John Hinderaker:
Harvard, like most other universities, admitted large numbers of international students, including from the Islamic world. They set up centers for these students, as well as degree programs and similar types of centers for the various categories of “BIPOC” students. These programs and centers became hotbeds of radicalism and grievance. The universities sacrificed not only their prior meritocratic standards, but also their commitment to liberal principles, on the altar of diversity.
So if you look at pictures of a pro-genocide rally at Harvard or any other school, what do you see? Mostly, a lot of Middle Eastern students and far-left minorities. Did Harvard seriously not understand that Jew-hatred is rampant among these student groups and is fostered by the programs and institutions that purport to serve them? Or did it just not care?
So, can President Gay succeed in her professed desire to rid Harvard of anti-Semitism? She can if she really wants to, but no doubt she would find the prescription painful. Harvard can get rid of anti-Semitism by no longer admitting students from the Islamic world; terminating grievance-oriented racial programs and centers; and discarding its discrimination-heavy admissions model, so that Jews and Asians are treated equally with minority students. In short, by recognizing that anti-Semitism is one aspect of the larger sickness of the contemporary university.
John Hinderaker:
“Green” energy companies and electric vehicle manufacturers rely on governments to force consumers to buy their products, like it or not. But there is a limit to how much of a decline in their standard of living voters are willing to accept for the sake of “green” mythology. Blackouts have already begun (not to mention skyrocketing electricity prices), and as blackouts become more widespread, voters are going to punish the politicians who lied to them about “green” energy. Let’s hope that happens before tens of billions more dollars are poured into the coffers of the cynical “green” industries.
John Hinderaker:
Note that I do not use the term “biological men.” “Man” and “woman” are biological terms. Thus, “biological man” is redundant. You cannot turn a man into a woman, no matter how much you mutilate him and give him drugs. Or vice versa.
John Hinderaker:
Israel’s first order of business should be exacting revenge against Gaza for the horrors of October 7. Most if not all of Gazan society has collaborated with Hamas over nearly two decades to turn that polity into the most hellish place on Earth, with a culture that is utterly dominated by Jew-hatred. Killing all the Jews between the river and the sea has long been the sole goal of Gaza’s foreign and domestic policies.
After World War II, many Germans claimed that they didn’t know about the Holocaust. Some of them may have been telling the truth. On the other hand, no one who lives in Gaza can have been ignorant of that polity’s genocidal purposes. Further, while Hamas, like the Nazi Party, is the duly elected government of Gaza, Hamas actually got a majority of the vote, which the Nazis never did. So Gazan “civilians,” assuming there are any, need to experience the full wrath of Israel’s revenge. The situation is the same as what obtained in Germany in 1945: Gazans need to experience the full horror of war, so that the survivors’ memories of October 7 will always provoke a shudder, and no Gazan will ever again propose wiping out the Jews.
David Strom:
What is impossible to explain to anybody is the hostages. If this is war, how do you justify taking hostages as bargaining chips? Women, children, grandmas…these are so clearly noncombatants, and hostage-taking is so indefensible that there is only one thing to do: hide the evidence.
Jazz Shaw:
There is only one obvious answer. Paul objects to the idea of Israel using weapons and ammunition from the United States against the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas. He describes this process as being “unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse.” Which values would those be? The right to self-defense? The right to respond to years of civilians being bombarded with rockets launched across their border? Those sound like the actual values that America has embraced for the entire history of our country.
I would argue that this example of very “not quiet quitting” is little more than an exercise in virtue signaling from a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel leftist who somehow wound up with a job inside of our State Department. On that assumption, I suppose it’s better that he exits stage left rather than sticking around and potentially sabotaging one of our shipments to our closest ally in the Middle East. Add that to your resume and commence the job search, Mr. Paul. Be sure to let us know how it goes.
John Hinderaker:
Gaza is not occupied and has not been for some time. The “occupation” apparently consists of the fact that Israel occupies territory that the Palestinians covet.
Clifford D. May:
“Palestine” is the name the Romans gave to Judea, the land of the Jews, as a punishment for Jewish rebellion. The name derives from the Philistines, non-semitic, sea-faring people from Crete who settled in the coastal area known as Canaan in the 12th Century BCE. The Philistines became enemies of the Jews — Goliath the best known. Arab armies invaded centuries later.
Palestine was ruled by foreign empires for millennia until the founding of Israel in part of that territory — an act of decolonization.
Ed Morrissey:
The only country that should give refuge to the Gazans at the moment is Iran. They authored the present misery of the Gazans through their proxy Hamas. Iran won’t take them in either, though, even apart from the logistics of that kind of relocation. For one thing, the Persian Shi’ite mullahs couldn’t care less about the mainly Sunni Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank, but also they can’t afford their destabilizing presence either. They already have a restive population that the IRGC can barely contain, and that population hates the Palestinians and the way that the mullahs exploit their cause to justify their oppression.
Abdullah is right about the solution to the Palestinian issue, too. “This is a situation that has to be handled within Gaza and the West Bank,” he declared. The answer lies with the Palestinians, and it always has. Had they accepted the 1948 partition, they would never have had to live for eight decades in camps. Had they chosen to pursue peace and engagement with Israel as a final outcome, they would have had their own state decades ago, along with tons of Western investment. Instead, the Palestinians have insisted on annihilating Israel and seizing the land “from the river to the sea,” and keep adding to their misery.
John Hinderaker:
But there is something else going on, something beyond even Israel’s need to win the war or the entirely appropriate desire to exact revenge. The Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, have the sickest culture on Earth. Little productive work is done; Gaza exists largely as the beneficiary of international welfare. Instead of goods and services, the main product of Gaza is ideology—the perverted ideology of Jew-hatred.
John Hinderaker:
The “humanitarian crisis” is 100% the fault of Hamas and the large majority of Gazans who have supported Hamas for years. They sowed the wind, and they are about to reap the whirlwind. To the extent that there are innocents—non-Hamas supporters—who suffer, Israel has tried to prevent that suffering, while Hamas and the majority who support Hamas have deliberately brought it on.
John Hinderaker:
When a country is attacked, the only appropriate course is to respond with massively disproportionate force, as we did against the Japanese in World War II. Israel should treat Gaza as the Allies treated Dresden and other German and Japanese cities to end that war. Israel made a mistake in withdrawing from Gaza, and Gaza has been a thorn in its side ever since. This should be the last time.
In fighting this war, the Israelis should not distinguish between Hamas and non-Hamas, any more than we distinguished between members of the Nazi Party and non-members when we crushed Germany. And I don’t want to hear one goddam word about civilian casualties. Civilian casualties are what happen when you start a war.
The Palestinians started it, Israel should end it. Quickly, with overwhelming force that ensures nothing similar will happen again.
Also:
Hamas’s invasion was no mere act of terrorism. It was, rather, an act of war carried out by what is effectively a state. Prime Minister Netanyahu got it right when he said, immediately after the invasion was launched, that Israel was at war.
The difference is important. If the invasion was just another in a long series of terrorist outrages, then selective reprisals, as in the past, are the presumptive response. In other words, doing again what hasn’t worked before—destroying a few military installations and taking out a handful of political or military leaders. War is different. A war ends only when one side internalizes the fact that it is beaten and loses the will to continue.
When I say “one side,” I don’t mean military or political leaders, who face their own imperatives and may or may not ever choose to give up. I mean the civilian population (acknowledging that in Gaza it is not easy to tell who is a civilian, but that doesn’t matter for this purpose). Why did the Allies fire-bomb Dresden? Not to achieve some discrete military objective, but to horrify the German people and convince them that continuing the war would lead only to further catastrophe. Likewise with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In total war, the situation in which Israel finds itself, destroying the will of the civilian population to resist is the ultimate military objective.
