https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20415/us-abandoned-israel
“Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people. And I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be.” — US President Joe Biden, October 18, 2023.
It did not take long, however, for the Biden administration to completely turn that promise on its head. The reversal began with US demands on Israel to scale down military operations, which were already scaled down….
“Israel implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other nation in history…. Israel’s use of real phone calls to civilians in combat areas (19,734), SMS texts (64,399) and pre-recorded calls (almost 6 million) to provide instructions on evacuations is also unprecedented.” — John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point, newsweek.com, January 31, 2024
The only relevant country that has apparently not been invited to the “urgent” discussions [to reward terrorists unilaterally with a soon-to-be-militarized Palestinian State] is Israel.
Biden, clearly, seems not that intent on making Israel or the Free World a safe place again. At least not if it might compromise his reelection.
“I come to Israel with a single message: You are not alone,” US President Joe Biden said right after the October 7 massacre by the terrorist organization Hamas of Israelis, Muslims, Americans, Europeans, Filipinos and Thai visitors enjoying a Saturday holiday in southern Israel. “As long as the United States stands — and we will stand forever — we will not let you ever be alone,” Biden continued.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/20/amy-winehouse-and-the-fanaticism-of-the-israelophobes/
Not content with pillorying living Jews, now they’re coming for the dead ones. Witness the desecration of the statue of Amy Winehouse in Camden Town in London. Some lowlife covered the statue’s Star of David necklace with a Palestine sticker. Just when you thought woke anti-Semites couldn’t get any more repellent, they go and defile the likeness of one of modern Britain’s greatest cultural icons. And for one simple, chilling and sickening reason – because she was a Jew.
There have been many gross acts of Jew hate in the UK since the Hamas pogrom of 7 October. Posters of kidnapped Israeli kids have been daubed with Hitler moustaches. The word ‘Gaza’ was spraypainted outside a Holocaust library. Jews have suffered a tsunami of ‘hate incidents’. But there’s something about the posthumous racial harassment of Amy that feels especially egregious. It’s the fanaticism of it. For me, it’s the realisation that there are people in London so in thrall to Jew hate that they can’t even walk by a statue of a singer who died 13 years ago without furiously eradicating its Jewish symbols.
The violation of Amy was an act of brazen racial bigotry. It has eerie echoes of a darker past when Jewish institutions and symbols – synagogues, Jewish-owned shops, Jewish gravestones – were frequently set upon by mobs of the hateful. Yes, it’s good that the weapon in this case was a mere peelable sticker, easily removed, rather than stones or fire. But the fact that the thing is happening again, the fact we’re witnessing a return of seething intolerance for outward expressions of Jewishness, should leave us truly cold.
The shaming of Amy the Jew confirms that the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is now so thin as to be virtually imperceptible. The git who put up that sticker no doubt thought he was being pro-Palestinian when in truth he was being anti-Jew. The racist probably thinks he is anti-racist. For all the defensive bleating of the activist class about their ‘anti-Zionism’ being a zillion miles from anti-Semitism, it is everyday Jews who are getting it in the neck on the back of the Israelophobic hysteria these people have whipped up since 7 October.
Indeed, long before the late Ms Winehouse had her Star of David hidden, many British Jews had taken to hiding their Jewishness. The Campaign Against Antisemitism found that 69 per cent of Britain’s Jews say they are less likely to show ‘visible signs of their Judaism’ right now. Kids at the Jewish Free School in London were given permission – for ‘security reasons’ – to remove their school blazer and tie when travelling to and from school. Some Jewish uni students have stopped wearing their kippahs after getting flak from campus leftists. Tell me – if anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have nothing in common, why are their consequences so unnervingly similar?
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/youre-not-imagining-food-inflation/
On the menu today: A new report in the Wall Street Journal confirms what you likely suspected — despite the Consumer Price Index numbers (CPI) getting much closer to normal, you’re still paying more to eat, whether you’re shopping at the grocery store or going out to a restaurant. In fact, Americans haven’t spent this much of their money on food since the early 1990s — a fact that is likely to widen the divide between the administration’s happy talk about the economy and Americans’ perceptions that they’re constantly being squeezed, even if they’re making more money than a few years ago. Meanwhile, to fight the rising cost of living, states are hiking the minimum wage, left and right. Hey, it’s not like that increased cost of labor could ever get passed along to consumers, right?
The ‘Shrinkflation’ Election
Have you had this experience? You read that the year-to-year numbers of the CPI indicate that inflation is largely, if not completely, beaten . . . and then you go to Trader Joe’s or your local grocery store, or you take the family out to eat, and when the bill comes you think someone has mistaken you for a much wealthier person. Did I accidentally get charged for a Lamborghini in there somewhere?
(This is where the typical Biden-defending lefty will jump in and say, “This is because you’re shopping at expensive stores and restaurants!” For what it’s worth, Trader Joe’s is less expensive than the average grocery store*. And if you want to argue that by living in northern Virginia, I’m buying food in a part of the country with a higher cost of living, fine, but the point is not that things are expensive compared to other places, it’s that things are expensive in this place compared to prices in the not-so-distant past in this place. )
Over in the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Newman and Heather Haddon lay out the numbers demonstrating that we’re not just imagining this. Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food since 1991:
The last time Americans spent this much of their money on food, George H.W. Bush was in office, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was in theaters and C+C Music Factory was rocking the Billboard charts.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-shocked-me-about-the-culture
There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the most passionate, literary critic and Shakespeare scholar in America.” When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, “You were forged in a fire.” I also met the psychology professor Albert Bandura—who at the time was 91 years old and died in 2021—to chat about a book he had recently written. I was surprised at how late in life many professors worked—some well into their eighties and even nineties. This was a notable difference from the aging adults I knew in my adoptive hometown of Red Bluff, Northern California, who typically looked forward to retirement and preferred not to work longer than they had to, unless it was out of financial necessity.
Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.
“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.
I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-nitwits-on-campuses-who-want-an-end-to-israel/
These campus nitwits and stormtroopers in posse endlessly chant their dislike — no, their hatred — for the tiny Jewish state, and their hope for its disappearance, with its Jewish population expelled or killed, so that it may be replaced by a twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” On the other hand, they find the terror group Hamas, “the resistance” that showed its mettle on October 7, thoroughly admirable.
Here are a few snapshots of the latest demonstrations, which on some campuses are now a monthly or even a weekly affair.
At Stanford, you can see the “Sit-In To Stop Genocide” here:
No one in the Stanford crowd seems to have any problem with describing the war in Gaza as a “genocide,” even though we know that, in order to save civilian lives, the IDF has used every possible means to warn people to leave areas, and to notify civilians to get away from individual buildings that are about to be targeted. It has dropped millions of leaflets, sent millions of pre-recorded messages, made 79,000 phone calls. And if Israel were intent on committing a “genocide” of the Gazans, why is the sister of Yahya Sinwar now being treated in an Israeli hospital?
At Harvard, a black student harangues his audience here:
He repeats again and again that “there is no black liberation without Palestinian liberation.” And he insists that “there cannot be freedom anywhere as long as Palestine is not free.” He reminds his audience that he is a “history major,” which, I presume, is supposed to testify to the breadth and depth of his knowledge.
I wonder what that black student thinks of the hundreds of thousands of black Africans who are now being held as slaves by Arab masters in Niger, Mali, and Mauritania? I suspect he thinks nothing, because he has never heard a word about those slaves. And if he did hear about Arab slave masters and their black slaves, he would dismiss it as a fiction promoted by “Zionist propagandists.”
At Columbia, students chant “We don’t want two states. We want all of it” here:
In their most recent demonstration, the Columbia students poured fake blood on the snow in the middle of the campus — meant to represent, of course, not the blood shed by Israeli victims of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, but rather, the blood of the innocent civilians who, we are expected to believe, were being deliberately murdered by the IDF in Gaza.
Fortunately, universities have girded their loins and are one by one showing that they are prepared to face down the pro-Hamas protesters. MIT is the latest in a growing list of schools that are cracking down on pro-Palestinian student organizations, citing similar grounds. The MIT student group that was suspended is Coalition Against Apartheid – an offshoot of the better-known Students for Justice in Palestine. Columbia has banned two pro-Palestinian groups. So has George Washington University. Brandeis University has permanently suspended all pro-Palestinian groups on campus. A congressional investigation into antisemitism on American campuses, obviously prompted by the hideous spectacle of these menacing pro-Palestinian groups, has now begun. Things are looking up.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-will-politicians-stop-calling-themselves-progressives-d7380f6f?mod=opinion_lead_pos12
This column has searched and searched for years and still cannot find evidence for the existence of any great civilization built by progressive leftists. Your humble correspondent does not want to be called a quitter and is determined to maintain an open mind. But it’s hard to keep hope alive. Seeing the destruction wrought by progressive policies on great cities and towns across this country, one wonders how long it will be before even the most radical elected officials refuse to self-identify with the tarnished label.
The brand now stands for human degradation, yet there are still a few hardy comrades willing to wear it proudly. As U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) campaigns for a third term this year, her campaign website proclaims her “one of the country’s leading progressive voices.”
When it comes to policy, she shows no sign of altering her course. To take one example, Sen. Warren still wants fewer cops and more treatment providers responding to drug-related 911 calls. But on the other side of the country another high-profile experiment in progressive drug policy has gone catastrophically wrong.
Katia Riddle reports for the Guardian:
When voters approved Measure 110 in 2020, they made Oregon the scene of a novel social experiment in the US by decriminalising the possession of small amounts of hard drugs and funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into substance abuse treatment.
The vote was celebrated as a groundbreaking step toward a compassionate approach to substance use disorders, one that prioritised treatment over punishment. But nearly three years after its passage, the law has become the subject of fierce debate as Oregon, like many US states, grapples with a spiralling opioid crisis…Lawmakers are now considering a number of bills that would reinstate criminal penalties such as fines and jail time for drug possession – a decision that could come any day.
No one is saying that treatment isn’t vital, but removing law enforcement from the equation now appears to be anything but compassionate. Ms. Riddle adds:
At a community forum in January, the Eugene district attorney Christopher Parosa summed up the recent prevailing mood. “What has developed in the last three years is not the utopian Shangri-La that we have been promised with ballot measure 110,” said Parosa, “but rather a dystopian nightmare that is akin to a grim Hollywood movie.”
http://bit.ly/3T7N2lM
*FBI Director Christopher A. Wray visited Israel on February 14, 2024, during the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah wars, meeting with leaders of the Mossad, Israel’s Secret Service, and Israel’s National Police in order to benefit from Israel’s unique urban and tunnel warfare experience and battle tactics in the war against Islamic terrorists, who are advancing the vision of Iran’s Ayatollahs and the Moslem Brotherhood.
*Director Wray considers Israel’s as the most effective battle-tested laboratory of the US armed forces, law enforcement agencies and defense industries.
*Director Wray is aware of the Ayatollahs’ and Hezbollas’ growing entrenchment in Mexico, along the US-Mexico border and throughout Latin America. In fact, since the early 1980s, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah have entrenched themselves in Latin America, bolstering collaboration with the drug cartels of Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, all Latin American terror organizations, and each anti-US Latin American government. They supply the drug cartels underground tunnel construction equipment, and train them in the areas of car bombs and Improvised Explosive Devices. In addition, they have leveraged the convoys of illegal aliens from Guatemala to the US-Mexico border, smuggling terrorists and drug traffickers into the US.
*Islamic terrorism has targeted the US since the early 19th century irrespective of US policy and independent of the identity of the US President. Thus, Islamic terrorism afflicted the US during the presidencies of both Trump and Obama, G.W. Bush and Clinton, Reagan and Carter.
*Hamas is a branch of the Moslem Brotherhood – the largest Sunni terror organization with religious, educational and welfare branches – whose charter aims to topple all national Islamic regimes, establish a universal Islamic society, bring the Western “infidel” – and especially the USA – to submission, and establish Islam as the only legitimate and divinely-ordained religion.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/did-scotus-green-light-racial-discrimination
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it would not hear Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case concerning revised admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Alexandria, Virginia. The school has adopted a new admissions policy that, while race-neutral on its face, effectively penalizes Asian American applicants. The Court’s denial of certiorari practically endorses efforts to discriminate against Asian American students and may lead other schools to follow suit.
Before 2020, TJ’s admissions process was strictly merit-based. Any student who had completed or was enrolled in Algebra I and held at least a 3.0 grade point average was eligible to apply. Applicants were required to take a standardized test, similar to the SAT/ACT, and those with the highest scores advanced to the process’s second round, in which they had to submit two teacher recommendations and complete three writing prompts and a problem-solving essay. TJ’s class of 2024 (the last admitted under the old, merit-based system) is 73 percent Asian, 17.7 percent white, 3.3 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent black.
The high number of Asian American students at TJ—and the correspondingly low number of black and Hispanic students—troubled education officials in Fairfax County. TJ principal Ann Bonitatibus, for example, said in October 2020 that she wanted a student body that “more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.” One school board member wrote in an email that she was “angry and disappointed” with TJ’s racial makeup. Other education officials in Fairfax County stated that TJ’s entrance exam had led to too many “students who had been in test prep since second grade.”
Apparently in response to these objections, the school board crafted a new admissions policy in December 2020. The new scheme limits how many students each area public middle school can send to TJ (the equivalent of 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade enrollment). It also calls for applicants to be evaluated on several criteria, including GPA; a “portrait sheet” where they must demonstrate “graduate attributes” and “21st century skills”; a problem-solving essay; and “experience factors.” These “experience factors” include whether a student is economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, participating in a special-education program, or attending an underrepresented middle school. Notably, the school board struck the standardized-testing requirement.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/bad-policies-leaving-next-generation-of-surgeons-unprepared
What is going on in surgery? Why are young surgeons are coming out of residency programs unprepared for clinical practice? A 2013 Annals of Surgery report revealed that 40 percent of surgical residents lacked confidence to practice independently after five years of training, the typical length of a full general-surgery residency. According to the same report, one in five surveyed program directors “felt that new fellows arrived unprepared for the operating room,” and program directors deemed 66 percent of new fellows incapable of operating unsupervised for more than 30 minutes in a major surgery.
While these statistics are frightening, that report is 11 years old. Have things gotten better since? Judging by more recent reports and my conversations with peers, they have not, and in fact, have probably gotten worse. Surgeons I have recently spoken to have observed that too many young surgeons are poorly prepared and need remedial help, such as operating with a more experienced surgeon before they can be trusted to operate on their own. The young surgeons themselves seem to realize their inadequate preparation, as nearly 80 percent of post-general-training surgeons pursue a one or two-year fellowship in a subspecialty, which for some may be a way to get more surgical experience and put off entering general practice.
One possible explanation for young surgeons’ lack of preparation stems from the American Council on Graduate Medical Education’s 2003 decision to limit residents in training to 80-hour work weeks and no more than 24 consecutive work hours. For surgery residents, fewer work hours means less time spent caring for patients and performing surgeries. Only with time and repetition do surgical residents develop the requisite cognitive and technical skills necessary to learn sound surgical judgement—knowing when to operate and what operation to do—and how to operate safely under all circumstances. The hour reductions also have resulted in less continuity, as residents hand off patients to one another, diminishing residents’ sense of responsibility for patient care.
