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.

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. . . .