Friday, March 01, 2024
From Ian:
Douglas Murray: Shocking double standard of support for Ukraine and Israel
Douglas Murray: Shocking double standard of support for Ukraine and Israel
“The Ukrainians must stop fighting in case they defeat Putin.”Seth Mandel: How to Solve a University’s Anti-Semitism Problem
Have you heard any of our leaders say that in the last two years?
As Ukraine enters its third year of war it is striking how committed political leaders of all parties are to that war.
And not just here but across the West.
At home — Democrat or Republican — almost everybody is committed to arming Ukraine until victory.
They don’t want Ukraine to fight to a stalemate.
They don’t want it to stop just before winning.
They want it to beat Putin back.
So how strange it is that another war, involving a far closer ally, gets such different treatment.
The historian Niall Ferguson noted the curious double-standard this week after a visit to Israel.
In Washington, London and every other Western capital, political leaders are not saying that they will stick with Israel until it defeats Hamas.
They are not saying “Victory at any price and at any cost.”
Instead they are insisting that Israel stop its war against Hamas as soon as possible.
This week President Biden suggested that there might be a peace deal by Monday.
And he seemed positively happy about the fact.
Despite the deal being an disastrously anti-Israel and Hamas having already rejected it.
But why do people like Biden want peace in Gaza?
Why should anybody want Hamas to crawl out of this war, dust itself off and be able to carry out the same terror against Palestinians and Israelis that it has carried out for years?
A seminar on diversity? Bizarrely, and accidentally, Mogulof is getting warmer. Rep. Adam Schiff, leading Democratic candidate for the California Senate seat vacated by the late Dianne Feinstein, said, “What happened at Berkeley is just the latest, horrifying example” of anti-Semitism on campus. “It’s unacceptable in any setting, especially in a California university that prides itself on inclusion. And yet, this kind of intimidation — and inaction from administrators — is an all-too-common reality for so many Jewish students today.”NYPost Editorial: Redefining ‘jihad’ is part of the left’s insidious attempt to twist reality
If you combine Schiff’s and Mogulof’s explanations, you have the makings of a solution. Schiff says it’s unacceptable at a school that “prides itself on inclusion.” Mogulof says he doesn’t know how to include Jews in the university’s diversity system.
Well, I do. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are theoretically designed to provide the targeted support that members of “underserved communities” need. In reality, DEI is an anti-Semitism-creating machine of unmatched efficiency.
What Jews on campus need, specifically, is security—just to make sure their events and prayer services and the like can be held without incident. DEI programs increase the security risk to Jewish students. The DEI budget at the University of California, Berkeley is $36 million.
Problem solved. Just redirect some of the $36 million the university spends on DEI toward protecting Jewish students and staff and events. That would satisfy Mogulof’s desire to develop DEI “policies that would be unique to the Jewish community that would be necessary or effective.” And it would make Adam Schiff feel so much better about the pride his state takes in inclusion.
Of course all this raises an obvious alternative: If spending DEI money puts Jews in danger, which then will be mitigated by spending more DEI money, wouldn’t it make more sense to not spend all that money in the first place?
If you had “jihadism gets a PR makeover” on your 2024 bingo card, feel free to mark it off.
Teachers who attended an “anti-Muslim bias” webinar offered by the New York City Department of Education on Feb. 20 were told the meaning of jihad was “struggle” and that it could apply to a person’s effort at self-improvement, showing a video that suggested that a “jihad” could mean always giving your “best effort,” building “friendships across the aisle” or working “to get fit.”
The video also tried to whitewash “sharia” as “personal religious or moral guidance.”
Of course, no one but ultra-lefties view “jihad” this way: Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word is “a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty.” The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists aren’t interested in, say, shedding pounds from their own bodies but blood from nonbelievers.
When former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal called for a “global day of jihad,” on Oct. 23 following the Hamas attack on Israel, he wasn’t suggesting that Muslims worldwide slow down on the carbs and fats or look to make more friends.
“When the world, America, the West, and the Zionists see . . . that convoys of mujahideen are on their way to shed their pure blood on the land of Palestine, the battlefield will change, the balance of power will change,” he made clear.
In 1998, when Osama bin Laden signed a letter calling for “jihad” against “Jews and crusaders,” his meaning was clearly stated: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
