politico | Elise Stefanik’s viral line of
questioning of an elite trio of university presidents last week over how
to respond to calls for the genocide of Jews didn’t just spark
bipartisan outrage and lead to a high-profile resignation. It settled a
personal score the congresswoman had with her alma mater, which had all
but disowned her in the wake of Jan. 6.
Back then, in 2021, the dean of
Harvard University’s school of government said the New York
congresswoman’s comments about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential
election had “no basis in evidence,” and the Harvard Institute of
Politics removed Stefanik from its senior advisory committee. Stefanik
at the time criticized what she described as “the ivory tower’s march
toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views.”
Mitch
Daniels, the retired former president of Purdue University and a former
Republican governor of Indiana, called it “higher ed’s Bud Light moment”
— referring to the beermaker’s divisive ad campaign featuring a
transgender influencer — “when people who hang out with only people who
adhere to what has become prevailing and dominant ideologies on campuses
and suddenly discover there’s a world of people out there who
disagrees.”
Republicans,
of course, have been the loudest voices defending Stefanik. Daniels,
who has also testified before hostile lawmakers on behalf of his
university, mocked that the administrators Stefanik questioned retained
the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale to prepare.
dailycaller |“[DEI] is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. It divides students
along racial and religious lines and creates a zero-sum game. If you’re
in favor of one group you’re [against] another group,” Dershowitz told
Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. “It is a real problem. It is
anti-intellectual, it is dishonest in many ways. Look, it uses the word
diversity, but only means racial diversity. Less than 3% of the faculty
at Harvard identify as conservative. They say equity, which suggests
equality, but equity is the exact opposite of equality. Indeed under
equity, if you dare to quote Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where
children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by content of
their character, you have committed a microaggression. Inclusion, Larry
Summers made it clear that inclusion has excluded Jews over the years.”
“So, it’s a fraudulent concept, a dangerous concept, but 700 of my
colleagues at Harvard, professors have come out pandering to President
Gay and calling for her to remain on,” Dershowitz continued. “They don’t
want people like you and me, who are now outsiders to have any
influence on Harvard but they refuse to answer the legitimate points
made by people like Bill Ackerman, they just dismiss him out of hand
because he’s a rich alumni.”
Gay issued a clarification in a statement posted on X Wednesday, a day after she was grilled by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York about antisemitic actions on the university’s campus.
“Schools
are, colleges and universities are not only the current faculty, not
only the current students but they are alumni and they are the future
students, they are great institutions and DEI is destroying these
institutions and President Gay is a product of DEI,” Dershowitz said.
“She championed it. That’s how she became president. She is the symbol
of DEI and the symbol has failed and she must also recognize her own
failure and her role in that failure.”
modernity |Al Gore says that people having access to information outside
of mainstream media sources is a threat to “democracy” and that social
media algorithms “ought to be banned.”
Yes, really.
Gore made the comments during an appearance at the Cop28 climate change hysteria conference in Dubai.
Gore whined that social media had “disrupted the balances that used
to exist that made representative democracy work much better.”
The former Vice President said that functioning democracy relied on a
“shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together
collectively” but that “social media that is dominated by algorithms”
upsets this balance.
According to Gore, people are being pulled down “rabbit holes” by
algorithms that are “the digital equivalent of AR-15s – they ought to be
banned, they really ought to be banned!”
Gore claimed, “It’s an abuse of the public forum” and that people were being sucked into echo chambers.
“If you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what’s weaponized is
another form of AI, not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity!
I’m serious!” he added.
Apparently, the only echo chamber that should be allowed to exist is
Gore’s own rabbit hole, wherein the earth is constantly on the brink of
destruction thanks to people not obeying his technocratic mandates.
Perhaps Gore is unhappy at his own misinformation being fact checked
by individuals who have access to information not produced by corporate
media sources that are friendly to him.
Gore infamously predicted that the north polar ice cap would be “ice free” within 5 to 7 years.
popehat |Stefanik’s purpose was transparent. No matter how the college
presidents answered, she won. If they answered accurately — that the
question depended on the context - she could shriek neeeeeerrrrrrdddd like
a football player bullying a kid with glasses, and credulous people
would eat it up. If the presidents answered inaccurately but simply
“yes,” she could make her next point: then why aren’t you punishing
people who advocate intifada? Why aren’t you expelling students for
saying “from the river to the sea”? Why aren’t you punishing people for
accusing Israel of genocide? That was her express, explicit purpose:
Congresswoman Stefanik:
Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate
MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or
no?
President Kornbluth:If targeted at individuals not making public statements.
Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment?
President Kornbluth:I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.
Congresswoman Stefanik:But you've heard chants for Intifada.
There’s
the rhetorical trick. Calling for Intifada is not the same as calling
for the genocide of the Jews, and it’s just dishonest to say it is. Not
all Jews are Israeli. Arguing that a particular group has a moral
right to violent revolution against the power over it is not a call for
the genocide of a group. The argument about when violent revolution is
morally justified is ancient.
Whether or not you agree that Israel is tyrannical or the Palestinians
are unjustifiably oppressed, you can’t outlaw arguments that they are
and pretend you’re anything but an absolute censor. The hearing was
full of gripes like that — contentions that the slogan “from the river
to the sea” should be outlawed and complaints that colleges had invited
speakers with radical pro-Palestinian views. The crystal clear message
was we think protecting Jews from antisemitism requires suppressing a broad range of speech from Them.
You
might say I am being more than usually uncharitable in this post.
That’s because I think people falling for Stefanik’s gambit have been
more than usually gullible. They’ve become useful idiots for evil.
They’ve become the dupes of people who will wave the banner of “fight
antisemitism” while pushing Great Replacement Theory. They’ve become
the patsies of people who transparently want to use Jews as an
instrument and excuse to suppress speech they don’t like. They’ve
become the creatures of cynical, dishonest politicians who want to treat
hard things like they are simple to rile up mobs.
dailycaller | Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York warned colleges and
universities in a letter on Saturday that she would order legal action
against them if they fail to address antisemitism on campus.
Three
university presidents appeared before Congress on Dec. 5 to testify
about antisemitism on their campuses, after which they were heavily criticized for failing to say whether “calling for genocide against Jews” violated their institutions’ codes of conduct. Hochul wrote
to all colleges and universities in New York that a failure to address
antisemitism would result in legal action from the state under New York
State Human Rights Law and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of
1964.
“I assure you that if any school in
New York State is found to be in violation, I will activate the State’s
Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will
refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” Hochul wrote in the letter, which was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
UPenn’s president and chairman of the board of trustees resigned on Saturday, while Harvard’s president issued a public apology amid calls for her removal.
“The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to
questions posed during this week’s congressional testimony hearing
cannot and will not be tolerated here in the State of New York,” Hochul
wrote.
Hochul has previously dealt with fallout from an antisemitic controversy at a university in her own state. Police arrested Cornell University undergraduate student Patrick Dai on Oct. 31 for allegedly making violent threats to commit a mass shooting against Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living.
“Gov.
Hochul cannot command colleges and universities to violate the First
Amendment. Nor may she enforce state law to compel action against speech
protected by the First Amendment,” the Foundation for Individual Rights
and Expression told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Broad, vague
bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”
newrepublic | The
question of Kissinger’s alleged antisemitism is a complicated one. Yes,
he told a friend in the 1970s that Judaism “has no significance for
me,” according to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, and is also quoted
as having said in 1972, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I
would be antisemitic.” Another gem from that year: “Any people who has
been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”
But
to be fair, these views were not as uncommon among German Jews in the
United States as one might wish them to have been. One can find
similarly disturbing quotes in the private discussions of say, the great
pundit and political philosopher Walter Lippmann and the longtime New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When confronted with Richard Nixon’s frequently hysterical antisemitic rants about “dirty rotten Jews from New York” who dared to reveal the truth about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the Times
or some such thing, Kissinger usually tried to placate the president
without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing. But when he felt Jews,
whether American or Israeli, were refusing to cooperate with his plans,
he was more than happy to join in, once complaining to Nixon that he had
“never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest”
as when American Jewish leaders supported Israel’s position over that
of the Nixon administration. The Israelis at various times were “as
obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a
sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” As for American Jewish leaders, “They seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”
Kissinger
was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than
Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get to do
things his way. The question is, was he worse about Jews and Israel than
about anyone else who refused to genuflect before what he understood to
be his genius? To be fair to someone who really doesn’t deserve it,
Kissinger, like Nixon, would tend toward churlish, racist reactions when
anyone rebuffed him. When, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi refused to go along with his plans for a secret opening to China,
he informed the president that “well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” and Gandhi herself was “a bitch.”
But
Kissinger also engaged in explicitly antisemitic actions himself. When,
in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state,
Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.”
And as he doled out jobs to his aides, he made certain to count the Jews
to ensure there were not too many of them. He explained that while he
knew that it required 10 Jews for a minyan (Jewish prayer service), he
could not “have them all on the seventh floor.”
Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German
Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of aides scheduled to accompany
the president to Germany because he said,
“I don’t think too many Jews should be around.” But here again, he was
likely not acting out of personal anti-Jewish animus. Rather he was
behaving cravenly in the face of what he judged to be the Jew-hatred of
others, especially Nixon, who famously ordered an aide to count the
number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For the
purpose of history, the most important aspects of Kissinger’s hostility
to Jews and Israel can be seen in his conduct related to the 1973 “Yom
Kippur War.” Kissinger apologists have consistently attempted to give
him the credit that belongs almost entirely to Jimmy Carter for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Martin Indyk, a longtime diplomat and Kissinger acolyte, actually published a 688-page book titled Master of the Game, making exactly this comical claim.
The
truth is that Kissinger’s machinations were at least partially
responsible for the fact of the war itself. Egypt’s visionary leader
Anwar Sadat made clear to Kissinger and company that he was interested
in a peace agreement with Israel (and moving his allegiance from the
Russians to the Americans). The Israelis expressed interest at the time,
but Kissinger instructed them that they were “wasting time” in taking
Sadat seriously. To make certain the Israelis went along with his plans,
he secretly bribed them with a promise of over 100 U.S. Phantom fighter
jets. His overture rejected, Sadat eventually decided that another war
to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice to lay the
groundwork for an eventual deal. Even Indyk, who treats Kissinger’s
famous “shuttle diplomacy” between Israel and Egypt after the war as one
of the great achievements of American diplomatic history, admitted in
his book that Kissinger “might have averted the Yom Kippur War” by taking Sadat seriously earlier.
Kissinger
also helped ensure that Israel would be unprepared for the Egyptian
attack. According to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s secret testimony
before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began,
Kissinger warned Israel that if it wanted any help from the United
States in the event of hostilities, then it should not make a preemptive
strike against Egypt or Syria or to mobilize the reserve army before
the war actually started. These warnings were given after Kissinger
insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken.
Dayan then canceled his air force’s preemptive operation and objected to
Golda Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserves. Kissinger is not known to
have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs,
Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages, in order
to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath. To my
knowledge, Kissinger never addressed this.
Kissinger wanted Israel
to suffer a significant setback before it finally won the war. He
succeeded at this at an enormous cost in lost lives on both sides. As
the Egyptian army marched toward Tel Aviv, he informed Sadat and company
that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that
was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting,
however, Nixon insisted, over Kissinger’s objections, on implementing a
massive emergency weapons airlift. He did this despite Kissinger’s
warning that victory would make Israel “even more impossible to deal with than before.”
Kissinger
came in for extremely harsh criticism from some American Jews in this
period. Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar
whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare
the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated
Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler. To try to
disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record
meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals and another with leaders
of Jewish organizations.
The
former group spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic
socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as
Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for
disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue
discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it. Kissinger
posed as Israel’s savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out
support for Israel in Congress. (Actually, the opposite was true.
Congress was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger was.) He pointed out
that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international
community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely
success of the “extremely effective” OPEC oil embargo, which would give
the Arab world more leverage over the West and turn consumers in both
the U.S. and Europe against Israel. Israel was “in great danger.” What
he needed, he explained,
was for influential American Jews to “privately … make clear to the
Israelis that you understand the situation.” The meeting broke up,
according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm
expressions of gratitude.”
NYTimes | Richard M. Nixon
has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in
your bones that he is destined to keep returning.
Sure
enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release
of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at
his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the
Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent
acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and
abrasive and obnoxious personality.”
But
Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many
heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national
security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that
helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a
totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective
of American foreign policy.”
“And if
they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is
not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”
In New York, the
epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not
back in place after dropping to the floor.
Bad
enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding,
raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas
chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from
Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his
family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this
city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have
ended up in a gas chamber himself.
“Despicable,”
“callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a
few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations
and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.
Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed
silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up
had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or
Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about
Jews.
Even some who
deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The
Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but
said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate
legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The
American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but
suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been
at least partly to blame.
“Perhaps
Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to
the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,”
the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.
There
was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The
Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column,
Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in
Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”
Now
87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that
said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”
Back
then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would
have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent
on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger
rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not
suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry
at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.
In his statement,
Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a
humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That
approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews
permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while
anyway.
Still, that “gas chamber” line
is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a
man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word
that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.
Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”
dailysignal | First, the Left—and
university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual
leftists—believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition
of the oppressed. By leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure
of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of
power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Thus Jews cannot be
victims.
Then there’s the second reason: The hard Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful
in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is
a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too
is successful—which means that it is exploitative and oppressive.
Hence the Left’s rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel’s
destruction are somehow not antisemitic, but actually a reflection of a
more universalistic humanitarian creed.
Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions
of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn’t
matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the
real problem—and we know that’s true because the West and Israel are
successful.
According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren’t worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.
So, what ought to be done?
First, donors ought to pull their money from such universities.
Second, businesses ought to start hiring directly out of high school
and stop treating the bizarre credentialing process of major
universities as worthwhile. It isn’t. Chances are better that you’ll get
a great employee by selecting a high school graduate with 1500 SAT and a
4.0 GPA than by selecting a Harvard graduate with the same statistics.
Finally, parents ought to stop subsidizing this nonsense with their own children.
The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement
of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile,
and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral
depravity.
foxnews | More than a dozen state attorneys general signed a letter to media outlets
such as the New York Times and Reuters, putting them "on notice" that
providing material support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas is
illegal, Fox News Digital exclusively learned.
"We
will continue to follow your reporting to ensure that your
organizations do not violate any federal or State laws by giving
material support to terrorists abroad. Now your organizations are on
notice. Follow the law," 14 state attorneys general stated in a letter
to the chiefs of CNN, The New York Times, Reuters and The Associated
Press on Monday afternoon.
Republican Iowa Attorney General
Brenna Bird spearheaded the letter, which detailed concerns that
journalists embedded with Hamas may actually have deep connections with
the terrorist organization "and may have participated in the October 7
attack."
"Reporting credibly alleges that some of the individuals that your
outlets hire have deep and troubling ties to Hamas—and may have
participated in the October 7 attack. In the wake of those alarming
reports, some of you have cut ties with these so-called journalists
whose connections to terror groups have become too obvious to hide.
Good. But one factor in determining whether an organization has provided
material support for terrorism is that it be ‘knowing,’" the letter
states.
The attorneys general said the four outlets have a responsibility to
fully vet potential hires and ensure they have no connections to
terrorist organizations before putting them on the payroll and embedding
them during armed conflicts.
"If your outlet’s current hiring practices led you to give material support to terrorists,
you must change these policies going forward. Otherwise, we must assume
any future support of terrorist organizations by your stringers,
correspondents, contractors, and similar employees is knowing behavior,"
they wrote.
The state AGs pointed to a recent letter sent by a
bipartisan group of lawmakers to Reuters asking "how its journalist knew
to be available for the October 7 attack," and called on the outlet to
address whether it had prior knowledge of the attack or if one of the
organization’s journalists had been in contact with Hamas before the
attack.
The letter went on to argue that the issue of providing material
support to terrorist organizations is not new, pointing to a watchdog
group telling the AP five years ago that "one of its journalists worked
for the Hamas-affiliated Quds TV." While The New York Times, the AGs
continued, published an op-ed in 2020 penned by Taliban deputy leader
Sirajuddin Haqqani.
"Mr. Haqqani himself is on the Department of
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List. Did the
Times pay for that piece? If so, whom did it pay? Was that payment consistent with federal and State laws? These questions are still unanswered," the letter stated.
leefang |As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October,
Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building
company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom
for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.
Within 24 hours of
Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor,
took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of
more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at
least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note
that Carey worked for Wix.
Moshe was apparently aware of Carey’s LinkedIn comments, which also included a denunciation of the “Zionist ideology which promotes an exclusivist state,” before Ozer flagged them in the WhatsApp group.
The
interaction nonetheless reflects the heightened coordination among
pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.
Following
Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7, a loose network of pro-Israel
investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials
have stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from
the pro-Israel script.
The WhatsApp group where Carey’s case came
up serves as a kind of switchboard where the various independent players
in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies,
and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the
business world.
We have obtained access to thousands of the
group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October, and an intricate
spreadsheet where group participants request and claim tasks ranging
from social media responses to IDF support shipments. Separately, we
have viewed a number of video meetings charting best practices for
“hasbara” – an Israeli term of art for “public diplomacy” whose
detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window
into Israel’s public-relations war that is not limited to the tech
sector.
In addition to Moshe, the WhatsApp group includes
prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO
of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also
serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation,
entrepreneurship, and tech.
The WhatsApp group, officially
named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures,
a U.S.-Israeli investment fund that calls itself a “capitalist kibbutz”
-- a reference to Israel’s historically collectivist
farming communities. Hermoni, the WhatsApp group’s founder, is a
managing director of J-Ventures, and David, the foreign ministry
official, is internally listed by J-Ventures as a member of the
"PR/Political Team" that makes decisions on messaging and lobbying.
timesofisrael | ‘Charbu Darbu’ by Ness Ve Stilla promises to rain fire on Israel’s enemies, capturing the righteous indignation felt by Israeli youth during the Israel-Hamas war.
A new song became a number-one hit in Israel over the last week, an angry hip-hop war anthem by the duo “Ness Ve Stilla,” whose real names are Nesia Levy and Dor Soroker.
The song’s title, “Charbu Darbu,” comes from Syrian Arabic and means literally “swords and strikes.” In Hebrew slang, it is a reference to raining hell on one’s opponent — which is what the rappers promise the IDF will do to Hamas.
With a minimalist beat produced by Stilla (Soroker) and quick cuts of the rappers in various urban and desert landscapes, the two-and-a-half-minute video is in many ways typical of Israeli hip-hop.
Lyrically, though, the piece encapsulates a feeling of righteous fury that has been prevalent in Israel since the October 7 atrocities.
“Left, right, left, how is it that the whole country is in uniform from Galilee to Eilat… We’ve brought the entire army against you and we swear there won’t be forgiveness, sons of Amalek,” Stilla raps, comparing Hamas to the Biblical enemy of the Israelites who must be obliterated.
The chorus is a roll call of the IDF’s most storied combat units (“Golani, Givati, Air Force, Navy, Commandos!”) and ends with the phrase “All the IDF units are coming to ‘Charbu Darbu’ on your heads, oy oy.”
Ness lends a feminine counterpoint to Stilla’s bravado, but her verses are equally militant. After complimenting all the men in uniform for being handsome, she raps, “For mom and dad, all my friends are at the front, for grandma and grandma, let’s write names on the bombs, for the children of the Gaza envelope.”
The song ends with an up-tempo section where the rappers promise to “X out” their enemies. They call them out by name, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing and one of the likely masterminds behind the October 7 massacres, saying in Arabic, “Every dog gets his day.”
The rappers also include in their list of enemies Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa, prominent Western celebrities who expressed support for the Palestinian cause shortly after the war began.
Since its release about a week ago, “Charbu Darbu” has become the number-one song in Israel on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming platforms. The duo’s PR team told The Times of Israel that based on the feedback they have received, the song was currently the most popular song in the country.
zerohedge | On Wednesday President Joe Biden suggested that if Congress doesn't send Ukraine more money, now, it may 'embolden' Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade a NATO ally, which would precipitate "American troops fighting Russian troops."
The threat was not persuasive.
In response, Senate Republicans channeled Elon Musk (G...F...Y...), blocking Biden's $111 emergency supplemental package that would also include aid for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and a smattering of border funding.
The
Senate voted 49-51, failing to reach the 60-vote threshold required to
allow the proposal to come up for consideration. Notably, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against the measure,
while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) flipped his vote to
'no' to preserve the option of revisiting the bill at a later date.
President Joe Biden has raised the possibility of "American troops
fighting Russian troops" in a speech urging Congress to put aside
"petty, partisan, angry politics" which is holding up
his multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. He said that he's
willing to make "significant compromises" with Republicans but that it's
they who've been unwilling to back down from their "extreme" demands.
"This
cannot wait," Biden stressed in the televised remarks from the White
House. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess.
Simple as that. Frankly, I think it’s stunning that we’ve gotten to
this point in the first place. Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he can hope for and abandon our global leadership."
"I’m
willing to make significant compromises on the border. We need to fix
the broken border system. It is broken. And thus far I’ve gotten no
response," Biden pleaded. He made the speech after speaking with G7
leaders, who are reportedly alarmed that US funding to Ukraine is set to
run dry in a mere three weeks.
"If we walk away, how many
of our European friends are going to continue to fund and at what rates
are they going to continue to fund?" he posed.
And
that's when the fear-mongering really kicked into overdrive. He went so
far as to say that if Ukraine's defense isn't funded, this will lead to
the country being steamrolled by the Russian military machine, and an
emboldened Putin will then seek to gobble up more territory.
yasha | It
might sound like I’m describing a cult or something. But actually
zionism was actually pretty normal by 19th-early 20th century European
standards. It’s just nationalism — Jewish nationalism. It came out of
Europe and the Russian Empire and gained popularity as one solution to
the Jewish Question that was being debated there at the time: Are Jews a
religious group? A race? Should Jews assimilate and become part of the
societies in which they live — to become Russian or German?
Why does
antisemitism exist?
Jewish
nationalism offered an answer: Jews are a race. And because the only
natural and healthy way to organize society is for every race to have
its own state, the Jews need also need a state of their own where they
can live and flourish and control their fate— like the English, the
French, the Italians, the Germans. Without this Jewish state, Jews in
Europe and all over the world are doomed. They’ll remain hated
minorities and suffer bouts of violence. Or even worse, the race will
continue to degrade spiritually and culturally and will eventually
disappear altogether. To zionists, a Jewish state is the only path to
survival of the Jewish race.
This
wasn’t unique to zionism. Nationalism was a popular notion in Europe at
the time — and it led to some horrible results, Nazi Germany being one
example. One thing that made Jewish nationalism stand out was that it
wasn’t about defending land that Jews currently occupied from inferior
races. It was about transporting millions of Jews from Europe to a place
called Palestine — and once there purging the land of the locals and
restoring what zionists believed is their rightful ancient Jewish home.
Here’s
how Vladimir Jabotinsky — a journalist originally from Odessa who
played a big role in setting up the militant rightwing flank of zionism
that ultimately produced Israel’s Likud — wrote about about European
Jews and the Land of Israel. The two were one:
…the
true kernel of our national uniqueness is the pure product of the Land
of Israel. We did not exist before we came to the Land of Israel. The
Hebrew people was created from the fragments of other peoples on the
soil of the Land of Israel. We grew up in the Land of Israel; on it we
became citizens; we strengthened the belief in one God; we breathed in
the winds of the land, and in our struggles for independence and
sovereignty, its air enwrapped us and the grain that its land produced
sustained us. In the Land of Israel the ideas of our prophets were
developed and in the Land of Israel the “Song of Songs” was first heard.
Everything Hebrew in our midst was given to us by the Land of Israel.
Anything else in us is not Hebrew. Israel and the Land of Israel are
one. There we were born as a people and there we developed.³
The
zionism had all sorts of rifts and fissures. But at its core, the
movement believed in the same goal and sought to speak collectively for
all Jews. It wasn’t about individuals. It was about the race.
So
that’s been the main obsession of the movement ever since: the creation
and protection of a Jewish state in Palestine. The existence of this
state is linked to the survival of the Jewish people. Get rid of one and
the other will follow. A Jewish state — a government of Jews, by Jews,
for Jews — is the base on which all zionism rests.
Ideologies
impose structure on the way people see the world. They condition
reactions and assumption and interpretations. That’s why zionist Jews
are so freaked out right now. For them October 7 was a shock. The
surprise Hamas attack, the killing of innocents, the hostages dragged
back to Gaza, the powerlessness of Israeli military — to them this had
nothing to do with violence that the zionist quest for land foisted on Palestinians,
it was a reminder of the atavistic horror that always plagued Jewish
people: Jews are hated for just being Jewish. Existence is never
guaranteed.
And
as they looked around after the attack, they saw more sympathy for
Palestinian suffering than they ever have before: pro-Palestinian
protests and marches, college kids on Instagram and TikTok posting about
Israel’s occupation and apartheid. All over the world, people were
criticizing Israel. In their minds, they saw this as people going after
the Jews. This only reaffirmed their fears and deepened their
convictions: The ancient hatred is still there. Israel is our only
refuge, the only thing that can protect us.
Survival
of the Jews. That’s what they believe Israel is fighting for in Gaza.
They think they’re warding off a mortal enemy, an enemy that seeks to
destroy the Jewishness of Israel. And so nothing is off limits to them
— no number of babies or children killed is too high, no destruction is
too great. There are no innocents in a war of survival between competing
races. The innocent baby of today will grow into a fierce enemy who
will want to exterminate them tomorrow. It’s a zero-sum world. They
really do believe it. The survival of the race is at stake.
WaPo | This
is the trajectory we are on now. Is descent into dictatorship
inevitable? No. Nothing in history is inevitable. Unforeseen events
change trajectories. Readers of this essay will no doubt list all the
ways in which it is arguably too pessimistic and doesn’t take sufficient
account of this or that alternative possibility. Maybe, despite
everything, Trump won’t win. Maybe the coin flip will come up heads and
we’ll all be safe. And maybe even if he does win, he won’t do any of the
things he says he’s going to do. You may be comforted by this if you
choose.
What
is certain, however, is that the odds of the United States falling into
dictatorship have grown considerably because so many of the obstacles
to it have been cleared and only a few are left. If eight years ago it
seemed literally inconceivable that a man like Trump could be elected,
that obstacle was cleared in 2016. If it then seemed unimaginable that
an American president would try to remain in office after losing an
election, that obstacle was cleared in 2020. And if no one could believe
that Trump, having tried and failed to invalidate the election and stop
the counting of electoral college votes, would nevertheless reemerge as
the unchallenged leader of the Republican Party and its nominee again
in 2024, well, we are about to see that obstacle cleared as well. In
just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our
democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from
the possibility of dictatorship.
Are
we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought
there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America
a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would
we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including
many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the
crisis, must be tried anyway?
Yes,
I know that most people don’t think an asteroid is heading toward us
and that’s part of the problem. But just as big a problem has been those
who do see the risk but for a variety of reasons have not thought it
necessary to make any sacrifices to prevent it. At each point along the
way, our political leaders, and we as voters, have let opportunities to
stop Trump pass on the assumption that he would eventually meet some
obstacle he could not overcome. Republicans could have stopped Trump
from winning the nomination in 2016, but they didn’t.
The voters could have elected Hillary Clinton, but they didn’t.
Republican senators could have voted to convict Trump in either of his
impeachment trials, which might have made his run for president much
more difficult, but they didn’t.
Throughout
these years, an understandable if fatal psychology has been at work. At
each stage, stopping Trump would have required extraordinary action by
certain people, whether politicians or voters or donors, actions that
did not align with their immediate interests or even merely their
preferences. It would have been extraordinary for all the Republicans
running against Trump in 2016 to decide to give up their hopes for the
presidency and unite around one of them. Instead, they behaved normally,
spending their time and money attacking each other, assuming that Trump
was not their most serious challenge, or that someone else would bring
him down, and thereby opened a clear path for Trump’s nomination. And
they have, with just a few exceptions, done the same this election
cycle. It would have been extraordinary had Mitch McConnell
and many other Republican senators voted to convict a president of
their own party. Instead, they assumed that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump
was finished and it was therefore safe not to convict him and
thus avoid becoming pariahs among the vast throng of Trump supporters.
In each instance, people believed they could go on pursuing their
personal interests and ambitions as usual in the confidence that
somewhere down the line, someone or something else, or simply fate,
would stop him. Why should they be the ones to sacrifice their careers?
Given the choice between a high-risk gamble and hoping for the best,
people generally hope for the best. Given the choice between doing the
dirty work yourself and letting others do it, people generally prefer
the latter.
A
paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work. At each
stage, the price of stopping Trump has risen higher and higher. In 2016,
the price was forgoing a shot at the White House. Once Trump was
elected, the price of opposition, or even the absence of obsequious
loyalty, became the end of one’s political career, as Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul D. Ryan and many others discovered. By 2020, the price had risen again. As Mitt Romney recounts in McKay Coppins’s recent biography,
Republican members of Congress contemplating voting for Trump’s
impeachment and conviction feared for their physical safety and that of
their families. There is no reason that fear should be any less today.
But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him
becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of
freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was
merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost
might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family?
We
are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue
to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that
will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice,
our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep
commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not
with a bang but a whimper.
The Book of Enoch is an ancient text attributed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is divided into five main sections. The first section, the Book of the Watchers, describes the fall of a group of angels who descend to Earth and engage in sinful behavior, teaching forbidden knowledge to humanity. Enoch is appointed as a messenger to the fallen angels, warning them of their impending judgment.
The second section, the Book of Parables, contains apocalyptic visions given to Enoch. These visions include prophecies of the final judgment, the coming of the Messiah, and the establishment of a new and righteous kingdom.
The third section, the Book of Astronomy, presents a detailed account of the movements of the heavenly bodies and their significance in the ordering of the universe.
The fourth section, the Book of Dream Visions, features Enoch's visions of the future, including the fate of the righteous and the wicked.
The fifth section, the Epistle of Enoch, describes Enoch's teachings to his sons, emphasizing the importance of righteousness, repentance, and the fear of God.
Overall, The Book of Enoch provides insights into angelology, cosmology, and eschatology, and it is considered a valuable text for understanding ancient Jewish and Christian traditions.
There are a lot of books of the canonical Bible she could’ve used here, but she chose The Book of Enoch? I think she’s hunting at something.
TheHill | Across news sites, Democrats are warning of the imminent death of democracy. Hillary Clinton has warned that a Trump victory would be the end of democracy. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is warning of “executions.” Even actors like Robert DeNiro are predicting that this may be our very last democratic election.
Yet these harbingers of tyranny are increasingly pursuing the very
course that will make their predictions come true. The Democratic Party
is actively seeking to deny voters choices in this election, supposedly
to save democracy.
Henry Ford once promised customers any color so long as it is black.
Democrats are adopting the same approach to the election: You can have
any candidate on the ballot, as long as it’s Joe Biden.
This week, the Executive Committee of the Florida Democratic Democracy told voters that they would not be allowed to vote against Biden. Even though he has opponents in the primary, the party leadership has ordered that only Biden will appear on the primary ballot.
And if you want to register your discontent with Biden with a
write-in vote, forget about it. Under Florida law, if the party
approves only one name, there will be no primary ballots at all. The
party just called the election for Biden before a single vote has been
cast.
This is not unprecedented. It happened with Barack Obama in 2012 and,
on the Republican side, with George W. Bush in 2004. It was wrong then,
and it is wrong now.
As Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.)
noted, “Americans would expect the absence of democracy in Tehran, not
Tallahassee. Our mission as Democrats is to defeat authoritarians, not
become them.”
In Iran, the mullahs routinely bar opposition candidates from ballots as “Guardians” of the ballots.
There is good reason for the Biden White House to want the election called before it is held. A CNN poll found that two out of three Democrats believe that the party should nominate someone else. A Wall Street Journal poll that found 73 percent of voters say Biden is “too old to run for president.”
The party leadership is solving that problem by depriving Democratic voters of a choice.
In other states, Democratic politicians and lawyers are pursuing a
different strategy: “You can have any candidate, as long as it isn’t
Trump.”
They are seeking to bar Trump from ballots under a novel theory about
the 14th Amendment. In states from Colorado to Michigan, Democratic
operatives are arguing that Trump must be taken off the ballots because
he gave “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection or rebellion.” Other
Democrats have called for more than 120 other Republicans to be stripped
from the ballots under the same claim tied to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
pacemaker | I've been waiting for today, knowing it was pre-planned and coming. Today in Riyadh at the China-Arab Summit President Xi of China formally invited the Arab nations to trade oil and gas in yuan on the Shanghai Exchange. Now the way diplomacy works (because it seems to have been forgotten in the West) is that Xi would not have made the invitation unless all the Arab states gathered in Riyadh - and particularly Saudi Arabia as host - had already agreed as a matter of joint policy to take action accordingly. Oil and gas will price in Shanghai and in yuan, breaking the dollar monopoly the US has imposed and enforced since 1974. Since the dollar-for-oil monopoly was the lynchpin of Bretton Woods II stability, it follows Bretton Woods II ended today.
To
refresh memories, President Nixon unilaterally repudiated the US treaty
obligation under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement to redeem dollars for
gold in 1972. The chaos in foreign exchange markets that followed led
to instability, made worse with the inflationary OPEC oil embargo of
1973-74.
In July 1974 the US Treasury Secretary William Simon and US Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger made a top-secret flight to Riyadh to meet
King Fahd. They offered a deal: sell Saudi oil exclusively for US
dollars and buy US Treasuries with the proceeds, or we kill you, your
entire family, and occupy the oil fields with the US military. Unsurprisingly, they left with a secret agreement.
The
same deal was more or less extended to all of OPEC. Leaders like Saddam
Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya who strayed from the US
dollar were killed, their countries destroyed and destablilsed, as an
example to others. Iran, Syria, and Venezuela have resisted more
successfully, but have been badly destabilised by US occupation, oil
theft, attempted coups, attempted assassinations, and economic
sanctions.
So today marks a big and admirably brave shift. After sending all the
weaponry it could spare to Ukraine all year, ending oil and gas trade
with Russia under sanctions, weakening allies with surging inflation,
and depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of a record amount of oil
to blunt inflation before the midterm elections, the US is not in an
ideal position to launch wars in every Arab state at once. In fact, it
probably can't launch a war or coup even in Saudi Arabia because Saudi
Arabia will have prepared and provided for that risk. In any event, a
new war in the Middle East would make the inflationary shock of the
Ukraine war pale in comparison.
Signs of a shift have been in the wind all year. The fist bump and
low-key reception of President Biden compares poorly to the lavish state
reception of President Xi. Then Biden's attempt to get GCC states to
sanction Russia was unanimously rejected.
And
OPEC's outright refusal to defer oil production cuts until after the
American midterm elections was a further sign Saudi and OPEC+ no longer
take orders from Washington. Saudi took the unusual step of officially
rejecting the US request in public.
When
a presidential state visit by Xi to Saudi began leaking in the fall I
began to watch for confirmatory signs of OPEC moving East. There were
quite a few, but nothing as momentous as the extravagant welcome for
President Xi to Riyadh and the China-Arab Summit. President Xi and King
Salman signed a 30-year Strategic Partnership Agreement for cooperation
on virtually all forward economic plans yesterday: energy, telecoms,
investment, trade, infrastructure, regional development, Belt & Road
Initiative, etc. Significantly, the Agreement bars interference in
domestic affairs by either nation, a principle China has urged widely
for many years.
cointribune | Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon
in 1973. That is, just two years after the end of the gold standard.
The collapse of the international monetary system established in 1944
at Bretton Woods should have dug the grave of the dollar. But that was
without counting on Henry Kissinger and his brilliant geopolitical poker
move: the petrodollar…
Indeed, the beginnings of the petrodollar date back to 1945, when
American President Roosevelt, returning from the Yalta Conference with
Stalin and Churchill, met with King Abdul Aziz aboard the USS Quincy.
This meeting was later called the Quincy Pact. Kranklin Roosevelt
secured a guarantee from Saudi Arabia to supply American energy needs
for 60 years.
Owing to current events, it is worth noting that the American
president had to promise not to allow the creation of a Jewish state in
Palestine. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on one’s view,
Roosevelt died two months later and his successor Harry Truman, hand in
hand with the British, recognized the State of Israel immediately after
its creation.
Despite this betrayal, Saudi Arabia did not sever ties. It needed
Washington to counter the growing popularity of Nasser in Egypt. His
pan-Arab socialist policy was indeed an existential threat to the Saudi
monarchy. The United States saw an opportunity to counter the USSR,
which was then allied with Cairo.
But let’s focus on H. Kissinger.
The Masterstroke
His poker move took place in June 1974 during a meeting with King
Faisal bin Abdul Aziz in Saudi Arabia. It was the climax of a
Machiavellian plan rooted in the Israeli-Arab War of Yom Kippur (1973).
At the time, Kissinger convinced President Nixon to intervene in
favor of Israel. Henry Kissinger was indeed Jewish. In retaliation,
Saudi Arabia raised the price of a barrel of oil from $3 to $12.
This is exactly what Henry Kissinger wanted, who ended up simply threatening Saudi Arabia to use force to address what he then called the “strangulation of the industrialized world”. It wasn’t a bluff. The London Sunday Times revealed in February 1975 the existence of operation “Dhahran Option Four” which envisioned invading Saudi Arabia.
King Faisal heard these drumbeats loud and clear and, by the end of 1974, reached an agreement with Kissinger, who promised unlimited arms sales and a return of Israel to its 1948 borders.
In exchange, the kingdom had to commit to two things:
To sell its oil EXCLUSIVELY in dollars, To invest its dollar surpluses in US debt.
The petrodollar was born, thanks to H. Kissinger, who was undoubtedly a key player in the special relationship that the United States maintains with Israel.
The European nations that had the audacity to exchange their dollars for gold were forced to accumulate dollars again to buy the oil essential to any industrialized nation. Checkmate.
As for the agreement on Israel’s borders, it was quickly forgotten after the assassination of King Faisal a few months later…
epochtimes | Mr. Schumer warned that the rise in anti-Semitism is "a five-alarm
fire that must be extinguished." This comes amid the latest conflict
between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, which started on Oct. 7
when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 in Israel, the largest single-day
massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were killed.
He
lamented anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the United States
ranging from protests on college campuses to coverage in the media to
boycotting and vandalism of Jewish businesses. He also cited examples of
Jews being persecuted throughout history, from the Crusades to pogroms
to expulsions from countries including England and Spain.
In the United States, there was a 388 percent increase in
anti-Semitic incidents between Oct. 7 and Oct. 23, according to the
Anti-Defamation League. Additionally, Jews are the leading target for
religious-related hate crimes in the United States, according to the
FBI.
Mr. Schumer emphasized that there is a difference between criticizing Israeli government policies and demonizing Israel.
"This
speech is not an attempt to label most criticism of Israel and the
Israeli government, generally, as anti-Semitic," he said. "I don't
believe that criticism is."
Double Standard Applied to Jews
He also criticized double standards regarding Israel compared with other
countries, such as people celebrating when a new country is founded but
being against the formation of the Jewish state, which occurred in
1948. He even referenced the 1947 United Nations partition plan that
would have created a Jewish state and an Arab state in what was the
British mandate of Palestine—which the Jews accepted and the Arabs
rejected.
"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.
"The
double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never
good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some
problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this
double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world
treats Israel differently than anybody else."
"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.
"The
double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never
good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some
problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this
double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world
treats Israel differently than anybody else."
"The double standard has been ever present and is at the root of anti-Semitism," Mr. Schumer said.
"The
double standard is very simple. What is good for everybody is never
good for the Jew, and when it comes time to assign blame for some
problem, the Jew is always the first target. And in recent decades, this
double standard has manifested itself in the way much of the world
treats Israel differently than anybody else."
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