was a product of the Soviet regime. We all began as assimilated Jews, disconnected from and ignorant of our heritage. Yet soon we began to study Hebrew and Jewish traditions in secret. Many of us had KGB "tails," agents assigned to monitor and report our activities to the authorities. We didn't know that the end of our story would be as spectacular as the Exodus itself and helped bring down the Iron Curtain, allowing millions of Jews to return home to Israel.

This year when we gathered to read about those who aspired to kill us, we thought about Hamas. We recalled the hostages, who have spent more than six months in captivity, enduring horrors that civilized minds refuse to imagine. We recalled American universities, where professors and students have celebrated the terrorists' Oct. 7 massacre.

Yet reviewing our millennia-long journey strengthened our determination and optimism. If we stand strong in defending our rights as free people in our land, our persecutors will be carried away by the floods of history, as Pharaoh's army and the Soviet empire were before it.

Seth Mandel: The Ignoramuses of Hamasville

My point here is not that these kids don’t know anything—although that’s true. My point is that teenagers following the crowd for a chance to touch the hem of an upperclassman’s garment ought not to make policy. The vapidity of this trend was well expressed by a young actress explaining why she’ll continue to advocate “for Palestine” despite people warning her that the you-know-whos in Hollywood won’t like it: “I went campaigning door-to-door for marriage equality in Ireland, I went on marches for abortion rights. I’ve always cared about causes and social justice… To me it always becomes about supporting all innocent people, which sounds oversimplified, but I think you’ve got to look at situations and just think, ‘Are we supporting innocent people no matter where they’re from, who they are?’ That’s my drive.”

Lincolnesque, truly. But she actually nails an important part of this: Hating-on-Israel is today’s campaigning-for-abortion-access-in-Ireland. Who knows what tomorrow’s cause will be for our heroes?

Do you know what tomorrow’s cause will be for Israelis? Same as it was today: defending their existence and trying to get their hostages back. And I’m pretty sure it’ll be the day after tomorrow’s cause too.

Similarly, for the protest leaders who shout about wanting to kill Zionists, their goals don’t change day to day. Nor do the goals of the Nazi-like murderers in whose honor these protests are organized. But the numbers of these protests, which are supposed to show some measure of righteousness, are ballooned by two categories: people who want to kill Jews and people who treat political causes like a car radio, flipping from station to station in search of the popular songs of the day. (I realize many of them may not know what a radio is.)

Israel doesn’t get to wake up with a hangover, sleep till two in the afternoon and find a different party the next night. This is real life. If Hamas isn’t defeated, Israelis will continue living next to the skeletal framework of an underground tunnel system that exists to hold future Israelis hostage. And above that tunnel system will be the people who intend to take those hostages.

We should stop excusing the people who plead ignorance as they follow murder-minded grad students. And under no circumstances should policy be made with them in mind, or because enough of them are standing elbow-to-elbow a hundred yards from their dorm. The people who live in the real world can’t afford it.

Progressive Racism

The vast majority of contemporary Westerners protesting against Israel today are selective racists. "Racist" in that skin color does count for them (big time!). "Selective" because they ignore the number of victims.

Sudan is undergoing a humanitarian crisis of monumental proportions, starting a year ago. Airstrikes have hit civilian centers on an ongoing basis. In many regions, hospitals and health services hardly function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including massacres that are clear war crimes. The UN reports that 3,000,000 Sudanese children are malnourished. World Food Program trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, and looted. Yet not a peep is heard from Westerners.

In Myanmar, an estimated 50,000 have been killed since the military coup in 2021, and over two million displaced. Most of this is due to the military junta's blanket use of air strikes and shelling of mostly civilian targets. Here, too, one would be hard pressed to find any protests.

Since 2000, the Ethiopian conflict has led to 350,000 civilian fatalities. According to the UN, close to 30,000,000 people now require emergency food aid. Have you seen any protests at Harvard or Columbia regarding such mind-boggling suffering?

When one realizes the disparity between the number of Gazan fatalities (a bit over 30,000 if the Hamas-based numbers can be believed - not to mention that at least 10,000 of these are terrorists) and the humongous numbers around the globe, it becomes clear that selective racism is certainly a factor in singling out Israel when the devastation and humanitarian crises are far worse elsewhere. Israelis are racist? The protesters should look in the mirror. Their avoidance of the greatest political-human tragedies in the world today constitutes the real racism.

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04/27 Links: Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time; Hamas publishes video of hostages Omri Miran and Keith Siegel; BBC has turned into modern day Joseph Goebbels

From Ian:

Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem… (Psalm 137)

It is the great moral disorder of our time.

Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.

To find just one period, just one time, just one place where and when they did not have to start up in the middle of the night when unfamiliar sounds disturbed, did not have to hear demagogues howling at them from street corners, or put up with the trendy, ignorant western pseudo-radicals shouting in bullhorns from library steps. To not see their shops and homes targets of mobs and slanders, their synagogues battered.

A time when they might gather on a bit of land where dogs were not set upon them; where children did not mock them; where passerby thugs did not attack their elders in the street; where Jews unique in their sorrow and pain could meet with some of their tormented doubles, if for nothing else but to share laments and profound griefs, generate solace by shared company and memory.

Ah, Jews. Ah, Israel.

Poor Jews. It was not enough that Europe built a hecatomb of your kind because a madman and his mad country hated you. When you were nearly ripped out of history altogether, your spectacular survival over centuries and millennia genuinely threatened, averted as much by the chances of a war in which one side ignored you while the other industrialized your killing.

A guilty world — no, only a part of what should be a guilty world — offered you a spit of land: dust, bush, waterless (the former B.C. cabinet minister was correct in her description). I believe it’s called a desert.

It was “presented” as the homeland for Jews in 1947. For (wrung with accents of burning pity whenever the word was said in this context) the “survivors.”

This was when “survivors” meant people — men, women, children, infants — who had been rounded up, packed into railway cars, families ripped asunder, thrown into hideous camps with sadistic guards and vicious dogs, worked to death, starved, and for days, weeks or (some few) for years, spat upon, beaten, treated like less than dogs — hollowed out from torture, starvation and hopelessness.

To still be breathing after that! That’s a survivor.

(One of the heresies of our careless times is how we have let moralizing idiots, fat and comfortable woke types, haul out this word — “survivor” — to describe their own ignorant obsessions, their hypertrophic sense of privilege, to claim our attention.)

Arsen Ostrovsky and Amjad Taha: It's Time to Act Against Antisemitic Behavior on Campus

When universities continue to permit anti-Jewish hatred under the guise of anti-Zionism; indulge hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and cannot even answer whether calling for genocide against Jews is against university policy, what did they think was going to happen?

In a statement ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, President Joe Biden said "this blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."

Condemnations of the protests and expressions of solidarity with Jewish students are certainly welcome, and in fact necessary, but in the absence of urgent action, they are hollow and meaningless.

The following, therefore, is a 10-point action plan to restore order and protect Jewish students:
1. These ugly scenes must be labeled not as peaceful protests, but as pro-Hamas demonstrations by antisemites.
2. Universities need to call in the police to remove these rioters and anarchists from their encampments on campuses. If the police won't, then the National Guard should be called in.
3. Leaders must speak to Jewish students who are scared to enter campus, listen to them, and provide all the support they need.
4. Students found in breach of school policy must be punished, including with expulsion, and banning of their registered student organizations, while foreign students found in violation should have their visas revoked and be deported.
5. Lecturers, professors, and staff found taking part should also be disciplined.
6. Do not cancel in-person classes. That would be cowering before the bullies and haters, putting students who want to learn at a disadvantage. If universities and teachers take appropriate disciplinary measures and security precautions, there should be no need to resort to virtual classes.
7. Follow the money to find out who is funding these protests and protesters. Qatar, for example, has poured billions of dollars into Ivy League universities, buying up schools, chairs, and fellowships.
8. Initiate an avalanche of lawsuits and Title VI claims. Jewish students are not powerless and universities that receive federal funding are prohibited under the Civil Rights Act from discriminating against students on the basis of race or national identity, or allowing a hostile environment to form.
9. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, the most widely endorsed definition of Jew-hatred in all its manifestations, must be adopted and applied by every university. The IHRA definition has already been adopted by more than 40 countries, thousands of civil society organizations and has received bi-partisan support in the United States.
10. And lastly, Congress must immediately pass legislation rescinding federal funding from any university that does not take satisfactory action against this tidal wave of antisemitism or fails to protect Jewish students from discrimination or harassment.


We are at an inflection point where universities must decide whether they want to remain respected places of higher learning for all or become no-go zones for Jewish students. The decision is theirs.

Andrew Neil: Anti-Semitic campus know-nothings aren't pro-Palestine... they're pro-WAR! And, in their stupidity, they're making the strongest case yet for Israel's survival

Nobody is wondering that now as, even in America, radical Muslim leaders call for the destruction of Israel, backed by students at the nation's most elite universities and therefore those possibly (and frighteningly) running the country in the years to come.

America's Muslim population can only grow while Jews will become an ever smaller percentage of the total population.

Violent Islamism has a strong footing in many Western democracies these days and its influence is likely to grow stronger. Suddenly that Jewish homeland looks more necessary than ever.

This sorry tale still has some way to run. The pro-Hamas protestors have strong allies on the Left of the Democratic Party. They will be out in force come the Democratic convention in Chicago this August.

Chicago, of course, was the scene of the most violent Democratic convention ever in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when Mayor Daley's somewhat robust police force clashed with radical demonstrators trying to disrupt the convention.

I don't say we're in for a repeat as bad as that but it will not be pretty on the streets of the Windy City this summer.

The President, for today's protestors, is 'Genocide Joe'. They will be out to pressure the Democrats into ending their support for Israel the way they wanted the party to end its support for the Vietnam War all these years ago.

Vietnam involved the conscription of hundreds of thousands of young American men to fight a massive war on the other side of the world, which eventually cost over 55,000 American lives. That gave the protests a special edge and relevance. Israel involves none of that, which is why it does not have the same piquancy for most folks.

But pro-Palestinian sentiments are the coming force in the Democratic Party, with all the attendant anti-Semitism we are currently witnessing.

There can be no compromise with such forces, whatever the superficial attractions of winning the youth vote by pandering to know-nothing students. We shall see if Biden is up to the challenge and stands firm in his resolve to support Israel.

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04/26 Links Pt2: International Criminal Court’s vicious smear tactics against America’s allies; Hamas Propaganda Gets a Pass from ‘Disinformation’ Watchdogs

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.

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