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.

THE MORAL DEGENERACY OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: Here is the very first paragraph of the executive summary of Amnesty’s new report on Israel’s supposed “genocide” in Gaza. You will notice that Amnesty traces Israel’s offensive in Gaza to October 7, 2023. In fact, Israel was too busy fighting off genocidal Hamas terrorists committing unspeakable atrocities within Israel on 10/7 to be launching any forces into Gaza. Amnesty surely knows that, and thus (a) shows immediately that it has no concern for factual accuracy; and (b) is intentionally trying to blur the sequence of events so that readers forget what really happened on October 7, turning a genocidal assault *on* Israel into the beginning of a supposed genocide by Israel. H/T @elderofziyon. And a reminder: while Israel is the immediate target, the ultimate goal is to render the entire West incapable of defending itself militarily.

UPDATE: And I failed to note another lie in the same paragraph. No Israeli troops or civilians, except a few kidnap victims, were in Gaza on October 7, and thus Gaza was not “occupied” except in the most tendentious of imaginations.

I QUESTION THE FUTURE OF THE UK, PERIOD: Man arrested for ‘kapo’ slur questions Jewish future in Britain. The UK is prosecuting one person for referring to Jew haters as … “Jew haters,” and another for referring to a leftist rabbi as a “fake rabbi” and “kapo.” Meanwhile, mobs of antisemites shout genocidal slogans in the street unmolested. Thank goodness for the First Amendment…

OUR TWO-TIER JUSTICE SYSTEM: How the Trump administration and congressional Republicans may crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters. Ignore the tendentious headline, which should be, “how the Trump administration may start enforcing the law.” To wit: “Biden administration officials have told NBC News that prosecuting speech-related crimes related to the anti-war protests is not a high priority for the current Justice Department, nor is seeking out student protesters on foreign visas [who violated their visas by supporting designated terrorist groups] a top concern for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” This is nuts. There is no such thing, legally speaking, as “speech-related crimes.” It’s either a crime, or it’s not. Fraud and threats are “speech-related,” but we still prosecute them.

More pointedly, every crime charged against January 6 defendants was also “speech-related,” as the underlying motivation was protesting the official election results. Basically, Biden Justice Department officials are acknowledging that they intentionally went easy on criminals who engaged in their crimes while expressing pro-Hamas, anti-Israel sentiments. As one commenter on X stated, they are admitting “that combatting antisemitic campus and street harassment of the American Jewish community was not a high priority for the outgoing administration,” nor, obviously, was excluding students who openly violating their visa terms by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah. Trump appointees will need to a do a major housecleaning.

BOOKS TO READ AND GIFT: Over on X, Steven Sinofsky has an interesting list of books to read and gift this season. This includes my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, regarding which he says: “This book is an **infuriating** look at the arbitrary and cynical world of racial and ethnic classification. It is filled with the absurdity of the legislation, court battles, and cynical application of what amount to fairly nonsensical classifications when considering the goal.”

TO THE LEFTISTS WHO DOMINATE “INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE” THIS IS A FEATURE NOT A BUG: Human rights law has been intentionally perverted by people who want the West to be unable to defend itself against terrorist groups and other non-state actors. Israel is their first target, but they will use any precedents set against Israel against the US and NATO. Israel is serving as the canary in the coal mine, and the US must do everything in its power to undermine the power of far leftists (and their Islamist allies) to set the terms of military engagement, especially given that Israel’s rules of engagement are stricter than NATO’s.

PAGING MARCO RUBIO–THIS SHOULD AFFECT STATE DEPARTMENT HIRING: I Saw How Georgetown’s Prestigious School of Foreign Service Coddles Violent Anti-Semites—Who Are Plotting to Transform US Policy From Within.

The trouble started with a required course for all students in my program, “Globalization: Inter-Societal Relations.” Georgetown’s course guide describes the class, which was “DEI certified,” as focusing on how European states expanded globally and “the impact of that expansion on peoples with different political and social traditions.” More simply put, this was a class about the negative effects Western expansion had on the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Georgetown solicited online feedback about the course, and I submitted a public review on a Google document set up by school staff for the purpose of collecting student appraisals. I argued that we deserved “a serious history class” focusing on the West, rather than a course that dwelled on the evils of imperialism and colonialism (this line of study has consumed American academia, especially on elite, private school campuses). Diplomats need to understand their own history, I wrote. “In order for you to represent, as a global leader and foreign service officer, you need to know what you represent and why.”

Not a day passed before an anonymous student slapped back at my review, decrying “circumstances where people the most privileged—namely white men—come together to intellectually masturbate to lionized accounts of the West.”

As comments became increasingly heated, school administrators had the whole Google document evaluation taken down. A few days later, the master’s program’s leadership team sent a program-wide email decrying what they said were “racist comments and hurtful responses.” Though my name was not explicitly mentioned, it was widely understood that they were referring to my remarks.

WORTH READING: Amir Tibon, The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands. Amir, an acquaintance of mine, became famous when his dad, a retired general armed only with a pistol, drove from Tel Aviv to Israel’s border with Gaza in the middle of Hamas’s October 7 attack to rescue Amir, his wife, and two small children from Hamas terrorists who had invaded their kibbutz. But as dramatic as that is, the full story is even “better.”

FIGHTING ANTISEMITISM WHILE PRESERVING FREEDOM OF SPEECH: C-Span covered a panel discussion on this issue, sponsored by the Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School’s Voices for Liberty Project (I am executive director of the Center). On the panel, I discussed a paper I am coauthoring on the subject, with comments from the Brandeis Center’s Ken Marcus (who served as head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in the first Trump administration) and George Washington University professor Sam Goldman. You can watch the discussion here, starting at 4:15 in the video. The basic thrust of my remarks: much of the controversy around antisemitism on college campuses involves actions (vandalism, harassment, disruption, “occupation” of parts of campus) that isn’t protected speech to begin with; when it comes to licit speech, the two basic principles are that universities should adopt a liberal posture on speech, but if they don’t, they should be forced to enforce their rules even-handedly, rather than favor the interest of favored groups (certain racial and ethnic minorities, feminist women, LGBT students, and the like) over others (everyone whom they currently exclude from “intersectionality,” including but hardly limited to Jews).

NOTABLE AND QUOTABLE: Thomas Chatterton Williams:

The third Awokening was smaller and shorter than the others, stretching from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, and repurposing and popularizing the Marxist term political correctness. Its main legacy was to set the stage for the fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the so-called cancel culture that has defined and bedeviled the past decade of American institutional life. (As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, political purges often serve as jobs programs.)

THAT’S JUST CRUEL: But not undeserved.

UPDATE: I thought it was obvious that Aaron is being sarcastic. The Democrats only wanted to expand the Court and eliminate the filibuster when they thought they’d be the ones to benefit. Now it’s the opposite, and of course they don’t want these things.

DEMOCRAT TURNOUT ISSUES IN PA?: Re Stephen Green’s post below on Democratic concern about turnout, I have a distant cousin who was a high-level Obama appointee. According to his Facebook page, he’s spent the last several weekends knocking on doors in Pennsylvania for Harris, and urging others to do the same. I’m no grass-roots politics maven, but when a campaign’s best use for a top political operative is retail door-knocking, it strikes me as a sign that the campaign is concerned about turnout.

LAST SATURDAY AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT, SIDI MOHAMED ABDALLAHI, SHOT A JEWISH MAN WALKING TO SYNAGOGUE IN AN APPARENT LONE WOLF ISLAMIST TERRORIST ATTACK: Big news, especially just before the election, right? Right?

SEPARATED AT BIRTH?:

HOW TO TURN OFF NORMIES, KAMALA HARRIS EDITION:

MAINSTREAM CHRISTIANS ARE A PROBLEM, ISLAMIST FANATICS ARE PROGRESSIVE, QED:

WHEN PEOPLE TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE, BELIEVE THEM: Campus Pro-Hamas Events on October 7: What Should be Done?

The groups holding these events are quite openly and publicly telling you who they are and what they believe in. To quote Mandel once more, their “leaders don’t want to wait a day to hold the rally because while any other day could mark the war, no other day could mark the murder and mayhem of Oct. 7. The day is important to them because the massacre of Jews is important to them.” And that’s important information to have.

DEPARTMENT OF JUST MAKING S*** UP, MATT YGLESIAS EDITION:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I know Matt just pulled this out of his ass, but if it’s true it would be terrible news for the Democrats. They’ve had a lock on the felon constituency forever, and if it’s abandoning them along with lots of black and Latino voters it’s a bad sign. . . .

WOKE FOREST: It’s not surprising at this point that some moral imbeciles at a prominent university would invite a supporter of Palestinian terrorists to speak on the anniversary of the October 7 atrocities. It’s not even surprising that it would happen at a relatively conservative campus like Wake Forest. It is surprising, and outrageous, that the event would be sponsored by several academic departments, giving the event an official university imprimatur. Academic departments are agents of the university administration, and Wake needs to put a stop to this. Note the university’s name on the bottom of the flyer, suggesting official endorsement. And what is the National Endowment for the Humanities doing providing funding for this?

REMEMBER WHEN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ENABLED HEZBOLLAH?: Politico flashback: The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

The story is so bad, it’s almost unbelievable. A few choice excerpts: “In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.”

“One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that ‘under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.'”

“As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.”

“By May 2010, Brennan, then assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to build up ‘moderate elements’ within Hezbollah…. ‘There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing,’ Brennan said. ‘And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.'” (And I still don’t understand how Brennan got his security clearances despite supporting the Soviet-puppet Communist Party USA candidate in 1980, much less how you can give someone like that top national security positions.)

WAR ON ISRAEL, WAR ON THE WEST: There has never been a lower civilian to combatant casualty ratio in any major anti-terrorism operation in modern history than in Israel’s recent action against Hezbollah. In fact, it’s not even close. Yet all the “international law scholars” and grifters who were previously claiming that Israeli anti-terrorism actions were indiscriminate or put too many civilians at risk are still complaining, inventing new rules so they can that Israel was still acting illegally. The (ever-shifting) legal standards they want to apply would mean that no counter-terrorism operation is lawful, ever. And in fact, that’s what the far leftists who dominate international law discourse want–to leave the West defenseless against terrorism. The plan is to use Israel, which is relatively weak and isolated diplomatically, as precedent, and then use those precedents against the US, NATO, and any other Western actor seeking to counter Islamic State, Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group.

A CULTURE OF HATE: Imagine, if you will, that Senate Democrats scheduled a hearing on hate crimes and civil rights with a special focus on racist hate crimes. In the middle of the session, a right-wing protestor disrupts the proceedings and shouts, among other things, “fucking blacks!” I have little doubt the MSM would be screaming about it for weeks, including front page headlines and ponderous essays about the purported right-wing culture of hate.

Well…

Today, Senate Democrats (reluctantly) held a hearing on antisemitism and other forms of hate. As Ted Cruz was speaking, a protestor, apparently from Code Pink, came to the floor of the committee room and shouted, among other things “fucking Jews!” I only know about this because someone send me a private IM. No media outrage, no headlines or even coverage in the MSM, and of course, no ponderous essays about how the left has created a culture of hate.

UPDATE: For that matter, if it was a right-wing type who had shouted “fucking Jews” today, and had interrupted a Democrat instead of Ted Cruz, we’d never hear the end of it.

A BIDEN ADMINISTRATION LIE EXPOSED BY KAMALA HARRIS?: The Biden administration has consistently stated that any holdup on weapons shipments to Israel were either routine bureaucratic delays, or to ensure that humanitarian concerns were addressed. Today, when asked by journalists unsympathetic to Israel what she would do to pressure Israel into a ceasefire, she replied that she was “entirely supportive of” “the pause on 2000 lb bombs” to Israel to gain “leverage.”