AL JAZEERA ON THE POTOMAC: That’s what I’ve been calling the Washington Post on social media, but I may have been understating things.

MODERN DAY NAZIS HOLDING AN ANTI-NAZI RALLY: Because to left, “Nazi” means “people I disagree with” and has little if anything to do with actual Nazis. By the way, but “support of Israel” they mean only that the rabbi thinks Israel should continue to exist. The only way Israel will cease to exist is through mass murder and expulsion. Hence, modern Nazis.

THIS IS WHAT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SURGERY DEPT IS UP TO INSTEAD OF, YOU KNOW, TEACHING SURGERY: These tweets are all in the last two weeks… And, not joking, I initially thought the first tweet on the surgery Grand Rounds on voting rights was satire from the Babylon Bee or something.

UPDATE: It turns out that the UVA Board of Visitors just announced the dismantlement of the DEI infrastructure at the university. Maybe in time to save a few lives.

AND IT’S JUST THE OPENING SALVO: Trump Administration Cancels $400 Million in Grants to Columbia University.

Literally all Columbia had to do to avoid all this was to enforce its preexisting rules about campus behavior, and the law, and not give special treatment to Hamasnik students, faculty, and outside agitators. And also cooperate with Congressional investigators looking into Title VI violations, rather than stonewalling hoping that things would blow over after the 2024 elections. That’s really it.

As a former research fellow at Columbia Law School (1994-95) I hate to say it, but not only am I not going to go the ramparts to defend Columbia, I’d be happy to dance on its grave. Let it go bankrupt, and have Yeshiva University buy up its assets.

WELL, THAT’S DISAPPOINTING: “[NIH chair nominee Jay] Bhattacharya was also asked about how the Trump administration’s anti-DEI crusade might affect scientific research. For example, would efforts to include minorities in clinical trials be undermined? Bhattacharya said no.”

Comment from DB: Biomedical research should be focused on genetics and how that influences health risks and outcomes. The government, however, requires researchers to focus on human diversity not based on genetics, but on unscientific racial and ethnic classifications invented by the government in the 1970s for entirely different purposes. These classifications at best are weak proxies for genetic diversity, and more often are completely nonsensical. What do we learn by using data on “Hispanics,” who can be 100% European, 100% Indigenous, 100% African, or any combination? What does a study on “Hispanic” Cubans in Miami tell us about “Hispanic” Dominicans in New York? Or take the “Asian American” classification, which includes Caucasian South Asians, East Asians, and Filipino Austronesians, groups that have nothing more genetically in common with each other than any random humans. I could go on, but instead if you are interested in more you can read this piece, or an expanded version in chapter 6 of my book Classified.

BONKERS: I don’t know why anyone would admire a cretin like Andrew Tate, but to each his own. Unless you happen to be White House liaison to Homeland Security, and you write a completely bonkers, worshipful post about Tate filled with nonsense conspiracy theory. Then, you need to be shown the door.

GAZA AND THE DEATH OF INTERNATONAL LAW: Last week, I spoke at a Scalia Law School Jewish Law Students Association memorial service for the murdered hostages, including the Bibas boys. My speech turned into a column, with this highlight:

Two particularly absurd manifestations of the IHL [international humanitarian law] world’s anti-Israel bias stick out in my mind. First, there was the condemnation of Israel’s pager operation against Hezbollah. For months, IHL activists had been alleging that at best Israel was not narrowly targeting Hamas terrorists and at worst was engaging in genocidal indiscriminate bombing. So you think these groups would rejoice and praise Israel when it managed to kill or wound three thousand enemy terrorists with almost no civilian casualties. Instead, various IHL organizations and prominent individuals accused Israel of terrorism.

After that, we may have reached the reductio ad absurdum a few months ago, when Amnesty International came out with a report accusing Israel of genocide. The report acknowledged that Israel’s actions didn’t really seem to meet what it called the prevailing “overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence” that would “effectively preclude” finding that Israel committed genocide. Amnesty’s solution to that quandary, since it really, really wanted to accuse Israel of genocide, was to make up a new definition of genocide that would encompass Israel’s actions.

“INTERNAIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS” WON’T RECOVER, NOR SHOULD IT: “Human rights” NGOs have longed lean left, but in the couples of decades they have shed relatively mainstream liberal views to be propaganda agents and lawfare warriors against the West. This has been clear for a while, but the way these organizations have gone to bat for Hamas since 10/7 should have made it obvious to even the dullest observer.

DEFUND NPR: If you go on X, you can watch videos of Hamas playing celebratory music as cheering and jeering crowds watch the bodies of murdered babies, their mom, and a peace activist go by. Here’s how NPR reported it: “It was definitely more somber and much less celebratory on both sides. In Gaza, large crowds gathered in Khan Younis in the South. Masked Hamas gunmen presided over a ceremony on a stage with four coffins draped in black. There were large posters on both sides of the stage in Hebrew and English, one depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a fanged vampire, another said that if Israel resumed the war, more hostages would come home in coffins.”

(I should note that NPR is just as bad on many other issues, but I happened to catch this segment involuntarily, whereas I stopped listening to NPR on my own years ago.)

MAY GOD AVENGE HIS BLOOD: Besides the Bibas mom and babies, who deservedly have received a great deal of attention as their bodies returned to Israel today, the monsters in Gaza also murdered 83 year old Oded Lifshitz. Oded was a peace activist who devoted his retirement to driving children from Gaza to hospitals in Israel for medical treatment. My heart breaks for his daughter, who I met in Israel last July, and who had the strength to show my tour group the burnt-out husk of a home she grew up in, and from which her parents were kidnapped. They were kidnapped alive, and Oded was alive when his wife was released in November 2023. Hamas was well-aware by then of Oded’s biography, and at any time could have ordered the release of the elderly man who had helped so many Palestinians. To Hamas, though, he was just a Jew fit for slaughter. And at least some of the “civilians” in Gaza who were befriended and helped by peace activists like Oded provided intelligence information for Hamas’s 10/7 massacre. In Judaism, when someone dies we traditionally say “May his memory be a blessing.” But when someone is murdered by antisemites, we say, “May God avenge his blood.”

A CIVILIZATION IN RAPID DECLINE: Pakistani immigrant allowed to stay in Britain despite ‘preying on barely pubescent girls when his wife wouldn’t have sex’.

ISRAELIS “POUNCE”: For the far left and its allies, it’s always about how normies react to Islamist crimes, not the crimes themselves.

IT’S EQUALLY UNCLEAR WHETHER CNN REPORTERS ARE IMBECILES:

READING FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH: February is Black History Month, and the official theme this year is “black history and labor.” If you have an interest in black history, labor history, and/or constitutional history, you can check out my book, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations and the Court from Reconstruction to the New Deal. I also recommend Paul Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. Most modern labor history is written from a Marxist perspective, and these two books most assuredly are not.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VS. COLOMBIA SOUTH AMERICA:

SUGGESTION: While we have presidents deciding on their own what is and is not in the Constitution, may I suggest DJT think hard about whether the 16th Amendment is *really* part of the Constitution?

DON’T FORGET, DON’T FORGIVE: Hamas has kept the war going for over a year, holding civilian hostages and overseeing massive death and destruction in Gaza, so it can win the “victory” of securing the release of some of the most vicious murderers on the planet. And this is what the Hamasnik students in the US were protesting in favor of.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGING: Has ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt been red-pilled?

Since the 1950s, mainstream Jewish organizations have adopted a “community relations” strategy. To oversimplify, this meant allying with liberal groups on public policy matters even when (as in the case of affirmative action, for example) it conflicted with the immediate interests of the Jewish community. The basic idea was that if Jewish organizations supported progressive causes, progressive groups would in turn be sensitive to issues important to the Jewish community.

Under Abe Foxman, the ADL took this position, but would still occasionally dissent from progressive orthodoxy, especially when antisemitism was at play. When Greenblatt took over, however, he announced that the younger ADL donor base was no longer especially interested in antisemitism, and that the ADL would pivot strongly in the social justice activism direction. This led the ADL to go full woke during the Trump years, including endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, even though it was rife with antisemitism.

With that in mind, check out Greenblatt’s recent statement about combatting antisemitism in the post-Oct. 7 landscape:

I think if you’re not stepping back and rethinking, considering the facts, just the facts — how so many allies fled, or at least didn’t stand by us in the way you would have thought — just the fact that in the younger demographic there’s a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes than in the older segments of the population,” Greenblatt explained. “If you start to think about the fact that the Jewish community has been very supportive of diversity initiatives, and yet these initiatives, which are supposed to promote inclusion, actually result in the exclusion of Jews. So all of this, and the moment we’re in, leads me to say we have to step back and rethink and reconsider and have the humility to acknowledge it all wasn’t working the way that we hoped.

This marks a remarkable shift for both Greenblatt himself and presumably his donor base, who have collectively recognized that putting their eggs in the DEI basket was a huge error. More generally, this may be indicative of a paradigm shift in how mainstream Jewish organizations (and their donors) approach politics. Better late than never.

ORWELLIAN DOUBLESPEAK: The leftist Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide tweets that “one can have different views about the definition of genocide, but one may not use definitional disputes to deny genocide.” Exactly how one can dispute the Institute’s preposterous claim that Israel is committing genocide without first properly defining genocide is unclear. Of course, that’s the entire point, to make a preposterous claim and then try to create debate rules that make it impossible to dispute that claim.

STUPIDITY AND ANTISEMITISM GO HAND IN HAND: Must be the Jewish space lasers responsible for both.

NUMBER OF GAZAN REFUGEES TAKEN IN BY IRELAND? APPROXIMATLEY NONE. PRESSURE PUT ON EGYPT BY IRELAND TO ALLOW GAZANS TO ESCAPE THE WAR? NONE: And yet: Ireland joins South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel. It’s that weird sort of genocide where no country that has identified genocide wants to help the civilians escape.

THEY REALLY ARE THAT DUMB: In other news, a 1750 Atlas of the world shows no United States of America.

THE LATEST FROM ALJAZEERA ON THE POTOMAC, AKA THE WASHINGTON POST: Phony stats from the Hamas-controlled Gaza “Health Ministry” are accepted without question, but stats provided by Israel are “without evidence.” One might also note the generosity of calling a terrorist massacre an invasion by “fighters” and the falsity of calling Israel subsequent war to dislodge Hamas a “retaliatory campaign.”

TERRORISTS TO THE LEFT OF ME, JIHADISTS TO THE RIGHT, HERE I AM: Maybe, just maybe, George Mason president Gregory Washington should have spoken up about masked pro-genocide Hamasnik rallies on campus in October 2023?

I HOPE DADDY CAN AFFORD GOOD LAWYERS: Because these Sarah Lawrence students have just admitted to the serious felony of material support for terrorism. And given the Supreme Court’s holding in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the First Amendment is unlikely to protect them.