Displaying posts published in

October 2025

EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

A Case for Historical Clarity By Peter Wood

By on October 14th, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/a-case-for-historical-clarity/

In the first days of the spring 2020 national shutdown, as the country froze in fear of the Chinese virus, I sat down with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ production: the Sunday, August 18, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine. It was branded The 1619 Project, consisting of 100 pages of pseudo-history, photo-essays, poetry, and an announcement from the Pulitzer Center that this extravaganza was on its way to school classrooms around the country.

This was not my first dive into Hannah-Jones’ fantasy world. I read the magazine cover to cover on its day of publication, and concluded then and there that someone would have to summon resistance to this effort to adulterate American history. From its first page, The 1619 Project set itself out to dethrone the Declaration of Independence as a statement of America’s founding principles. And not just the Declaration.

Through the lens of The 1619 Project, all of American history — from the arrival of the first English settlers — was to be seen as a tale of slavery, excuses for racial oppression, articulations of fake principles, and lies intended to mask continuing exploitation.

The following day I called my staff at the National Association of Scholars together to discuss how to respond. One member suggested that we frame our response as the “1620 Project,” after the arrival in New England of the Mayflower and the signing of the Mayflower Compact. That was one way to say that America had roots in a completely non-racial establishment of freedom and self-government.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Elite Schools Like MIT Are Hardly Free Markets for Ideas The school’s president rejected the Trump administration’s “compact” to receive funding preferences in exchange for committing to basic goals.

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-university-funding-compact-mit-president-sally-kornbluth?skip=1

Earlier this month, the White House announced a “compact” under which universities would receive funding preferences in exchange for committing to basic educational goals. The compact represents the Trump administration’s most concrete plan yet for ensuring academic excellence and reversing the process of ideological capture in the universities. It builds on many of the concepts I and others championed in the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education: freedom of speech, civil discourse, institutional neutrality, and equality under the law.

These are common-sense principles. They should be the opening ante in any negotiation between the White House and the elite universities. As the Manhattan Institute demonstrated in public polling, these ideas are also overwhelmingly popular with the American people.

Nonetheless, the reaction from the higher-education establishment has been mixed. Some universities are considering entering into the compact. But the first university to go on the record, MIT, has publicly rejected it. In a reply to education secretary Linda McMahon, MIT president Sally Kornbluth wrote that such a compact would jeopardize the university’s ability to participate in a “free marketplace of ideas.”

The argument is preposterous for four reasons. First, elite universities are, intellectually speaking, some of the least free institutions in America. Conservatives have spent decades documenting double standards and ideological capture in these institutions, including at MIT. Even anodyne speech, like the idea that men cannot become women, sets off investigations, punishments, and ostracism.

In a real marketplace of ideas, scientifically and naturally obvious statements—such as the fact that men cannot become women—should win in a landslide. Instead, elite universities enforce a system of complex fictions, of which transgenderism is merely one example.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Keffiyeh and Loathing at the Writers’ Fest Paul Purcell

By on October 14th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/memoir/keffiyeh-and-loathing-at-the-writers-fest/

If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, then the end of the Gaza War will see the launch of something equally significant in 2026. Instead of wooden boats, the ‘misery memoir’.

This rather unfortunate term is used in the publishing trade to describe true stories of personal hardship, trauma, and abuse with the stress on suffering. Misery memoirs are very popular with readers because we can all relate in one form or another. When the first Palestinian memoirs hit the shelves in 2026 describing the horrors of the last two years of life in Gaza, writers festivals will be eagerly awaiting these new books and so will potential readers. The misery memoir will find its zenith when Palestinian writers describe the horrors of war, and the struggle to survive in the ruins of Gaza.

Earlier this year, the Sydney Writers Festival (at the Carriageworks) had skyscraper-high Palestinian misery memoirs stacked neatly on their trestle tables, next to novels about Palestinian life. These books were a mixed bag. While many were articulate and described the difficulties of living in the Palestinian regions, others were openly anti-Semitic towards Jewish people and the state of Israel.

Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin demonized Israeli characters and institutions and portrayed her characters in anti-Semitic tropes. Sarah Abhawa was criticised at the 2023 Adelaide Writers Week when she described an Israeli-American terror victim as human garbage.

Thankfully not all the books I looked at contained such inflammatory rhetoric. There were many titles about life in Palestine predating the Israeli state. These were lovely stories of happy families enjoying life before war and violence gripped the Middle East. But Jewish memoirs and books, with one or two exceptions, were conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they weren’t as ‘current’ or topical?

As I skimmed through these memoirs, I noticed from the corner of my eye, a constant parade of something I would normally expect to see on the streets of Gaza. The keffiyeh. It was everywhere. Young or old. Black or white. Gay or straight. You really couldn’t miss this distinctive piece of patterned cloth.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Get your hands off the Holocaust, Mehdi Hasan His claim that aspects of the Gaza conflict were worse than the Holocaust is a whole new low for Israel-haters. Brendan O’Neill

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/14/get-your-hands-off-the-holocaust-mehdi-hasan/

Remember when Britain exported nice things to America, like The Beatles? Now we treat it as a dumping ground for our irritants. Behold Mehdi Hasan, who started out as a scribe for listless left-wing magazines in Britain and now makes a living titillating moneyed liberals in the US by feeding back to them their lazy, luxury beliefs. Trump is bad. Israel is evil. Jimmy Kimmel’s ‘cancellation’ was the most stunning and brave martyrdom since St Sebastian. And then that most twisted of high-status opinions, the one it might be normal to spout at Team Mamdani soirées in Bushwick, but which still leaves most normal people cold – ie, that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide. And possibly comparable to the Nazi genocide.

Hasan gave vent to a version of this puerile and ghoulish view on X this week, perhaps forgetting he was on a public platform and not gabbing with Ivy League Israelophobes at a swanky do for Cythnia Nixon. He was responding to Eli Lake, a columnist for the Free Press. Lake had a pop at digital blowhards like Hasan who bemoan Israel’s promise to dismantle Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza. Even though that is literally a requirement of the peace plan Hamas has ostensibly signed up to! ‘It’s a genocide against the indigenous tunnels of Gaza’, Lake quipped. Hasan, who suffers from a lifelong allergy to humour, the poor lad, was not happy. So not happy that he played the Holocaust card. Which is always a shitty thing to do, but against a Jew like Lake? Mate.

He wrote: ‘One of the ways in which the Gaza genocide is worse than a lot of previous genocides – Rwanda, even the Holocaust – is that you didn’t have Hutus or Nazis mocking the genocide after it was over.’ No, back then the genocidaires were too busy being ‘shunned / deradicalised / prosecuted’ to make wisecracks.

First off, can we agree this is an insane response to a gag? Someone jokes about destroying Hamas’s underground lairs and you bring up the Holocaust? Get some perspective, or at least a funny bone. I’m curious to know why anyone would get their knickers in a twist about laying waste to tunnels in which an army of anti-Semites stored weapons and tortured Jews. Just get rid.

More to the point, to speak of Gaza in the same breath as the Holocaust is historical illiteracy of the most noxious kind. It is ignorance on steroids. Even stating the basic facts feels ridiculous, because surely everyone with a reading age higher than nine knows this shit? Gaza was a war between two armies: the army of the Jewish State and the neo-fascist militia of Hamas. It was a war in which the IDF targeted Hamas fighters and Hamas fighters targeted the IDF, killing more than 900 of its soldiers. The Holocaust was the machine-like incineration of an entirely defenceless people by one of the mightiest and wickedest empires the world has ever known. Comparing these two events is worse than dumb – it is sinister and repulsive.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

About that ‘Qatari air base’ By J.R. Dunn

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/10/about_that_qatari_air_base.html

Over the weekend we had a brick fall into the MAGA pond, roiling the waters and sending ripples out in all directions. This involved reports that Qatar, the Persian Gulf state of mixed reputation, has made arrangements to “build an air base” at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho. The response was instantaneous and virulent. It was a clear case of treason, another Muslim takeover of U.S. soil, a threat that demanded immediate action. The calm, lucid, and easygoing Laura Loomer went so far as to call it an “abomination.”

It always pays to take a close look at any such story before coming to conclusions. This one immediately revealed some iffy aspects. Why build a new air base when there’s a perfectly suitable Air Force Base right on the spot? Why select southern Idaho, as close to the back of beyond as you can find in the continental United States? What, exactly, are the Qataris supposed to be doing there?

The answers are pretty straightforward. Qatar has purchased 48 F-15QA Eagles from Boeing. As the letter suffix suggests, this version of the venerable and superb F-15 has been optimized for operations with the Qatar Emiri Air Force.

Fighters of the 21st century are quite different animals from the aircraft flown during WW II and the Cold War – and even the earlier models of the F-15. They are extraordinarily advanced, fitted with cutting-edge avionics and weapon systems, and capable of tricks that pilots of an older era would have thought impossible. It requires lengthy and intensive training to use the aircraft at the peak of their capabilities.

And that, playmates, is what is happening here. The new Qatari “air base” is in fact a training installation built to host and service Qatari aircraft flown by pilots brought to the U.S. to receive training from veteran U.S. pilots. There are a number of other nations involved in similar programs at Mountain Home, including the mighty and foreboding Asian giant, Singapore.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How can anyone now deny these are ‘hate marches’? The ceasefire in Gaza has done nothing to placate the rage of the anti-Israel bigots. Fraser Myers

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/10/13/how-can-anyone-now-deny-these-are-hate-marches/

The hostilities in Gaza may have ceased, but Britain’s anti-Israel protests are now roaring back to life. On Saturday, while most Israelis and Palestinians were celebrating the end of a devastating two-year war, 2,200 miles away in London, hundreds of thousands took to the streets to express their anger and dismay at the terms of the peace. The Trump-brokered deal cannot stand, they cried, because it leaves Israel intact.

The return of the ‘hate marches’ should surprise no one. Peace has never been the aim of the ‘pro-Palestine’ movement. The slogan, ‘Ceasefire now’, had long been retired before last weekend’s protest. As the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), one of the main organisers of the marches, helpfully spelled out, the demos will not stop until ‘Palestine is free, from the river to sea’ – that is, until the State of Israel, from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, is wiped off the map.

PSC’s message was reinforced by the attendees. ‘We don’t want no two-state’, one group chanted, ‘We want ’48’ – referencing a time before the modern Israeli state was officially recognised. These are demands not for peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Israelis, but for the destruction of the Jewish State – for the eviction of Jews from the Middle East.

There were other clues on Saturday that these marchers are no peaceniks. Less than two weeks after British Jews were slaughtered in a terror attack in a Manchester synagogue, protesters were out in London chanting for ‘intifada’. In the context of the Israel-Palestine debate, it is hard to interpret this as anything other than a demand for terrorist violence. When counter-protesters unveiled a banner stating that ‘Globalise the intifada is a call to murder Jews’, they were immediately assaulted by the pro-Gaza mob.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Declines to Commit to Two-State Solution After Historic Gaza Peace Deal By Liz Sheld

By on October 14th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/14/morning-greatness-trump-declines-to-commit-to-two-state-solution-after-historic-gaza-peace-deal/

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why No Female Israeli Hostages Are Coming Home Will the West ever face the truth about why? Amy Mek

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-no-female-israeli-hostages-are-coming-home/

The media won’t say it, but here is the truth.

Some of the male Israeli hostages are finally coming home. All were tortured. Most were murdered.

And the women… they were ALL slaughtered every last one of them. I can not even begin to comprehend the horror they endured. Yet the media refuses to explain why Hamas terrorists act this way.

Because the answer leads straight to Muhammad himself — Islam’s founder and the model for jihad.  

Historical fact: After the Battle of Badr, Muhammad’s followers slaughtered defenseless prisoners — fathers and sons hacked to pieces. Muhammad personally ordered the beheading of captives, mocked the dying, and even celebrated their deaths. He “revealed” Quran 8:67, declaring: “It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land.”

From the 800 men and boys executed at Qurayza, to women like Umm Qirfa torn apart by camels… This is not a distortion of Islam.

This is Islam’s origin story. So when Hamas tortures, rapes, and executes hostages, they are not betraying Muhammad’s example. They are imitating it.

And that’s why the media stays silent. Because telling the truth would expose the ideological root of Islamic terror.

Pro-Tip: Expose Islam like your life depends on it…

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Don’t Beat Your Swords into Ploughshares Just Yet Nothing is more certain than that the jihad against Israel will continue. by Robert Spencer

By on October 14th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dont-beat-your-swords-into-ploughshares-just-yet/

Monday was a festive day, with the whole world seemingly celebrating the dawn of peace in the Middle East and hailing President Trump for bringing it about. The president himself, while speaking about the release of the hostages in his speech to the Knesset, promised a bright new world unencumbered by past hatred and animosities: “After two harrowing years in darkness and captivity, 20 courageous hostages are returning to the glorious embrace of their families. Twenty-eight more precious loved ones are coming home at last to rest in this sacred soil for all of time. And after so many years of unceasing war and endless danger, today the skies are calm, the guns are silent, the sirens are still, and the sun rises on a Holy Land that is finally at peace.”

Trump proclaimed not just the end of the present war between Israel and Hamas, but of an entire era of war: “This is not only the end of a war. This is the end of an age of terror and death, the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God.” He said that the cessation of hostilities heralded ” a very exciting time for Israel and for the entire Middle East,” and added that “the forces of chaos, terror and ruin that have plagued the region for decades now stand weakened, isolated, and totally defeated.”

Swept up in the excitement of the occasion, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana said: “You, President Trump, are a colossus who will be enshrined in the pantheon of history. Thousands of years from now the Jewish people will remember you. We are a nation that remembers.”

It is likely that President Trump will indeed be remembered thousands of years from now, for he is a transformative figure who has reshaped national and international politics. Whether he will be remembered, however, as the man who brought about “the end of an age of terror and death” and “the beginning of the age of faith and hope and of God,” however, is another question altogether.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Checking In On The Climate: Here Are A Few Facts

By on October 14th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/10/14/checking-in-on-the-climate-here-are-a-few-facts/

Global warming hysteria has been cooling off. But it’s not cold-on-the-slab dead yet. So it’s important to continue to roll out the reality. If we don’t, the zealots will rearm and flood the zone with their mendacious narrative.

From various sources, here is an update on the facts and the fiction:

Summers are still summer in America – hot, but not as hot as the climatistas want us to believe they are. University of Alabama in Huntsville climate researcher Roy Spencer, who keeps up with this sort of thing, tells us summer’s hottest days in the U.S. “Have Barely Warmed in the Last 40 Years.” He continues: “Of course, you would never know this based upon media reports … in fact, most people are probably under the impression that our hottest days are rapidly getting hotter.”
A month ago, the New York Times reported, citing “scientists,” that “Severe heat this summer killed three times as many people in European cities as would have died had humans not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.” Is that right? No, it’s not, says a fact-check service provided by a consortium of policy groups.

These are not real mortality figures.” The Times “admits that these figures from Dr. Malcolm Mistry, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, are derived from the modeling of mortality trends in 854 European cities, not observational data, which the Times says ‘[a]re not yet widely available.’ Thus, they are attempting to pass a claim off as established fact without supporting evidence.”

The claims that man-made global warming is causing island nations to sink into the sea won’t go away. They should. H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute notes that even with “modest sea level rise,” the island nations that are supposedly drowning “have increased in size, population, and prosperity amid modest climate change.” There’s simply “no real data (that) shows that the oceans are about to swamp these countries.”
The alarmists have warned for decades that global warming was going to cause bigger and badder storms, including, according to federal functionaries, an “above-normal 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.” Except – “no hurricanes made landfall in the United States” in September, says meteorologist Anthony Watts. It was “the first time that’s happened in a decade.” 
Solar farms are supposed to be keys to saving us from global warming, yet they raise nighttime air temperatures from 5 to 7 degrees (3 to 4 Celsius) Fahrenheit. Shouldn’t someone say something about this?
Here’s a point we’ve been making for decades from Substacker Ignominious: “In 1875 very few sensors were placed in very few areas. We have extremely limited data for the first 100 years (1850-1950) so temperature comparisons are unreliable.” He also mentions that “temperature is local and changes acre to acre and block to block due to elevation, wind, rain, and land type. Precise worldwide temperature cannot be known.”

Continue reading →