https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/01/balfour-declaration-monument-humanity-anti-semitism-israel/ “It’s a boy”, Sir Mark Sykes, the government’s negotiator on the Middle East, told the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, eventually to be the first president of Israel, on October 31, 1917. Two days later, on November 2, the British commitment to Zionism was born, with the Balfour Declaration that the “Government view with favour the […]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/10/31/jd-vance-cast-dark-shadow-over-us-relations-with-israel/
The strong alliance between the United States and Israel has been a staple of US foreign policy for decades. But that bond, advantageous to both countries, is now facing sustained attack – and no longer just from the progressive Left.
The Left-wing attacks on Israel are likely to get more exposure if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor of New York, America’s largest city and its media capital. His hostility to the Jewish state, combined with his apparent indifference to violent Palestinian resistance, is no outlier on the far-Left. It is, in fact, a pillar of their political coalition.
Why? Because the groups in that coalition have very different, often antagonistic goals (Queers for Palestine?). What allows them to lock arms is that they hate the same things, beginning with Donald Trump, Israel, and capitalism. The coalition remains intact by emphasising these shared hatreds, which sometimes border on anti-Semitism or cross that line entirely. The anti-Semitic, conspiratorial line is always some variant of “the Jews, with all their money, control American policy for their narrow interests, not America’s”.
Less familiar are rising attacks on Israel and its American supporters from the populist Right. The most prominent voice for those hostile views is Tucker Carlson, with his huge podcast audience. But he is hardly alone.
This Right-wing populist opposition to the Jewish state is far different from the traditional, pro-Israel stance of Reagan Republicans and evangelicals like Mike Huckabee, who is now US ambassador to Israel. Still, support is waning even among evangelicals, especially younger ones.
This shifting view on the Right was on display on Wednesday night at Ole Miss, where vice-president JD Vance spoke to a crowd, organised by Turning Point USA. After a short speech, Vance answered questions from students. Two posed questions hostile to Israel. Instead of pushing back, the vice-president largely seemed to endorse the students’ antagonism. That’s new for such a prominent voice in Republican politics.
It’s hard to criticise Vance’s statement that American foreign policy should put American interests first. Although that sounds like a simple restatement of Trump’s “America First” policy, as Vance surely intended, it is really the aim of every country’s foreign policy. They all ask the same question, “How will this policy advance our interests?” That’s perfectly sensible.
What’s different under Trump is that those national interests are conceived primarily in transactional terms rather than long-term relationships. That’s how Vance’s response to students appeared to frame US-Israeli relations, more as stand-alone transactions and less as a firm, long-term bond of mutual advantage. That reframing is significant, and it’s not good news for Israel.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/history/ruffian-dicks-pilgrimage-mecca-2/
Traveling incognito, Sir Richard Francis Burton eventually entered Mecca. They don’t make Englishmen like him these days
In a time of turmoil in the Middle East, a thirty-one-year-old Englishman’s pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest shrine—Mecca’s House of Allah—disguised as a wandering Dervish doctor, is even more remarkable today than it was in 1853.
Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. A kind of scoundrel imperfectly reverent of, and niggardly contributory to, divines, ecclesiastics, popes, parsons, canons, monks, mullahs, voodoos, presbyters, hierophants, prelates, abbés, nuns, missionaries, exhorters, deacons, friars, hadjis, high-priests, muezzins, Brahmins, medicine-men, confessors, eminences, elders, primates, pilgrims, prophets, etc. — [Ambrose Bierce, 1911, The Devil’s Dictionary]
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1822–1890)—also known as “Ruffian Dick” and “the White Nigger”—was such a “scoundrel”. Irreverent of many things, he was neither British spy nor Muslim. He was driven by a prodigious curiosity, not geopolitics, to explore the hidden and forbidden—geographical, ethnological, erotological and spiritual.
In the Folio Society edition of Burton’s three-volume Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, Tim Mackintosh-Smith describes him as having “one foot in the buccaneering age and the other in that of mass tourism”. The Personal Narrative (1855-56) was “the masterpiece of a misfit”, a “mixture of scholarship, slapdash and slapstick, of tedium, trivia and transcendence, of rhapsody and rant, prejudice and poetry”.
Misfit he was, but one with bravado, courage and erudition in equal measure. A keen observer, Burton documented virtually every facet of life he encountered, ferreting away scraps of paper in his kit. “Thou art always writing, O my brave!” remarked his Arabic teacher in Cairo. “What evil habit is this? Surely thou hast learned it in the lands of the Frank. Repent!” But he never did.
Why did he do it?
https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-students-cry-that-asking-them-to-work-hard-is-bad-for-their-mental-health/
There’s a personality type on display here. If you want to understand where so much of the wokeness is coming from, this is one place to start.
A Harvard report found that grade inflation was a major problem and urged more serious academic standards.
Here’s the response from our future leaders.
Sophie Chumburidze ’29 said the report felt dismissive of students’ hard work and academic struggles.
“The whole entire day, I was crying,” she said. “I skipped classes on Monday, and I was just sobbing in bed because I felt like I try so hard in my classes, and my grades aren’t even the best.”
“It just felt soul-crushing,” she added.
Kayta A. Aronson ’29 said stricter standards could take a serious toll on students’ mental health.
“It makes me rethink my decision to come to the school,” she said. “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.”
Zahra Rohaninejad ’29 added that grading already felt harsh and raising standards further would only erode students’ ability to enjoy their classes.
“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” she said. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”
Should studying at a top school make you feel “fulfilled” or reach your “maximum level of enjoyment”?
The purpose of a top school is, in theory, to winnow out the best. In this case it’s the best whiners who respond to any setback by crying and claiming that asking them to work hard threatens their mental health.
(Anyone who says that shouldn’t be in any kind of position of responsibility and hasn’t progressed much beyond childhood.)
Understand that and you understand why so many of our institutions are failures. They’re being run by people like this.
https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5581563-gop-poll-numbers-rising/?tbref=hp
Republicans are winning the shutdown, and even CNN has to admit it. We turn now to my favorite pollster, Harry Enten, who has some shocking news for his colleagues at the network. Take a look.
That’s right: GOP poll numbers are actually up! The way Republicans are choosing to handle the shutdown is actually resonating with voters. And not just their own voters, but also with independents. Republican voters, the MAGA base, they’re excited that the party is sticking to its guns, and independents are also rewarding them for it. I think that’s very telling.
GOP voters do not want feckless establishment leadership to succumb to Democrats’ efforts at emotional blackmailing over healthcare coverage, welfare payments and federal employee salaries. Because let’s keep in mind, Democrats are asking for everything. They want to maintain healthcare insurance subsidies that were intended to be a temporary COVID measure. But like most temporary government spending programs, Democrats now expect them to become permanent.
Democrats were willing to let the government shut down and say, look voters! Look what those mean Republicans are doing to you! They’re willing to withhold your paycheck, if you’re a government employee. They’re willing to take away your welfare! Blame them!
Well, it’s not working. Republican and independent voters know that, at this point, the Democrats own the government shutdown. They could vote to end it anytime — Republicans are ready! But Democratic members of Congress are afraid to go along with this, because they fear the anger of their furthest left voters, who are demanding they stand up to the Republicans, even in performative and self-sabotaging ways.
Well, they’re only hurting themselves, because a majority of voters — not everyone clearly, but enough people — are with the GOP on this one. Even CNN’s Jake Tapper sounded ever so slightly exasperated with congressional Dems.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/01/new-yorks-deal-with-the-devil/
One of the best-known legends in the Western tradition is the story of Faust, a brilliant scholar who becomes disillusioned with the limits of man’s knowledge and experiences and, as a result, sells his soul to the devil in exchange for extraordinary power, insight, and earthly pleasures. The German-speaking world is most familiar with the story as retold in an epic drama by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered one of the greatest works in all of German literature, while English speakers are likely most familiar with the version—“Dr. Faustus”—produced nearly two centuries earlier by Christopher Marlowe. Gen-Xers (like me) are, of course, most familiar with the version told in 1986 by screenwriter John Fusco, starring the Karate Kid himself as an aspiring blues guitarist and the great Steve Vai as the devil’s guitarist.
The moral of the story—in German folklore and in Marlowe’s telling—is that arrogance and craving for temporal pleasures and rewards are damning vices. They push man to make stupid choices, to underestimate his worth (and the worth of all humanity), and to risk full-blown tragedy for comparatively small gains. The contemporary terms “deal with the devil” and “Faustian bargain” are universally understood to represent foolish and ultimately destructive decisions made by those lacking foresight and wisdom.
Naturally, I mention all of this today for a reason—a couple, actually. First, residents of New York City go to the polls this coming Tuesday and, from all indications, are expected to make their own Faustian bargain. They are expected to elect the avowed Socialist and not-so-avowed-but-still-obvious Islamist Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor. They are expected to hand leadership of the financial center of the universe over to a Marxist, to turn the keys of the city in which the most horrific terrorist attack ever occurred to someone who campaigned with an unindicted co-conspirator on the first World Trade Center bombing, and to stake their collective future on the words and deeds of a spoiled, dishonest nepo-baby who has never had a real job in his life.
They are willing to do all of this in return for a few baubles: free bus rides, rent-controlled apartments, city-owned grocery stores, and an ever-higher minimum wage—and, of course, the social status that goes along with such virtue-signal-voting. Even if these policies were deliverable and not likely to unleash financial havoc, they would still be almost entirely irrelevant in the grand plan to “make NYC affordable.” None of them will do anything to help the city’s most vulnerable, those whom Mamdani claims to want to help. At the risk of mixing my soul-selling literary metaphors, one can’t help but be reminded of Thomas More’s line (delivered to Richard Rich), “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22021/iran-march-toward-nuclear-bomb
Iran’s regime has officially declared that it will not abide by any nuclear limits. It is finally admitting out in the open that its ultimate objective has always been to become a nuclear-armed state.
Its announcement… represents the formal end of Iran’s long-standing campaign of deception, in which it pretended to cooperate with international nuclear agreements while secretly expanding its program.
When Iran claims now that the JCPOA is “dead,” it is simply acknowledging that it never had any intention of honoring it in the first place. While the regime publicly claimed to respect the deal, in reality, it was quietly expanding its capabilities, building advanced centrifuges, and enriching uranium far beyond the levels needed for peaceful nuclear energy.
The idea that Iran can be persuaded through diplomacy or economic incentives to change its behavior has failed time and again.
The first and most crucial step is to reestablish deterrence.
In addition to deterrence, the West needs immediately to reimpose and expand sanctions and secondary sanctions -– announcing that countries that do business with Iran may no longer do business with the United States. Unfortunately, Europe remains far behind.
Appeasement and indecision will only embolden Tehran further. The Iranian regime is going full nuclear, and the West needs to act — swiftly, decisively, and with unity — before removing Iran’s nuclear program becomes difficult.
Iran’s regime has officially declared that it will not abide by any nuclear limits. It is finally admitting out in the open that its ultimate objective has always been to become a nuclear-armed state.
Its announcement is not merely a change of rhetoric; it represents the formal end of Iran’s long-standing campaign of deception, in which it pretended to cooperate with international nuclear agreements while secretly expanding its program.
