Israel

The Demons Return

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This is Barclay’s Bank, St Johns Wood, after overnight attack by ‘Pro-Palestine’ activists:

Link

“Palestine Action” has openly bragged about this and other attacks on Barclays.

Don’t think this is only a UK thing.  In Washington, DC, ‘protestors’ vandalized monuments on Federal property and threw bottles at a park ranger.

Link with video

It gets worse.  At UCLA, the Chabad Rabbi was assaulted live on camera, with students calling him a “Zionist pedophile Rabbi,” telling him to “go back to Poland.”  Link with video. Also at UCLA: More ‘protestor’ violence.

In NYC, Palestinians and/or their supporters protested outside a theater, attempting to intimidate Jews and their supporters who were inside the theater screening a movie about October 7.  Video.

The response to the events at UCLA from the UCLA Faulty Association was to complain about the university’s (highly insufficient) attempts to contain the ‘protestor’ violence.  “Campuses are not police states. @UCLA stop militarizing our workplace, cease and desist from using police violence against students and employees.”  

It is worth noting that virtually ALL of the recent ‘pro-Palestinian’ (anti-Israel–anti-Semitic–anti-American–and anti-civilization) violence and intimidation has been centered on America’s institutions of higher education.

The title of this post is taken from a chapter heading in Peter Drucker’s 1939 book The End of Economic Man, which is about the rise of European totalitarianism.

 

Worthwhile Reading

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Self-censorship among scientists, for ‘prosocial’ reasons…and the harm it does.

How sculpture and ornament-making has been semi-industrialized for centuries, using a device known as a pointing machine.

Selecting government officials in China –historically and at present.

Support for using violence to suppress campus speech, broken down by college major.

The growth of anti-Israel radicalism in the Democratic Party: how much of this has been due to Obama’s attitudes and associations?

The District of Columbia has established minimum education requirements (a high school diploma is not enough) for child care workers. Is there a study that validates a significant positive correlation between such training and the quality of care provided?  (What would you guess)

Katherine Boyle argues that some people are great at judging people but not great at judging systems. Others are great at evaluating systems but not people and says that it’s very rare to meet someone who is exceptional at both.

Inspirational:  A cancellation attempt that backfired.

Biden, Hamas, and Israel

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In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false.  He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.”  He is apparently just fine with this outcome.

He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet:  “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”

Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.

Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.

History Lesson

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This newspaper is so old that one of the news stories is about a US visit by the Graf Zeppelin…the airship before the Hindenburg…that would be 1929.  And the other story is about the massacre of Jews by Arabs–almost 20 years before the establishment of the state of Israel.

Nightmare Numbers

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A poll conducted Dec 13-14 among 2000 registered voters included the question:

Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?

Among respondents aged 18-24, 67% believed that Jews as a class’ are oppressors.  Note well: the questions was not about ‘Israel’ or ‘Israelis’ or ‘Zionists’, it was about Jews, plain and simple.

Michelle Tandler responded: “This is extraordinary. How did Gen Z come to believe that Jews are oppressors? Is that being taught somewhere..?”

What is being taught, pretty clearly, is that people are primarily defined by their ethnic and gender identity…there are no individuals, there are only ‘communities’ defined by these demographic categories. The more successful groups are defined as oppressors of the less-successful groups. Even the behavioral attributes required for success are viewed pejoratively; see for example  the Smithsonian on ‘whiteness’.  If values such as ‘hard work’, ‘rational thinking’, and ‘future orientation’ are considered as ‘whiteness’, then Jews ‘as a class’ certainly exemplify that attribute, regardless of the shade of any particular individual’s skin.  And if whites as a class are oppressors, then Jews as a class must be meta-oppressors.

This kind of thing clearly had its origins in academia.  As John Ellis notes at the WSJ:  “Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”..The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.”

Academia, and the K-12 schools which are repeaters of its ideologies, are of course not the only factors in this shocking rise in anti-Semitism. The rise of TikTok, with its emphasis on pre-literate modes of communication and the behavior of its algorithms–are they purposely malign toward American interests?–is surely a factor. See this comparison of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views among TikTok users and users of other platforms…see also this WSJ study of what actually shows up in the TikTok feeds of people registered as 13-year-olds.

Also–given that there are many nations–and not only Muslim ones–where anti-Semitism has been more pervasive and accepted than in the US, it is likely that the presence of large numbers of immigrants and foreign students has played a role in moving the Overton Window to a worse place: ‘Personnel is Policy.’

And, historically, societies in which people lose a sense of hope for the future, that they feel that they are facing pervasive decline, have been especially likely to be prone to anti-Semitism.  There are a lot of people in the US today who are not optimistic about either our national future or their personal futures.

While there are all these factors–and doubtless many more–behind the upsurge in anti-Semitism and the support for extreme groups such as Hamas, I believe that the ideology of Indentity Politics is the primary factor.  The prominent lawyer Alan Dershowitz went so far as to say DEI is the incubator of anti-Semitism.

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