FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Donald Trump, Meet the Twelfth Imam Peter Smith

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/middle-east/donald-trump-and-the-twelfth-imam/

I am a bit this way but mostly that way on Trump’s strategy on Iran. Mostly unenamoured. Dropping those bunker-buster bombs was an unmitigated good thing. It seems unlikely after the Israel bombardment and Trump’s coup de grâce that the Iranians will be able to get back on the nuclear track very quickly, even if some minor mole in the Pentagon leaked it otherwise. But where to from here? Has anything been lastingly solved? Hardly.

While the mullahs call the shots nothing will change. I get the impression from Trump that he believes the Iranian leaders will get behind a MIGA movement (make Iran great again). Doubt it. He is dealing with religious fanatics who look forward to the end times when Muhammad al-Mahdi, the twelfth imam, will return and make Shia Islam great again.

I trust that someone has educated Trump on Islam. Otherwise, however good his negotiation skills, he is out of his depth. Islamists (i.e., fundamentalist Muslims to which legion the ayatollahs most certainly belong) will lie and cheat with impunity if they believe it is in the interests of protecting and promoting Islam. They are obliged to do so. Quite simply you can’t deal with them on a transactional basis. Netanyahu understands that. That’s why he must be secretly ropeable about Trump’s 12-days war when many more days were required.

An opportunity has been recklessly thrown away. Not only to inflict considerably more damage on Iran’s military apparatus but to trigger a regime change; the only pathway to a lasting peaceful solution. There is no other. Was Trump fearful of being blamed for American casualties if the war continued? I hope not. That would be the most fatal of flaws. There is another explanation. Bad enough but not so bad.

A clue is in Trump’s comment: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.” The expletive is unimportant. What is important is the equivalence he appears to draw between Iran and Israel. Don’t get me wrong. Trump knows where the fault lies. The equivalence he is drawing is a transactional one.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Schumer Flips on Antisemitism by Rafael Medoff

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/382488/schumer-flips-on-antisemitism/

 Israeli ambassador Abba Eban was greeted by an irritating sight when he rose to speak in Harvard University’s Sanders Hall on a chilly Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1970. A group of anti-­Israel extremists in the gallery had unfurled a banner denouncing “Zionist imperialists” and tried to shout Eban down when he began to speak.

    Half a century later, another group of extremists, including Zohran Mamdani—now the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City—employed similar tactics in their own anti-Israel protests.

    Senate minority leader Charles Schumer has cited Eban’s response to the Israel-haters as a transformative event in his own political life. Schumer’s very different response to the Israel-hater Mamdani reflects his own curious transformation.

    Schumer, who in 1970 was a Harvard undergraduate, was in the audience the night Eban spoke. He was so moved by the ambassador’s rebuke of the radicals that he spoke about it at length in what was arguably the most important speech of his life, delivered on the senate floor in November 2023.

    As Schumer rose to speak that day, anti-Israel protests, often mixing with blatant antisemitism, were erupting on college campuses and beyond. Schumer, who by then was the senate majority leader, was shocked at the refusal of many of his fellow-Democrats to acknowledge that antisemitism was coming from their own political camp.

    The reality, Schumer told his visibly discomfited colleagues, was that the people expressing antisemitism after the October 7 massacres “are in many cases people that most liberal Jewish Americans felt previously were their ideological fellow travelers.” He continued: “The vitriol against Israel in the wake of October 7th is all too often crossing a line into brazen and widespread antisemitism, the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations in this country—­if ever.”

    Sen. Schumer then recalled with admiration the way Ambassador Eban responded to the hecklers in 1970. “Eban pointed his finger up at the protesters in the gallery, and with his Etonian inflection, he calmly but strongly delivered a statement I will never forget,” Schumer recalled. 

    Schumer then quoted Eban’s words: “I am talking to you up there in the gallery. Every time a people gets their statehood, you applaud it. The Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Zambians, you applaud their getting statehood. There’s only one people, when they gain statehood, who you don’t applaud, you condemn it—­ and that is the Jewish people. We Jews are used to that. We have lived with a double standard through the centuries. There were always things the Jews couldn’t do. . . . Everyone could be a farmer, but not the Jew. Everyone could be a carpenter, but not the Jew. Everyone could move to Moscow, but not the Jew. And everyone can have their own state, but not the Jew. There is a word for that: antisemitism, and I accuse you in the gallery of it.”

    The audience of more than 2,000 “broke into heavy applause,” The Harvard Crimson reported. Young Charles Schumer never forgot that moment.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The myth of Israel’s ‘killing fields’ Reports of the IDF deliberately killing civilians at aid centres are a blatant misrepresentation of the facts. Andrew Fox

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/01/the-myth-of-israels-killing-fields/

Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, specialising in defence and the Middle East.

You do not need to invent facts to spread propaganda. You only need to stretch them.

Haaretz’s latest ‘exposé’ on Israeli military conduct in Gaza is a prime case in point. This week, the Jewish State’s oldest daily newspaper reported that soldiers belonging to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had ‘deliberately fired’ at Palestinians as they tried to access aid-distribution centres. Since May, these distribution centres have been operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a private, American-run organisation that is supported by the IDF. Haaretz’s reporting has been repeated, without question, by an almost ubiquitously anti-Israel media.

It is a grim, morally explosive accusation. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz say it is ‘malicious’ and ‘designed to defame’. The IDF says it is investigating the allegation, but rejects any claims soldiers were instructed to fire at Palestinians accessing aid.

While the facts aren’t always easy to discern in the fog of war, there are a number of problems with the Haaretz report. The most significant is that the original Hebrew version of the article says something quite different to the widely reported English version. It reports that soldiers were ordered to fire toward crowds, not at them. This is not a subtle difference. ‘Toward’ is what soldiers call warning shots. It is a common practice for militaries, and one the British Army frequently used in Afghanistan. ‘At’ is to fire at a crowd or an individual – in other words, ‘at’ is the preposition you would use if you wanted to accuse the IDF of war crimes, instead of employing a common tactic.

The report has other flaws – flaws that should not be hard to pick up on, even for the untrained eye. The anonymous soldier quoted by Haaretz claims that the IDF has used machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars on unarmed crowds queuing for aid. Yet, according to the source, this ‘killing field’, in which soldiers use ‘everything imaginable’, results in around ‘one [to] five’ deaths a day. One to five deaths a day, in the middle of a war zone, involving thousands of people and countless flashpoints, from the heaviest weapon systems any infantry can bring to bear? That is not a ‘killing field’, unless the IDF are the worst shots in military history. This is clearly not the number of deaths you would expect to see if one of the world’s most advanced militaries had been instructed to target crowds of unarmed civilians with ‘everything imaginable’, as the source does.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Let’s Talk about ‘Proportionality’ By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/let_s_talk_about_proportionality.html

“But it’s so disproportionate!” Comment from an Israel loathing liberal.

It’s not often that you have a ready answer for people with whom you disagree.  Usually, you think of the perfect comeback when you wake up at two in the morning.

But as it happened, I simply had the cold, hard facts on my side, so it was almost shooting fish in a barrel to answer this Jew-hating, Israel-loathing liberal.

Do You Remember?

My response to her came in a series of questions.

“Do you remember,” I asked her, “when we watched the entire Iraq War — from 2003 to 2011 — on TV, for years?  And the endless articles and commentaries and news coverage, all day and all night?”

“Of course,” she responded.

“Well, even before that, going back to the sixties, do you remember the years-on end coverage of the Vietnam War — from 1964 to 1973 — and the morning and afternoon and nightly news coverage and commentaries the impassioned anti-war demonstrations across the country protesting this war?”

“You know I do.  I was on the frontline of those protests.  I was with the so-called traitor Jane Fonda all the way!”

“How about the Korean War in the 1950s, which wasn’t covered so extensively on TV — TV was relatively new in that decade — but which a million articles were written about, not to mention the extensive radio commentary?”

“Okay,” she said, “and your point?”

“One more question: How about World War II in the 1940s, when we dropped the bombs, and 140,000 died in Hiroshima and 74,000 died in Nagasaki?”  And that is not to omit the massive, overwhelming loss of life from that war — 70–85 million deaths.

“Stop with the statistics, already!” she blurted out.  “What is your point?”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Nicole Gelinas New York’s Unsettling Mayoral Race Whatever the outcome in November, the city will get (another) highly flawed leader.

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-mayoral-race-candidates-voters

Just after midnight on June 25, with the temperature finally down from a 100-degree high to the upper 80s, a hoarse and exhausted-looking Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani addressed a cheering crowd in Queens. Clad in a crisp white shirt under his dark suit and tie, the 33-year-old exulted: “My friends, we have done it. I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.” Indeed, Mamdani had done it—an upstart Democratic Socialists of America member with four years’ experience in office had pulled off a stunning victory in the city’s mayoral primary. From just 7 percent support in January polls, he surged to defeat former governor Andrew M. Cuomo by eight points. Cuomo, backed by tens of millions of dollars from business and real-estate interests and long leading in polls, had expected an easy path to the nomination. The result was the biggest political upset in New York in nearly 25 years—since Michael Bloomberg, running as a Republican after 9/11, edged out Democratic favorite Mark Green as voters chose a businessman over a party stalwart.

It’s understandable that New Yorkers, and observers nationwide, see Mamdani’s victory as a sharp break in city politics. Going back more than three decades, voters have elected pragmatic leaders focused on public safety and economic growth. The exception, Bill de Blasio, benefited from the safety and prosperity created by his immediate predecessors. But the reality is less dramatic: Mamdani won not because voters embraced his self-described socialist agenda of government-run grocery stores and free buses, but because the alternatives were so weak. New Yorkers didn’t reject a centrist—they simply weren’t offered a credible one.

To understand the failure of Mamdani’s rival candidates to inspire, it’s worth looking back at the primary campaign, which began in January and played out across countless forums.

On a Tuesday evening in late May, veteran New York politico Scott Stringer sat in his Manhattan living room, peering into his laptop camera. He spoke confidently and capably about an issue affecting New Yorkers rich and poor: illegal noise. Whether from unpermitted construction or raucous park parties, Stringer argued, noise isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a health hazard—and he proposed enforcement solutions.

One problem: this Zoom forum, hosted by the NYC United Against Noise citizens group, drew fewer than a dozen attendees. The dismal turnout underscored the challenge that New York’s career state and local politicians faced this spring in a long, strange city election: voters barely noticed them. Stringer’s résumé was solid: lifelong Manhattanite, teenage community-board member, two decades in the state assembly, eight years as Manhattan borough president. Most notably, in 2013, he won a citywide election for comptroller against a formidable, well-funded opponent—former governor Eliot Spitzer.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Persistent Presence of Absence The public school exodus continues unabated. by Larry Sand

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-persistent-presence-of-absence/

The fact that many children are ditching America’s public schools is undeniable. Most recently, Nat Malkus, Deputy Director of Education Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, reported that while chronic absenteeism spiked during the COVID pandemic, it remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57% higher than they were before the pandemic. (Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.)

Malkus goes on to explain that in 2018 and 2019, about 15% of K–12 public school students in the U.S. were chronically absent—a number so high that numerous observers and the U.S. Department of Education are labeling it a “crisis.”

In total, nearly one in twelve public schools in the United States has experienced a “substantial” enrollment decline over the last five years

The problem is especially egregious in our big cities. In Los Angeles, more than 32% of students were chronically absent in the 2023-2024 school year.

In Chicago, dwindling enrollment has left about 150 schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity.

Additionally, schools identified by their states as chronically low-performing were more than twice as likely to experience sizable enrollment declines as other public schools.

In February 2025, FutureEd disclosed that data from 22 states and the District of Columbia for the 2023-24 school year show significant differences across grade levels, with absenteeism particularly severe in high school.

“In most states, 12th graders have the highest rates of chronic absenteeism, often far exceeding state averages. In Mississippi, for example, the overall absenteeism rate was 24%, but among seniors, it soared to 41%. Several other states have senior absenteeism rates above 40%, with rates in the District of Columbia and Oregon exceeding 50%.”

FutureEd also reports that kindergartners have disproportionately high rates of chronic absenteeism.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Social Media Campaign Targets ‘Ivory Tower Hypocrites’ By Sara Dogan

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/social-media-campaign-targets-ivory-tower-hypocrites/

Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have become cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting opinion is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

The Freedom Center’s Spring 2025 Campus Campaign targeted these elite universities and their leaders as “Ivory Tower Hypocrites” in a published report and a wide-reaching social media campaign.

“At far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views,” explains the report.

Universities named in the report include UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among others. These schools allowed woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views.

Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill defended a blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian literature festival on campus, claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission” but persecuted conservative law professor Amy Wax for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Great President Trump’s Worst, Terrible, Bad Idea Ever by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on July 2nd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21723/the-great-president-trump-worst-terrible-bad-idea

Qatar’s job, if it is part of a consortium controlling the Gaza Strip, will be to make sure that the jihad against Israel continues.

If Egypt is in any way involved in securing the Gaza Strip, it is certain there will be renewed smuggling of weapons and terrorists into Israel through and under the Rafah Crossing. The weapons-and-terrorists industry has always been far too profitable and far too successful at attacking Israel just to give up.

Trump’s original plan to make Gaza an American Riviera, together with Israel — or Israeli sovereignty by itself — is a far more dependable way to guarantee security. It is, in fact, the only way to ensure that Israel can either defend itself, or has a US shield nearby to deter aggression — the same way the US stations the forward HQ of Central Command and Air Forces Central Command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, to protect its survival.

There were rumors this week that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas might ultimately include a consortium of Arab countries taking charge of the Gaza Strip.

Unfortunately, hardly anything could be more dangerous than that for the stability of the region. A consortium of Arab countries governing the tiny strip of land next to Israel is, in fact, is a sure-fire recipe for a monstrous conflict just around the corner. This plan will make all the breathtaking achievements of US President Donald J. Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the great US Air Force and the Israel Defense Forces be for naught.

The problem: If a consortium of Arab countries controls the Gaza Strip, one of those countries is bound to be Qatar. Qatar will no doubt make sure of that. One of Qatar’s main reasons for existing is to make sure that radical Islamic organizations stay active and well-funded. It is hard to think of an Islamist terrorist group that has not been a large beneficiary of Qatar — from ISIS, to al-Qaeda, to the Taliban, not to mention Hamas.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

This is an anti-fascist Forget the bigots of Glastonbury – it’s the heroic IDF soldier, Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, we should be talking about. Brendan O’Neill *****

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/30/this-is-an-anti-fascist/

The name we should remember from this weekend is not Bob Vylan. Or Pascal Robinson-Foster, to give the Israelophobic punk who caused such a stink at Glastonbury his real name. No, it’s Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. For as Bob Vylan was whipping the smug mob of Glasto into a frenzy of violent loathing for the IDF, this young IDF soldier, himself a Brit, was laying down his life for the Jewish people. He was killed in Gaza on Sunday as he did battle with that army of anti-Semites, Hamas. Now that’s anti-fascism.

Natan – as he was known – was 20 years old. He was born in London and moved to Israel 11 years ago. He was a sergeant in the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion of the IDF. He was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza. His sister’s boyfriend, also an IDF soldier, died in combat during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Natan’s father paid tribute to him this morning. He was fighting ‘for his parents, his family, his people’, he said. ‘I feel he has a place in history.’

This is the Briton we should be talking about – not the sozzled, moneyed brats of Glastonbury who got a sick thrill from chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’, but this fresh-faced warrior against Islamofascism. Not that Bob Vylan faux-punk who hollered for the death of the Jewish State’s soldiers, but this soldier of the Jewish State, this British Jew just out of his teens, who ventured into enemy territory to fight the Islamists who butchered so many of his people. Not the fake anti-fascists of Britain’s wet, vain left, but this real anti-fascist who put his life on the line for the Jewish homeland.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer Cornell’s Racialist Hiring Scheme The university’s FIRST program mandated “diverse” lists of finalists.

Posted By on July 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/cornell-university-hiring-race-first-program

At Cornell University, faculty search committees adopted a series of checkpoints to ensure that job candidates were sufficiently “diverse.” Internal documents I’ve reviewed raise questions about whether the university unlawfully used racial preferences in hiring—and offer a revealing look at the tactics of Cornell’s social-justice advocates.

In 2021, Cornell received $16 million from the National Institutes of Health to help start its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, aimed at increasing the faculty’s “compositional diversity” by hiring ten new professors. According to the program’s grant proposal and progress reports, its leadership team screened applicants at four stages—the initial pool, longlist, shortlist, and finalist slate—to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible.” These checkpoints aligned with the program’s stated objective: “Cornell University aims to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences through establishing an NIH FIRST Program at Cornell University.” The university pledged to hire the ten new professors specifically from “groups underrepresented in their fields.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. Had Cornell restricted these faculty positions to certain racial groups, it would have plainly violated the law. The Cornell FIRST program was more subtle, prioritizing diversity throughout the search process rather than at the final hiring stage.

Still, the program’s carefully structured, four-stage process—explicitly designed to shape the racial composition of the candidate pool—raises legal concerns. “Each search will be governed by a clear process and 4 checkpoints,” the FIRST proposal notes, “to ensure that the search has as diverse a pool as possible.” The process is described step by step.