Edward Said

Many professors at Columbia University are dismayed that a campus culture with a long history of demonizing Israel as a barbaric imperialist state, and little to no history of criticizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the past, now actively embraces such attacks against Israelis today. “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as some members of the Columbia faculty have done in a recent letter, try to ‘recontextualize’ them as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”

This attitude toward Israel is an outgrowth of the modern leftist doctrine that the West is history’s greatest aggressor. The sum of the West’s interventions in non-Western lands is automatically regarded with cynicism, including the post-WWI nation-building in the former Ottoman provinces – and especially the formation of Israel. Anti-Zionist leftists blindly trust the Arab side of the story, that the Israelis and not the Arabs instigated the 1948 war. Many if not most of this group – certainly the loudest – reject the notion that Jews have rightful claims to any of the territory west of the Jordan River; it was Arab-ruled before the Turkish occupation (albeit under governments headquartered outside of the region), it should be Arab-ruled again.


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Consequences

So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them. Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

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Quote of the Day

David Harsanyi:

Though Jews are by far the most targeted religious minority in the United States, we have yet to have a big national conversation about the problem. No one in major media dares even bring it up.

There are lots of “conversations” we’re supposed to have, meaning mob actions where leftist cadres will abuse isolated non-leftists who are dumb enough to take the bait. Media and top Democrats are all-in. Maybe it’s time to go Alinsky on the Left and hold struggle sessions about antisemitism? It’s a nice thought.

A Double-Edged Sword

Almost as horrifying as Hamas going all murderously Einsatzgruppen in Israel two weekends ago, is the realization that yes, indeed – is the realization there are a not-inconsiderable number of Americans (and Americans-in-name-only) cheering them on. Cheering the remorseless slaughter of young and old alike, kidnapping for extortion and/or jollies, mutilation, torture, burning whole families and individuals alive, gang-rape … it’s a sobering spectacle. I expect any minute a rousing chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” from the Jew-hating undergrads and their professors on the campus too many colleges and universities.

I used to wonder how Germans under Adolph Hitler came around to accept, support, or at least turn a blind eye towards the so-called “Final Solution”, during the 1930s and ’40s. Well, wonder no more – I’ve seen it play out now in real time. Corked up resentments, envy and pure unadulterated hatred, given voice in classrooms, newsrooms, in social media and from the pulpits of certain churches, spewing from so-called leaders of various communities … all spilling out, in the wake of October 7 … it’s as sick-making as reports of all the rejoicing in the Arab streets, and the comments about how we Americans had it coming, after 9-11. To try and focus on the horror and misery inflicted on the innocent and the self-justifying replies from the usual pro-Palestinians boils down to something like the rationale from an abusive spouse – “Look at what you made me do!”

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Fahrenheit 451

This report, of a school district eliminating all books published before 2008 from the shelves of school libraries struck me as more-than-usually horrifying, when it comes to stupidities enacted by a public school system. Of course, there is some comfort – not much – to be had in the fact that the school district in question is in Canada, but bad ideas in pedagogy have the unfortunate tendency to go international. I am a hundred percent certain that many American school districts have wokified administrators just chomping at the bit in their eagerness to perform the same purge on their own school libraries. Part of the great purge plan allows for an intensive review of pre-2008 books and restoring certain of them to school library circulation upon being judged appropriate – most likely after extensive editing or bowdlerization to remove every scrap of bad-thought.

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