NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The Centenary of Buckley and the Crisis of Free Speech William F. Buckley Jr.’s centenary arrives as free speech falters and truth-telling grows perilous—a reminder that every generation must fight anew for civilization’s soul. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 25th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/25/334453/

William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February 2008, would have been 100 years old in November of this year. There are many tributes planned to celebrate his centenary. The huge, authorized biography by Sam Tanenhaus will be out in just a few weeks. I will not say anything about that book apart from noting that its subtitle—“The Life and the Revolution That Changed America”— is apt.

For five or six years at the end of his life, I would generally see Bill at least weekly. We sailed and dined, emailed, and spoke on the phone very often. I find it hard to believe that seventeen years have passed since he died. In some ways, it seems like yesterday.

It is interesting to ask what Bill would make of the contemporary cultural and political scene. He had witnessed similar follies throughout the 1960s and 1970s. And after all, the Sage of Ecclesiastes was right: there is nothing new under the sun, though many of our most prominent cultural figures seem to believe that they occupy a unique perch at the very apogee of virtue and moral rectitude and are therefore entitled, O how entitled, to discard the achievements and admonitions of the past as so many false starts and dead ends on the way to true enlightenment, which is to say, to whatever they happen to believe at the moment.

It is important to remember how general the assault on our civilization was in the 1960s. It wasn’t just protests against the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, or the new hedonism. What was aimed at was nothing less than what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of all values.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

To President Trump: The Iranian Regime Will Always Seek Your and America’s Death by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21644/iran-death-to-america

“When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan – it is a policy.” — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Channel 1 (Iran), November 1, 2023.

What did Iran do with this windfall of billions in cash and at least $100 billion in unfrozen assets received during Obama’s term? They funneled the money into Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and a sprawling regional terror network. Iran enriched uranium and built long-range ballistic missiles — some with a range far beyond what is needed to attack Israel. Iran expanded its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Venezuela — all while promising America’s destruction with renewed fervor.

The dangerous reality is that while the United States continues to dangle olive branches, Iran continues to rebuild its air defense systems and enlarge up its ballistic missile arsenal for future attacks.

Like Russia’s and China’s, Iran’s is not a regime seeking peace.

The willingness of many American foreign policy elites to believe that everyone can be “brought in from the cold” is what continues to place the U.S. in constant danger. The cruel fact is that the China, Russia and Iran have different goals than the United States. The US and Trump want peace and prosperity. China, Russia and Iran do not give a flying lawbook about their citizens; they want conquest

We are not victims of Iran’s deception; we are victims of our own delusions.

[E]very time a new U.S. president takes office, the same tired fantasy sprouts up: “This time, it will be different.” No, it will not. The regime has not changed. We keep forgetting, and keep hoping that if we are nice enough or bribe them enough, or if they bribe us enough, they will give up their dreams of an Islamist empire.

America, and especially Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and all Congress need to wake up and acknowledge that the U.S. cannot find peace through isolationism, and that Iran, Russia and China will not be America’s partners in peace.

Since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, its regime has operated with one unshakable and unwavering ideological mission: to defy, destabilize and ultimately destroy the influence and presence of the United States and its allies, especially Israel. This is not speculation. It is in the slogans shouted in their streets, in the sermons delivered by their clerics, and in the laws enshrined in their constitution.

Iran’s constitution explicitly declares its goal to export the Islamic Revolution beyond its borders. Jihad is not merely permitted — it is prescribed.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Graduation Hijacked: Columbia Ceremony Marred by Antisemitic Protests, Parents Left Outraged Liz Peek

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://lizpeek.com/daily-rant/graduation-hijacked-columbia-ceremony-marred-by-antisemitic-protests-parents-left-outraged/

Imagine being a parent who scrimped and saved to put your kid through college, only to have Graduation Day, a day that should be a joyous celebration of achievement, turned wretched by ill-informed antisemites railing about Palestine and disrupting the proceedings. That happened yesterday at Columbia University, of course, with students showily burning their diplomas and otherwise wrecking the festivities.

There have long been student protests, of course, but anti-Jew and anti-Israel protests are something new. To have antisemitism increasing across our country, and across the world, is hideous, and far too little has been done to stop it.

The acting president of the school, Claire Shipman, could barely get through her address as students booed her appearance, shouted “free Palestine” and also called for the freeing of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who was arrested by ICE and is now cooling his heels in a detention center in Louisiana awaiting deportation. Khalil led some of the school’s ugliest protests; the Trump administration claims he has allegiance to Hamas, which they have designated a terrorist organization. It was Khalil’s group CUAD, which demands divestment from Israel, that called for agitators to disrupt graduation.

Notwithstanding the interruptions to her speech, and the intentional undermining of the festivities, Shipman chose to reward the agitators by saying, “I know many in our community are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil”, infuriating Jewish students in the audience and, undoubtedly, their parents.

But this is the time of year when college presidents can make headlines through commencement speeches that blast President Trump, or glorify Hamas, or otherwise appeal to the New York Times. Parents be damned.

What do parents actually think about what’s going on in our schools? A conservative group called Defending Education recently did a poll to find out. Turns out, most parents don’t want either admissions or hiring based on DEI, they don’t want biological men in women’s sports or bathrooms, and – guess what – over two-thirds think schools should introduce antisemitism bias training for faculty and staff. No surprise, parents are a voice of common sense.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Charles Lipson What to do about Iran? Tehran is trying to run out the clock on negotiations

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/what-to-do-about-iran/

China is surely America’s most dangerous threat over the medium term, but Iran is surely the most dangerous right now. The Islamic Republic would be even more dangerous if the Israelis had not decimated the Mullah’s deadly “ring of fire,” the proxy forces across the Middle East funded, armed, trained, and directed by Tehran. But removing these proxies (all except the Houthis in Yemen) does not remove Iran’s nuclear threat. That threat now faces the Trump administration and Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel, leaving only difficult choices.

To understand the current problems, we need to grasp a series of fundamental issues surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.

• What are Iran’s objectives?

• Why might nuclear deterrence, which has worked against other countries, not work against Iran?

• How has the United States responded so far?

• What was Trump’s Iran policy in his first term?

• How did Biden’s policy differ, and what were the consequences?

• What is the minimal acceptable solution for the Trump administration and Israel, as publicly stated?

• What is Iran’s negotiating strategy with the United States?

• How will the Trump administration respond if it is clear that Iran is simply delaying and will not meet America’s minimum requirements to dismantle its nuclear program?

• If Trump refuses to act militarily, will Israel make the dangerous decision to go it alone?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Douglas Murray: Israel can’t afford to leave Hamas in Gaza The British author downplayed the weight of foreign efforts to end the war prematurely, which he argued would cost more than seeing it through. Canaan Lidor

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/douglas-murray-israel-cant-afford-to-leave-hamas-in-gaza/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_

Despite mounting international pressure and war costs, Israel cannot afford to end it war “with Hamas in power in any form,” British public intellectual Douglas Murray told JNS last week.

A prominent author, associate editor of the British magazine The Spectator and regular contributor to The Times and The Daily Telegraph, Murray in an interview with JNS justified Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to keep fighting until Hamas’s dismantlement, and downplayed concerns that it would leave Israel isolated.

“Anything short of victory is defeat,” Murray told JNS at a conference organized by the European Jewish Association in Madrid on combating antisemitism.

Israel’s decision this month to intensify the fighting until Hamas is removed from power in Gaza has triggered a coordinated effort within the European Union and beyond to punish the Jewish state for what its critics call war crimes.

.

On Monday, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada published a joint statement threatening “concrete actions in response” to the war. The European Commission on Tuesday decided to review its trade agreement with Israel, citing concerns of human rights abuses.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Israel Congressman Invited D.C. Shooter’s Dad to Trump Address How deep does this go? by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/anti-israel-congressman-invited-d-c-shooters-dad-to-trump-address/

As Front Page Magazine already documented, Elias Rodriguez, the D.C. shooter, was part of a network of radical leftist and anti-Israel groups some of which have publicly come out in support of his crimes.

One of those groups had ties to Rep. Rashida Tlaib. But now it turns out that the shooter’s family also had ties to another radical member of Congress who hates Israel and America almost as much as she does.

The father of the terror suspect accused of gunning down two soon-to-be-engaged Israeli Embassy staffers at the Capital Jewish Museum was honored by a far-left member of Congress with an invitation to President Trump’s joint address this past March, The Post has exclusively learned.

“Eric Rodriguez was our guest during the President’s Joint Speech to Congress, but we don’t know his family,” a spokesperson for Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.) told The Post Thursday night.

Rodriguez also appeared in a Service Employees International Union video that same day, and said he was an Iraq War vet and an employee with the Veterans Affairs Department, the New York Times reported.’

SEIU is a radical leftist union. It’s also anti-Israel and had demanded that Israel stop attacking Hamas.

Even stranger…

A worker at a shop near Eric Rodriguez’s Chicago home confirmed he approached the clerk, asking for a translation of an Arabic-language article about his son and the shooting on Thursday.

… that one sends off all sorts of red flags.

But back to Rep. Chuy Garcia who is for BDS, against Israel, for an arms embargo on Israel, accused the Jewish State of atrocities and demanded a ‘Palestinian’ speaker at the DNC. After the murders, Garcia put out a statement condemning the attack, but if a right-wing congressman had invited the father of a white supremacist mass shooter to an event, the media would be asking questions. It’s not going to do that here, but we ought to. Maybe this is a coincidence, but maybe it reflects another network, one that is embedded in a somewhat more ‘mainstream’ Left.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden, the Mainstream Media, and the Republic We Couldn’t Keep Calls for soul-searching over Biden’s decline ring hollow in a nation where power trumps principle and no one pays for political deceit—because winning is all that matters. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/24/joe-biden-the-mainstream-media-and-the-republic-we-couldnt-keep/

I like Megan McArdle, the conservatarian political columnist for The Washington Post. I really do. I think she’s smart and talented and interesting. Best of all, she’s not someone who is bound by ideology or political allegiances. Ideology and allegiance are good in some cases and in some occupations, but not in hers and not at her paper. McCardle is as close to a “truth teller” as exists in the mainstream media today, and I appreciate that.

All of that said, McArdle’s column this week leaves me nearly despondent, mostly because it’s hopelessly naïve and, as a result, exposes the ridiculousness of the current American predicament. McArdle starts her piece by expressing sympathy for former President Joe Biden with his recent cancer diagnosis, but then jumps right in, openly and aggressively criticizing those who hid Biden’s mental incapacity from the nation for the better part of four years. So far, so good. Biden deserves our sympathy, while his enablers deserve our detestation. Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there, as McArdle uses her platform to call for Democrats and even her colleagues in the media to reflect on their treachery and determine how best to fix things going forward:

I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” … without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought, or speak in coherent sentences.

That’s great. I agree that these are reasonable conclusions, but I still have some questions. How is it that some of us reached those same conclusions in 2020? How did some of us already know this would happen before he won the White House? Why do some people—Democrats and the mainstream media—pretend that they need this book to explain to them now what many of us knew all along? More to the point, does anyone actually believe that the people who need to do soul searching will actually do it? Or, if they do, that they will come to the conclusion that they screwed up and put the nation in great jeopardy?

Here are some predictions, although not particularly bold ones: No one, save maybe Megan McArdle, will do any soul-searching. No one will resolve to do anything differently in the future. No one in the media will suffer any negative career repercussions for hiding Biden’s decline and openly lying to the American people. Indeed, some—like the execrable Jake Tapper—will get rich off it. Most notably, no one in the Democratic Party or Joe Biden’s inner circle will suffer any sort of legal, financial, or professional consequences for their overt and inarguable criminality. If anything, they’ll be lauded by their fellow partisans as heroes and saviors, brave men and women who did what had to be done to save “our democracy” ™ from the bad people. In short, nothing good will come of any of this.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Terrorist Attack on Jews in Washington by John Podhoretz

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/terrorist-attack-on-jews-in-washington/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

Unspeakable news out of D.C.—a man named Elias Rodriguez of Chicago yelling “Free, Free Palestine” opened fire at an event at the entrance to the Capital Jewish Museum. Two Israeli Embassy officials—a young couple about to be engaged next week in Jerusalem, according to a powerful and teary-voiced statement by Israeli ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter—were murdered. The invaluable Josh Kraushaar of Jewish Insider notes the discovery of the pseudonymous Xer AG that Rodriguez is part of a group called “The Party of Socialism and Liberation.”

This is a different kind of event from the attacks on synagogues in Pennsylvania and California in 2018, which were the work of white supremacists. It happened at a secular Jewish site, and targeted an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee for young diplomats. And it was self-evidently an act of anti-Semitic terror in the nation’s capital—which raises similarities to the 2015 attack on the Hyper Casher supermarket in France’s capital, Paris. The only analogue here I can think of was the invasion of the headquarters of the B’nai Brith in D.C. in 1977 by Hanafi Muslims, during which 104 staffers at the Jewish organization—including my wife’s cousin, William Korey, an expert on Soviet Jewry—were held hostage for three days and repeatedly threatened with execution and torture. Two other buildings in D.C. were invaded as well, and a security guard at one of them was shot in the head and killed.

The terrorist leader was a convert to Islam critical of the Nation of Islam whose family was murdered in 1973—and who chose to blame the “Jewish judge” in charge of the conviction of the Farrakhanites who actually committed the killngs. He also demanded the suppression and burning of a movie called Mohammed, Messenger of God on the grounds that any depiction of the founder of Islam was a sacrilege—an eerie foreshadowing of the killing of the staffers at Charlie Hebdo magazine for publishing cartoons making fun of Muhammad, which took place in Paris two days before the attack on the supermarket in 2015. The leader gave up after three days; Bill Korey told me 30 years later that he still had nightmares about his captivity, a classic case of PTSD.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Walk a Few Miles in An Israeli’s Shoes by Seth Mandel

Posted By on May 24th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/walk-a-few-miles-in-an-israelis-shoes/

The Israeli Foreign Ministry has ordered its diplomats around the world to refrain from participating in public events until further notice, according to a leading Israeli broadcaster. The cautionary note comes after last night’s murder of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

These are, of course, government officials with government-level security. I don’t think most people have the faintest idea of what it’s like for Israelis traveling abroad these days on their own. So here’s a peek at the experience of being an Israeli in the world, via a few stories that demonstrate the point.

Earlier this month, an Israeli tourist attempted to book a hotel stay in the popular Norwegian destination town of Geiranger. The would-be traveler received the following response from the hotel:

“The Norwegian Labor Organization (LO) will soon enforce a boycott that will affect Israeli tourists and Israeli goods due to the catastrophic situation in Gaza. We need to inform you that our staff is organized in LO unions, and they will not break the boycott. I will need to consult with the employers’ organization as I see this as a force majeure situation.”

Force majeure refers to the way unforeseen events can be excluded from normal liability obligations. It seems the hotel could not possibly have expected an Israeli traveler and believes its trade union will be enforcing a boycott against not just Israeli companies and products but people.

Put simply: We don’t serve your kind here.

Of course, sometimes it’s easier to take those discriminatory obligations off the shoulders of your holiday hotels and just ban Israeli passport holders from your entire country. That was the route the Maldives took last month. The Maldives parliament passed a bill to such effect and the president signed it, insisting the ban “reflects the government’s firm stance in response to the continuing atrocities and ongoing acts of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.”

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Whatever Happened to ‘Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself’? by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on May 23rd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21643/whatever-happened-to-love-thy-neighbor-as-thyself

What instead seems to have been considered important is the great new cause to refabricate society in accordance with a skewed view of social justice that consists not of individuals but groups, and that decides which of those may, or may not, be members of some private global “club.” No wonder Western society, especially in Europe, seems to be bordering on implosion.

“The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” — European Fatwa Council Brotherhood, “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America”, May. 22, 1991

It was probably to be expected with the election of Donald J. Trump as US president, and with the fearless leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister, that a repudiation of those policies by opponents in both countries, would focus all their resources on bringing these two statesmen down.

As Netanyahu’s detractors bring one charge after the other in a continual attempt to bring the take down the prime minister, one cannot but wonder who Israel’s real enemies actually are.

It appears that some high-ranking activists are possibly prepared to destroy the nation in pursuit of their ambition for leadership, and to impose their own ideologies on its people. The prime minister and others no doubt see through their bogus proclamations that they are “protecting democracy.

The culture of Western society is Judeo-Christian. Its respect for individuals, its humanitarian morality, the need for empirical evidence, and entreaties such as “Love thy neighbour as thyself”‘ (Leviticus 19:18) — echoed by Mark and Matthew in the New Testament — are the values that have formed the foundation for all education in the West.

As we have seen, however, as recently as this week, however, when two young innocent staffers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C., were gunned down, there have been increasing attacks on these Judeo-Christian social values. Both anarchistic revolutionaries and many religious zealots apparently wish to eradicate and replace them, presumably on the way to a world order featuring themselves.