Category Archives: Freedom of Speech and of the Press

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Waging war against Israel, from the safety of Morningside Heights

That our oh-so-noble leftists will lie through their scummy teeth whenever they think it to their advantage is of no surprise to anyone who pays attention. That The New York Times would report on it actually is at least slightly surprising.

Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

by Sharon Otterman | Wednesday, October 9, 2024

The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.

The ‘student’ in question is Khymani James, who, according to NBC News “uses he/she/they pronouns,” thus proving that he’s mentally ill and an idiot, was barred from Columbia’s campus on Friday, April 26th, and is now suing Columbia over his dismissal. Apparently Mr James open support of “militant groups fighting Israel” means fighting Israel in Morningside Heights, and not actually picking up a rifle and heading to Gaza to face the Israel Defense Force in real life.

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology.

The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And the group posted an essay calling the attack a “moral, military and political victory” and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.

“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there,” the group wrote on Oct. 7 on Telegram. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom!”

Also see: William Teach, “Unhinged Jew Hating Group At Columbia U Rescinds Apology For Anti-Semite Comrade

“Apparently, to judge by their support of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and their statement that they “support liberation by any means necessary” means that they support the rapes, murders, and kidnappings perpetrated by the attackers.

Reporter Sharon Otterman’s article noted the problems the university’s leadership have with statements made under our First Amendment protections, but which can also create a “hostile environment for Jewish students.”

Laughably, Mr James, in his lawsuit against Columbia, as reported by the Columbia Spectator, is claiming that he is the one being victimized by a ‘hostile environment’:

“The environment at Columbia, which has been rendered hostile for James, is sufficiently severe, pervasive, persistent, and offensive such that it deprives James of equal access to the opportunities and benefits that Columbia provides to other students,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit states that after James began sharing “anti-war and anti-genocide political beliefs” on their personal Instagram account, they (sic) became the target of “racist, homophobic, and physically threatening messages,” including ones that called James slurs. These messages distracted James from their (sic) schoolwork and caused them (sic) to feel “uncomfortable, anxious, and unsafe,” according to the lawsuit.

Laughing out loud! At least the Times wasn’t silly enough to use Mr James’ preferred pronouns, but the Spectator, produced by the foremost School of Journalism in the country, was. 🙂

I have to ask, are Mr James and his attorney claiming that he has “anti-war . . . political beliefs” at the same time he and his supporters are calling for war against Israel, and are actively supporting the war Hamas started against Israel? But, I can answer my own question: for the anti-Semitic left, violence in advance of their cause is perfectly acceptable; they are simply “anti-war” when it comes to other people and other people’s defense.

There have been several stories about Americans, primarily combat veterans, who have left the United States and gone to Ukraine, to fight against the Russians, and at least a few of them have been killed in action. Hey, they were vets, knew the dangers, and chose to brave them anyway!

And there have been many stories about Americans and Europeans, primarily Jews, who have gone to Israel to fight with the Israel Defense Force. Some are dual citizens, and the anti-Semitic left have been calling for them not to be allowed to return to their European countries, saying that they are “war criminals.”

But pro-‘Palestinian’ Europeans and Americans? I can’t say that none have gone to Gaza to join the fight, but if any have, there haven’t been enough of them to have merited any story that I have seen in the credentialed media about it.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer conceals a truth that everyone already knows Is the Inky actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid?

This site has reported, many times, on how The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news, at the direction of published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes. Miss Hughes told us that “racial justice” concerns will be considered in the newspaper’s “crime and criminal justice coverage.”

Teen critically wounded in shooting on SEPTA bus in North Philly

The shooting occurred on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. Some gunshots hit the engine area and disabled the bus.

by Robert Moran and Earl Hopkins | Friday, October 4, 2024 | 9:47 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, October 5, 2024 | 2:33 PM EDT

A 17-year-old was critically wounded in a shooting on a SEPTA bus Friday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting occurred just after 6:15 p.m. on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. The teen was taken by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in critical but stable condition with several gunshot wounds, including to the face, police said Saturday.

The suspected shooter, described as a male wearing all-black clothing, got off the bus and fled in a silver Kia, which was located and pursued by police until it crashed at Fifth Street and Glenwood Avenue, said Inspector D.F. Pace. One person in the Kia ran from the car and was apprehended, according to video of the chase, but another remained at large, police said.

Based on a preliminary investigation, police said an altercation between several males on the bus likely led to the shooting near Allegheny Avenue and Fifth Street. The bus had several bullet holes, and spent shell casings were found on the highway in the 300 block of West Allegheny Avenue, so investigators are looking into the possibility of some shots fired outside the bus, Pace said.

There’s more at the original.

I noticed as soon as I read it: the “suspected shooter” was “described as a male wearing all-black clothing”. He wasn’t described as a white male, or an Hispanic male, or an Asian male, but just a male. And I was 99.44% certain that meant that the “suspected shooter” is a black male. The victim was described only as a “17-year-old,” but the Inquirer does tell us that he was male, through the use of the masculine pronouns.[1]Since, in English grammar, the masculine subsumes the feminine, the masculine pronouns are used when the sex of the person to which they refer are unknown, so that does not tell us, technically … Continue reading

But the reporters knew: the Philadelphia Police Department released a crime notification to the media, which Fox 29 News reporter Steve Keeley duplicated at 7:18 PM Friday evening, 2½ hours before the newspaper’s original story, which stated that the victim is a black male. And NBC 10 News reported last night that the suspect was a black male.

Let’s tell the truth here: when violent crime is reported in the City of Brotherly Love, people who hear about it automatically assume that the perpetrators are black. And, in the majority of cases, they are.

But not all of the bad guys in Philly are black, and when the Inky deliberately conceals the race of suspects and victims, is the newspaper not contributing to the stereotype that they are all black?

The Inquirer is privately owned, by the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and absolutely has the right to print what it wishes, and not publicize what it wants to keep quiet. But it ought to be asked just how much journalist respect we can have for a newspaper that censors the news for political purposes.

References

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↑1 Since, in English grammar, the masculine subsumes the feminine, the masculine pronouns are used when the sex of the person to which they refer are unknown, so that does not tell us, technically speaking, that the victim is male, but I also know that the newspaper’s reporters are too grammatically illiterate to realize that and use pronouns thus.
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When the Jew haters tell you who they are, believe them! "Students for Justice in Palestine" could have protested at Israeli consulate, but chose to protest at Jewish center

This poor site, along with literally hundreds of others, has covered the pro-‘Palestinian, really pro-Hamas ‘demonstrations’ on our college campuses last spring. I did note, with some pleasure, that at least at my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, the protests were carried out the way the First Amendment, which guarantees to all of us both the freedom of speech and the right of peaceable assembly, contemplated, peaceably.

Sadly, many of the pro-savages demonstrations at other schools were not entirely peaceable. But I did gloat report on those demonstrations fading away when school was out for the summer.

Well, it’s a new school year — though October seems like this article is a bit late — and the Usual Suspects have been up to their old tricks. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Temple suspends pro-Palestinian student group; Muslim advocates call to investigate police over alleged hijab removal during campus protest

CAIR is calling for an investigation after Temple University’s handling of a protest, where they say a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab.

by Max Marin and Robert Moran | Wednesday, October 2, 2024 | 2:02 PM EDT | Updated: 6:37 PM EDT

Temple University has temporarily banned Students for Justice in Palestine from operating on campus, the latest in a wave of suspensions against pro-Palestinian student groups amid sustained protests against the war in Gaza.

The move comes after police detained four SJP members, including a Temple student, during a demonstration that interrupted an on-campus career fair last week.

So, the “Students for Justice in Palestine” demonstration was not peaceable in nature, but interrupted a meeting to help more sensible students at Temple who were looking to begin their professional careers after graduation. You know, the sensible thing to do after spending a boatload of money for a university education.

Muslim community leaders are calling for an investigation into the university’s handling of that protest after a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab and detained the woman without access to her religious head covering.

If that happened, and I will never believe claims by “Muslim community leaders” without outside corroboration, it would have been because the woman was resisting arrest.

While Temple did not cite that specific incident, a university spokesperson said in a statement that the interim suspension stemmed from “recent conduct,” and the student activist group is now forbidden from holding on-campus activities, including “meetings, social and philanthropic events.” The suspension was first reported by the Temple News.

The spokesperson pointed to the university’s on-campus demonstration guidelines that are “in place to ensure the safety and well-being of community members while also encouraging and preserving freedom of expression.” . . . .

This is not the group’s first brush with university leaders. Temple president Richard Englert denounced an SJP-led demonstration in August after protesters chanted outside a Jewish student center on campus.

In a statement, Englert threatened disciplinary action against students who participated in the rally, which he described as a form of “intimidation and harassment.” The pro-Palestinian student group pushed back against Englert’s comments, arguing in a post on social media that the president “distorted our message to serve the false narrative that Temple SJP is a threat to Temple.”

No, I suppose that the pro-barbarian students wouldn’t see accosting Jewish students outside of a known Jewish student gathering place as “intimidation and harassment,” but the Jews on campus certainly would have, and did:

Temple University says it is investigating a student pro-Palestinian demonstration held outside a Jewish center on campus

“Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated,” Temple’s president said.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, August 29, 2024 | 10:40 PM EDT

Temple University said it is investigating for possible disciplinary action a pro-Palestinian march by students and nonstudents who demonstrated outside a Jewish center on campus Thursday.

The protest march began at the Charles Library, said Temple University president Richard Englert in a statement, then some demonstrators went to the Rosen Center, which is the home at Temple of Hillel, an international organization for Jewish students.

“While there, the demonstrators used megaphones to chant directly at the occupants within the building,” Englert said.

Emphasis mine. Using megaphones to chant directly at the people in the Hillel Center, the majority of who could be assumed to be Jewish, would constitute targeted ethnic and religious harassment.

“We are deeply saddened and concerned by these events,” Englert said. “Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated.”

This was clearly a protest against Jews in general, not just Israeli policy, as the “Students for Justice in Palestine” have conflated the two. Not all Jews are Israelis, and at an American college 5,774 miles away from Israel, it’s virtually certain that most of the Jews on campus at Temple are not from Israel.

There is an Israeli consulate in Philadelphia, at 1880 John F. Kennedy Blvd, which is just 2.6 miles away from the Hillel Center, at 1441 West Norris Street, pretty much of a straight march down Broad Street, though, admittedly, marching that way takes you partly into the Philadelphia Badlands. If the SJP wanted to protest Israeli government policies specifically, they could have been protesting outside the consulate; instead they were harassing people they knew to be Jooooos.

Temple’s actions won’t stop the SJP from existing; all it does is ban them as a student organization and deny them use of Temple’s facilities.

Our First Amendment was written by civilized men, with civilized behavior in mind; they cited “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”. It does not protect some right to harass others, or gather in mobs, or riot.

But the pro-‘Palestinian’ people in this country, and around the world, are not truly civilized men. They might think that they are, but they are supporting the barbarism of Hamas, they are supporting the antithesis of the Western civilization, the benefits of which they enjoy.  The “Students for Justice in Palestine” have a right to exist, and to protest peacefully; it’s only when the break the code of civilization that they become subject to arrest.

The one thing they do not have is any right to the respect of decent people, and for them, I have none. When the anti-Semites tell you who they really are, you should believe them!

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Karma comes to Taylor Lorenz!

The First Street Journal has previously reported on the very lovely Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture for The Washington Post. Miss Lorenz was most famous for her doxing of Chaya Raichik as the creator and proprietor of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok, along with her continual fretting about people not wearing face masks for all eternity.

But, I used the wrong tense above. Miss Lorenz does not cover anything for the Post, but covered her subjects, as in past tense.

Taylor Lorenz leaves Washington Post following her Biden ‘war criminal’ post controversy

Columnist had gone weeks without anything published by the paper, suggesting she was benched over the Instagram post</h4
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Tuesday, October 1, 2024 | 12:18 PM EDT

Reporter Taylor Lorenz announced she left The Washington Post on Tuesday after being absent for weeks following a viral controversy involving her calling President Biden a “war criminal.”

Lorenz went viral in August after a screenshot obtained by the New York Post’s Jon Levine appeared to show her calling President Biden a “war criminal” in an Instagram post while attending a White House event. Lorenz initially implied the caption was edited by someone else before admitting that she shared the post herself.

Translation: Miss Lorenz knew that she had f(ornicated) up badly, and lied to try to save her job. She knew that the newspaper was supporting Democrats editorially, and she had just posted something which hurt the Democrats chances in the November election. We don’t know that was the concern of the editors, but the credentialed media cannot go around calling the President of the United States a “war criminal” unless it’s in a specific opinion column, or he’s a Republican.

As part of the launch of her User Magazine Substack, she explained “why I’m leaving legacy media,” saying her type of reporting “has become increasingly difficult to do in corporate media.”

Yup!

Further down:

In the viral image shared by Levine, a masked Lorenz was seen taking a selfie with Biden speaking in the background. Included was a caption that read “War criminal” with a frowny face.

Fox News Digital learned the post was made in an Instagram story specifically using the “close friends” feature as indicated by the green star icon, meaning it was not posted publicly and could only have been seen by a select group of Instagram users of her choosing.

Perhaps Miss Lorenz wasn’t quite as good an “online culture” reporter as she believed. Anyone even a quarter-way internet savvy knows that anything you post on the internet has left your control, and can be ferreted out and used by someone else. That she sent it out only to “close friends” tells us that she knew it could be problematic for her, but wasn’t quite smart enough to not send it in the first place.

Miss Lorenz was trying to get Miss Raichik fired from her previous job with her doxing article. I don’t think she’s still doing real estate, but her net worth is now estimated to be $10 million, so being doxed doesn’t seem to have hurt her.

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John Kerry lets us know that the Democrats have not given up on the idea of regulating speech

My daily diary informed me that September 30th is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and my immediate thought was: whose truth?

John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, Secretary of State during the last half of the Obama Administration, and recently President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, said:

“But, look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said.

“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he added, while acknowledging that different people have other visions for change.

It was 2004, and CBS News, certainly one of our traditional media sources, tried to torpedo the younger President Bush’s re-election campaign, and if it weren’t for two blogs, Powerline and Little Green Footballs — the latter of which has gone off the deep end whacko — spotting that the documents used to buttress the story were forged, and were able to publish that on the internet, it is at least possible that Mr Bush would have lost the election.

Thus, you can see why Mr Kerry doesn’t really like Freedom of Speech, at least not the kind of speech which doesn’t support Democrats.

It’s not just the 80-year-old Mr Kerry. President Biden wanted to set up a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, to be run by the highly partisan Nina Jankowicz, but that effort was first paused and then dropped due to the fiery reaction it received. Naturally, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz waxed wroth!

Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.

The lovely Miss Lorenz told us everything we needed to know about how Miss Jankowicz was expected to run her Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board: she expected it to block “far-right influencers” and “the “right-wing Internet apparatus.” The left were aghast when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter — sorry, I absolutely refuse to call it 𝕏 — because Mr Musk wants it to be a free speech site, not one which censors some — mostly conservative — arguments.

Mr Kerry’s comments at the World Economic Forum, that private jet set gathering of the hoitiest and the toitiest in Davos, Switzerland to talk about Other People not being able to use fossil fuels, tell us one thing: today’s Democrats have not given up on the idea that they can somehow circumvent the First Amendment and regulate people’s speech. They are so invested in telling people what they want them to hear, and not wanting them to hear anything else, that they actually do thing that regulation of speech, to control ‘disinformation,’ of course, is actually the freedom of speech. And if Kamala Harris Emhoff wins in November, we’ll simply see further efforts to regulate speech.

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USA Today sports columnist is incredibly butthurt that two top athletes didn’t speak out the way she wanted

For whom Patrick Mahomes and Caitlyn Clark intend to vote has absolutely no bearing on for whom I intend to vote, but sports columnist Nancy Armour apparently believes that it’s their duty to open their secret ballots to me.

Caitlin Clark, Patrick Mahomes’ bland answers evoke Michael Jordan era of athlete activism

by Nancy Armour | September 13, 2024

Not every athlete can be LeBron James or Megan Rapinoe.

Remember Michael Jordan’s comment about Republicans buying shoes? There’s a long history of athletes putting as much space as possible between themselves and controversy, and what Caitlin Clark and Patrick Mahomes did this week was no different.

Asked about the upcoming presidential election Wednesday and who they might be supporting, both Clark and Mahomes dodged the question and instead found a safe space in encouraging people to register and to vote.

“It’s more than nothing, but it doesn’t put them on the front lines of the discussion,” said David Niven, an associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati who teaches a course on sports and politics.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Mahomes and Miss Clark were not thinking about Mr James or Miss Rapinoe; perhaps they were thinking about Colin Kaepernick, and the activism that persuaded NFL owners not to sign him.

Mr James did himself no favors with his political statements, which only exacerbated people looking at him as an opportunist and a flop artist in the NBA. Miss Rapinoe’s political activism didn’t serve her or women’s soccer very well, either. The fact that Mr Mahomes plays in deeply conservative Missouri, and Miss Clark in very red Indiana might have contributed to their decisions, and Miss Clark, who has led the WNBA from near-obscurity to sold-out arenas when and where she plays, makes her hugely valuable to the league. Miss Armour was saying that it’s a shame the athletes weren’t openly supporting Kamala Harris Emhoff.

Clark’s Instagram account is now flooded with nasty comments from supposed fans who are upset she liked Taylor Swift’s post endorsing Kamala Harris. Mahomes is getting backlash both from people who want him to disassociate himself from his wife’s (presumed) political beliefs and people angry he didn’t defend them.

Perhaps Mr Mahomes disagrees with Mrs Mahomes, who ‘liked’ an Instagram post from former President Trump, and perhaps he doesn’t. That’s really kind of a ‘who cares’ thing as far as I am concerned.

We have a long tradition of a secret ballot in the United States, and while a lot of people, including me, are willing to tell others how they will vote — I will vote the straight sensible ticket, meaning Republican, over the blithering idiots, the Democrats — a lot of other people are not.

The Democrats have even tried to exploit the secret ballot, with comments that women do not have to tell their husbands or boyfriends how they voted, and that they can even lie and support Mrs Emhoff, when the men in their lives vote more sensibly. And when it comes to the presidential contest, it almost doesn’t matter: President Trump will carry the states in which Mr Mahomes and Miss Clark live, and it will not be close.

Outkick noted that Miss Armour did not support Tom Brady speaking out on politics, because Mr Brady supported Mr Trump. It seems as though Miss Armour is really only interested in athletes speaking out on politics if they happen to support the politicians she likes. Miss Armour was similarly upset when Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker spoke in favor of conventional, Catholic morals at a Catholic college. She just retweeted a post in which Mr Butker missed a kick, which said, “Harrison Butker is, once again, a little too far right.”

And she has taken the far-left position that ‘transgender women’ — meaning males who have deluded themselves into thinking that they are girls — should be able to compete in women’s sports. Neither her Wikipedia profile nor her Twitter bio say anything about her ever having played sports.

Miss Armour has, as we all do, the absolute freedom of speech and of the press, and she can say whatever she wishes. But the freedom of speech and of the press carries with it the freedom not to say something, and the columnist is just wholly upset that a couple of well-known athletes didn’t say what she wanted them to say.

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In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work The way to fight anti-Semitism is not to let the anti-Semites win!

In February of 1896, long before the Nazis, just a couple of months before Adolf Hitler’s 7th birthday, Theoror Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State, was published in Leipzig and Vienna by M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung. Mr Herzl saw the persecution Jews were facing in Europe, where they had lived ever since their expulsion from the Holy Land by the Romans beginning in 70 AD. Jews, he believed, needed to live apart from the mostly Christian populations of Europe.

But even living apart, while in Europe, didn’t prove particularly safe. While the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau, the Warsaw ghetto, was not formally established until November of 1940 by the Nazi occupation authorities, it contained those heavily Jewish neighborhoods which existed before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:

Maybe It’s Time for Jewish Self-Segregation

The self-protective impulse is a healthy response to a wave of antisemitism.

By Joseph Epstein | Thursday, September 19, 2024 | 5:33 PM EDT

The recent and rampant rise in antisemitism is, to put it gently, disheartening. One finds it everywhere, much of it passing under the flag of anti-Zionism, criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and presumably sympathy for the Palestinians. Saddest of all is that antisemitism has cropped up so exuberantly among students in our elite universities. Apart from decrying it, calling it out for what it is, what are Jews to do to protect themselves from this recurring nightmare? Perhaps a jaunt down memory lane will help.

For those who don’t have my too-expensive subscription to the Journal, the OpEd can be accessed for free here.

I was 5 when I was first aware not only that I was Jewish but that being Jewish had consequences. My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” which I began to recite. When I came to the n-word—before “tiger” had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative—my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.

A few years later, returning with my father from a Bing Crosby movie, “Going My Way,” I asked if we might have a Christmas tree. “No,” he said. Why not? “Because you are Jewish.” Case closed. Not long after that, my mother pointed out various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs—Sauganash, Kenilworth—that were “restricted,” which meant no Jews allowed. Not only did being Jewish carry responsibilities; it also apparently meant being despised, at least in certain quarters.

After several more paragraphs, in which Joseph Epstein, the author, describes his life growing up, and in college, in mostly Jewish enclaves, we get to the meat of the column:

No one saw the current wave of antisemitism coming. Who thought Hamas would find supporters at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere? The country had known of this virus before, but it came not from crowds of thousands but from prominent people. Henry Ford was openly antisemitic. No Jew in those days drove his cars. Father Charles Coughlin, on his radio show in the 1930s, attacked what he termed “international bankers.” But those were largely isolated, the present strain more widespread.

Is self-chosen segregation among Jews a good thing? In one sense, it feels like taking a step backward toward a less open society. Yet when the politics of a country swing too far in either direction, antisemitism is almost certain to come in its train. The swing today is unmistakably and strongly leftist, and self-segregation strikes me as the first step in combating the attacks on Jews that attend it.

I am not Jewish, and I live in an area with very few, if any Jews, so perhaps I just don’t understand, but this seems to me to be an advocacy of surrender, and not even an effective one. If American Jews self-segregate, into small, mostly Jewish communities, are they not simply gathering in a smaller and more confined target area for any violently antiSemitic ‘mostly peaceful protests’? We have already seen ‘protests’ at synagogues and Hillel Centers on campuses. Self-segregation, self-isolation doesn’t work when those who hate you still know where you congregate and live.

Israel is, of course, Mr Herzl’s dream, even if he never saw it; he died in 1904, at a very young 44 years of age, though he is now buried in Mt Herzl, on the west side of Jerusalem. But look at the situation today. Israel is the self-segregation of millions of Jews in the modern world, yet we see not just the Arabs — who can always be counted on for hate — but millions of people reared in Western civilization nations who don’t want the Jews to have even that small nation.

Self-segregation counts on the tolerance of others to allow your segregated communities, and we aren’t seeing much of that tolerance by the supporters of Hamas and the ‘Palestinians.’

In the end, hiding from your enemies just doesn’t work.

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The #woke run amok Sometimes it's more than just silliness; sometimes far left ideology constitutes a danger to civilized society

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.

Were it not for my website, I would not be wasting spending so much on newspaper subscriptions, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lexington Herald-Leader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Wall Street Journal. One thing on which I can always count is something silly from the Inquirer to give me inspiration!

Using a person’s preferred pronoun isn’t about being woke. It’s a sign of respect.

Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be.

by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, September 16, 2024 | 9:01 AM EDT

Applicants vying for a job in Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign have the option of selecting from nine different combinations of preferred pronouns.

There’s the usual he/him, she/her, and even they/them/theirs. But some options are much more obscure — most I’ve never even heard of, such as fae/faer and hu/hu (which is derived from the word human). I was this week years old when I learned about some of these neopronouns, as they’re called.

I continued with Miss Armstrong’s column, and you know what I didn’t find? I didn’t find any mention of whether those people who chose not to use the “preferred pronouns” an applicant might select — unless the “preferred pronouns” selected were the normal ones — would be disciplined or fired under a Kamala Harris Emhoff administration.

The Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office of the National Institutes of Health stated:

Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns — by which them mean their preferred pronouns — DRP — is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights.

The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expressly prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination includes discrimination based on an employee’s gender identity or sexual orientation. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s technical assistance publication Protections Against Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity considers the use of pronouns or names that are inconsistent with an individual’s gender identity as unlawful harassment. The EEOC guidance states, “intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment” and is a violation of Title VII.

Translation: use the “preferred pronouns,” or you’re history!

Back to Miss Armstrong’s column:

Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be for people for whom the usual he/him, she/her, or even they/them don’t cut it.

I personally don’t mind referring to an individual by “they” if that’s what’s preferred. You shouldn’t, either. It doesn’t cost anything to show each other the kind of respect we all deserve.

Actually, it does. By using the non-standard “preferred pronouns,” or the newly assumed names, of the ‘transgendered’ or ‘non-binary’, one is, in effect, conceding their position that they are something other than their actual sex! Miss Armstrong is asking us to, in effect, lie to both others and ourselves, to keep from hurting their precious little feelings.

There’s more to it than that. The left in general, and Miss Armstrong specifically, wish to control language, in an attempt to control the argument. If someone concedes that Bruce Jenner is actually ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner, then one is concomitantly conceding that a person can actually change his sex. Mr Jenner has had his “gender confirmation surgery”, but he is still biologically male. He has the standard XY chromosomes which determine sex, and has to “dilate” his faux “vagina” frequently, because, being biologically male, his body sees that “vagina” as an open wound, and tries to close it up to heal it. That, in itself, tells you that while Mr Jenner has had extensive plastic and urologic surgery to attempt to appear female, he’s still male.

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

If someone concedes the narrative that a person can change his sex simply to be nice and kind and polite to a specific person who has claimed that he[1]As specified in The First Street Journal‘s Stylebook, “In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to … Continue reading has done so, then he has also conceded, in his language, that changing sex is possible in general. It’s pretty difficult to argue that you don’t believe that changing sex is possible if you are already referring to Bradley Manning as “Chelsea.”

That, of course, leads to all kinds of stupidity, such as Will Thomas claiming that he is a female called “Lia,” and other males pushing themselves into women’s sports, in which they have dominated. As we have previously reported, Miss Armstrong’s newspaper has gone all-in on referring to Mr Thomas as a woman, even though, at the time of his competition on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, he was a fully intact male.

We have already seen some of the results of placing “transgender women” who are convicted felons in women’s prisons, and girls’ teams choosing to forfeit a game rather than play against biological males, because bigger males were injuring the girls.

If the ‘transgendered’ were content to just try to live their lives quietly, this wouldn’t be an issue. But no, at least some of them seem determined to use the force of law to compel you to confirm their delusions, and that constitutes a danger to individuals, to girls and women — there doesn’t seem to be a similar danger from females claiming that they are male, though Audrey Hale is an obvious exception — and to society in general. Miss Armstrong’s subtitle said that we shouldn’t think of it as being #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading run amok, but it clearly is an assault on science and common sense, on things human beings have known ever since human beings became self-aware.

References

References
↑1 As specified in The First Street Journal‘s Stylebook, “In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to whom a pronoun refers is unknown, the masculine is properly used, and does not indicate that that person is male, nor is it biased in favor of such an assumption. The feminine pronouns, on the other hand, do specify that the person to whom they refer is female, and not male.” We do not use the silly and ungrammatical formulation “he or she.” We do not, however, change the direct quotes of others.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues. By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Blogging from France! Freedom of speech for he, but not for thee, or me

Ville de Nice, France (4:08 PM local time) — My Twitter feed has recently been full of calls from people using their freedom of speech to stifle other people’s freedom of speech. Jay Michaelson, “author and journalist,” as he describes himself, wrote:

Like a pack of anguished Austrian nuns, progressives can’t stop singing this tune on talk shows and Twitter feeds. And for good reason: the world’s richest man has turned a once-essential social media platform into a far-right propaganda machine.

Despite his lofty libertarian claims of a year ago, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Elon Musk has put his finger on the scale in countless ways to boost far-right posts and deprecate others — starting with his own posts.

There’s more at the MSNBC original.

Even though I do not follow many leftist sites and people at all, my Twitter feed is full of posts supporting the Communist from California, and the antiSemites wishing death upon Israel and total victory for the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas. It’s pretty laughable when I read tweets by people in the United States whining about ‘stolen land’ and ‘white settler colonialists’ when that’s exactly how and why the US exists: white settler colonialists, white Christian settler colonialists, came to these shores and conquered the Indians who were here before them. If you are an American, if you live in the US, everything you have is something you owe to those white settler colonialists.

Somehow, some way, those opinions get expressed in my feed on Twitter. I am, of course, free to block them, but I haven’t.

Mr Michaelson wants us all to boycott Twitter, but it’s his self description as a journalist, paid and fed by MSNBC, which tells us something. The credentialed left have long hated that major thing about this internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that we commoners, we riff-raff, can extend our voices beyond local shouting distance, without the need to get approval by an editor of The New York Times or MSNBC. Their gatekeeping function has been lost.

Freedom of speech and of the press are, for people like Mr Michaelson, reserved for those who have been approved by the powers who control the media, and Elon Musk’s (mostly) libertarian attitude is just another, another very large, medium for the Little People to say things, sometimes things of which Our Betters disapprove. Freedom of speech and of the press for he, but not for thee, and me.