RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/21/what-the-latest-attacks-on-musk-are-really-all-about/

Just as Democrats were trying to downplay the rampant antisemitism in their ranks, what happens? Elon Musk, who has lately become something of a darling on the right, suddenly becomes the poster boy for antisemitism. This is how the left works.

This latest twist started when Media Matters — the George Soros-backed media “watchdog” — released a report claiming that ads for major corporations were appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content.

This is a two-fer for the left. It both attacks Musk — whom the left now hates because he stopped Twitter’s side hustle as the federal government censor — and it takes the spotlight off the left’s virulent antisemitism on display after the Hamas attacks.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter and promised to live up to the company’s “free speech wing of the free speech party” mantra, the left went into fits of hysterics.

Media Matters puts it, “Musk has opened the floodgates to hateful content.” Really? Because Twitter was pure as the driven snow before Musk?

We seem to recall that “blue check” leftists had free reign to say whatever they wanted about conservatives on Twitter, up to and including calls for their assassination. After Donald Trump took office, to cite just one example, “assassinate Trump” was showing up all over Twitter. When Twitter banned Trump before Musk bought the company, it let Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continue to incite hate and violence on its platform. Etc., etc.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-is-gen-zs-first-real-war-hamas-israel-social-media-world-war-ii-3111692f?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?

I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.

As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of about 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Many of the expulsions took place in winter amid terrible scenes of hunger and deprivation, all while mass rapes of German women slowly subsided across the Soviet zone of Germany.

Lawyers and legislators can debate whether these actions constitute war crimes, but as Cicero put it more than two thousand years ago, “inter arma enim silent leges.” Roughly, that translates as the “laws go silent when armies clash.” Or as William Tecumseh Sherman put it more succinctly, “War is hell.”

One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. The war in Gaza hasn’t merely introduced young Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also has shown them the face of war.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2015/10/18/a-watershed-for-americas-jews/

Are the years when the United States was a supremely comfortable place for American Jews coming to an end? Thanks to President Obama’s polices, the answer may be yes, although most American Jews are not only blind to the dangers, but actively promoting those very policies.

Challenged by what U.S. Secretary of State Kerry calls Germany’s “example to the world” in opening its borders to 800,000 (overwhelmingly Muslim) migrants this year, the Obama administration now proposes to boost the number of refugees it accepts to 100,000 annually, including 10,000 Syrians.

In practice, this means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. Breitbart reported that in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Of these, just under 40,000 were refugees. The rest were divided almost equally into those given permanent resident status and those coming as temporary (in theory) migrants, including students and foreign workers. With Obama more than doubling the number of those admitted as refugees, there is little doubt there will be a substantial rise in the other categories. Don’t forget, family unification is a major source of legal immigrants.

There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration. Unlike in Germany, a million more Muslim immigrants will not upend the religious demographics of the United States with its population of almost 319 million. But the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small U.S. Jewish population. There are estimated to be five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, over-matching the number of Jews.

One cultural trait Muslims infallibly bring with them is hatred of Israel — and contempt for Jews –  inculcated in them from a very early age. When a reporter for The Times of Israel interviewed migrants at a reception center in Milan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee named Adman told her, “In Syria we have all races and religions living together. We are all brothers but Israel, Israel is the ultimate enemy.” Rima, a Syrian who has lived in Italy for years and now registers migrants, explained “For Syrians, Israel is Palestinian territory.” When the reporter suggested a two-state solution, Rima replied “I don’t think Jews should have a state. They are a religion, not a people.” The reporter encountered no contrary views among the refugees.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/19/flirtation-with-evil-will-not-end-well-for-leftists/

Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?

Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process.  Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

Those videos were watched by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Millions—millions—have searched for bin Laden’s paean to Jew-hatred, radical  Islamic theocracy, and contempt for America. The Guardian newspaper, which had published a transcript of Osama’s letter back in 2002 when it first appeared, took it down because, an editorial note explains,  it “had been widely shared on social media without the full context.” Ah, “context.” Patient readers can still avail themselves of the 4,000-word lunatic effusion here. I offer two brief snippets, chosen more or less at random (slice him where you will, as Bertie Wooster observed, a hellhound is still a hellhound), just to give readers a little taste of the surreal world we’re talking about:

The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [i.e., Americans] are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily. [My italics, but bin Laden’s emphasis.]

So what, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done? Bin Laden does not disappoint. 

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. . . . complete submission to His [Allah’s] Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). . . It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. . . 

Et very much cetera.

In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe,  by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-americans-dislike-the-economy

“Why are the vibes so bad?” ask legions of commentators, noting the disconnect between polling on the economy and top-level economic indicators. The unemployment rate is within spitting distance of 60-year lows, and measured inflation has dropped from a punishingly high 9 percent rate to a lower, though still too high, 3.2 percent.

And yet, citizens are unhappy with the economy. According to a New York Times–Siena poll, 81 percent of registered voters described the condition of the economy as fair or poor, and only 19 percent called it good or excellent. Another poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that a majority of voters said that they are worse off under President Biden then they were before, and only 14 percent said that they are better off. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, the Times–Siena poll found voters trusting Donald Trump more than President Biden on the economy.

To reconcile voters’ discontent with the economic data, we shouldn’t consider the top-level employment and inflation indicators separately. Instead, we should combine them—and when we do, we observe workers’ real (that is, after inflation) wages have declined significantly in recent years.

Some commentators argue that real wages are rising, but these claims are based on the popular average hourly earnings measure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics. Average hourly earnings is a less useful indicator now because of large workforce-composition changes. During the pandemic, the economy shed large numbers of low-paying service jobs (for instance, in leisure and hospitality), which pushed the average wage in the economy higher. The average moved up because low-paying jobs dropped from BLS’s sample, not because individuals experienced strong wage growth. The effect reversed as the economy began adding those low-paying service jobs back, which pushed average hourly earnings down. Those composition effects linger today, as the economy is still short 560,000 leisure and hospitality jobs (adjusting for labor-force growth), relative to pre-pandemic levels, due largely to firms’ difficulty finding workers. 

More recently, labor shortages have eased, and firms have been adding back these workers. Given that leisure and hospitality wages are below those of all other major sectors tracked by BLS, these workers’ return to the labor force has dragged down average hourly earnings growth relative to other measures.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/10/the-passionate-intensity-of-the-know-nothing-protester/

“The most-quoted poem to describe the world we live in has for some years now been WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. And especially the line, ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ Let us at least teach our children not to mistake one for the other. Especially when, on a rare occasion, the best display some conviction after all.”

A short video was shared on X this week in which two young female protesters at a pro-Palestine march were asked a pretty straightforward question about the crisis in the Middle East: ‘When Hamas invaded Israel on the 7 October, what was your initial reaction to that?’

The first one looked briefly confused. Was this a trick?, she seemed to be thinking. Her companion stepped in: ‘I don’t believe they did, did they? Hamas?’ Then something started coming back to the first one. The stirrings of something like a distant memory. ‘I think so…’, she said, trying to correct her friend who didn’t think Hamas had done anything.

Encouragingly, in the light of this, the first one then appeared to experience an awakening. ‘Honestly, I think I need to be a bit more clued up on everything that’s going on’, she said, before finally responding to the original question: ‘I feel like I’m not really qualified to answer that too well…’

Her companion, however, was having none of this. No room for doubt in her ranks. So she persisted in her Baudrillard-tier scepticism about the 7 October attack: ‘I mean, I’m not sure that I’ve seen anything that shows that that’s actually happened or that’s actually correct.’

It’s tempting to respond to this video by wondering who the fuck are these virtue-signalling halfwits and why aren’t they in a library studying? Yet even if these young women are typical of many of those attending the anti-Israel demos, a bit more understanding might be in order.

https://www.thefp.com/p/american-marxists-funding-pro-palestinian-rage

The pro-Palestinian protests over the last month, where tens of thousands in the U.S. have chanted for the end of Israel, are not merely a story of organic rage. 

They are also funded in large part by an uber-wealthy American-born tech entrepreneur: Neville Roy Singham, and his wife Jodie Evans.

Since 2017, Singham has been the main funder of The People’s Forum, which has co-organized at least four protests after 1,400 innocent Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7. One rally, in Times Square, happened on October 8 before Israel had even counted its dead.

Based in Midtown Manhattan, The People’s Forum calls itself a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” But a review of public disclosure forms show that multimillionaire Singham and his wife Evans have donated over $20.4 million to The People’s Forum from 2017 to 2022 through a series of shell organizations and donor advisory groups—accounting for nearly all of the group’s funding. 

Singham’s wealth stems from Thoughtworks, a software consulting company that he launched in 1993 in Chicago and sold in August 2017 to private equity firm Apax Partners for $785 million. That same year, The People’s Forum was founded and set up on the ground floor of a multistory building on 37th Street just blocks from Times Square; Evans was also installed as one of its three board members. As of 2021, the organization employed 13 staff members and held more than $13.6 million in total assets. 

“I decided that at my age and extreme privilege, the best thing I could do was to give away most of my money in my lifetime,” said Singham, now 69, in a statement after selling his company, according to a New York Times investigation in August. 

But Singham is more than just a Marxist with deep pockets. He is also a China sympathizer who lives in Shanghai and has close ties to at least four propaganda news sites that boost the Chinese Communist Party’s image abroad, the Times reported.

These Chinese media interests are helping sow discord in the U.S., Rep. Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told The Free Press. 

“The Chinese Communist Party uses tools like Confucius Institutes on college campuses, TikTok’s addictive algorithm, and organizations like those that Mr. Singham funds to divide and weaken America,” Gallagher said. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uncivil-servants-foreign-policy-bureaucrats-target-israel-war-gaza-3bb7ceff?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Biden administration faces a wave of internal dissent against its support of Israel. On Nov. 14, more than 500 staff members and political appointees from about 40 government agencies sent a joint letter to President Biden criticizing his administration’s policy on the Gaza war, according to the New York Times.

It was the latest of several protest letters. The Times reported that the administration has received similar messages, including three internal memos addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a letter “signed” by more than 1,000 employees of the Agency for International Development. The State Department requires that employees sign their names to dissent cables, but the other two letters have no signatures. The Times reported that these government employees wrote anonymously out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.”

The internal memos, two of which were sent during the first week of the war, called on Mr. Biden to press for an immediate cease-fire. One State Department memo, Axios reported, accused the president of “spreading misinformation.” Signed by 100 State Department and Agency for International Development employees, the memo said members of the White House and National Security Council showed a “clear disregard for the lives of Palestinians.”

Mr. Blinken responded to government employees’ protests in an email, according to Reuters. Mr. Blinken said the administration was organizing forums and “candid conversations” to hear employees’ feedback and ideas. “We’re listening,” he wrote. “What you share is informing our policy and our messages.” It would seem that the fear of losing one’s government job, or of angry mobs threatening the safety of the “signers,” was overblown.

The proper reaction would have been to squash the mutiny. Those who called for a cease-fire in week one were essentially saying Israel had no duty or right to protect itself after Hamas’s brutal attack on its civilians. Mr. Blinken should have told these government workers that he and the president reject their views as entirely wrong and contrary to U.S. national interests. Instead of encouraging the dissenters to offer more “feedback and ideas,” he should be wondering if he can count on such people to offer any sound advice on foreign policy—or even to implement a policy that he sets.

This wave of protests is anomalous. Between 2011 and 2021, according to the United Nations, more than 300,000 Syrian civilians died due to the conflict there. The highest death counts were between 2012 and 2015. Frederic Hof, the Obama administration’s special adviser on Syria policy, wrote in 2017 that “during 70 months of chaos in Syria, the United States had protected not one Syrian civilian from the homicidal rampages of Bashar al-Assad and his remorseless regime.” Yet in 2016 only 50 State Department officers protested Barack Obama’s Syria policy in a non-anonymous signed letter.