THERE ARE STILL POCKETS OF SANITY IN THE ACADEMY: My law school is one of them. Law Professors Protest University’s Silence on Genocidal SJP Rally.

A few of my colleagues declined to sign because they thought the letter should focus on calling for the university to adopt the Kalven Report, which advises universities not to take official position on issues of public import. I agree that my university, and other secular universities should adopt this principle. But so long as they do not, I think it’s appropriate to call them out when they comment on certain things, even when they have nothing directly to do with the university, but stay silent on others, even when they occur at the university.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAR LEFT:

When conservatives were being canceled over ‘micro-aggressions.’

When genocidal antisemites supporting Hamas get canceled now.

THIS IS CALLED “REAPING WHAT YOU SOW”: And the hypocrisy charge is obvious projection.

I’LL TAKE A HEADLINE YOU WON’T SEE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR $1,000, ALEX: What is, “Palestinian terrorists bomb own hospital, lie and blame Israel.”

U. PENN FACULTY SENATE CHAIRS TO BIG DONORS: Go fuck yourselves. For all the talk of academic freedom, Penn is number 227 out of 228 on FIRE’s academic freedom rankings. It is, shall we say, interesting how many academics have suddenly discovered the virtues of academic freedom, institutional neutrality on political issues, and opposition to cancel culture only when the question is whether it’s okay or even admirable to slaughter hundreds of Jews.

OUR ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS HAVE BECOME DERANGED: Quoting Chris Rufo: “A group of prominent academics have signed a letter justifying violent struggle against Israel, including: Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron Aceves (UT), Joshua Nguyen (Tufts). Our academic institutions have been deranged.”

Deranged is putting it mildly. If you read this letter, you will have a hard time believing anyone sane signed it. Maybe no sane person did. It’s far worse than any of the pro-Hamas student letter I’ve seen, and that’s saying something.

UPDATE: Just to give you a flavor. Here’s the entirety of how the letter describes the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel: “the resistance bulldozed part of the fence around Gaza and some Gazans set foot outside the boundaries of their besiegement for a moment.”

SELECTIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT: Below is a picture that a friend forwarded to me from a Students for Justice in Palestine rally at my university’s Fairfax campus. The organizers advised students to wear face coverings to hide their identities.

Like many states, Virginia has a law, aimed at hate groups like the KKK (and, for that matter, SJP), prohibiting the wearing of face coverings in public, except for theatrical or medical reasons or during a state of health emergency (which does not currently exist in Virginia): “It shall be unlawful for any person over 16 years of age to, with the intent to conceal his identity, wear any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, to be or appear in any public place, or upon any private property in this Commonwealth without first having obtained from the owner or tenant thereof consent to do so in writing.” Virginia statutes § 18.2-422.

Are such laws a good idea? Are they constitutional? I am ambivalent on both counts. There is significant value in allowing for anonymous protest, and also significant value in not allowing masked hate groups to intimidate others and potentially cover up criminal behavior by masking their identities in public.

Regardless of my views, however, the law is on the books, creates a felony, and the police should not get to pick and choose which laws they enforce and against whom. I know from my friend that several people called the George Mason University police in advance to inform them that a masked rally was scheduled to occur, that wearing a mask at such a rally is a felony, and that they want the police not to arrest the students or quash the rally, but only to require them comply with the law and not wear masks. Obviously, the police did nothing, apparently telling people that since the rally was peaceful, they weren’t going to interfere. Surely, however, if a KKK or neo-Nazi rally was taking place on campus, no matter how “peaceful,” the police would have enforced the law. That’s what’s known as selective enforcement, and it’s a real problem.

If you are interested, GMU has a form to complain about police misbehavior. And the phone number of the state AG’s office, run by a sound AG is 804-786-2071.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Eagerly awaiting the “Klansmen for Palestine” march on the GMU campus.

“THEY” SEEM LIKE A DANGER TO OTHERS AND PERHAPS “THEMSELVES”:UC DAVIS professor threatens “Zionist” journalists and their kids. This is crazy and serious enough to warrant a police investigation. Meanwhile, how did someone get a tenure-track job at a prestigious state university who says that “their” scholarly focus is “on the interplay between sound, race, gender, and embodiment.” They must’ve written a heckuva DEI statement.

IT’s NOT JUST HARVARD: Defense of Hamas Brutality By University of Michigan Law Student Organizations. For the uninitiated, Michigan is considered one of the top ten law schools in the country.

ONE THING THE MEDIA HOPES YOU WILL FORGET, AND ONE THING THEY NEVER REPORTED: They hope you will forget that Hamas still holds around 200 people, including babies, children, women, and the elderly, hostage. They have never reported, except in Israeli media, that 300,000 Israelis living near the conflict zones in Gaza and south Lebanon have been displaced and are living in temporary locations all over Israel.

IN OTHER NEWS, HUNDREDS OF THOUSAND OF ARABS KILLED IN ONGOING YEMEN CIVIL WAR, FOUR MILLION DISPLACED: Various news report suggest 150,00 killed directly, 300,000 indirectly by disease, famine, etc. brought about by war, and four million refugees.

As with Assad’s brutal war in Syria a few years back, the “Arab Street” has been almost entirely silent about this. Apparently, deaths from war only become meaningful when you can hold Israel responsible, whether it’s true or not, and regardless of who started the hostilities.

Why would that be? The most obvious answer is the most logical one. The “Arab Street” cares little about the welfare of Palestinians, or of other Arabs more generally. They just hate Israel, because Israel is run by Jews, and their religion, history, and culture tell them that Jews are supposed to be dominated by Arabs and Muslims, and it’s humiliating when instead the Jews turn out to be more powerful than their Arab enemies.

And of course leftists don’t care either, because Arab victims don’t interest them unless some Western-oriented country can be blamed.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in the latest on the Yemen situation, check out StrategyPage.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Huff Post spreads misinformation, then changes headline on story to make it about the spread of disinformation. Hat tip: Jon Sutz.

WE HAVED RAISED A GENERATION FILLED WITH IMBECILES:

FREEDOM OF SPEECH FOR GENOCIDAL HAMASNIKS, BUT NOT FOR THESE:

Shot: [Harvard President] Gay added that Harvard “rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs” and “embraces a commitment to free expression. “That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such view. But that is a far cry from endorsing them.”

Chaser: Despite Harvard’s reputation for excellent scholarship, the university has consistently failed to meet standards in one area: free speech.

According to FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, Harvard University ranked dead last at 248 out of 248 institutions. Students reported their discomfort expressing ideas, lack of confidence in the administration’s support for speech, and acceptance of students shouting down speakers.

A SMALL DISSENT ON “PROGRESSIVE” REPLACING LIBERAL: I was a college student in the Boston area from 1985-1988. At my school, the lefty activists did not have the standard liberal-moderate-conservative understanding of politics. Rather, they called themselves, stationed on the far left, “progressive”; liberals and moderates were “conservative”; and conservatives were “reactionaries.”

In this environment, Gov. Michael Dukakis chose to call himself a “progressive” rather than a “liberal,” to station himself, at least rhetorically, on the far left of his party. When he ran for president, however, the media consistently reported along the lines of “Dukakis calls himself a progressive, not a liberal, to try to appear more moderate to voters.” The truth, as noted, was the opposite, but it served Dukakis’ political prospects as he wrapped up the Democratic nomination, so he went with it.

Thus, the media took the term “progressive,” meant to convey leftist radicalism, and turned it into a more palatable, more moderate version of liberal. But the activist “progressive” left always understood their agenda to be stripping the American left of its vestiges of classical liberalism–free speech, some respect for property rights, belief in color-blindness–in favor of a totally illiberal agenda.

ANTISEMITISM IS/AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY: I’m planning to elaborate on this further, hopefully soon, but briefly more antisemitism goes beyond ordinary religious or ethnic hatred in that it manifests itself so often as a political tool. In the university context, it does two things. First, it allows “intersectional” groups that base their identities on victimhood that would otherwise be at odds with each to ally. How do you get feminist and LGBTetc groups to ally with Islamists? Shared hostility to Jews. Second, how do you overthrow the mainstream, white-dominated squishy liberal establishment that has run universities since the 1960s in favor of the hard-left? Well, secular establishment Jews largely replaced establishment Protestants as the heart of the university establishment–recently, eight of eight Ivy League presidents were Jews. By “excluding Jews from progressive spaces,” as liberal campus Jews now frequently complain about, you ensure that all the roles Jews have played in the university hierarchy will be replaced by the hard-left coalition, among whom Jews radical enough to be allowed to join are a small minority. My namesake David Bernstein’s book Woke Antisemitism is very good on the subject of how woke ideology fosters and foments antisemitism (buy it!) But I think even David wildly underestimates how much of this antisemitism is not merely a natural outgrowth of wokeism, but part of its political strategy. You can’t make an omelet (overthrowing the mainstream liberal establishment) without breaking a few eggs, and Jews are among the eggs.

SHE JUST CONDONES MASS MURDER OF JEWS, IT’S NOT LIKE SHE RETWEETED A SEXIST JOKE OR SOMETHING:

Karen Attiah is a columnist for the Washington Post, and its international opinion editor.

CHICKENS FOR KFC:

IT’S NOT JUST HARVARD: Dartmouth student and local groups blame Israel for Hamas’s massacre.

Who are these rapscallions, you may ask? “Ramsey Alsheikh ’26 is the president of the Palestine Solidarity Coalition of Dartmouth Students, Hayden El Rafei ’24 is a member of the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective and Roan V. Wade ’25 is an organizer with Sunrise Movement at Dartmouth. They submitted this column on behalf of the above organizations.”

UPDATE: Roan Wade, btw, is another “Chicken for Colonel Sanders:”

“Art has always been a way for me to have a voice, a way of silently shouting my beliefs, a way of seizing space, a way of fighting those who have attempted to strip me of my voice. I view art as a means of communicating the revolution, raising class consciousness, and increasing awareness of intersectional struggles for our collective liberation. My work feeds the flames of revolution whether through creating art directly intended as a form of protest, or by using my own experiences with queer youth homelessness, housing and food insecurity, homophobia, sexism, and sexual harassment and violence to highlight that the personal is political. In these dystopian times, everything is political, including all my work.”

HEROES: In Heroic Battle, 15 People Saved Kibbutz Kerem Shalom From Hamas Massacre. Tragically, two defenders fell.

THEY ARE COOL WITH GENOCIDE:

There has been too much pointless debate over whether those who call for Israel’s destruction are necessarily antisemitic. The important point is that such people know that the end of Israel most likely means genocide for 7.5 million Israeli Jews, and they are okay with that.

Whether they are motivated by Islamism, leftist bs “anticolonialism,” hostility to the West with Israel as their first target, or pure hatred of Jews is immaterial, it’s much worse than mere antisemitism. Most antisemites aren’t full-on Nazis, and as much as they dislike Jews would object to mass murder (just like most people who have racist opinions of black people would object to mass murder). The so-called antizionists do not, and therefore are much worse.

It’s a weird tic of American progressivism to worry more about people’s moral intentions than their actions. I really don’t care if someone doesn’t like Jews. But someone who claims and may sincerely think that they have nothing against Jews, but is content to see my friends and relatives in Israel murdered in the name of some idiotic ideology, that’s a real problem.

PS: Here’s a test, which in my experience almost all leftist “antizionists” fail. Most of them will claim that they have some solution in mind to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will protect the rights of what would become the Jewish minority in “Palestine.” So you ask them, “well, what if it turns out as a practical matter that your one-state solution, if implemented, will likely result in the murder/expulsion/oppression of the 7.5 million Jews in Israel. Would you still support it?” This should be an easy question to answer, especially given that it’s a pure hypothetical that could not be binding. I’ve asked this many times to “antizionists,” and I’ve never received an unequivocal “no.” Like I said, they are ok with genocide.

USEFUL IDIOTS (OR WORSE): Here is the very misnamed Human Rights Watch attacking Israel for trying to enforce a no-go zone by its border with Gaza: “Both before and after the confrontations, senior officials publicly said that soldiers stationed along the barrier that separates Gaza and Israel had orders to target ‘instigators’ and those who approach the border. However, the Israeli government presented no evidence that rock-throwing and other violence by some demonstrators seriously threatened Israeli soldiers across the border fence.”

Israel argued, correctly, that these “demonstrators” were Hamas operatives trained to create a distraction for an eventual Hamas assault on Israeli border towns. As I understand it, the no-go zone eventually gave way to a “high-tech” border fence that totally failed.

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?: Footage of Hamas assault on civilians shows likely war crimes, experts say. Ya think?

Of course, as non-uniformed combatants who hide among civilian populations, everything Hamas does is a war crime…

IF YOU READ ONE ARTICLE ON THE SITUATION IN ISRAEL, MAKE IT THIS ONE: Haviv Retig Gur: A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one.

Two main points:

(1) “Here lies a part of Palestinian thinking and discourse that many of Palestine’s Western defenders ignore, both because it’s a hard sell to Western audiences and because they don’t really understand it themselves. Palestinian ‘resistance,’ as conceived by Hamas, is about much more than settlements, occupation or the Green Line. A larger theory of Islamic renewal is at work…. This reclamation of Islamic dignity through the ultimate defeat of the Jews occupies a great deal of Hamas’s political thought, permeates its rhetoric and profoundly shapes its thinking about Israeli Jews and its strategy in facing Israel. Israel is more than a mere occupier or oppressor in this narrative, it is a rebellion against God and the divinely-ordained trajectory of history. And by showing Israelis in their weakness, the thinking goes, Israelis are somehow actually made weak. Redemption requires only the faith of its believers to be fulfilled, and seeing is believing.”

(2) “The Israel that emerged from Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Deluge” operation was different from the one that went into it. A tectonic shift had occurred in the country’s psyche. The horrors inflicted by Hamas sparked rage and an intense feeling of vulnerability. Where Hamas had always seemed an implacable but ultimately containable enemy, it had now proven it could bring the danger into Israeli homes, could slaughter children and kidnap grandmothers while all the vaunted power of the Israel Defense Forces was helpless to stop it…. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”

Read the whole thing.

PROMINENT BAD TAKE ON HAMAS MASSACRE, II:

Literally all Hamas had to do to ensure safety, peace and prosperity for Gazans is to announce that they were no longer going to attack Israel, and mean it. Israel has no such option.