PROMINENT BAD TAKE ON HAMAS MASSACRE, I:

Hamas, in fact, has been trying to murder or kidnap as many Israelis as it can for decades. And “No options for their future in Gaza?” How about “we announce that we will no longer launch attacks on Israel, mean it, and become a thriving Palestinian enclave that will eventually govern an independent Palestinian state?”

CHUTZPAH: Palestinian students are suing University of Illinois Chicago for being excluded from an information session for study abroad to Israel. According to the plaintiffs’ own press release, there was disruptive scheme afoot that was thwarted: “I planned to attend the information session to voice my concerns about how a study abroad program in Israel discriminates against me as a Palestinian student.”

Well You see an ‘information session’ is for *them* to give *you* information about the program, not for *you* to hijack the session to express your political views. As a Twitter commenter noted, “the plaintiffs are seeking to establish a permanent right to harass and obstruct any activity related to Israel.”

The standard illustration of the Yiddish word chutzpah is the guy who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy because he is an orphan. Suing a university for being denied the “right” to disrupt university activities is another good one.

VOICES FOR LIBERTY SYMPOSIUM ON FREE SPEECH AND CIVIL RIGHTS: My Liberty & Law Center at Scalia Law School has a conference on Friday that some Insta-readers might be interested in attending (live if you live near Arlington, VA, online otherwise).

“Does free expression help or harm the cause of social progress? Join senior scholars and exciting new voices presenting cutting-edge research on the role freedom of speech plays in advancing civil rights movements (past, present, and future). Academic research into this important topic has been surprisingly limited. Scholars will present new papers exploring whether free expression entrenches an unjust status quo or provides critical support for groups wishing to challenge it.”

You can find the program here.

And you can register here.

MY NEW ARTICLE (bumped): “Students for Fair Admissions and the End of Racial Classification as We Know It.” Forthcoming in the Cato Supreme Court review, which always comes out on Constitution Day. Download it while it’s hot (downloads are free).

RUBE SELF IDENTIFIES: Indyk is frequently depicted as one of the US’s top Mideast diplomats. If true, that’s a real problem. Abbas has a decades-long history of Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish incitement, but it suddenly occurs to Indyk that his professed friendship with a Jewish American diplomat may not have been entirely sincere?

PS By the way, Israelis have a deserved reputation for being forthright, even blunt, sometimes even rude. Most Israelis, even diplomats (especially political appointees), are basically incapable of the kind of smooth phony “sincerity” that elites like Indyk eat up. This is, for example, a big reason why supposed “human rights advocate” Jimmy Carter got along famously with ex-Nazi military dictator Anwar Sadat, but couldn’t stand the blunt, but democratically elected, Menachem Begin.

And UPDATE: For those not following, Indyk’s tweet today was a response to a flagrant display of antisemitism by Abbas, ranging from justifying the Holocaust to the false claim beloved of antisemites that Jews are descendants of Khazars. The linked article about Abbas’s long history of Holocaust denial is from 2022, demonstrating, among others things, that this was widely known before Abbas’s recent outburst and Indyk is either feigning surprise or is truly an ingenue.

REPUBLICANS POUNCE: Ali’s tweet below is what happens when you believe, or at least pretend to believe, your own “intersectional” bullshit that requires you to think that all groups the left defines as oppressed are naturally allies.

It’s an updated, but even more ridiculous, version of the old Marxist belief that all workers naturally have solidarity with each other. Thus, for example, if American unions were excluding black workers, and black workers in turn eagerly served as strikebreakers, it was not because of racism or enmity but because they were being manipulated by capitalists. Believe it or not, this was, and maybe still is, the standard explanation for racist union policies in the labor history literature.

I’M EMBARRASSED FOR PRINCETON: A controversy has broken out at Princeton University over an upcoming course that “will include reading material [the book “The Right to Maim,” by Rutgers University professor Jasbir K. Puar] alleging the Israeli military deliberately attempts to cripple Palestinians for profit — outraging critics who have called on the Ivy League school axe the professor and apologize to students.”

A group of students at Princeton wrote an open letter defending the professor and attacking what they called “right-wing Zionists,” which apparently includes anyone who question the lie, rooted in longstanding antisemitic tropes, that Israel deliberately cripples Palestinians for profit.

The letter was signed by several dozen students, and another thirty or so professors. Two things are remarkable about the letter. First, it never gets around to defending the underlying lie that sparked the controversy. One would think that the truth of this claim would be highly relevant to whether the critics are justified in their criticism of the course, or are simply right-wing Zionists who reject any criticism of Israel.

The open letter does allege that “Israel, like other countries, engages in human rights violations — having illegally harvested the organs of both Palestinians and Israelis, which is well-documented.” Puar has, in fact, alleged that Palestinian bodies “were mined [by Israel] for organs for scientific research,” but that is not the crux of the complaint against using her book.

The even more embarrassing part, though, is that when the letter claims that it’s “well-documented” that Israel illegally harvested the organs of Palestinians, the letter links to two sources. First, an article from the newspaper Ha’aretz about the head of an Israeli forensic institute being prosecuted for illegally taking body parts from patients. The fact of prosecution should be sufficient to show that this was not Israeli government policy, but rogue actions.

The second link is to an article about that scandal from from an academic journal, titled, “The Body of the Terrorist: Blood Libels, Bio-Piracy, and the Spoils of War at the Israeli Forensic Institute.” The article is hardly sympathetic to Israel, and takes pains to note that, not terribly surprisingly, the bodies of Israeli soldiers killed in battle were treated more respectfully than were the bodies of Palestinian terrorists. Nevertheless, the article acknowledges that this wasn’t an issue of abusing Palestinians specifically. Rather, “body parts were taken from Jews and Muslims, from IDF soldiers and from Palestinian stone throwers, from terrorists and from the victims of terrorist suicide bombers, from tourists and from new immigrants. There were only two considerations: the physical condition of the body and its organs, and the ability to conceal what they were doing.” Indeed, it was the families of Israeli soldiers, not Palestinians, who discovered that the institute had been tampering with bodies.

So, while the letter suggests that it’s well-documented that “Israel” specifically “harvested the organs of Palestinians,” the actual sources suggest that the head of a forensic institute was prosecuted for taking body parts from any body he could get his hands on. The connection the letter tries to draw between this and claims that Israel has a policy of intentionally maiming Palestinians is entirely spurious, and I can only imagine that the professors signed the letter either didn’t bother to check as to whether the letter’s claim was in fact well-documented, or knew it wasn’t but didn’t care.

And the complete disregard for truth and documentation of claims when Princeton professors support the underlying cause (here, hostility to Israel) is why I’m embarrassed for the university. How did it wind up with several dozen professors (and even more students) who have no regard for the truth?

SHOULD I CALL THE NEW YORK TIMES DISHONEST, OR IS THAT REDUNDANT: Here’s how the Times explains opposition to a newly appointed journalism dean at Texas A&M:

McElroy, who once worked as an editor at The New York Times, said she was notified by the university’s interim dean of liberal arts, José Luis Bermúdez, of political pushback over her appointment.

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?'” Dr. McElroy recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘You’re a Black woman who was at The New York Times and, to these folks, that’s like working for Pravda.'” Dr. McElroy left The Times in 2011….

Matthew Poling, the president of [an alumni group opposed to her appointment], said that members did not approve of Dr. McElroy’s work promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts had been a small part of her journalism and academic career, she said.

You would never get a sense from the article why McElroy was so controversial. I couldn’t believe that it was solely about the fact that she supports DEI, given that basically all academic bureaucrats are required to be on board.

So I googled for about two minutes, and got an answer from this article she wrote. She favors race-based hiring in journalism, calls “objectivity” a “flawed” goal for journalists, calls journalism a “white patriarchal institution.” (In fairness, she adds, “I wholeheartedly believe in journalism’s mission to seek truth and tell it fairly and dimensionally.”)

Also, it turns out that her protestation that “diversity, equity and inclusion efforts had been a small part of her journalism and academic career” is misleading. Her dissertation, as she describes it, was “about black columnists at ‘mainstream’ newspapers,” in which she “challenged Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach’s thoughts about “diverse” journalists included their seminal book “The Elements of Journalism.” So her signature academic project may not have been about DEI “efforts,” but it was about DEI.

Proponents of the autonomy of academic institutions in the name of academic freedom from political interference can still object that her appointment should have been left solely to university officials to consider, without political interference. But even if one strongly takes that position, it doesn’t excuse the Times’ reporter from her obligation to (objectively and?) accurately report on why her appointment was controversial, rather than implying that it was just racism and extremism.

IT’S A MYSTERY, WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA: Journalist claims to be unable to figure out what funds designated for a Christmas party were for:

JOURNAL OF WOMEN’S HEATH ISSUES DOESN’T THINK MOTHERS EXIST: Any “scientific” journal that uses a term like “birthing people” is not a scientific journal.

SINCERE THANKS TO ATTORNEY CORY LIU: My general policy as a law professor is that I don’t write briefs in cases, as an amicus (“friend of the court”) or otherwise. If I wanted to be a lawyer, I would practice law.

A bit over two years ago, attorney Cory Liu contacted me and asked me if I was planning to write a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the SFFA affirmative action cases. I explained my policy, noted above. Cory suggested that my emerging work on the arbitrariness of racial classifications, published in an article and in my then-forthcoming book, Classified, provided an important perspective on an issue that that the Court had largely ignored but needed to consider: not just whether affirmative action preferences served a compelling interest in the abstract, but whether the classifications used to grant or deny favorable treatment, such as “Hispanic” and “Asian,” were unduly arbitrary and failed to serve their purported purpose. Cory offered to write the brief with me as the named amicus, discussing my work. I agreed.

Once the Court agreed to hear the case on the merits, we filed another brief. As one of over 100 briefs filed in the case, I didn’t expect it to get any attention, and was pleasantly surprised when many articles on the case discussed this brief to the exclusion of almost all the others. Clearly, Cory and I had struck a nerve.

The fruits of Cory’s efforts were ultimately apparent in the Court’s opinions. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, stated that one reason Harvard and UNC’s policies were unlawful was that “it is far from evident … how assigning students to these racial categories and making admissions decisions based on them furthers the educational benefits that the universities claim to pursue. For starters, the categories are themselves imprecise in many ways. Some of them [such as Asian American] are plainly overbroad…. Meanwhile other racial categories, such as ‘Hispanic,’ are arbitrary or undefined.”

Roberts also cited Justice Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, which has an extensive discussion of the arbitrariness of the classifications. Gorsuch primarily relies on, and extensively cites, Cory’s amicus brief.

Justice Thomas, concurring, also citing Gorsuch, adds that “university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups…. Whichever choice he makes (in the event he chooses to report a race at all), the form silos him into an artificial category.”

In short, the Court’s majority has given potential litigants a new rationale for challenging affirmative action preferences and other uses of race in public policy; such preferences not only constitute illicit divvying up of opportunities by “race,” but the way they are divvied up is based on incoherent, arbitrary classifications that in most situations will be impossible to justify. Given the Court’s almost total reticence on this issue before SFFA, I doubt they would have reached it but for Liu’s efforts.

FOR SOME REASON SHE ONLY THINKS THIS APPLIES TO WOMEN: Justice Kagan: Affirmative Action Suggests that Beneficiaries Could Not be Accepted Based on Merit Alone.

SPEAKING OF ERRORS IN RECENT SUPREME COURT OPINIONS: Justice Sotomayor wrote in her SFFA affirmative action dissent that during the Jim Crow era, University of North Carolina excluded “all people of color.” In fact, only black Americans were excluded.

THE COMPREHENSIVE CASE AGAINST RENOMINATING TRUMP: Qunn Hilyer: A Trump nomination would bring GOP victories to a screeching halt.

Trump’s laziness and incompetence are confirmed by those who were closest to him. When a single disgruntled former staffer hurls accusations at his former boss, such complaints may be dismissed as sour grapes. But when numerous former aides, each of high independent stature, all recount the same serious horror stories of an out-of-control president, reasonable people should believe them. Former Gens. H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, and John Kelly, two-time Attorney General William Barr, and longtime foreign policy leader John Bolton were Trump’s “best men.” But he drove them all away to tell harrowing tales of catastrophes averted only because Trump was so easily distracted that he did not follow through on his worst instincts.

THERE IS, IN SHORT, INCREDIBLE CORRUPTION IN MINORITY BUSINESS ENTERPRISE PROGRAMS: Welcome to the World of Minority Contracting.

When writing my book Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America (currently, btw, at its lowest price on Amazon to date), three things struck me about MBE affirmative action. One is that the Supreme Court issued two pretty strict rulings against in in 1989 and 1994, everyone thought this would be the end of minority contracting quotas and preferences. As it turned out, government at all levels was so committed to these programs that they exploited loopholes in the decisions and took advantage of the limited resources of preference opponents, such that racial preferences in contracting are more prevalent than ever. Which shows, in turn, that if SCOTUS want to get rid of such programs, whether in education or contracting, they need to hold them unconstitutional, period.

The second is that these programs were instituted in the 1970s to help black Americans integrate into the national economy, but the vast majority of such contracts go to post-1965 Hispanic, Caribbean, African, and Asian immigrants and their descendants, and to people with distant Native American heritage. Very few MBE contracts to descendants of American slaves. I tried to get some hard data on this from friends in the Trump federal Department of Transportation, but word came back that the statistics were so embarrassing that no one would ever release them. Meanwhile, given immigration and intermarriage rates, within a few decades eighty percent or more of Americans will be eligible for an MBE preference. If almost everyone gets a preference, does it still count as affirmative action?

Third, not only can people with only vague, distant minority ancestry claim MBE status, there is an incredible amount of fraud in these programs. Paper-only majority ownership by minorities, with the real owners being white men. White men pretending to be American Indians (finally, in 2019 the DOT started requiring tribal membership instead of self-identification), white men buying membership in Indian tribes, white men inventing otherwise non-existent Indian tribes and getting state legislatures to recognize the new tribe … and so on. It’s remarkable given the level of fraud and the amount of money involved that there is no book on the subject, and precious few investigations by journalists.

$1.5 TRILLION HERE, $1.5 TRILLION THERE, PRETTY SOON YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT REAL MONEY: CBO Projects Debt-Ceiling Deal to Reduce Budget Deficits by $1.5 Trillion over Next Decade.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN WOKE, BUT WOKE IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Campus Puritans Come for an Astronomer—And His Byline.

NONSENSE GOVERNMENT RACIAL CLASSIFICATIONS PERPETUATE AND ENCOURAGE RACISM, BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT: Justin Gest: The Problem With How the Census Classifies White People. “White” Americans, like “Asians,” “Hispanics,” and so forth, are a mix of different ethnicities, ancestries, national origins, and cultures. And to paraphrase Justice Scalia, the Constitution recognizes only one race: American.

RELATED: The Arbitrariness of Racial Classifications Gets Attention as SCOTUS Considers Affirmative Action.

RETORT OF THE MONTH:

IT’S 2023, AND ANGELA DAVIS IS STILL A COMMUNIST SIMPLETON: But a very well-paid one, you almost gotta admire the grift of a Communist getting paid 30K-plus (per speech) to peddle conspiratorial nonsense at places like the University of Texas.

NO, ELON MUSK IS NOT “AFRICAN AMERICAN”: At least not according to the official government definition.

Based on some correspondence with Instapundit readers, a lot of people are confused by this, and by the Hispanic classification. The US has official government racial and ethnic classifications, promulgated by the Office of Management and Budget in 1977. One of those was Black/Negro, later changed in name but not in substance to Black/African American. The government’s definition is a person descended from one of the “black racial groups of Africa.” So, no, Musk does not qualify, nor does an Egyptian or Moroccan-descended American, no matter how dark-complexioned.

Re Hispanics, people seem to think that this is also a racial classification, and means someone from a Spanish-speaking background who has brownish skin. In fact, Hispanic is defined by the government as an ethnic classification that includes anyone of “Spanish origin or culture.” So, yes, that blond-haired blue-eyed Argentine immigrant of German descent who you met in college is officially Hispanic, as is anyone who immigrates from Spain.

Of course, outside legal contexts, no one requires us to follow these classifications and definitions. But if Elon Musk applied for Minority Business Enterprise status based on being an African American, the relevant government agency would properly deny that status based on the law.

If you are confused by all this, you can always read my book for an explanation of how our classifications developed, how they are defined, and how they are enforced.

UPDATE: To everyone saying I don’t get the “joke” of people referring to Musk as an African American, I understand that we all know that when people say “African American,” that’s not what they have in mind. But a lot of people also seem to think that Musk is *technically* African American, because he fits the definition, and thus *could* check the box for affirmative action and whatnot if he wanted to. That’s incorrect, though I should add that one of the weird things about American government-imposed racial classifications is that while we are constantly asked to check the “right” box, we usually aren’t provided with the relevant official definitions on the forms.

THE ABSURDITY OF AMERICAN “RACIAL” CLASSIFICATIONS, IN ONE PICTURE: Hispanics are already the only official American “ethnic” minority. If the Biden administration gets its way, these guys will be members of an official “racial” minority if they live in the US.

ETHNIC QUOTAS ARE A ZERO-SUM GAME, AND THIS IS A NATURAL RESULT: India:

The Bnei Menashe victim this week is believed to be one of at least five other people killed in violence that erupted after protests by more than 50,000 Kukis and members of other predominantly Christian tribal communities in Churachandpur and adjoining districts in Manipur state protested against demands by the non-tribal Meitei ethnic community to be included under the government’s “Scheduled Tribe” category. Under Indian law, members of such tribes are given reserved quotas for government jobs and college admissions as a form of affirmative action to address structural inequality and discrimination.

AN OVERTLY ANTI-CATHOLIC, BIGOTED ARTICLE BY TWO PROMINENT LAW PROFESSORS: Marci Hamilton and Leslie Griffin: How Did Six Conservative Catholics Become Supreme Court Justices Together? The underlying facts backing up the absurd notion that there has been a conspiracy to stock the Court with Catholics aren’t even accurate. Clarence Thomas was raised Catholic, but had left the church when he was nominated to the Supreme Court (he later returned). Neil Gorsuch was also raised Catholic, but seems to have been attending an Episcopal church as an adult. I thought this sort of crude anti-Catholic conspiracism had died out with JFK’s election… (And by the way, there is a simple explanation as to why conservative Justices have been disproportionately Catholic–they almost all went to Yale or Harvard, which is almost a prerequisite for appointment these days, and those schools graduate many more conservative Catholics than Protestants. For example, when I was in law school, the presidents of the Yale Federalist Society over three years were Catholic, Catholic, and (you guessed it), also Catholic.) The one exception to the Yale and Harvard rule, Amy Coney Barrett, became a conservative hero when Democrats attacked her Court of Appeals nomination because she was … Catholic.

OR GETTING RID OF THEM ENTIRELY: Unchecking the Box. This piece is a brief summary of the themes of my book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. So if you’ve been thinking of checking it out and want to get the gist…

By the way, if you *have* read the book, a brief review over at Amazon is always appreciated.