RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/our-punchline-in-chief/

Joe Biden is, quite literally, a joke.

F . Scott Fitzgerald was incorrect when he averred that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But, if we tweak his aphorism just a little, we will arrive quickly at the truth: There are no second acts in American lives once the American in question has become a joke.

Joe Biden has become a joke.

I do not mean this as a sharp criticism, but quite literally. Joe Biden is a meme. He is a punchline. He is a source of mirth and amusement. Worse still, he is the subject of a series of jokes with which the apolitical and disengaged have become casually familiar. “Why,” I hear it asked, “has Biden fallen so far, so quickly in the public’s estimation, and why has he not recovered?” The answer to both questions is that he is inspiring the wrong response in the public at large. Disappointment can be addressed. Anger can be quelled. Suspicion can be dissipated. Ill fortune can be reversed. But mockery is another matter altogether: In politics, ridicule — that freewheeling cousin of contempt and derision — has a nasty habit of becoming permanent. “They laugh that win,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed. And they who are laughed at, lose.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-sunrise-dc-zionism-left-green-new-deal-israel-boycott-11634910900?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, what to make of anti-Zionism? It is increasingly in vogue on the left, and throwing its weight around. Consider Sunrise DC, Washington hub of the Sunrise Movement, an activist group whose once-fringe proposal for a Green New Deal is now de rigueur on the left. On Wednesday Sunrise DC announced it would pull out of an event advocating statehood for the District of Columbia, a cause it supports, because of the involvement of three “Zionist organizations.”

All three groups are liberal. The National Council of Jewish Women gives “Israel grants” to Women Lawyers for Social Justice and a group helping Palestinian women. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs wants to “end mass incarceration,” rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and secure a two-state solution. The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism represents the most liberal major Jewish denomination. It urges “immigration justice” and promises to “address our own behaviors, practices and policies through the lens of racial equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

If even these groups can be deemed toxic on the left—and Sunrise DC calls on an activist coalition to banish them—which Jews can’t? This points to an unavoidable fact: Anti-Zionism means marginalizing American Jews, some 90% of whom have positive views of Israel per Gallup’s review of studies. A token anti-Israel fringe doesn’t change that.

Take anti-Zionist logic to its conclusion. If the effort for D.C. statehood must exclude Zionists, shouldn’t the Democratic Party do the same? How about university faculties, media outlets and other major corporations? Arguing that Zionism is racism and silence is complicity, a successful American anti-Zionism would arrive at Ruth Wisse’s definition of anti-Semitism: the organization of politics against the Jews.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-we-lose-when-we-lose-thomas?token=

After years of debate and a unanimous decision by New York City officials, the statue of Thomas Jefferson that has stood in the City Council chamber since 1915 is on its way out. Banished from official display, the seven-foot likeness will find its new home, likely in the New York Historical Society, by the end of the year.

The removal is disgraceful. Unlike monuments to Confederate leaders that display them in full military glory, Jefferson is depicted as a writer. Holding a quill pen in one hand and the Declaration of Independence in the other, he is clearly being honored for composing an immortal argument for liberty and equality. That is the accomplishment that the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, in a 2019 letter, called “the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded.”

It is a fact known to all Americans that Jefferson didn’t live up to his own words. He owned more than 600 people over the course of his life. Unlike George Washington, moreover, he did not take even halting steps toward manumission. It’s little comfort that Jefferson recognized his own hypocrisy. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Jefferson asked in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” 

The removal of the statue isn’t just an attack on Jefferson, though. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it: “The New York City Council hearing on Monday to remove a statue honoring Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence — a serious blow, especially to the most vulnerable among us, for whom Jefferson’s cry of equality is the last best hope.”