DOWNLOAD IT WHILE IT’S HOT: My friend and namesake David L. Bernstein–author of the extremely timely book Woke Antisemitism–and I have a new article forthcoming this month, Supporting Free Speech and Countering Antisemitism on American College Campuses.

In short, universities don’t have to, and should not, infringe on anyone’s freedom of speech to crack down on antisemitism. They just need to enforce university policy and the law. This means expelling students who engage in vandalism, harassment, building takeovers, illegal encampments, class disruptions, violence, and so on, firing professors who discriminate against Jewish, Israeli, or “Zionist” students, and ensuring that administrators, including faculty who have administrative roles, don’t play use those roles to engage in antisemitic discrimination.

Also, no ideologically driven double standards: “The basic test for university enforcement of conduct rules should be this: if a group of student white supremacists was engaging in this behavior, are there existing rules that could be enforced and therefore would be enforced to stop them? If the answer is yes,” then just enforce the rules, period, zero tolerance.

For the full argument, read the whole thing.

Bonus fun fact: David L.’s book came out around the same time as my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. We both had the same editor: David S. Bernstein.

THE NY TIMES WILL PROBABLY NEVER FIGURE OUT THE MOTIVE: Also, they were not murdered because they were “embassy aides,” the perp just shot a random couple attending a Jewish event.

GLOBALIZING THE INTIFADA IN DC: Last night’s murder of two Israeli embassy employees outside an event held at a Jewish museum was an attack on Jews, period. A political assassination of Israeli diplomates would be bad enough, but this was simply an antisemitic attack by someone chanting “Free Palestine.”

(1) The event was not an Israeli event or even a pro-Israel event, it was an event for young Jews interested in foreign affairs sponsored by the American Jewish Congress (AJC). A close relative of mine, who is not Israeli and has nothing to do with Israeli politics was there.
(2) The couple murdered were not Israelis, one was American, the other German. The Israeli embassy employed them as foreigners, embassies typically have local staff. [Correction based on ne reporting: One victim grew up in Germany, but later became an Israeli citizen.]
(3) They were randomly targeted after attending the Jewish event.

This is what Globalize the Intifada and similar rhetoric means, those who have apologizing for it, or worse justifying it, are morally culpable.

UPDATE: Thank you for the New York Times today, for informing us about the debate over whether extremist rhetoric at Hamasnik rallies is inciting violence against Jews.

NOTHING SAYS IMPARTIALITY AND NEUTRALITY LIKE UNRWA’S LONG COLLABORATION WITH HAMAS: What a clown show the whole UN/NGO complex is.

EVEN YALE (MY LAW SCHOOL ALMA MATER) IS LOOKING RELATIVELY GOOD (BUT ONLY RELATIVELY): I Don’t Mean to Brag, but I Didn’t Go to Harvard. Money quote: “It’s almost like certain Harvard affiliates want to give the Trump administration ammunition in its war against the university.”

NEWS YOU WON’T FIND IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Potential deportee and Columbia grad student Mohsen Mahdawi won a habeas hearing yesterday. That perhaps temporary victory should not obscure the truly blockbuster revelation in the judge’s opinion, that Mahdawi was reported to the authorities and investigated by the FBI in 2015 after he told a gun store owner that he was involved in murdering Jews in Israel, and telling another individual that he liked to kill Jews, all why eyeing various firearms. The judge, seemingly intent on teaching the Trump administration a lesson did not take these statements very seriously, but (a) Mahdawi should have been referred to ICE for deportation in 2015; and (b) if he can’t be deported now, something is very wrong with our immigration system. Meanwhile, I won’t bother linking to the Times’ story on the habeas ruling but, no surprise, no mention of Mahdawi’s love of Jew-killing.

HAMASNIK MOB CHOOSES THE WRONG TARGET: How it started:

How it ended:

THIS IS WHAT “GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA,” A FAVORITE SLOGAN OF HAMASNIKS, LOOKS LIKE: Suspect in Shapiro arson attack cited plight of Palestinians.

Nothing to see here, just a leftist loon taking campus Hamasnik rhetoric seriously and trying to murder a Jewish governor and his family on the first night of Passover.

THE TRUTH HURTS: A friend writes: “The Left tries to portray their support for college Hamasniks as being the 1970s ACLU defending the Nazis, except they actually like the Hamasniks. So, it’s more like the 1970s Nazis defending the Nazis.”

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?