Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

JEFF JACOBY: Why they rip down the ‘Kidnapped from Israel’ fliers.

The posters were the brainchild of two Israeli artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, who were visiting New York when Hamas carried out its bloodbath. Aching to help in some way, they drew on their art backgrounds to design the eye-catching fliers. Each is topped with the word “KIDNAPPED” in large white letters on an orange background; below that heading is the name, age, nationality, and photo of one of the hostages, who range in age from 3 months to 85 years.

The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel’s anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives’ safe return. Then came the backlash. “Within minutes or hours of going up,” reported the New York Jewish Week, “many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station’s walls, tears obscuring the victims’ faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as “Free Palestine.” On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls’ faces. On other posters, the words “Lies” or “Actors” were scrawled.

Those ripping down or damaging the signs are by no means abashed about doing so. Some have filmed themselves attacking the fliers and posted the video online. Others, when asked why they were trashing the pictures of civilian hostages, have yelled about “genocide,” declared their support for “Palestinian civilians,” claimed the fliers contained “inaccurate information,” or simply cursed out the person filming them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely controversial and generates great emotion on both sides. But these assaults on the “Kidnapped” posters have nothing to do with the merits of the dispute. The sole purpose of the fliers is to emphasize the humanity of the innocent hostages seized by Hamas (many of whom, as it happens, were peace activists deeply committed to Arab-Israeli coexistence). What drives the people ripping down the posters or adding Hitler mustaches to the pictures is a pathological need to deny the humanity of those kidnapped Jews.

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The “Kidnapped” fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

In response, the left is blaming the posters for triggering anti-Semites. The Daily Dot asks: ‘Like a trap:’ Are posters of Israeli hostages drawing awareness or baiting pro-Palestinians into getting canceled when they tear them down?

The Gray Lady similarly explores:

REPORT: Harvard Law editor who assaulted Jewish student said by Stanford to have ‘compassion and humility.’

Video circulated online Wednesday morning showing a group of pro-Hamas students at Harvard University entrapping a group of Jewish students and shouting “Shame” at them.

The Canary Mission, a nonprofit that investigates anti-Semitism, is now claiming a ringleader in the physical confrontation is Ibrahim Bharmal.

”Ibrahim Bharmal participated in physically and verbally assaulting an Israeli student during an anti-Israel “die-in” protest at Harvard University (Harvard) in October 2023,” the nonprofit states.

The organization also reports, “At the rally, the protesters surrounded an Israeli student, grabbing and shoving him to the ground while covering their faces with keffiyehs. Bharmal was one of the assailants identified [00:01:54] in the video of the incident, published by the Washington Free Beacon.”

I’d like to think Professor Kingsfield would not be amused by the behavior of an editor of the Harvard Law Review, but perhaps he’d be uber-woke as well in 2023.

ACE ON THE DAILY DISNEY DISASTER: The Reason for the Long Delay of the Blade Movie…? Disney Wanted to Make It About Women and “Life Lessons.”

For this next story, a little backstory about Ike Perlmutter.

Perlmutter was, IIRC, a toy company magnate. His company was making Marvel action figures when Marvel went bankrupt, so he bough Marvel.

The left hates him because he’s a friend and supporter of Trump, and because he dared to offer his expert opinion, as a toy company/action figure magnate, that boys will not buy action figures of girls, so companies should make few girl action figures.

He’s absolutely 100% right about this, but the left insists on pretending the world is as it is not, so we now see toy aisles full of unbought girl action figures, rotting on the shelves forever.

He also said that he didn’t want to make Marvel movies about female heroes, because they wouldn’t make money. He was mostly right; see Black Widow and the upcoming The Marvels disaster for evidence.

Yes, a huge character like Wonder Woman can make some money, but that’s a rare bird. The Perlmutter Rule is 94% correct, which is pretty good for any rule.

Perlmutter retained a place on Disney’s board even after Disney bought Marvel. But Iger and Feige schemed to fire him, which they did last year.

Here’s the fun part: Perlmutter is also a close friend of Nelson Peltz, who lives down the street from him.

Peltz is now preparing the battlespace for a proxy war against Bob Iger.

And guess who just pledged all of his Disney shares to Peltz to help him depose Iger from power?

Pass the popcorn. Exit quote: “As someone with a large economic interest in Disney’s success, I can no longer watch the business underachieve its great potential.”

MEGYN KELLY: ‘We’re Witnessing the Collapse of Wokism.’

“We have to be upset because the lunatics get triggered by what Hamas did, they don’t like evidence of it on the wall?” Kelly said.

Kelly shared a rare silver lining from the ongoing Middle East conflict, one that could have cultural ramifications.

“The only good news to come out of this mess in the Middle East is that domestically, we’re witnessing the collapse of wokism,” Kelly said. “It’s happening, in real time, all around us.”

Kelly uncorked a long, impassioned rant that will leave a mark on anyone who previously gave the woke movement some credit.

“The woke Left has been exposed in spectacular fashion as a complete and total fraud. The very people who harassed us for years about our speech by demanding jobs be taken, SAT scores be thrown out, businesses be shut down for virtually any imagined offense that allegedly dehumanized a minority, have all gone silent on the open threats and attacks on Jews.

Don’t get too cocky — I can remember when 9/11 was supposed to be the end of leftist thinking — there was a “rally ’round the flag” effect for perhaps six months, but by 2004, the left back to being as crazy as ever, if not more so. In 2004, the late Charles Krauthammer coined “the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release” to explain why the left exploded after maintaining a veneer of civility in the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud’s Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They’ll need therapy.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

SQUAD GOALS: AOC Finally Wins The Anti-Semitism First Prize!

Poor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The “squad” leader and enforcer, scalp hunter of pro-Israel Democrats, and vocal opponent of purely defensive systems that keep Jewish civilians alive just wants a little recognition.

No one in Congress works harder to drum up Jew-baiting at home and abroad than AOC, yet her Democratic colleague Ilhan Omar gets all the credit. It’s unjust! Sure, Omar has specifically said that Jewish money buys members of Congress and that American Jews are disloyal citizens. But Ocasio-Cortez responded as any true competitor would and got creative. After all, no one else in Congress had thought to suggest U.S. testing of chemical weapons in Puerto Rico was “practice” for Israeli airstrikes on Gaza. That was impressive one-ups-persons-ship! She’s the Dennis Miller of Father Tom Coughlins.

Now it appears she has learned her lesson. Forget dog whistles—if you want to get credit for saying something, just say it. Last night, the congresswoman tweeted straight from her wild heart:

“AIPAC endorsed scores of Jan 6th insurrectionists. They are no friend to American democracy. They are one of the more racist and bigoted PACs in Congress as well, who disproportionately target members of color. They are an extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy.”

Take that, Ilhan.

But more seriously, this is actually dangerous incitement. It came in response to AIPAC’s criticism of all ten representatives who voted against a resolution supporting Israel and condemning Hamas’s barbarism. That criticism, it should be noted, was leveled against every “no” vote—including that of the far-right Republican Rep. Thomas Massie—so AOC’s “target members of color” accusation is risible. But it’s not meant to be factual. It’s intended to set America’s ethnic and religious minorities against each other for her own amusement. Though she is from New York City, AOC was too young to enjoy the Crown Heights pogrom in 1991, and clearly feels she missed out on a formative experience.

Just stop by MSNBC AOC, and fellow Democrat Al Sharpton will be delighted to tell you all about it.

IT’S THE (NOT SO) FINAL COUNTDOWN!

UPDATE: It’s 1983, and global warming was eventually going to kill us all. Which must have felt like whiplash to people who remembered the mid-1970s, when global cooling was eventually going to kill us all, according to the Washington Post, via their then-subsidiary magazine, Newsweek.

FRANCE’S NIGHTMARE IS YOURS NOW:

Make no mistake: This timeline does not diminish the ground-breaking aspect of what happened on Oct. 7. To the contrary. Pogroms are old news, of course. What makes this whole sequence new is that these killers publicized their actions live, in real time.

And it worked. During one of the first pro-Palestinian rallies in Times Square, shortly after Oct. 7, a demonstrator proudly exhibited on his iPhone screen the ravaged, naked body of one of the Israeli victims—a woman of course. (That women paid and continue to pay the heaviest price for the events of Oct. 7 is a fact that should be examined more closely; in France, some days ago, a Jewish feminist student was surprised to discover a tweet from one of her activist friends justifying the rapes.)

In 2015 in France, ISIS’s most gory videos were also the most efficient ones at motivating jihadi recruitment. In the same breath, would-be terrorists would deny that atrocities were happening in Rakka (it was all Western propaganda) and feel enthralled by those same snuff films because they were proof that “it was really happening.” As it turns out, the public performance of sadistic acts is the most efficient way to break down every moral barrier across the world. By duplicating and diffusing the terror and the horror, and by making this duplication part of their “military” strategy, Hamas aims at controlling the narrative of what’s going on as it happens, winning admirers and gaining new supporters and recruits, who commune together in a worldwide social media loop of Jew-lynching, backed by proof that it is really happening.

I know exactly what this looks like for Jews in France, and for the rest of the country. The specific nature of the horrors it will produce when enacted on a global scale remain to be seen.

Read the whole thing.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: White House indicates people making ‘violent antisemitic threats’ not classified as ‘domestic terrorists.’

The White House indicated Tuesday that people in the U.S. making “violent antisemitic threats” were not going to be classified as “domestic terrorists.”

The comments, made by National Security Council spokesman John Kirby during the White House press briefing, ran in stark contrast to parents concerned about their children’s education previously being described as “domestic terrorists” in a letter that prompted a directive from the Biden administration for the FBI to investigate.

“The people in this country making violent antisemitic threats. Are they domestic terrorists?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked Kirby.

“I don’t know that we’re classifying people as domestic terrorists for that. I mean, that’s really a question better left to law enforcement. I’m not aware that there’s been such a characterization of that,” Kirby responded.

Just think of the Biden administration as Obama’s third term and it all makes sense. Or think of it as:

OUT ON A LIMB: COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic.

As for President Donald Trump, he never used the word lockdown, but he was worried enough to  call for the country to adopt social distancing as a mitigation strategy. Schools, restaurants, businesses — they all closed. White-collar employees who were able to work from home did so. More than once, Trump mentioned that 2.2 million lives were at stake, referring to Ferguson’s estimate. Trump’s order wound up lasting six weeks.

Most governors issued their own “stay-at-home” orders, usually stricter than Trump’s. Even Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida — who would soon become an outspoken opponent of mainstream mitigation measures — reluctantly went along for a brief period. But there were important questions that no one advocating for lockdowns addressed, maybe because in the urgency of the moment the questions didn’t occur to them. How long would they last? And even if lockdowns did slow the virus’s progression, what would happen when they were lifted?

Regardless, in the space of two months, lockdowns had gone from being unthinkable to being an unquestioned tool in the pandemic toolkit.

* * * * * * * *

Dr. Anthony Fauci was probably the best-known defender of lockdowns as a life-saving measure. But the policy continues to have many defenders within the public health establishment. Howard Markel, a doctor and medical historian at the University of Michigan, believes they succeeded. “The amount of lives saved was just incredible,” he says. Markel pointed to an August 2023 study by the Royal Society of London that concluded that “stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and restrictions on gathering size were repeatedly found to be associated with significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent measures having greater effects.”

Still, the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust — the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”).

In all of this discussion, however, there is a crucial fact that tends to be forgotten: COVID wasn’t the only thing people died from in 2020 and 2021. Cancer victims went undiagnosed because doctors were spending all their time on COVID patients. Critical surgeries were put on hold. There was a dramatic rise in deaths due to alcohol and drug abuse. According to the CDC, one in five high-school students had suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Domestic violence rose. One New York emergency-room doctor recalls that after the steady stream of COVID patients during March and April of 2020, “our ER was basically empty.” He added, “Nobody was coming in because they were afraid of getting COVID — or they believed we were only handling COVID patients.”

I’m glad to see New York magazine in 2023 finally reach the same conclusion the rest of us arrived at by April of 2020, and certainly by the summer:

After telling GOP to downsize convention due to COVID-19, N.C. governor marches in crowded protest.

NJ governor admits COVID-19 double standard, says recent protests are different from business owners’ complaints.

De Blasio: Large Group Protests Are Acceptable, Religious Observances Are Not.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.

Related: ‘We would’ve done everything differently:’ Newsom reflects on Covid approach.

Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.

MARK JUDGE: A welcome end to superhero movies.

I recently went to the movies, where I was confronted on the screen by minor miracles: two well-crafted films that are smart, brave, and aimed at adults. And they have nothing to do with superheroes.

The films are The Holdovers and American Fiction. The Holdovers  is about the relationship that develops between three people who are left stranded at an expensive private school for Christmas. The second film, American Fiction, didn’t play, but the trailer did. That was enough to leave the jaws of those seated around me on the floor.

With what looks like brutal satire, American Fiction tackles the phenomenon of white elites in the media, academia, and publishing world who satisfy their own egos by making black authors sound more “street” and “authentic” at the expense of more gifted black writers. It’s a savage takedown of the condescension liberalism holds toward black people.

The best part is neither film felt the need to insert the superficial action and predictable plot that too often accompanies the superhero genre. “Lackluster storytelling and the gatekeeping of interconnected story arcs have led to superhero fatigue,” movie critic Brandon Towns recently wrote.

So it’s possible for Hollywood to make films for grownups that aren’t sequels or part of an enormous franchise? As far back as 2011, Hollywood producer Lynda Obst tracked her industry’s obsession for endless remaking the same product in her book Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business:

UPDATE: The trailer for American Fiction is absolutely brilliant. As Steve Hayward writes, “If this film turns out to be as good as this trailer, I can’t wait to see the liberal film reviewers fall all over themselves denouncing it, even though it was written and directed by a black filmmaker (Cord Jefferson). Takeaway line from the trailer: ‘The dumber I behave the richer I get.’”

(Updated and bumped.)

MICHAEL WALSH: The Scales Have Fallen. Now What?

You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,  I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is… nothing.

To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: The Issue Is Not the Issue.

‘NOW AND THEN:’ Film director Peter Jackson tells us how he made The Beatles’ last music video.

A Beatles music video must have great Beatles footage at its core. There’s no way actors or CGI Beatles should be used. Every shot of The Beatles needed to be genuine. By now I really had no idea how anyone could make a ‘Now And Then’ music video if they didn’t have decent footage to work with, and this was far from being a lame excuse. My fear and insecurity now had solid reasons why they should prevail and allow me to say no without looking too much like a chicken.

I knew The Beatles don’t take no for an answer if their minds are set on something – but they didn’t even wait for me to say no. I found myself swept along as they quickly addressed my concerns. Paul and Ringo shot footage of themselves performing and sent that to me. Apple unearthed over 14 hours of long-forgotten film, shot during the 1995 recording sessions, including several hours of Paul, George and Ringo working on ‘Now And Then,’ and gave all that to me.

Here are the release dates:

‘Now and Then’ will be unveiled [this] Thursday at 2pm, with a full release the following day, while a 12-minute Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song documentary film, written and directed by Oliver Murray – will premiere on November 1, hosted on The Beatles’ YouTube channel at 7:30pm. This poignant short film tells the story behind the song, with exclusive footage and commentary from Paul, Ringo, George, Sean Ono Lennon and Peter Jackson.

Based on my reactions to “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” the Lennon demos that were reworked by the then-three surviving Beatles in the mid-1990s, I’m really looking forward to being disappointed by the project.

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Muslim Group to Biden: ‘Ceasefire by 5PM Tuesday or We Walk.’

If the stakes were not so high in Israel and the situation was not so tragic, and if Joe Biden were not at least the titular president of the United States, it would almost be worth a chuckle or two. But the stakes are almost too high to measure for a moment of comedy, and while Biden is clearly not in charge, his handlers must certainly be vexed, if nothing else.

On Monday, the National Muslim Democratic Council sent the administration a letter. In essence, Biden has until 5 p.m. Eastern tonight to force Israel into a ceasefire with Hamas. If not, it could cost him at the polls. The council claims that the voters’ trust in Biden has been “eroded” by the administration’s support and the “funding of armaments.”

And the council maintains that this is no idle threat. The council promises to mobilize Muslim Arab and “allied” voters to withhold any endorsements, support, and even votes from candidates who did not call for a ceasefire “and endorse (sic) the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian people.” There is no mention of the October 7 attacks and as Just the News pointed out, the letter contains nothing about Hamas.

Meanwhile: Protesters calling Antony Blinken a ‘murderer’ demand ceasefire in Gaza and derail hearing:

‘Stop the brutal, brutal massacre in Gaza…Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now,’ one heckler shouted.

They also held signs saying: ‘All the walls have got to go’ and ‘Free Gaza’.

Another shouted: ‘Blinken, you have blood on your hands! Murderer.’

Note the blood on the hands of protestors, possibly a callback to the 2000 Rallah lynching:

The 2000 Ramallah lynching was a violent incident that took place on October 12, 2000 – early in the Al-Aqsa Intifada – at the el-Bireh police station, where a Palestinian crowd of passing funeral marchers broke in and killed and mutilated the bodies of two Israel Defense Forces reservists…Aziz Salha, one of the lynchers, waving his blood-stained hands from the police station window. Salha was later arrested by Israel and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.

Ed Morrissey notes: Anti-Semitic Left About to Blow Dems Apart.

There’s just one little problem with this threat, which is that Muslims only make up a population that’s half that of Jews in this country, and Jews vote more often and reliably. This may not be an all-or-nothing in either group — some Muslim voters no doubt abhor what took place in Israel, while some Jews may want Israel to stand down — but among both groups, it’s fair to assume diametrically opposed positions.

Which means that Democrats may have to choose which demo to cut loose. On those terms, the Hamas Caucus and the NMDC will clearly lose. Jewish Democrats vote more reliably with the party, held fundraise and organize more and for longer, and Israel is more popular with the broader electorate than Hamas will ever be.

Besides, Jewish voters spurned by Democrats in this situation may not necessarily thunder over to the GOP, but they certainly know the GOP would welcome them if they did, especially on the issue of Israel vs Hamas. The [National Muslim Democratic Council] has no place else to go, except maybe the Greens. If they don’t know that yet, they’ll learn it the hard way soon enough.

Roosevelt managed to keep his coalition of disparate voting groups, which included both northern intellectuals, minorities, and racist southern “Progressives”  united enough to win four terms as president. Biden (read: Obama) may not be as lucky this time around.

PALLYWOOD NEEDS A BIGGER CAST OF EXTRAS:

UPDATE: He’s back! This time portraying a radiologist:

More: He’s back!

IOWAHAWK:

I understand why individual leftists are pulling down the posters but: Why Are British Police Tearing Down Pictures of Hamas Hostages?

Who are the police protecting here? It certainly isn’t Britain’s Jewish citizens or their right to free speech and assembly. It is anti-Israel, pro-Hamas mobs and vandals.

I’m pretty sure the guys who made It Happened Here shot it in 1964 as a warning to England, not a how-to guide.