Category Archives: Foreign Policy

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For the #woke professors, the truth might set you free, free from supporting Hamas, that is.

Why do the left support the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general? The Advocate is a very leftist homosexual rights publication, but even they can’t stomach the idea of “Queers for Palestine”:

Queers for Palestine?

By James Kirchick | January 28, 2009 | 12:00 AM EST

Of all the slogans chanted and displayed at anti-Israel rallies over the past month, surely “Queers for Palestine” ranks as the most oxymoronic. It is the motto of the San Francisco–based Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), a group advocating financial divestment from the Jewish State. QUIT contends that Zionism is racism, regularly demonstrates at gay pride marches, organizes with far-right Muslim organizations, and successfully lobbied the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission to boycott the 2006 World Pride Conference due to its location that year in Jerusalem.

Continue reading →

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But no, it’s not about Anti-Semitism at all!

Drexel University is a private research university in Philadelphia, dating from 1891, and now separated by only an alleyway between 32nd and 33rd Streets in the University City section of the city. For undergraduates in general programs, total cost of three quarters per year, including housing, is $83,818 for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Police investigating vandalism at Drexel Jewish center as ‘hate crime,’ university says

Video shows masked individuals removing letters from the sign outside the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life, the university’s president said.

by Robert Moran | Tuesday, April 2, 2024 | 7:48 PM EDT

Drexel University said Tuesday that police were investigating as a hate crime the vandalism of a sign outside the Raymond G. Perelman Center for Jewish Life. Continue reading →

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World War III watch: Warmongers gotta warmonger!

It seems that the neoconservatives — who haven’t seemed very conservative when it comes to domestic policy — simply have never met a war in which they didn’t want the United States to fight. Of course, by that, they meant other Americans to fight, not themselves. We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin also fits into that category:

Are there four brave GOP House members with the courage to save Ukraine?

That’s all it would take to get the majority needed to bypass speaker Mike Johnson and get a vote on Ukraine aid to the House floor.

by Trudy Rubin | Friday, February 23, 2024 | 6:30 AM EST

Wanted: Four GOP House members with a tiny fraction of the courage of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Saturday marks the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. It comes one week after Navalny died in an icy Siberian prison for his fight for democracy and opposition to the Ukraine war.

Yet the United States is on the verge of surrendering Ukraine into Putin’s hands because House Republican leaders refuse to allow members to vote for urgent military aid for Kyiv, a vote that would most likely pass (as it did with in a bipartisan vote in the Senate).

Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West — and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.

Mrs Rubin is most certainly dedicated to fighting the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich — addressing someone by his given and patronymic names is considered polite and respectful in Russian — but her comparison is accurate only in the most inaccurate of ways. Adolf Hitler was only 49½ years old when the Munich Pact was signed on September 30, 1938, and France and the United Kingdom were neither willing to fight Germany, nor able to send much aid to Czechoslovakia at the time. The Wehrmacht was an unknown quantity at the time, but Josef Goebbels’ propaganda made the world believe it was a tremendous fighting force.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is 71½ years old, and the Russian military, if not mostly exhausted by the two-year-long war in Ukraine, would still be in no shape to invade any other countries for perhaps ten years or more after their war with Ukraine is over.

These are undisputed facts which must be taken into account, but the neocons don’t really do that, because those facts just don’t fit the narrative they wish to push.

Whether Trump and GOP extremists succeed in gifting Ukraine to Putin may depend on whether four GOP House members have the courage to stand up to MAGA appeasement and defend America’s long-term security.

Here’s how it could work.

The best chance to skirt House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to permit a vote on Ukraine aid would be via a discharge petition. That is a parliamentary maneuver that effectively bypasses the speaker to bring a bill before the full House for a vote — if a majority of members agree to do so. If all Democrats signed on, it would only require four Republicans to get the Ukraine supplemental aid bill to the floor.

Heaven forfend! “Trump and GOP extremists”! “MAGA appeasement”! Mrs Rubin is telling Inquirer readers that there is no reasoned debate here, that only the extremists could possibly, possibly! be opposed to wasting sending yet another $60 billion in money and war materiel to Ukraine.

But let’s tell the truth here: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal.

Given Russia’s relatively poor showing against the Ukrainians, it would seem probable that American and NATO troops could push the Russians out of Ukraine, at least once they got there, but it has to be asked: at what point of a seeming military defeat would President Putin decide to cross the nuclear threshold? A concentration of US and NATO troops would be the perfect target for Russian ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and once that threshold is crossed, who could say when the nukes would stop being used? Would Russia even risk that deployment, rather than strike the deployment bases, either in Poland, a NATO member, or Ukraine once the troops moved into the country but before they reached the front lines?

There is something truly sickening about the fact that Johnson — and so many GOP supporters of aid for Ukraine — are too scared to allow Congress to vote on such a key measure. Johnson fears being ousted from his speakership by the MAGA clique, as was the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. House members fear that, if they buck the Trump line, a MAGA candidate will run against them in the GOP primary. And above all hangs the threat of physical danger to them or their families by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart.

Yet, surely, among more than 200 GOP House members, there are four whose belief in democracy and U.S. security would embolden them to take the risk.

Mrs Rubin, naturally, asserts that there’s a serious physical danger to any Republicans who voted to support this, “by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart,” but, shockingly enough, no such thing has happened to the Republicans in the Senate who voted to support Ukraine.

But, more importantly, Mrs Rubin noted that Republican House members who voted for such might face primary opponents. Well, if they fear primary opponents, then they must believe that their constituents wouldn’t support wasting sending more aid to Ukraine. Aren’t congressmen supposed to represent their constituents?

“This is not just about Ukraine, it is about our security,” (Representative Brendan) Boyle (D-PA) told me. “Putin is evil on the same level as Hitler. It is a lot less expensive to stand up to him now; if we wait until later, it will be much more costly in money and lives.”

Mr Putin might be “evil on the same level as Hitler”, but his military forces have not proven to be on the same level as the Wehrmacht in 1939. We are not likely to see Russian troops landing on the beaches of Maine and Virginia even if Ukraine collapses completely. We’re not going to see them invading even tiny Estonia, a NATO member roughly the size of New Hampshire and Vermont, because Ukraine has shown the Russians that they simply don’t have the wherewithal to do invasions well. Perhaps in ten years Russia will have rebuilt its forces enough to contemplate that, but Vladimir Vladimirovich will be 81 years old in ten years. if he’s even still alive then.

I don’t want to see Ukraine lose either, but I am not willing to waste American dollars and American weapons, and possibly American lives — remember: my older daughter is a reservist with the Army Corps of Engineers — to prop up Ukraine.

$60 billion in US aid would do what? It would help Ukraine to keep fighting the stalemate they’ve managed to achieve, but that’s all. $60 billion would keep the war going, and keep the killing on both sides and the destruction in Ukraine marching ever-forward, but it wouldn’t enable Ukraine to throw the Russians out of their country.

Mrs Rubin noted that the European Union have committed twice as much aid to Ukraine as the US has, to which I say, “Great! It’s a European problem; let the Europeans handle it! But leave the United States out of it.”

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The Associated Press make story about rescue of two Israeli hostages all about the poor, poor Palestinians! Maybe Hamas shouldn't have started a war they knew they couldn't win?

The Israel Defense Force have rescued two elderly hostages seized by Hamas in the October 7th terror raid, but Associated Press reporters Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy want you to sympathize with the Palestinian Arabs who held them captive!

Israeli forces rescued two hostages in a Gaza raid that killed at least 67 Palestinians

Israel says about 100 hostages remain in Hamas captivity.

by Najib Jobain, Josef Federman, and Samy Magdy, Associated Press | Monday, February 12, 2024 | 7:37 AM EST

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces rescued two hostages early Monday, storming a heavily guarded apartment in the Gaza Strip and extracting the captives under fire in a dramatic raid that was a small but symbolically significant success for Israel. Heavy airstrikes that provided cover for the operation killed at least 67 Palestinians, according to health officials in the beleaguered territory.

The plight of the hostages has profoundly shaken Israelis, and the rescue in densely populated Rafah briefly lifted the spirits of a nation still reeling from Hamas’ cross-border raid last year that started the war. Israel has described Rafah — a city on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip where 1.4 million Palestinians have fled fighting elsewhere — as the last remaining Hamas stronghold in the territory and signaled that its ground offensive may soon target the city.

In Gaza, the operation unleashed another tragedy in a war that has killed 28,340 Palestinians in the territory, displaced over 80% of the population, and set off a massive humanitarian crisis.

More than 12,300 Palestinian minors — children and young teens — have been killed in the conflict, the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Monday. About 8,400 women were also among those killed. That means minors make up about 43% of the dead and women and minors together they make up 73% of the dead.

As Messrs Jobain, Federman, and Magdy lament the “at least 67 Palestinians” killed in this operation, the 28,340 Arabs killed overall, and the “73% of the dead” being women and children, I am reminded of what would have saved their lived, namely Hamas not launching the October 7th terror assault in the first place!

The Wall Street Journal already documented how Hamas were using civilian facilities as shields:

Hamas Military Compound Found Beneath U.N. Agency Headquarters in Gaza

Subterranean complex had air-conditioned room with computer servers, office space

by Dov Lieber and David Luhnow | Saturday, February 10, 2024 | 3:52 PM EST

GAZA CITY—Hidden deep below the headquarters of the United Nations’ aid agency for Palestinians here is a Hamas complex with rows of computer servers that Israel’s armed forces say served as an important communications center and intelligence hub for the Islamist militant group.

For those who are stymied by the Journal’s paywall, you can also read the article here, for no charge.

Part of a warren of tunnels and subterranean chambers carved from the Gaza Strip’s sandy soil, the compound below the United Nations Relief and Works Agency buildings in Gaza City appears to have run on electricity drawn from the U.N.’s power supply, Israeli officials said.

A Wall Street Journal reporter and journalists from other news organizations visited the site this week in a trip organized by Israel’s military. A tunnel also appeared to pass beneath a U.N.-run school near the headquarters.

Gosh, I’m shocked, shocked! that the Hamas facilities were drawing power from the UNRWA’s building power. Are we supposed to believe that no one at UNRWA noticed the power drain?

The location of a Hamas military installation under important U.N. facilities is evidence, Israeli officials say, of Hamas’s widespread use of sensitive civilian infrastructure as shields to protect its militant activities. Tunnel complexes have also been found near or under some of Gaza’s largest hospitals.

Israel’s discovery of the Hamas operations below Unrwa offices is likely to put further pressure on the agency, which is facing international scrutiny after Israeli allegations that at least 12 of its employees had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which authorities say killed 1,200 people.

Israeli military officials assert that people working at Unrwa would have been aware of the tunnel complex, either from activities during its construction or by what they said would have been a jump in electricity usage when the complex started operating.

I’m trying to figure out just how Hamas could construct concrete-lined tunnels and excavate the material as they dug those tunnels with nobody noticing? The answer, of course, is that they couldn’t. It took a great deal of effort, mostly by hand, to excavate and line those tunnels, and the obvious question is: if the work effort put forth to construct those tunnels had instead been put to use building Gaza’s housing and infrastructure, how much better would that miserable place have been?

Next to the room with computer servers, which was air-conditioned, was an electricity-supply room fitted with massive batteries, apparently to serve as a backup if power was disrupted.

The electricity room and server room were beneath the Unrwa compound’s own electrical supply room, the officer said. He said wires snaked down into the underground base from the Unrwa compound, allowing Hamas to steal electricity from the U.N agency to power its underground facility.

If Hamas had computer servers in the tunnels, then the odds are that they were also stealing internet services from UNRWA, even though such is not mentioned in the article.

The three Associated Press reporters who wrote this article were certainly aware that Hamas were using the civilian population to shield themselves and their facilities from the IDF, but never mentioned that. They did, of course, have to give us a oh-the-poor-Palestinians bit:

In Hamas’ cross-border raid on Oct. 7, an estimated 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, and militants took 250 people captive, according to Israeli authorities. .  .  .  .

Mohamed Zoghroub, a Palestinian living in Rafah, said he saw a black jeep speeding near the Shaboura refugee camp in the town followed by clashes and heavy airstrikes.

“We found ourselves running with our children, from the airstrikes, in every direction,” he said, speaking from an area flattened by the heavy strikes overnight.

Footage circulating on social media from Rafah’s Kuwaiti hospital showed dead or wounded children. The footage could not immediately be verified but was consistent with AP reporting.

A young man can be seen carrying the body of an infant who he said was killed in the attacks. He said the girl, the daughter of his neighbor, was born and killed during the war.

“Let Netanyahu come and see: Is this (infant) one of your designated targets?” he said.

When the fighters use the civilian population as shields, civilians will get killed. This is all on Hamas!

The three Hamas-sympathetic reporters seem to want you to believe that Israel should not defend itself, and should not carry the fight to its enemies. They want you to believe that the IDF’s response is wholly disproportionate, in that 28,340 Palestinians have been killed compared to roughly 1,200, as though this ought to be a matter of competing body-counts rather than a war against enemies. They want you to believe that the lives of 67 Arabs were far too high a price to pay to rescue two Israeli citizens, two Joooos! Stories like this are designed to further inflame passions in the civilized West against the Israelis.

Hamas have made their goals clear: they want to destroy the Jewish state. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has made Israel’s policies clear: they must destroy Hamas. In the end, one has to destroy the other.

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CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau accidentally tells the truth, though I’m sure she is appalled by it

I spotted this following story thanks to a tweet from William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove. Mr Teach noted that CNN seemed far more concerned that an alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in Sicily would benefit conservative politicians — called the “far-right” by CNN — than they were about the fact that a young teenager was raped!

An alleged gang rape shocks Italy, and provides fodder for an ascendant far right

By Barbie Latza Nadeau, CNN | Sunday, February 11, 2024 | Updated: 5:27 AM EST

Rome CNN — Italy has been shaken by the alleged gang rape of a 13-year-old girl in front of her boyfriend in a public park in the Sicilian city of Catania, the latest in a string of shocking sexual attacks in the country.

The case is reminiscent of two alleged gang rapes last summer. A group of seven men and teenage boys between the ages of 15 and 18 are currently on trial for the alleged rape of a 19-year-old girl in Palermo in August.

Weeks later nine young men were arrested and charged with allegedly raping two cousins aged 10 and 12 near Naples and broadcasting the attack live on social media. They, too, are facing trial.

Last month’s alleged gang rape in Catania has become not only a symbol of violence against women in the country, but a cause célèbre for Italy’s far-right government. The seven suspected perpetrators were all Egyptian migrants, three of them under the age of 18, Catania police confirmed to CNN.

There’s more at the original.

As we previously reported, a ‘migrant’ from Venezuela has been arrested for trying to shoot an New York City Police Officer, and wounding a tourist in Times Square. Neither the United States as a whole, or New York more specifically, has a “far-right” government to which to tie that crime, and somehow, some way, CNN didn’t cover the story of the arrest of Jesus Alejandro Rivas-Figueroa at all, or at least a site search for Rivas-Figueroa conducted at 12:55 PM EST this morning returned no stories on the subject.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, came to power in September 2022 on an anti-immigration platform, but her efforts to curb irregular migration into the country have so far been unsuccessful.

How interesting that CNN reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau characterized Prime Minister Meloni and her government as “far-right,” and then linked an article which said, among other things, “She was nowhere near as far-right as some had feared, and the multilingual career politician was at ease with global world leaders.” 🙂 Perhaps if she had been more stringently “far-right” Italy would have been more successful in intercepting and turning around the ‘migrants’ boats.

The CNN writer then had a several paragraph section beginning with, “Italy has long struggled with the problem of gender-based violence,” even as she noted that the parliament has passed measures to more greatly criminalize such.

The legislation was inspired by the case of Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old woman murdered by an ex-boyfriend. She was one of 118 femicides in Italy last year. In 2022, women were the victims of 91% of homicides committed by family members, partners or former partners, according to the European Data Journalism Network.

“Violence against women is a phenomenon that’s more or less present in all countries, caused by structural causes like the disparity between men and women, stereotypes and prejudices,” Elena Biaggioni, vice president of D.i.Re, a national association that coordinates anti-violence centers and women’s shelters, said last June.

Speaking at a protest after a pregnant woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her partner, she added: “But of course in countries where there’s a macho culture and sexism is stronger, like Italy, this violence is justified in a different way.”

Yet in the latest case, officials have centered their attention on the background of the alleged perpetrators.

So, are you convinced yet that this is not really a problem of the illegal immigrants, but Italy, and wicked Italian men in general? It’s not the fault of the illegal immigrants, but the problem is that “officials” who have focused on the “background of the alleged perpetrators.” That’s pretty clearly what Miss Nadeau wants you to believe. But next comes the money line, though I doubt that the CNN writer realized it:

The judge investigating the most recent case, Carlo Umberto Cannella, said the suspects were likely to reoffend because they were not “accustomed to civilization.”

Absolutely right! Islamic ‘civilization,’ if you can call it civilization at all, simply is nothing like Western civilization, and Judge Cannella told the truth. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced, in the 21st century, an Iran which jails and occasionally beats to death women who don’t properly wear a headscarf, an Afghanistan where girls cannot be educated past the sixth grade, women are forced to wear head-to-toe burkas, and must be accompanied by a responsible male if they leave the home. Islamic ‘civilization’ has produced Hamas, which used murder and deliberate rape to terrorize Israeli civilians, and Da’ish, which throws homosexuals off of tall buildings.

They are not Westerners, and if we try to think of them as Westerners or expect them to behave as Westerners, we are deceiving ourselves and endangering actually civilized people.

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I guess that Marc Rowan will keep his checkbook closed

Our constitutional rights under the First Amendment include the right of peaceable assembly, and this demonstration on the University of Pennsylvania campus in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has been reported to be completely peaceful. But, in speaking their piece, the demonstrators, which included some Penn faculty, have exposed themselves to criticism of their message, and, unfortunately for the supporters of the Palestinians and Hamas terrorists, some of that criticism could come from deep-pockets donors. We have covered the backlash of deep-pockets donors against the outbreak of anti-Semitism on our college campuses, as recently as yesterday, but some people just don’t listen. From The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper:

Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine hosts College Hall protest, blocks main entrance

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You have been taxed to help kill Americans!

Is it any surprise, any surprise at all, that the United Nations agency which has been ‘helping’ the Arabs in Gaza would ‘help’ Hamas in their October 7th attack on Israel? These idiots dedicated relief workers live among the ‘Palestinians,’ are sympathetic to them, probably sleep with some of the Gazans, and are exposed to the same propaganda that the Islamist radicals spread throughout Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

U.N. agency in Gaza fires employees over alleged involvement in Oct. 7 attack

By Geoff Brumfiel | Friday, January 26, 2024 | 2:17 PM EST

TEL AVIV, Israel — The main United Nations agency that provides aid to Palestinians in Gaza has fired multiple employees following allegations that they were involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed some 1,200 people in Israel.

“The Israeli Authorities have provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several UNRWA employees in the horrific attacks on Israel on 7 October,” said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, in a statement.

“To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay.”

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for “an urgent investigation by UNRWA regarding the involvement of its employees in the terrorist events of 10/7.”

“It is important that UNRWA conduct a thorough internal inspection regarding the activities of Hamas and other terrorist elements in its ranks in order to ensure that the organization’s humanitarian activities are not abused,” it said in a statement.

Neither Israel nor the United Nations immediately provided further details on the allegations against the UNRWA employees. . . .

Twelve UNRWA employees were allegedly involved, according to the U.S. State Department, which also said it has temporarily paused additional funding for the U.N. agency “while we review these allegations and the steps the United Nations is taking to address them.”

Early reports had at least 29 Americans killed in the October 7 attack. The Wall Street Journal reported:

The White House said in mid-December that eight Americans, including three male soldiers, remained hostage, but later in the month, U.S. citizens Gad Haggai, 73 years old, and Judi Weinstein, 70, were declared dead. The husband and wife were killed on the day of the attack and their bodies were taken to Gaza and are still held by Hamas, a spokesman from their kibbutz said.

Also see: David T Cloft, “The Enduring Legacy of Judeo-Christian Values in the Western World“

In other words, workers for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, used dollars provided by the United States and American taxpayers to kill and capture American citizens.

But let’s be honest here: Hamas are able to exist because the surrounding population support them, support them with food, clothing, shelter, water, and concealment. That’s no surprise: every army or guerrilla group do the same thing, depending upon civilian support. And that means that all American dollars sent to UNRWA have gone in at least some respects to support Hamas. You have been taxed to help kill Americans!

The United Nations were formed by the Western democracies, by the nations which enjoyed the fruits and ethics and morality of Western civilization, in the aftermath of World War II, but other than our Security Council voting status, the vast majority of the UN member nations are not Western democracies, and want no part of — save our economic largesse — Western civilization.

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Awww, what a shame this is! Democratic Socialists of America go all in on their support for Hamas, and donations dry up.

One thing to remember: those who are marching in support of the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas tend to be younger, and poorer, and are usually not the kind of people who contribute to candidates and political organizations. Had I actually thought about this before, I would have guessed it, but now that it’s been brought to my attention, I do have a smile on my face while I type and drink my coffee.

From National Review:

Democratic Socialists of America in ‘Financial Crisis’ following Brash Support for Hamas

by Haley Strack | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 8:53 AM EST

The Democratic Socialists of America are in a “financial crisis” that will require seven-figure budget cuts and staff layoffs to correct.

News of the DSA’s financial condition surfaced as the group leads anti-Israel protests nationwide; including a pro-Hamas rally held in New York just one day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

“The current deficit will force us to make 7-figure budget cuts. This will require us to make painful decisions that will impact all levels of the organization. … Given our current financial state, we do not believe we can have a healthy, democratic, and effective organization while spending the amount we currently do on staff,” Alex Pellitteri, Kristin Schall, and Laura Wadlin, members of the DSA 2023-2025 National Political Committee, wrote in a proposal published last week.

For those of you who might be stymied by National Review’s paywall, you can read it for free here.

Awww, I just can’t put into words how saddened I am that the DSA will have less money to spend on trying to destroy the United States. And it pegs the irony meter that the Democratic Socialists are being hit hard by the capitalist economy. 🙂 As the New York Post’s Carl Campanile put it:

The situation appears to be a case of an organization that blindly seeks utopia and professes support of the working class clashing with reality — forcing it to have to balance a budget like the rest of America and even contemplate layoffs hated by labor unions.

Further down:

Many American progressives believe that DSA has abandoned its domestic political commitments to go all in on the pro-Palestinian cause, executive director Zioness Amanda Berman, told the New York Post.

On the matter of Israel, DSA dissented from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.), two of the country’s most prominent progressives, in the days following Hamas’s attack. Instead of condemning the mass rape and murder of Israelis, as Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders did in October, the DSA said on October 7 that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime—a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States.”

“After Hamas’s brutal invasion of Israel on October 7, DSA doubled down on their strategy of going deep and long on antisemitism, thinking it might get them out of the hole,” Berman said. “Instead, this depraved idea dug them even deeper. True progressives, whether in the grassroots or in political leadership, will continue rejecting this extremist group and its hateful ideas in the name of true justice and equity, including for Jewish Americans.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, “Democratic Socialists of America Now Planning Layoffs Amid Financial ‘Crisis’“

American Jews tend to be politically liberal and are overwhelmingly Democratic voters:

  1. Jewish adults are more likely to identify as Democrats (50%) than Republican (17%) and are more liberal in their political views (43%) than conservative (22%).
  2. Compared to the overall US electorate, Jewish adults are more likely to be Democrats (50% versus 31%) and liberal (43% versus 26%).
  3. When including independents and Others who lean toward the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, the disparity in party affiliation between Jewish adults and all US adults increases. Sixty-three percent of Jewish adults identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared to less than half (45%) of US adults.
  4. Among age groups, Gen Z Jewish adults include the lowest percentage of Democratic identification (43%) and the highest percentage of independents (43%). When including Democratic/Republican leaning, a greater percentage of Gen Z adults identify as Democrats or lean Democratic (65%) compared to older Jewish adults (61%).
  5. Jewish women identify as Democrats or lean Democratic at a greater percentage than Jewish men, similar to the pattern among all US adults, though to a larger degree.
  6. For both Jewish adults and all US adults, those with a college degree have higher rates of liberal identification and are more likely to identify as Democrats or lean Democratic.
  7. Just over one third of Hispanic and Black/other non-Hispanic Jewish adults identify as liberal, though 70-80% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic.

Look at that fourth numbered bullet point: the very group on which the DSA depend most philosophically are also the group which identify less with a political party have the lowest percentage affiliation with political groups. And the DSA have just trashed their brand with other liberals. Why it’s almost as though the baristas living ten to a two-bedroom fifth-floor walkup on 96th Street and the unemployed gamers and incels living in their parents’ basements spend their allowances on things other than political contributions.

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No one wants to live next door to a landfill

I have long said that the conquering Israelis should have expelled every last Arab from the territories they conquered in the Six-Day War of 1967. It would have been a horrible humanitarian disaster, but such would have left the Jewish State with shortened, more defensible borders, and the displaced Arabs would not have been living under Israeli occupation. If Israel was not willing to expel the Arabs, then they should have just annexed what they wanted — primarily all of Jerusalem, the eastern part of which was under Jordanian control prior to the war — and left the Arabs to live in their own state in 1967.

The Israelis somehow thought that the Arabs would slowly emigrate, rather than live under occupation, but in that, they forgot Jewish history, how very few Jews fled Europe even faced with pogroms, discrimination, murders, and even the Third Reich. We’ve all heard about the Jewish refugee ship, the MS St Louis, turned away from ports in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, but out of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany, the ship carried only 937 passengers. Most European Jews thought that they could ride out the storm of Naziism, with some casualties, but mostly their communities and their people would survive intact. It was simply outside their paradigm that the Nazis really did intend to kill them all.

Knowing that part of their history, the Israelis of the late 1960s should have realized that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs could, and probably would, do the same thing, try to ride out the storm at anchor.

From The Atlantic:

Some Palestinians Want to Leave Gaza. Let Them.

No one should be trapped in a war zone.

by Joshua Krug | Monday, January 22, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

Recently, I reached out to a prominent Palestinian activist to learn about his experiences in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. He told me that his apartment had been destroyed, and that he lives in a tent with his family. They are under the near-constant threat of bombings, are often hungry, and are worried about starvation and sickness. He wants to leave the enclave—but right now, he can’t.

Several other Palestinians I’ve talked with also want to leave Gaza, and have also encountered closed borders. They of course want the violence to stop, and do not want to be permanently shut out. But above all, they want to be safe. (And I have withheld their names to protect their safety.)

An article in The Guardian this month featured a U.K.-based Palestinian who said his family members were killed in Israeli air strikes and echoed the above sentiments: “I’m not sure why no schemes have been introduced, nothing to evacuate people. I don’t even hear humanitarians talk about this any more.”

Alas! The Atlantic now requires readers to either subscribe or “start a free trial”. Fortunately, the article is also in my msn.com, and can be read for free here.

I am an American Jewish academic based in Germany, and I oppose the forced relocation of Palestinians from their land. Gaza is central to Palestinian history, and I would like people there to survive and thrive right where they are. Still, life—rather than land—should be the ultimate value, a simple fact often lost in the heated debates around the current conflict. I hear calls for a cease-fire and for the surrender of Hamas, but almost never for a safe path out of an active war zone. Palestinians deserve a state of their own, and the opportunity to take refuge outside a war zone rather than serve as martyrs for “the cause.”

There are never calls for “a safe path out of an active war zone” because none of the neighboring nations want the ‘Palestinians.’ Letting the ‘Palestinians’ leave concomitantly means having a place for them to go, and none of their neighbors want people they consider to be murderous trash living in their countries.

The Six-Day War is within living memory in the Arab states, but so is Black September. ‘Palestinian’ guerrilla fighters under Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization escaped east of the river into Jordan used the Hashemite Kingdom as a base to attack Israel, but their presence and politics were leading them into calling for the overthrow of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy and King Hussein. Finally, open warfare broke out between the PLO and Jordanian forces.

Jordan and the other Arab nations get it: admitting large numbers of ‘Palestinians’ means a very probable eventual attempt to overthrow their governments.

Egypt says a mass exodus from Gaza would bring Hamas or other Palestinian militants onto its soil. That might be destabilizing in Sinai, where Egypt’s military fought for years against Islamic militants and at one point accused Hamas of backing them.

Egypt has backed Israel’s blockade of Gaza since Hamas took over in the territory in 2007, tightly controlling the entry of materials and the passage of civilians back and forth. It also destroyed the network of tunnels under the border that Hamas and other Palestinians used to smuggle goods into Gaza.

With the Sinai insurgency largely put down, “Cairo does not want to have a new security problem on its hands in this problematic region,” (Riccardo Fabiani, Crisis Group International’s North Africa Project Director) said.

(Egyptian President Abdel Fattah) el-Sissi warned of an even more destabilizing scenario: the wrecking of Egypt and Israel’s 1979 peace deal. He said that with the presence of Palestinian militants, Sinai “would become a base for attacks on Israel. Israel would have the right to defend itself … and would strike Egyptian territory.”

“The peace which we have achieved would vanish from our hands,” he said, “all for the sake of the idea of eliminating the Palestinian cause.”

President el-Sissi regards Hamas as just another part of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group Egypt has long attempted to suppress.

The ‘Palestinians’ have created trouble wherever they’ve gone, and the other Arab nations really want no part of them; to put it bluntly, they see the ‘Palestinians’ as trash. And nobody wants to live next to a landfill.