ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Antisemitism Is Proliferating in Our Public Schools Jews face discrimination in many K-12 schools and colleges. By Larry Sand

Posted By on August 21st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/21/antisemitism-is-proliferating-in-our-public-schools/

As I recently noted, UC Davis—a research university with 40,000 students—has a well-documented anti-Jewish problem. In April last year, the StandWithUs Center For Legal Justice filed a formal complaint with the Department of Education, claiming “a pervasively hostile, antisemitic campus climate, with incidents of unlawful discrimination and harassment, for students.” Not surprisingly, in November, Davis was ranked as one of the most anti-Jewish universities in the country by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism, which gave Davis a grade of “F.”

Davis is hardly an isolated case. A federal probe of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the school acted with “deliberate indifference” to threats against Jews and violations of their rights during an antisemitic encampment in the spring of 2024.

In a letter to UCLA leaders, Justice Department officials stated that Jewish and Israeli students at the school “were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment,” including being “assaulted, verbally harassed, and physically prevented from accessing parts of the UCLA campus.”

DOJ officials explained that UCLA received complaints from Jewish students that the school took no meaningful action to eliminate the hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students caused by the encampment until it was disbanded. The DOJ also alleged that they violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI due to antisemitism and race-based discrimination. As a result, in July, the university settled a lawsuit with Jewish students for $6.45 million.

University presidents at other California institutions face growing pressure to explain discrimination against Jewish students and faculty.

Nationally, 83% of Jewish college students have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, according to a recent poll.

Anti-Jewish bigotry also exists in K-12 schools. In late 2024, the Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley faced a lawsuit over widespread antisemitism experienced by students, with administrators standing by and allowing it to worsen. When SUHSD parents and students raised concerns—through emails, petitions, and formal complaints—the District responded with “bureaucratic obfuscation and outright denial, demonstrating a deliberate indifference to SUHSD’s Jewish students. Emails were ignored, and meetings were canceled without explanation,” the lawsuit states.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Is the Democrat Alternative to Trump? Democrats rage at Trump’s every move but offer no real alternative—only fury, obstruction, and failed policies voters have already rejected. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 21st, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/21/what-is-the-democrat-alternative-to-trump/

The Pavlovian Left goes berserk at the mere prospect of each new Trump initiative.

Its escalating reactive venom and hysteria are calibrated to the success of Trump’s latest policy.

Yet the new hard-left Democratic Party offers no counter-agenda to explain its furor.

Still less do Democrats attempt bipartisan efforts to craft shared legislation.

Take foreign policy.

Democrat senators trashed the recent Trump-Putin Alaskan summit as a failure. Then they became depressed when, just days later, an entourage of European leaders and President Zelensky of Ukraine suddenly flew to the White House.

The Euros praised Trump for offering some sort of negotiated pathway to peace after over three years of war and some 1.5 million dead, wounded, missing, and captured on both sides—on Europe’s doorstep.

So why did Democrats object to such negotiations by Trump?

Was the reason that no such thing occurred during the Biden administration, when Putin invaded Ukraine, after his earlier invasions during the Obama era?

What is the left’s alternate plan? The old Biden idea of supplying Ukraine with enough money and arms to keep fighting and dying, but with no path to either victory or a negotiated peace?

Would they prefer a fourth, fifth, or sixth year of war, or an additional one million casualties?

The more Trump pressed almost all NATO members to pay their promised two percent of GDP on defense, the more Democrats grew irate over Trump’s overseas influence.

NATO members now want to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP and gush that Trump is “Daddy.”

Democrats steamed at that, since Europeans are supposed to hate Trump, not admire him for rebooting NATO.

Would they prefer the old, disarmed NATO?

Under the Biden administration, over 10 million illegal aliens flooded the country, sometimes 10,000 a day at the southern border.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza John Spencer

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1948010761957052628

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the coauthor of the book  Understanding Urban Warfare.

In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.

I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.

Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price.” That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.

Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.

He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.

Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Russia and Ukraine: Why Are We Negotiating with Evil? by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21848/negotiating-with-russia-evil

Rubio, talking about the war in Ukraine, completely missed the fundamental issue: Should the United States be trying to reach a deal in the first place?

The answer is no: The U.S. should not be trying to broker any settlement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a mass-murdering, genocide-committing aggressor.

No one wants to see more people die, but trying to end this war by agreement will ultimately make the world less safe.

Did the U.S. try to reach a “deal” with the Third Reich? How about Imperial Japan?

A “deal” with aggressors always opens the door to more aggression.

“We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” — Vice President Dick Cheney, reportedly spoken in 2003.

“The only way to reach a deal on anything, whether it’s in business or in politics or in geopolitics, the only way to reach a deal is for each side to get something and each side to give something,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on August 17.

Rubio, talking about the war in Ukraine, completely missed the fundamental issue: Should the United States be trying to reach a deal in the first place?

The answer is no: The U.S. should not be trying to broker any settlement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a mass-murdering, genocide-committing aggressor.

Rubio should heed his own words. “This guy lies, habitually lies,” the then senator said in March 2022 about the Russian leader.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gavin Newsom: the chameleon who destroyed California The Democratic presidential frontrunner has turned the Golden State into an economic and social disaster. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/18/gavin-newsom-the-chameleon-who-destroyed-california/

Gavin Newsom may be saddled with an awful record. But the California governor is rapidly emerging as a leading bet – even a frontrunner in some polls – in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. How is this possible?

The simple answer is that Newsom might be the ultimate candidate for the attention-deficient generation. He is a political chameleon who changes positions compulsively – not according to facts, but to whatever best seems to fit the national mood. We witnessed this after last year’s presidential election, when he began ‘bro-washing’ his slick image with some cringe-worthy appearances on podcasts. One of these even included an embrace of gun ownership – a surprise to many of his supporters who had voted for him on the basis of his strong anti-gun record.

Newsom follows what may be charitably described as a flexible ideology. He flip-flops even on his core issues, such as climate change. Newsom, an avid supporter of Net Zero, basically fell on his knees before Big Oil in April, when two companies announced they were shutting their Californian oil refineries as a result of oppressive green regulations.

Newsom has proven equally slippery on woke social issues. In recent years, he made California a ‘refuge’ for transgender children, supporting the experimental use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy on minors. Indeed, these policies were central to Newsom’s assaults on rival states Texas and Florida. But he shocked trans activists in March by admitting that having biological males compete with women was ‘unfair’. Clearly, he had sensed which way the political wind was blowing.

Now, the chameleon has changed his colours once again. After trying to appeal to MAGA voters in the aftermath of Trump’s November victory, he is back leading the ‘Resistance’. Last week, he promised to redraw California’s congressional districts to the advantage of Democrats. In June, as US federal agents targeted undocumented immigrants in California, Newsom accused Trump of a ‘brazen abuse of power’. Like all aspiring Democrats, he regularly denounces Trump as a fascist.

But Newsom has an even bigger, more vulnerable Achilles’ heel than his shifting political positions. It is the undeniable economic and social decline he has overseen as governor of California.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Yes, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism Zarah Sultana is so wrong. Today’s obsessive loathing for Israel is definitely driven by bigotry. Brendan O’Neill *******

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/20/yes-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/

Is it anti-Semitic to criticise Israel? Of course not. No nation on Earth should be shielded from the brickbats or even the ridicule of the world’s citizens.

Is it anti-Semitic to rage day in, day out against Israel? To think of little else? To let this tiny state occupy your every waking thought? To call it uniquely barbarous, borderline demonic, a nation that lusts after blood like no other? To dream of its destruction? To traipse through the streets every week hollering for its obliteration? To call its citizens genocidal freaks and lunatics? To taunt them with memories of their ancestors’ extermination by branding them ‘Nazis’? To devote yourself so singularly to this one nation’s erasure that you come to define your entire political personality by that warped goal and proudly declare yourself an ‘anti-Zionist’?

Yes. Yes, that is anti-Semitic. If you maniacally obsess over the Jewish homeland, and detest Jewish nationalism more than any other nationalism, and gleefully chant for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers, and fantasise about the violent excision of the Jewish State ‘from the river to the sea’, then you have a problem with Jews. And more of us need to say so.

The anti-Zionism vs anti-Semitism debate is one of the most infuriating of our times. It reared its head again this week following an interview Zarah Sultana gave to the New Left Review. She’s the former Labour MP, now independent MP, who is setting up a new political party with the Magic Grandpa of Britain’s knackered left, Jeremy Corbyn. She praised Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, but she made some digs, too. He too meekly ‘capitulated’ to the definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, she said. And that was bad because the IHRA ‘equates [anti-Semitism] with anti-Zionism’.

She is presumably referring to the IHRA’s insistence that some forms of Israel-bashing cross the line from political critique into something darker and dodgier. For example, using ‘symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism’, such as ‘claims of Jews killing Jesus’, to ‘characterise Israel or Israelis’. That seems reasonable to me. I once saw a placard on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo that said ‘They killed Jesus and now they’re killing Palestinians’ – anyone denying the virulent Jew hatred in such a crude cry is either a fool or a liar.

The IHRA also says it is suspect to make comparisons between ‘contemporary Israeli policy’ and the policies of the Nazis. Again, that’s reasonable. I don’t want anyone cancelled or censored for drawing pitiless and historically illiterate links between the Nazis’ industrialised burning of the Jews and Israel’s wars against the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. But it is unquestionably bigoted. The gross fashion for referring to Gaza as a new Warsaw Ghetto, or to Israel’s war on Hamas as a new holocaust, or to Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Hitler, has one aim and one aim only: to wound Jews with reminders of their people’s near destruction; to shame them by likening them to the very monsters they were once gassed by.

Ms Sultana got some flak on X. Some people even called her anti-Semitic. She fired back. Your ‘smears won’t work this time’, she said. And then, definitively: ‘Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.’ She warned those accusing her of being anti-Jewish to ‘lawyer up’. I am more than happy to accept that Ms Sultana is not an anti-Semite. I hope she and her new party extend that courtesy to others and hold back from branding them ‘Islamophobes’. Otherwise, who knows, they might have to ‘lawyer up’, too. But on anti-Zionism, she is plain wrong. To some of us, it is patently clear that this strange and feverish ideology that has such a brutish grip on the minds of our young and our intellectuals is often anti-Semitism in wokeface.

Let’s leave to one side Ms Sultana and take a look at the broader Israelophobic animus that has swept the West like a fever since Hamas’s fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. There is nothing more disingenuous than when leftist hotheads or liberal scribes say, ‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’, because we are not talking about criticism of Israel. We are talking blind hatred for Israel. Hysteria about Israel. The fantasy of Israel’s death. The wild and demented conviction that Israel is the most murderous state in existence, if not the most murderous state ever, and that it wields staggering power over the obsequious nations of the West. That’s not criticism – it’s a species of madness, built on the foul belief that the Jewish State is the most nefarious, most bloody and most sneakily powerful state on Earth.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Netanyahu: Aussie PM is ‘weak,’ has ‘abandoned’ Australian Jews By David Isaac

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-denounces-australian-pm-after-mk-banned/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday slammed Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a weak leader after Canberra canceled the visa of a Knesset member who had been planning to visit the country.

“History will remember Albanese for what he is: A weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews,” Netanyahu posted to X.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar also weighed in, describing the Australian government’s decision as “shameful” during an interview with The Erin Molan Show.

“Instead of battling against antisemitism in Australia, as they should, they are doing the opposite. They are fueling antisemitism by these mad decisions to ban from Australia Israeli politicians and other figures,” Sa’ar said on Tuesday.

On Monday, Australia denied entry to Israeli parliamentarian Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism) ahead of his planned solidarity visit to the country’s Jewish community.

The move follows other visa cancellations by Australia, including that of Hillel Fuld, a pro-Israel social media personality, in June, and in November 2025 of former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

In retaliation for banning Rothman, Sa’ar on Monday revoked the visas of Australian representatives to the Palestinian Authority.

In response, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong posted a statement to her ministry’s website on Tuesday:

“At a time when dialogue and diplomacy are needed more than ever, the Netanyahu Government is isolating Israel and undermining international efforts towards peace and a two-state solution. This is an unjustified reaction, following Australia’s decision to recognize Palestine.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s High Court of injustice and the Red Cross Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/israels-high-court-of-injustice-and-the-red-cross/

Israel’s High Court of Justice has once again revealed its misplaced priorities. And that’s putting it delicately.

In a hearing on Monday about National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s policy to bar Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists in Israeli prisons until the organization gains access to the hostages in Gaza, the judges made their outrage clear. But their fury was not aimed at Hamas or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has utterly abandoned its humanitarian mission. Instead, it was directed at their own government and prison authorities.

The ex parte session was spurred by a petition on behalf of the terrorists. It was submitted by the usual left-wing “suspects”: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, HaMoked (the Center for the Defense of the Individual) and Gisha.

These NGOs pulled a typical fast one. They first acknowledged that “Hamas doesn’t provide information about those it holds in captivity, and refuses to allow Red Cross visits to the hostages … in Gaza [among whom] are those who were murdered in Hamas captivity.”

They then went on to get to the crux of their foul maneuver to equate victim and perpetrator, by stating that “Israel’s obligations toward those it holds do not change because of Hamas’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

As if Israel’s “holding” of mass murderers is comparable to Hamas’s “holding” of innocent captives.

Not surprisingly, Justice Yitzhak Amit, the self-anointed president of the Supreme Court, agrees with this twisted logic. But the reasoning that he proffered during the hearing went beyond woke politics to focus on his personal reputation and that of his hallowed perch in the international arena.   

“Right now, what’s … being publicized abroad [is] that there is starvation, that dozens of prisoners are dying, that it’s basically the Israeli Guantánamo,” he bellowed, banging on his table. “And you’re putting us, the court, at the forefront, on the front line.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo The New Yorker’s Racialism Problem Prestige media has turned “antiracism” into a farce. It’s time to move beyond it.

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorker-doreen-st-felix-sydney-sweeney

It seems that all of the conventional opinion of America’s chattering class is condensed and printed once a week in the pages of the New Yorker. In normal times, this process yields some good writing and reporting. In certain periods, the magazine has produced some magnificent work. But we have not lived in normal times for the past decade. The conventional opinions of the chattering classes have ranged from delusional idealism to racialist fever dreams, and worse.

The most recent illustration of this trend is an essay by New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Felix, who penned a screed about the blonde starlet Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney, St. Felix mused, represents a fantasy “Aryan princess” to some of her fans, with her much-discussed breasts placed in dark contrast with “the Black man’s hunger for ass.”

This is not the New Yorker of the past; it is something different. What is it, exactly? Beginning a decade ago, the New Yorker, like many of its peers, jumped on the “diversity and inclusion” bandwagon and declared itself an “anti-racist” institution. The magazine, owned by Condé Nast, set explicit racial quotas in hiring and pledged to “talk about racism” at every opportunity.

The magazine was capitulating to critical race ideologies. It snapped up writers, like St. Felix, who is black, to provide “representation” not only of favored demographic groups but also of a certain flavor of opinion.

After St. Felix’s Sweeney essay, a colleague sent me a link to one of her posts on X. “I hate white men,” the post read in part.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nigerian Leftist Calls for a New Constitution for America Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 20th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/nigerian-leftist-calls-for-a-new-constitution-for-america/

A Nigerian immigrant and a German publishing company teamed up to call for the destruction of America and a new Constitution.

In the name of ‘democracy’.

Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris both ran (and lost) on ‘democracy’ and the media branded Trump’s victories as defeats for ‘democracy’. This may seem confusing for those who think democracy means ‘one man, one vote’, but for the Left, democracy means that they win, democratic power means they wield it and anything that threatens their hegemony is a ‘threat to democracy’. When they talk about saving democracy, they really mean working to eliminate it.

So in this Orwellian landscape, calls for democracy are about the scariest things around.

Moderates see election defeats as a setback while extremists see them as an opportunity to radicalize a shocked base into accepting their radical plans. Did Kamala lose in 2024? That’s because we just don’t have enough “democracy”. What does democracy look like?

Osita Nwanevu, a writer at the New Republic, a formerly liberal turned leftist magazine bought in succession by a Facebook founder and banking fortune heir, has a big idea in his book, ‘The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding’, but it’s really the same old idea of smashing the existing system and replacing it with whatever will expand the power of the Left and then calling that totalitarian farce of insider ‘stakeholders’ democracy.

In Nwanevu’s native Nigeria, efforts at ‘democracy’ melted down into a civil war in which millions died. By his account, Nwanevu’s father seemingly fought on the Biafran side. Nigeria’s ‘democratic’ elections routinely begin and end with violence. And Osita Nwanevu thinks that the answer for America is for the Left to stage its own coup and construct a new Constitution.