Max Eden, Josh Hammer Dismantling Leftist Indoctrination on Campus How a conservative administration could use civil rights law to reshape American universities

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantling-leftist-indoctrination-on-campus

Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?

Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)

Shortly thereafter, Middlebury provided access to the chapel and police protection for an event titled, “Vigil for Palestine.” It began with a sectarian Islamic prayer and featured remarks from Middlebury’s vice president of equity and inclusion, Khuram Hussain, who conveniently did not attend the Jewish vigil. The director of StandWithUs’s Center for Legal Justice, the legal arm of the well-known Jewish advocacy organization, told the Free Beacon that “the Middlebury administration seems to think they’re off the radar and can get away with the disparate treatment of Jewish students because everyone is focused on Harvard.” The center filed a federal Title VI civil rights complaint, arguing that “there’s not just a hostile environment for Jewish students; the administration also seems to be directly complicit.”

Netanyahu returns ‘friendly’ fire The Israeli prime minister’s equanimity has its limits in the face of potshots from Washington.By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-returns-friendly-fire/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s angry response to recent comments emanating from Washington is as welcome as it was long in coming. For obvious reasons relating to the need for American ammo—and stemming from his deference to his country’s most important ally—Bibi has been careful to keep all discourse from his end dignified.

Despite being subjected to repeated digs from Democrats over his “extremist” coalition and renewed calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state, he has taken every opportunity to thank the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden for its support.

He has managed to keep his cool when admonished by “backers” about his execution of the war against Hamas. Rather than voicing outrage in the face of professed tough-love warnings over potential violations of international law, he has rebutted by describing the care taken by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties.  

He has countered accusations of causing famine in Gaza by pointing to the massive amounts of humanitarian goods entering the Strip and Israel’s efforts to prevent Hamas from stealing and selling it. He has also explained to those admonishing him not to enter Rafah why doing so is necessary, and promised that plans are underway to evacuate non-combatant residents from the area.

But even Bibi’s equanimity, no matter how tactical, has its limits. These were tested on Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose jaw-dropping chutzpah came on the heels of comparable gall spewed by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a lengthy speech on the Senate floor, Schumer asserted that Netanyahu “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

Fatah is right – Hamas is to blame for the war in Gaza It’s time we called out the woke left’s neo-imperial belief that Israel is to blame for everything. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/18/fatah-is-right-hamas-is-to-blame-for-the-war-in-gaza/

So, there you have it: Fatah is now taking a more grown-up line on the Gaza war than most of the woke left. Where Western radicals are still running around damning Israel as a uniquely barbaric state that is carrying out a genocidal pillage of Gaza, Fatah says that, actually, a certain terror army called Hamas bears vast moral responsibility for this calamity. It was Hamas’s ‘adventure’ of 7 October that lit the fire of this war, this ‘horrific and crueller [Nakba] than the Nakba of 1948’, Fatah says. It’s true – so why can so few in the West see it?

Fatah is the party of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank. It has rarely seen eye to eye with Hamas. In fact, they have a bloody history of rivalry. Now they’re at it again. Abbas has appointed a new prime minister, Mohammad Mustafa, and this has ticked off both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We weren’t consulted, they wail. In a stinging reply, Fatah said: ‘Did Hamas consult the Palestinian leadership… when it made its decision to carry out the “adventure” of last 7 October, which led to a catastrophe more horrific and crueller than the Nakba of 1948?’

Ouch. And it gets harsher. ‘Those who were responsible for the return of the occupation to the Gaza Strip and [who] caused the Nakba which our Palestinian people live… have no right to dictate national priorities’, Fatah fumed. There it is, the R-word – Hamas is responsible for the present disaster in Gaza. It’s a significant moment. As the Jerusalem Post says, this marks the ‘first time in which a formal Palestinian voice has blamed Hamas for the disastrous outcomes of the 7 October massacre’.

What’s hilarious – or horrifying – is that if a Fatah official were to say any of this on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo in London or LA, he’d be rounded on by the mob, possibly punched, and denounced as an apologist for Israel and a Zio-cuck. This isn’t a hypothetical. Counter-protesters who have correctly branded Hamas as terrorists or damned them for bringing war to Gaza have been insulted and even assaulted by these hate marchers masquerading as peace activists. It seems it’s safer to criticise Hamas in Palestine than in Westminster or Brooklyn. What’s going on?

It has been a chief aim of the West’s ‘pro-Palestine’ set to absolve Hamas of responsibility for the war in Gaza. Everything is Israel’s fault, apparently. Even Hamas’s own pogrom. As those overeducated radicals at Harvard infamously said on 7 October, the day of the anti-Semitic slaughter, Israel is ‘the only one to blame’ for the violence (my emphasis). Israel is ‘entirely responsible’ for what’s happening, said the Ivy League midwits. Such craven absolution of Hamas was widespread in the days after the pogrom. All violence is ‘a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime’, said the Democratic Socialists of America.

Berkeley Is a Safe Space for Hate Thuggish intimidation of Jewish students and teachers is the new normal as leftist brownshirts topple once-heralded free speech bastion by Daniel Solomon

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/berkeley-safe-space-for-hate

If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.

The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus “Free Palestine” movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which “equity” and “anti-colonialism” act as shields for rank antisemitism.

Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a “learning space” that exemplifies “what’s possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community.”

Long Tyranny A Greater Threat Than Long COVID

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/19/long-tyranny-a-greater-threat-than-long-covid/

The policy response to the coronavirus outbreak was as deadly as the disease.

Not to downplay the damage done by COVID, but we’re still dealing with a far worse disease and will be for some time. It has no medical name but if it did, we’d call it the tyrannococcus.

From the top we acknowledge that the novel coronavirus killed millions around the world. This is not a statistic but a procession of tragedies, and they happened despite the policy responses from those who claimed to be our guardians. Now, four years later, the experts are telling us to treat the disease similar to the way we treat the flu. The much-feared “long COVID appears to manifest as a post-viral syndrome indistinguishable from seasonal influenza and other respiratory illnesses,” says Medical Xpress.

Yet the damage wrought by governments, spread by the tyrannococcus machine, will continue well beyond 2024. “We will be dealing with the harm done for decades,” says Martin Kulldorf, the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist who was fired from his Harvard faculty position because he objected to COVID vaccine mandates.

Rather than respond in any sort of reasonable way, elected and unelected officials acted as tyrants, closing businesses, restricting our freedom to move about, limiting the number of people who could gather in private homes, requiring mask use and mandating vaccinations. “There was very little oversight or limitation on the powers conferred to” the agencies that made those decisions, says the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. They simply gave themselves power they should have never wielded.

Biden Weakens America’s Global Clout Step one for renewed respect is a serious defense budget. Step two: Kill some crows.By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-weakens-americas-global-clout-defense-budget-deterrence-failure-44d13d14?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

With Niger’s gross domestic product at a miserable $545 per person in 2022, the United Nations ranks the landlocked country as one of the five least-developed nations on the planet.

Over the weekend Niger’s government responded to American accusations that it was negotiating to sell uranium to Iran by ending military cooperation with the U.S. The decision is another win for Vladimir Putin’s effort to extend Russian power, a welcome boost to Iran, and a serious blow to America’s plans for combating the return of jihadist violence across a swath of Africa.

It is also one more sign that the Biden administration is losing its ability to shape international events.

In blowing off President Biden, Niger’s military junta is joining a global trend. Mr. Putin renews his threats of nuclear use, rejects talk of diplomacy and hints at even greater ambitions as he grinds out bloody conquests in Ukraine. Iran is helping one of its proxies close the Red Sea while another fires missiles and rockets into Israel. North Korea is beefing up its nuclear and conventional forces. China is massively boosting defense spending while pressing its advantages across the Indo-Pacific and into the Western hemisphere. From Haiti to Sudan, warlords and gang bosses thumb their noses at American diplomatic efforts to restore stability.

Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later Mandatory lockdowns had almost no benefit—but did significant economic and health-related damage. By Scott W. Atlas and Steve H. Hanke

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lessons-learned-four-years-later-596a9fa9?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Four years ago this week Vice President Mike Pence announced the White House’s “15 days to slow the spread” campaign. What followed was the unprecedented use of lockdowns, school closings and other sweeping measures to mitigate Covid-19. Four years later, we know what many of us suspected then: None of those policies were successful, and many were gravely damaging.

The Covid health benefits of mandatory lockdowns were tiny. Lockdowns in the U.S. prevented between 4,000 and 16,000 Covid deaths. In an average year 37,000 Americans die from the flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lockdowns also failed to reduce infections more than a trivial amount, in part because people voluntarily alter their behavior when a bad bug is in the air. Coercive government policies generated few benefits—and massive costs.

Public-health agencies exacerbated the damage by failing to keep their heads and follow standard pandemic-management protocols. Before 2020, it was recognized that communities respond best to pandemics when government measures are only minimally disruptive. During Covid, however, officials junked that practice by green-lighting restrictive practices and intentionally stoking fear. That response overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of those caused by the virus.

Those harms are captured, in part, in excess deaths—the number beyond what would have been expected without a pandemic. Non-Covid excess deaths from lockdowns, the shutdown of non-Covid medical care, and societal panic are estimated at nearly 100,000 between April 2020 and at least the end of 2021. The number of lockdown and societal-disruption deaths since 2020 is likely around 400,000, as much as 100 times the number of Covid deaths the lockdowns prevented.

Democrats Turn Against Israel Biden agrees with Schumer and puts a domestic twist on the ‘two-state solution.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-hamas-michigan-nevada-af0cccaa?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that “no international pressure will stop us from realizing all of the goals of the war: Eliminating Hamas, freeing all of our hostages and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel.” That this is interpreted as a challenge to President Biden speaks volumes about the shift in U.S. policy toward Israel.

The joke around Jerusalem is that while Mr. Biden once worked to help Israel after Oct. 7, he’s now working on the “two-state solution”: Michigan and Nevada. Israelis notice that the President rarely speaks of defeating Hamas anymore. Instead, he bashes Israel under the cover of bashing its Prime Minister.

This dance is Mr. Biden’s way of catering to the anti-Israel left without alienating the bulk of U.S. voters who would find it unconscionable to turn on the Israeli people in wartime. What Henry Kissinger once said about Israel having no foreign policy, only domestic politics, Israelis are now saying about America. How else to explain Mr. Biden’s “red line” on Rafah, Hamas’s final stronghold?

Mr. Netanyahu says, “You cannot say you support Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas and then oppose Israel when it takes the actions necessary to achieve that goal.” To leave Hamas in power in Rafah is to lose the war, and to replace Hamas with Fatah is to lose the peace. That’s an Israeli consensus, not “Bibi.”

Israeli officials say the U.S. military understands that Rafah must fall, but Biden officials don’t. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that “our position is that Hamas should not be allowed a safe haven in Rafah or anywhere else, but a major ground operation there would be a mistake.” Yet none of their political solutions for Gaza can succeed if Hamas battalions remain intact. There will be no politics if Hamas can put bullets in the heads of its Palestinian rivals.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Lessons in geography for some anti-Israel protesters.

First, to those calling for a two-state solution: Look at a map! Judea and Samaria (aka known as the West Bank) has an Arab city named Tulkarm which is only nine miles from the Mediterranean Sea which would give the “River to the Sea” barbarians an opportunity to divide Israel’s population with disastrous consequences.

Second, Israeli students should join the protests of Asians calling for race, gender, and ethnic neutral admissions to Harvard. Israel is in Asia, a fact that even some supporters don’t know. Duh!

Third, the moron of the week prize goes to a protester who recently declared: “If you can put a man on the moon, you can craft a cease-fire. Duh!

Michael Ordman’s weekly catalog of Israel’s dazzling contributions to humanity gives the lie to other shibboleths and outright lies about Israel. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Christian Embassy donates 4 ambulances. The International Christian Embassy Jerusalem has donated four new ambulances to help replace the dozens of Israeli ambulances destroyed on and since Oct 7. One is an advanced military  ambulance for Gaza border communities. One will serve Holocaust survivors in the North.
https://www.jns.org/wire/international-christian-embassy-jerusalem-donates-four-new-ambulances-to-israel/
 
Reservists complain – let us fight. Israel’s military ombudswoman Brig. Gen. (res.) Rachel Tevet-Wiesel has found that most of the 1,316 complaints during the first three months of the war (Oct-Dec) were civilians seeking to return to reserve duty after receiving exemptions and reservists asking to be moved to a combat unit.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-ombudswoman-report-finds-rise-in-reservists-clamoring-to-be-allowed-to-fight/
 
The largest ever IDF enlistment of Yeshiva students. The upcoming IDF recruitment cycle will include a record 1,000 fighters from the Hesder yeshivot (300 to combat units); another 300 from Zionist yeshivot gevohot (post high school yeshivot); and hundreds more from religious pre-military preparatory schools.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/386759
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-confirms-1300-to-be-recruited-early-from-pre-army-programs/
 
Volunteering changed her life. On Oct 7 Yocheved Ruttenberg was in Dallas Texas waiting for her lone soldier brother to return from Israel so they could start a business in the USA. Now Yocheved is co-founder of NGO Sword of Iron – Israel Volunteer Opportunities, helping others organize their Israel volunteering trips.
https://www.israel21c.org/how-a-two-week-trip-to-volunteer-turned-lifechanging/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/353201190423242/
 
You need it, Ariel 3D-prints it. Ariel Harush is an engineering student at Israel’s Ben Gurion University. He 3D-printed a radio connector for a friend in the IDF and suddenly army commanders were asking for 1,000 of them. He and 400 volunteers have since printed 43,000 items, from knee pads to night-vision rifle adaptors.
https://nocamels.com/2024/03/volunteer-engineer-is-3d-printing-kit-for-israeli-troops-at-war/
                                                     
Latin America solidarity mission. A delegation of governors and mayors from Panama, Uruguay, Honduras, Chile, and Guatemala, traveled to southern Israeli cities targeted on Oct 7 and met with family members of Israeli hostages during their four-day trip.
https://www.jns.org/latin-american-local-leaders-pay-solidarity-visit-to-israel/
 
IFCJ funds 123 bomb shelters. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (FCJ) is funding more than one and a half million dollars to place 123 shelters alongside bus stops serving 42 northern Israeli communities, amid Israel’s ongoing conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah. 
https://www.jns.org/ifcj-funding-123-shelters-for-bus-stops-near-lebanon-border/
 
Sderot supermarket re-opens. The first supermarket in Sderot has reopened more than five months after the Israeli city was mostly evacuated due to the war with Hamas. Its owner, Prosper Peretz, said, “I worked throughout the war, even though my house was hit by a rocket. I didn’t give up and I didn’t leave the city.”
https://unitedwithisrael.org/sderot-supermarket-open-for-business-5-months-after-hamas-invasion/
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Phage therapy combats antibiotic resistance. The Israeli Phage Therapy Center (IPTC), led by two Hebrew University of Jerusalem professors, has used a bacteriophage PASA16 on compassionate basis to treat tough Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections in 16 patients. It has shown promising results with an 86.6% success rate.
https://en.huji.ac.il/news/anti-bacterial-virus-phage-pasa16-treated-antibiotic-resistant-infections-866
https://www.cell.com/med/abstract/S2666-6340(23)00225-8
 
How do some viruses get nasty? Tel Aviv University researchers discovered a mechanism used by viruses to decide whether to kill their bacterial host. These phages monitor the health of the cell they are occupying. They also check that there are no viruses residing in nearby cells that the phages wish to occupy.
https://foodsecurity.tau.ac.il/sbcr/news/how-do-viruses-choose-whether-to-become-nasty-or-not-16-1-2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-023-01551-3
 
Clues may lead to a cure for Parkinson’s. Researchers at Haifa University have discovered that sufferers of Parkinson’s disease have brain cells that are deficient in mRNA and proteins that build the extracellular matrix (ECM).  It is the ECM that provides brain cells with structural and biochemical support.
https://www.israel21c.org/parkinsons-breakthrough-link-discovered-between-disease-and-brain/
 
500 doctors to make Aliyah.  Nefesh b’Nefesh’s Medex event held in Teaneck, NJ was a huge success. Nearly 500 medical professionals attended from 30 states and provinces in the US and Canada, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, therapists, dental hygienists, and many more. A European event is scheduled end-March.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/03/11/nefesh-bnefesh-inaugurates-international-medical-aliyah-program-to-combat-israels-physician-shortage/  https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/health-services/article-791431