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May 2024

The ‘Palestinian State’: Hamas Plays Westerners for Fools – Again by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20611/palestinian-state-hamas

[T]he Iran-backed Hamas terror group is again trying to dupe gullible Westerners, including the Biden administration and the European Union, into believing that it has accepted the “two-state solution.”

The Hamas official would not have dared to utter similar nonsense to an Arab media outlet. He knows that here his lies are directed at English-speaking audiences, who tend to swallow whole the baloney spouted by Israel’s enemies.

The Hamas official wants everyone to believe that his group is ready to stop killing Jews for a period of five years “or more” if it gets the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. He just forgot to mention that there was an official truce between Israel and Hamas until October 7, when the terror group Hamas initiated the current war.

The Hamas official also forgot to mention that Hamas has repeatedly violated several truces and ceasefire agreements reached with Israel over the past 17 years. The truces and ceasefires were always used by Hamas to regroup and rearm in preparation for the next round of attacking Israel.

Hamas will never abandon its weapons or dismantle its armed group, especially after the establishment of a Palestinian state

The mere talk about a Palestinian state these days is regarded as a reward for Hamas’s genocidal assault on Israel. It sends the message to Hamas that after you murdered so many Jews, the international community will reward you by giving you a state. It reaffirms that terrorism works. Where do we sign up?

The secret that the AP and the US administration do not want you to know is that Hamas does not actually want the Gaza Strip or the West Bank or east Jerusalem. Hamas wants to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Iran-backed Islamist terror state.

If Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are given a state next to Israel, they will absolutely continue to pursue their goal of killing Jews and obliterating Israel. Hamas official Ghazi Hamad has clearly said that the terror group will repeat the October 7 attack, time and again, until Israel is annihilated.

Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal has repeatedly clarified that his group’s acceptance of a Palestinian state does not mean that it will abandon its goal of destroying Israel.

“The lines below are for the next person who comes to me with ‘Hamas agreed to two state solution.’ It DID NOT! Hamas outlines this scenario fully in its Charter as amended in 2017…. Hamas will likely then stock as much rockets and drones possible for the next round of war to destroy Israel…. Prophet Muhammad is said to have entered into a 10-year truce with the infidels. He conquered them a few years into the truce. Hamas imagines a similar scenario with Israel.” — Hussain Abdul-Hussain, X, April 25, 2024.

Hamas is well aware of the credulity of the international community. It knows that it can engage in all forms of propaganda and win friends in the West. It also knows that the best vehicle to advance its goal of killing Jews and destroying Israel is a “two-state solution.”

Heather Mac Donald Sham Science “Inclusive scholarship” is the latest justification for failed diversity efforts.

The dean of the Case Western Reserve Medical School recently urged the medical profession to embrace “inclusive scholarship.” Dean Stan Gerson’s arguments for doing so epitomize the falsehoods that govern academic life today.

After a nod to the alleged virtues of “teaching indigenous knowledge alongside science” (a definitive takedown of the “indigenous knowledge” racket is here), Gerson gets to the heart of his argument:

Inclusive scholarship is not new, it has been essential to scientific discovery, innovation and conceptual breakthroughs for 3,000 years. It is . . . as old as the Hippocratic Oath, linking medical practice, culture and scientific innovation. It is not a passive effort—it takes work to manage different voices and perspectives either coming from one’s global social perspective or collected from conversations with students and colleagues from different backgrounds. All contribute to the fabric of innovation and discovery.

To the unwary, this opening claim for the long lineage of “inclusive scholarship” may seem innocuous. Science is naturally inclusive. Scientists have long built on each other’s work, particularly in the modern era. But Gerson refers to something other than spontaneous scientific dialogue.

It turns out that inclusive scholarship “is not a passive effort—it takes work to manage different voices and perspectives either coming from one’s global social perspective or collected from conversations with students and colleagues from different backgrounds.” Who has done this “work” of managing “different voices” for the past “3,000 years?” Gerson does not say.

Gerson’s use of the term “voices” gives away the nature of the “perspectives” and of the “work” to be done. In the progressive rhetorical arsenal, only certain individuals possess a valued “voice:” the allegedly “silenced,” the allegedly “marginalized,” the non-white, the non-heteronormative. These are the groups that scientific managers of “different voices” must strive to include.

Under traditional scholarship, anyone with scientific insight will be included in knowledge-building. Under “inclusive scholarship,” however, merely having a previously unrepresented “voice” entitles you to a place in the ladder of discovery.

Gerson’s letter continues:

“Our embracing this approach to inquiry in our age of inclusive excellence, expanding engagement across backgrounds, races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes, will help us break through to the next generation of discovery and improvements in health.”

Gerson’s modification of “excellence” with “inclusive” is as significant as his modification of “scholarship” with “inclusive.” If “inclusive excellence” is the same as excellence, why not just call it excellence? Because the two are not the same. “Inclusive excellence” is judged by a different standard than excellence, namely, the extent to which a given endeavor includes members of different “backgrounds, races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes.”

The excellence of science has never before been evaluated by that criterion. The plane either flies or it does not; the bridge either stands or it does not; the doctor either detects the tumor or he does not. The race and class of engineers and oncologists have heretofore had nothing to do with our judgments of their success.

Gerson is a professor of hematological oncology. He investigates stem cells and DNA repair. It is a virtual certainty that Gerson himself has not evaluated the race and class of the scientists whose work his research builds upon. But if we are to believe him now, if the scientists who made early breakthroughs in stem-cell research were overwhelmingly white and Asian, their work suffered for not being created under conditions of “inclusive scholarship” and “inclusive excellence.”

That’s a preposterous fiction. Science is a colorblind meritocracy (or was before the diversity virus hit). Research labs are stunningly multinational and multiethnic. The underrepresented groups—blacks and American Hispanics—are underrepresented because of their (on average) lower skills levels, not because of race-based exclusion, as demonstrated here.

The terms “inclusive scholarship” and “inclusive excellence” are just the latest effort to provide a justification for racial quotas. Initially, racial preferences were seen as compensatory: America had treated blacks so poorly over most of its history that it owed them dispensation from existing standards of achievement. Though blacks’ skills were not at present competitive, once brought into an elite academic environment, the preference beneficiaries would catch up, the thinking went.

That never happened. The low academic skill level that racially preferred blacks brought with them into competitive schools handicapped them from competing, and they remained behind. A black professor of mechanical engineering at MIT recently described MIT’s sad history of failed racial preferences. Students who had been chosen based on their skin color “left MIT, ashamed, bewildered, and without a degree,” recounts James H. Williams Jr. “This was an annual heartbreaking humiliation for black undergraduates at MIT, and it went on year after year.” No one at MIT or elsewhere was allowed to acknowledge these predictable consequences of academic mismatch.

As the compensatory rationale for preferences lost currency, proponents offered a new justification. Artificially engineered “diversity,” they argued, would educate white students about nonwhiteness and about their own white privilege. But such education of white students, whether or not a legitimate goal, was handicapped by black self-segregation on campuses, due to wide gaps in academic preparedness.

The latest argument, advanced by Gerson and others, is that racial preferences make for better scholarship. But the only reason that Gerson is calling for “work” to “expand engagement” by race, class, and other identity factors is that such expansion would not occur under a meritocratic system. To claim that race and class are independent positives in science means overturning the very essence of science—that it is a universal language, blind to identity and open to anyone with the capacity to contribute.

Contrary to Gerson, deliberately selecting participants in science based on their identities will not “help us break through to the next generation of discovery and improvements in health.” Quite the opposite: it will encumber that process of discovery and ensure that the global center of scientific gravity shifts to China, which cares only about its scientists’ competence, not their color. Sadly, Gerson is not an outlier. He speaks for the entire medical establishment—the AMA, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the federal funding agencies, science publishing—in his willingness, for the sake of racial virtue-signaling, to undermine the enterprise that has freed humanity from so much suffering.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit.

Hannah E. Meyers We Have a Freedom Problem At Columbia University and elsewhere, a generation of students that takes its liberties for granted behaves shamefully.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/we-have-a-freedom-problem

On Tuesday night, hundreds of New York City Police Department officers from specialized units rolled with quiet orderliness onto the campuses of Columbia University and City College. Within a few hours, they had arrested hundreds of students who had taken over campus property, barricaded buildings, destroyed furniture and windows, and allegedly even taken custodial staff hostage.

Social media soon flooded with videos capturing a rainbow coalition of twentysomethings in crop tops, piercings, and Kurt Cobain-era jeans, heads swaddled with Arab keffiyehs in solidarity with the fundamentalist Islamic forces that rule Palestinian Gaza. They shouted for violent uprising—“intifada!”—and then whined, went limp, and feigned unconsciousness as unflappable officers scooped them up, zip-tied their hands, and marched them into waiting police buses for arrest processing.

The NYPD operation, which occurred at the sundown conclusion of Passover, was uncomfortably resonant with the Jewish holiday’s central message: the great costs of freedom, and how easily we forget them.

The holiday enjoins participants not only to read aloud the story of the ancient Israelites’ miraculous exodus from Egyptian slavery, but to feel—personally­­—that they themselves had been in bondage and then freed.

What Happens When the Law and the Indictment Do Not State What the Crime Is:Bragg makes it up as he goes along, shredding due process along the way.Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-happens-when-the-law-and-the-indictment-do-not-state-what-the-crime-is/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

I have a column up today on why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former president Donald Trump violates both the federal and state constitutions.

It offends the U.S. Constitution because the indictment pleads a crime (felony falsification of business records) that is different from the one Bragg is presenting to the jury (the “crime” of conspiracy to steal an election by violating federal campaign-finance statutes — a crime that does not exist in New York law). The prosecution flouts New York’s constitution because the felony business-records-falsification statute (§175.10) does not describe with specificity what is meant by “another crime” — i.e., assuming a person falsifies business records with a fraudulent intent to conceal “another crime,” the statute does not elaborate, by describing conduct or citing other statutory provisions, what these other crimes are that would trigger the felony penalty.

When it comes to due process, it is about as basic as it gets that, to be sufficient, penal statutes and indictments must put people on notice of, respectively, what conduct has been proscribed and what proscribed conduct has been charged.

When basic due process is denied, we get the confusing farce that is the ongoing trial. The newest actor in this romp is Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels, the two women who claim to have had sexual liaisons with Trump circa 2006 — i.e., a decade before he ran for president.

Here’s a dispatch from this morning by the New York Times’ Jonah Bromwich, who is reporting from inside the courthouse (the trial is not being televised, so we much rely on such reporting):

We are still looking at the texts between Dylan Howard, then the editor of The National Enquirer, and Keith Davidson. Davidson tells Howard that Karen McDougal’s story “should be told” and Howard responds “I agree.” The Enquirer, as the jurors already know, had no intention of telling the story — instead it sought to bury it. So not only does this evidence remind us of David Pecker’s testimony last week, it also helps prosecutors double down on the idea that The National Enquirer was involved in a secret plot to help Trump. It’s a reasonable explanation for why Howard was lying.

Calls for Northwestern President’s Resignation Mount, Concessions to Protesters Draw Legal Scrutiny By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/calls-for-northwestern-presidents-resignation-mount-concessions-to-protesters-draw-legal-scrutiny/

After Northwestern University president Michael Schill announced a set of concessions to encampment organizers Monday that included pledging to implement full-ride scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics, several organizations have called for Schill’s resignation.

In a joint statement published Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, and StandWithUs urged Schill to step down from his leadership position.

“For days, protesters openly mocked and violated Northwestern’s codes of conduct and policies by erecting an encampment in which they fanned the flames of antisemitism and wreaked havoc on the entire university community,” the three organizations wrote. “Their goal was not to find peace, but to make Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. Rather than hold them accountable — as he pledged he would — President Schill gave them a seat at the table and normalized their hatred against Jewish students. It is clear from President Schill’s actions that he is unfit to lead Northwestern and must resign.”

The three groups wrote that if Schill does not resign, they expect the board of trustees to “step in as the leaders the University needs and remove him.”

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton A. Klein went a step further, arguing in a Wednesday statement that Schill, provost Kathleen Hagerty, and vice president for student affairs Susan Davis should each be relieved of their duties.

“President Schill, Provost Hagerty, and VP Davis should be fired immediately for this disaster — and this dangerous agreement must be rescinded,” Klein wrote. “If a group of white supremacists took over Deering Meadow and chanted for the deaths of blacks, the white supremacists would be immediately removed from the campus — not rewarded with scholarships, professorships, buildings, power over vendors, and investment powers. The same standard should apply here. The Northwestern officials who negotiated and entered into this agreement must be fired, and their agreement must be thrown in the dustbin. The student and faculty trespassers and promoters of anti-Jewish violence should be arrested and expelled or fired.”

Chinese Spy Ships Stalking U.S. Warships in Military Drills By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/01/chinese-spy-ships-stalking-u-s-warships-in-military-drills/

Two Chinese surveillance ships have been seen stalking American Navy vessels in the South China Sea, as the latter were conducting military drills outside of Philippine territorial waters.

As the Daily Caller reports, the exercise was a joint effort between U.S., Philippine, and French warships that first set off from Puerto Princesa on Thursday, to conduct the maritime portion of the Balikatan 2024 military exercises. But shortly after the vessels entered international waters, two ships with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) were seen pursuing them within a few nautical miles.

One of the Chinese ships was the Tianwangxing, a Type 815-class electronic surveillance ship, seen about 50 nautical miles from Western Palawan, which is located in the Philippine exclusive economic zone. One of the American warships, the USS Harpers Ferry, had to halt its live-fire drill because the Tianwangxing drew too close, coming within two nautical miles. Then on Sunday, a third Chinese ship was seen within nine nautical miles of the same formation.

However, American spokesmen denied that any part of the exercise was disrupted by the Chinese ships.

“I cannot speak for them but we are monitoring them, and we record then we report whatever our ships are monitoring in the area,” said Captain Ariel Joseph Colom Armed, from the Forces of The Philippines Western Command (Wescom). “As long [as] we continue to monitor and report them, we are in control of the situation.”

The maritime portion of the exercise ended on Monday. The ships involved in the exercise were the USS Harpers Ferry, the BRP Ramon Alcaraz, the BRP Davao Del Sur, and the FS Vendemiaire.

The exercise was conducted for the primary purpose of strengthening the alliance between the U.S. and the Philippines, in response to increasing aggression by China in the region.

“Balikatan is a tangible demonstration of our shared commitment to each other. It matters for regional peace and stability. When we increase our mutual response and defense capabilities, we strengthen our ability to promote regional security and protect our shared interests,” said Lt. Gen. William Jurney, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific commander.

Can The Current Universities Be Saved? Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/02/can-the-current-universities-be-saved/

Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/01/they-arent-revolutionaries-theyre-bigoted-brats/

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

U. Minnesota Dept. of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies: A Vile Font of Jew Hatred Oct. 7 was about “Hamas fighters” who “brought down border fences.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-minnesota-dept-of-gender-women-and-sexuality-studies-a-vile-font-of-jew-hatred/

Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”

Just a glance at the website for the University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies reveals it to be a highly politicized unit of the wider university, dedicated to progressive activism. The site declares that “As a place where research, education, and social change go hand in hand, GWSS identifies, analyzes, and challenges structural inequalities, while imagining and creating just and transformative futures for all.” Instead of searching for truth and knowledge, the Department openly acknowledges that its vision includes “social change,” “challeng[ing] structural inequalities,” and “creating just and transformative futures for all.”

So it should come as no surprise, that like much of the progressive left, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (DGWSS) is a vile font of Jew hatred on the University of Minnesota campus.

Just six days after the brutal and barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, in which innocent civilians were brutalized and raped, parents killed in front of children, children killed in front of parents, bodies gleefully mutilated by terrorists on camera, DGWSS released a “Faculty Statement on Palestine” in which they described the massacre as “Hamas fighters” (not terrorists) who “brought down border fences.” The statement went on to demonize Israel and its defensive response to the worst attack in its history as “not self-defense but the continuation of a genocidal war against Gaza and against Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and life.”  The statement declared “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with Palestinian scholars and organizers.” DGWSS might as well have said, “We stand with Hamas.”

WATCH: Radical Islamists Rally in Hamburg Calling for Caliphate in Germany: Kurt Zindulka

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/04/28/watch-radical-islamists-rally-in-hamburg-calling-for-caliphate-in-germany/

The German city of Hamburg saw over a thousand Muslims rally on Saturday against the freedom of the press and other liberal values of the country while calling for the imposition of an Islamic caliphate.

Around 1,100 gathered in the central Hamburg district of St. Georg — a progressive area of Germany’s second-largest city often identified as a gay neighbourhood — to demonstrate against what they perceived as an attempt by the media to portray all Muslims in Germany as radical Islamists.

However, the rhetoric reported from the event indicated the radical positions of the group itself, with chants of Allahu Akbar (God is great or Our God is greater than yours). Meanwhile, signs at the rally declare that a “Caliphate is the solution” and others read: “Germany = dictatorship of values”, NTV reports.

The rally was also attended by members of the Muslim Interactive group, a successor to Hizb ut-Tahrir, an international Islamic fundamentalist political party seeking to institute a caliphate which was officially banned in Germany in 2003 for extremism.

Muslim Interaktiv, which was founded in 2020, previously organised a demonstration in St. Georg in October in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel, despite the city placing bans on anti-Israel demonstrations at the time. The group has also been active outside of Germany, having organised a February 2023 protest against Qur’an burnings in Sweden.