I escaped Yale University this weekend to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath in Brooklyn with a deeply pious Chasidic community, the neighborhood papered with “KIDNAPPED” posters featuring the faces of Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.
I was relieved to be away from hostile protests where many of my classmates have cheered—in reference to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis—that such “resistance is justified.” At an Oct. 25 protest, Yale students publicly admonished an Oct. 12 op-ed I wrote for the Yale Daily News. In it, I noted that the student group Yalies4Palestine had blamed the victims for their plight, arguing that “the Israeli Zionist regime [is] responsible for the unfolding violence,” and called on the Yale community “to celebrate the resistance’s success.”
I was in Brooklyn when I learned that the Yale Daily News had done its own part to help the “resistance,” excising four sentences from my piece. They referred to Hamas’s atrocities. “Yes, they raped women. Yes, they kidnapped children. Yes, they beheaded men. Yes, they cheered the whole time.”
Appended to the article now is the following correction, made without my knowledge: “Editor’s note, correction, Oct. 25: This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.”
The War of the Worlds dramatization aired over CBS radio and starred 23-year-old Orson Welles. It told of the invasion of the United States by waves of Martians wielding deadly heat rays. So vivid and frightening was the program that tens of thousands of Americans were convulsed in panic and driven to hysteria.
And that makes for quite an intriguing tale.
But like most media myths, it’s a tale with scant evidentiary support.
As I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, if panic and hysteria had swept America during The War of the Worlds broadcast, the resulting trauma, turmoil, and mayhem surely would have resulted in deaths, including suicides, and in serious injuries.
But nothing of the sort — no deaths, no suicides, no serious injuries — were conclusively linked to the show.
As the man himself said, “Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio.”
REMINDER: A quote from Robert Heinlein:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
There are about eight hundred Jewish families left in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan. So the antisemites who live there have faced a supply-demand issue in recent days: a mob of salivating Jew-haters without sufficient Jews to lynch.
On October 28, the Flamingo Hotel in Khasavyurt, Dagestan, was stormedby a group of men looking for Jews. On October 29, the Jewish community center in Nalchik was set on fire—along with an inscription on one of its walls: “Death to the Jews.” In Cherkessk, on Russian Telegram, videoscirculate of locals calling for Jews to leave the country.
So you can imagine the excitement when the people of Dagestan heard that a flight from Tel Aviv was landing on Sunday evening at the airport in the city of Makhachkala.
Hundreds of people stormed the airport to greet that flight—of 45 passengers, 15 were Israeli, many of them children. “Allahu Akbar,” they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men waving Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, they attack an airport employee, who desperately explains: “There are no passengers here anymore,” and then exclaims, “I am Muslim!” Some of the rioters demanded to examine the passports of arriving passengers, seemingly trying to identify those who were Israeli, and others searched cars as they were leaving. Another video emerged of two young boys at the airport, proudly declaring that they came to “kill Jews” with knives.
According to the local health ministry, more than 20 people were injured in the skirmishes. One video showed a pilot telling the passengers over the intercom to “please stay seated and don’t try to open the plane’s door. There is an angry mob outside.”
But it’s okay though; the New York Times reported that the incident was merely a minor “outburst:”
But amid all the voices commenting about Disney, Carano’s words were the loudest as her post on X contained an insider’s look at, not just the state of Lucasfilm, but the terrible weakness and insecurity of its studio head, Kennedy:
This is the part where KK demands any YouTubers get censored off of YouTube for sharing and laughing at this hilarious episode, she’ll have YouTube disable the thumbs down option because of the ratio she’ll receive, then she’ll have her publicist ghouls make sure Variety and Hollywood Reporter run hit pieces about the South Park creators and their families smearing their names through every useful idiot she has under her thumb who would sell their soul to work for Lucas film, she’ll activate her online mob to repeat that the South Park creators are racist, bigot, transphobes, and demand the South Park creators publicly apologize by only using words she approves of and finally she’ll demand they subject themselves to a re-education course of 45 people in the lbgtq community zoom call to sit there and listen of how badly they got their feelings hurt all over a little boop of a South Park episode. But maybe just maybe the jig is up.
This is the part where KK demands any YouTubers get censored off of YouTube for sharing and laughing at this hilarious episode, she’ll have YouTube disable the thumbs down option because of the ratio she’ll receive, then she’ll have her publicist ghouls make sure Variety and… https://t.co/CMgASHQBgz
The episode wasn’t great. Many of the jokes were obvious, knocking down the lowest of low-hanging fruit, and then ending with a “both sides are wrong” message.
Really? I’m wrong? I’m not responsible for driving Disney’s stock price down from $160 to $79 and change.
And if I am partly responsible: Good. Proudest day in my life.
But even though South Park finished with some cowardly, sniveling, ass-kissing both-sidesing, the thing is, Disney’s critics do not have shareholders ready to fire us for criticizing Disney.
But Bob Iger and Kaffeine Kennedy do have shareholders they must appease.
So even though South Park’s final craven message was “both sides are wrong,” it still only hurts one side, and that’s Disney.
Disney’s shareholders now have the image of their crumbling share value linked with Kaffeine Kennedy’s endless demands to “put a chick in it and make it gay!”
And now that the Unsayable Thing has been said loudly enough that no one can pretend they didn’t hear it, people will actually begin talking about the Unsayable Thing.
Tom says he knows she’s pissed because he’s had her usual twitter minions attacking him all week.
Midnight’s Edge says that Gina Carano is tipping her friends that there’s going to be another shoe dropping about Kaffeine Kennedy and/or Iger and/or Disney shortly.
In the Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law School, tells us “nothing” has prepared him for the prevalence of antisemitism on campus.
Nothing?
Not even the “Jew-free” zones students set up at Berkeley last year? Not the 11 student groups that promised to exclude any “Zionist” (wink, wink) speakers on campus? Not the Jewish students who complained they didn’t feel welcome on campus? Not last month’s appearance of communist PLO-loving progressive heroine Angela Davis, who once argued that Jewish prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union deserved what they got?
In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, Steven Davidoff Solomon, a law professor at Berkeley, implores firms not to hire his own students because they have become a clique who “advocate hate and practice discrimination.” This trend did not start yesterday.
Chemerinsky is now traumatized that some Jew-hating Berkeley student asked him “to get rid of the Zionists” so she could feel safe. He’s unhappy that he’s been accused of participating in “a Zionist conspiracy.” And, after 70 years of supernatural cluelessness, the dean of a prestigious law school has apparently figured out that “Zionist” is just a codeword for “Jew.”
That’s awfully rich of Chemerinsky, considering he’s been at Berkeley since 2017; the left’s growing antisemitism isn’t all that new a development. The Squad were first elected in 2018; Jeremy Corbyn was head of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, when he was was suspended over a lack of reaction to a damning report on antisemitism in his party.
Or to put it another way:
My reaction to Mayim Bialik's video… who I really respect and like, BTW. Just my raw thoughts… pic.twitter.com/6nmhMuidzv
Ever since David Horowitz broke from the radical left back in the 1980s, he has been trying to warn conservatives that they don’t really understand the core principle of the left, and the depths of the left’s power-mad depravity. Conservatives too often think that the Israel-Palestine conflict, or civil rights, crime, income inequality, transgender ideology, climate change, etc, etc., are discrete issues to be argued against the left with reason and facts. To which Horowitz replies: The issue is not the issue—the issue is revolution! (And a key corollary is: the more violent, the better. Hence the approval and celebration of Hamas on October 7.)
The aftermath of October 7 ought to have revealed this truth more vividly than any event of the last 50 years. October 7 provided the spark for massive pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout the world and especially on college campuses. It is legitimized and brought out of the shadows the anti-Semitism long latent on the left, just waiting for a catalyst to organize spontaneously to vent their rage and hate. But it represents more than this.
A coalition of 26 local chapters called the attacks a “desperate act of self-defense.” The Chicago chapter shared an image glorifying Hamas gunmen on paragliders, before walking it back amid blowback. And the movement’s Phoenix branch praised Hamas “freedom fighters” for their acts of “resistance.”
Echoing this rhetoric are two Hamas-friendly groups—American Muslims for Palestine and the Council for American-Islamic Relations—that have for nearly a decade worked arm-in-arm with the Black Lives Matter organization to plan rallies and lobby lawmakers.
The groups are united by an “oppressed-oppressor narrative that helps them destroy society,” according to the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez.
“They see Israel as a kind of mini-me of the West and America,” Gonzalez told the Washington Free Beacon. “They hate the West. Jerusalem is one of the founding blocks of Western thought, so if they’re going to hate the West they have to hate Israel.”
Outside the City Hope Cafe in San Francisco stand two new large, gleaming metal tubs filled with hundreds of pounds of soil. Installed on the sidewalk last week, the planters will add a touch of greenery to the cafe that serves homeless people for free in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood.
But the cafe’s operator, the Rev. Paul Trudeau, acknowledges that their purpose is also functional — a tactic that a recent Chronicle block-by-block survey showed is often resorted to by San Francisco residents and businesses to deter encampments on the sidewalks around them after the city proved unable to provide long-term solutions.
At City Hope, an encampment where screaming matches and fights frequently broke out, including one where a person was arrested for beating another with a hammer, has been blocking the front of the cafe for months, Trudeau said — and despite near-daily calls to 911, the campers repeatedly returned.
So he put in the planters.
“We love our community, and we love the people who walk through our doors,” Trudeau said. “But you can’t get in our doors if you can’t get down the sidewalks.”
As San Francisco continues to grapple with its homelessness crisis, sidewalk planters have proliferated, becoming the latest flash point in the debate over what to do about the thousands of people who live on the city’s streets.
Flashback: “Despite its spending more money per capita on homelessness than any comparable city, [San Francisco’s] homeless problem is worse than any comparable city’s,” SF Weekly noted 15 years ago, stumbling into the Fox Butterfield effect.
Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.
The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”
Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users.
* * * * * * * *
After The Washington Post contacted Amazon for comment, Alexa’s responses changed.
When a long-silent former president finally speaks out, the public listens. So do foreign leaders, especially when the former president is closely tied to the current one. That’s why Barack Obama’s comments on the war in Gaza attracted attention.
Anyone who remembers President Obama’s foreign policy knew what to expect: criticism of Israel and a delicate dance around Iran’s malign behavior. In fact, he did not mention Iran at all. He totally ignored their role. His audience expected him to add a few words of moral self-righteousness, warning Israel about future civilian casualties, as if Israeli Defense Forces hadn’t taken enormous and costly steps to avoid them. He should have praised the IDF and contrasted their behavior with that of Hamas, which deliberately hides behind civilians and then lies about innocent deaths. He didn’t. Obama’s speech recapitulates his administration’s policies. Unfortunately, those policies didn’t work.
The former president’s comments are important because his aides populate the Biden administration and have continued his policies in the Middle East. The failure of those policies hasn’t prompted any self-reflection or significant policy changes. It’s time they do.
It’s possible, of course, that Biden will eventually reconsider as the full horror of Hamas’s attack and Iran’s backing for it sinks in. So far, however, there’s been no change. To quote an old English comedy routine, “We have learned from our mistakes and can repeat them exactly.”
I clicked the “Translate post” tab, which uses Google Translate, to see what text was in the tweet. This is what it showed:
This is the moment where your eyebrows should arch. Notice that the text refers to more than 500 victims. A victim can mean a death, but it, of course, can also mean someone injured in any capacity. Had the spokesperson not said that more than 500 were killed, but merely said more than 500 were victims?
Obviously, either of these outcomes are horrific. And, as noted earlier, any number cited so early after the incident was suspect. But if a news outlet is going to report a statement by Hamas, the specifics matter a lot when a claim made about deaths, initially attributed to Israel’s actions, was shared with and influenced the reactions of tens or perhaps hundreds-of-millions of people around the world.
The word “victim” was curious, but it was also text in a tweet, not the actual interview. And it was a translation from Google. How reliable was that? I was skeptical about the tweet text’s veracity.
I didn’t want to fall prey to the same secondhand sourcing error I suspected everyone else had done. So I hired two different Arabic translators to listen to the interview, then translate it and transcribe it into English.
One of the translators seconded the use of the word “victim,” and he made it clear to me that in this context it was different from “killed.” The other translator, in referencing Al-Qidra’s comments, translated the word as “casualties.” I pressed the translator: sometimes words in one language do not have a direct translation into a different language. Was it possible that the word Al-Qidra used could be translated as “deaths”? No, she said.
Bolstering confidence in the translations is that right before the sentence in question, Al-Qidra had referred to dead bodies and casualties or victims being brought to the hospital by paramedics. He differentiated between the two. The correct translation had to be that he said more than 500 were “victims” or “casualties”—not killed.
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