YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE:

I won’t have any kids until the 2nd amendment is abolished. I’m sorry but I don’t want my kids to fear for their lives every time they are dressed up in their uniforms. Congress must act immediately!

— •🥷🏻 (@MessiEra10_) October 12, 2023

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Shame of Academe.

As Israel mourns some 1,200 dead, prays for the release of more than 100 captives, reels from the worst day in its history, and mobilizes some 360,000 reservists, student activists and the international Left have mobilized to defend, apologize for, and appease evil. . . .

After the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, similar scenes of denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now, after Israel’s 9/11, they take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West.

Whatever this is, it is not progress. The grotesque tableaux represent social fracture, dissolution, ideological sorting, and weakening of confidence. They are a bad omen. Many of the protesters are young males asking for a fight. The last war with Hamas, in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic violence in the United States. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash when Israel launches its ground campaign to destroy Hamas.

The toxic atmosphere of anti-Semitism has several sources. One is the corrupt university system. Fifty-one U.S. student groups have written a letter that concludes, “We support the resistance, we support the liberation movement, and we indisputably support the Uprising.” The president of NYU’s student bar association said that Israel’s “apartheid regime is the only one to blame” for the chaos. Thirty-one “Palestine Solidarity Groups” at Harvard University echoed her despicable sentiment. Swarthmore Students for Justice in Palestine said it “honors the martyrs” of Hamas. Graffiti writers scrawled “Long live the intifada” and “Israel is dead” on Stanford’s sidewalks. Students at George Washington University, one of the most expensive private institutions of higher learning in the country, held a “Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine.” This is a small sample of dangerous student idiocy. A full catalogue would be endless.

Campus anti-Zionism and leftwing anti-Semitism are not new. The organizations behind the rallies and letters and social media posts have been around for a while. Democratic Socialists of America, Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom have spent years preparing for this moment. What they have set in motion is stunning, nonetheless.

The behavior of university administrations is just as shocking. They have either been mealy-mouthed or morally imbecilic.

There is a strong case to be made for reevaluating the place of higher education in our society. Its role seems to be growing less beneficial, and more toxic, every day.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford Instructor “Suspended for … [Alleged] ‘Identity-Based Targeting” of Students in Connection with the Israel-Gaza War”.

An instructor at Stanford University has been suspended for what the president and provost called “identity-based targeting” of students in connection with the Israel-Gaza war.

Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of the Chabad Stanford Jewish Center, said he was told by three students who were in the room that the instructor asked Jewish and Israeli students to identify themselves during a session for a required undergraduate course called “Civil, Liberal and Global Education.”

The teacher told the Jewish students to take their belongings, stand in a corner, and said, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians,” Greenberg said, citing the student accounts. The instructor then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” When a student answered, “Six million,” the lecturer said, “Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer.”

Why are our universities such cesspits of hate and misinformation?

WE’VE DISCUSSED THESE PROBLEMS BEFORE: How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People.

One of the FedEx pilots commandeered the air traffic control radio frequency. He ordered Southwest to abort its takeoff. It didn’t. The FedEx crew blasted the engines to climb away from the Southwest plane. “On the go,” a FedEx pilot radioed.

The FedEx plane, which had three crew members, skimmed less than 100 feet over the other jet. The 128 people aboard Southwest Flight 708 continued on their way to Cancún, Mexico. Passengers were unaware that they had nearly died.

In a year filled with close calls involving U.S. airlines, this was the one that most unnerved federal aviation officials: A disaster had barely been averted, and multiple layers of the vaunted U.S. air-safety system had failed.

Read the whole thing.

OH, I WON’T: Don’t overlook Biden’s empowering of antisemites.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Meet the UVA Student Leader Who Is ‘Proud to Stand in Solidarity’ With Hamas.

YEP: The Specter Of Barack Obama’s Deeply Held Anti-Israel Ideology Hovers Over Israeli Attacks.

However, any fair-minded critique of Israel is a far cry from Obama’s well-established and radical views on the Middle East that stem, by his own admission, from his affinity for radicals such as Frantz Fanon, whose brain-dead swagger produced such sentiments as “decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives.” . . .

And it’s probably time to admit that, while attempting to bury their aims under layers of academic sophistication, Obama and his acolytes used his presidency to destabilize the Middle East in the service of a left-wing ideology that excuses antisemitism and justifies terrorist violence.

In August, Tablet magazine published a much-discussed, comprehensive interview between David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow. The biggest headlines that emerged from that interview had to do with Garrow uncovering letters where Obama wrote in detail about his gay sex fantasies. But buried beneath that revelation was a substantial discussion of Obama’s anti-Israel politics. Or as Tablet’s David Samuels put it, “Obama’s hostility to American exceptionalism also seemed linked to his hostility to Israel, or more specifically to America’s identification with Israel.” As Samuels went on to note, the inexplicable fixation Obama had with making Iran — the world’s leading state sponsor of terror attacks, and the same country behind Hamas’ atrocities in Israel over the weekend — a regional hegemon in spite of Israeli (and Saudi) objections is ample proof of that. . . .

Finally, there was Obama’s embrace of Robert Malley. In December of 2007, the Obama campaign put out a press release listing Malley as a campaign adviser. Malley had previously worked on Middle East issues for the Clinton administration, though he was not well-liked by the Jewish community because his father, journalist Simon Malley, was a friend and sympathizer of Yasser Arafat, the head of the PLO terror group. Robert Malley himself had also written a series of essays for the New York Review of Books on Middle East issues that led prominent Jewish commentator and the former owner of The New Republic, Marty Peretz, to call him “a rabid hater of Israel. No question about it.”

I confess I hadn’t thought much about Malley in the last 15 years, other than to assume he was up to no good. This summer I learned he was the Biden administration’s special envoy to Iran and that he had been fired once again, and this time it was serious enough that he lost his security clearance and was being accused of mishandling classified info. Only in the past few weeks have the real facts come into sharper relief: “Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.”

Iran, of course, was actively involved in funding and coordinating Hamas’ atrocities this past weekend. At the same time this was all being planned, the apparently traitorous Malley was working on Iran issues in an administration that made the questionable decision to give Iran billions of dollars in a desperate attempt to jumpstart Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

Just in case you wonder, here’s an explication for the Obama/Biden administration’s otherwise inexplicable policy on Iran.

DO TELL: Michelle Goldberg: The leftist impulse to justify Hamas’ attack on Israel is pretty disturbing.

YES:

Harvard students are legit worried that their open Hamas support will affect future job opportunities with Goldman. https://t.co/OBS2H9dZlW

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) October 11, 2023

LIFE AMONG THE BARBARIANS: Music Festival Survivor Details Escape From Hamas: ‘They Hunted Us For Hours.’

THIS MAY HAVE BEEN IRAN’S GOAL: ‘India-Middle East-Economic Corridor is effectively dead’: Fears grow as Israel declares war on Hamas.

OPEN THREAD: Do it up right.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: U.S. to pursue stronger collaboration with allies in military space programs.

THIS HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR A WHILE: The true story of Matthew Shepard: it wasn’t homophobia that killed him. “I’m not going to get into the details, except to note one thing: one of the killers was not a homophobic hater, but was in fact an on-again off-again lover of Matt’s. This is hardly the stuff of a homophobic hate crime; it was a meth-fueled murder spree that was ignited because the perpetrators were trying to steal a cache of the drug from Shepard.”

LOL: Palestinian Flag Outside Rashida Tlaib’s Office Seen Throwing Pride Flag Off The Roof.

Is the Babylon Bee even satire anymore?

IT’S IN THE BLOOD: The Blood of Exceptionally Long-Lived People Shows Key Differences.

ABC NEWS: Hamas’ atrocities are every bit as ghastly as described.

TRUST-FUND REVOLUTIONARIES: Jo Malone’s son is an organizer for Harvard Palestine group behind anti-Israel letter.

The son of British perfume magnate Jo Malone is an organizer for the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee, one of the groups behind the letter blaming Israel for Hamas’ deadly attacks that left more than 1,200 people dead and thousands wounded.

Josh Willcox, a 22-year-old senior and a member of the men’s fencing team at the Ivy League school, has penned several op-ed columns for the group published by the campus newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

The only child of Malone, 60, and her husband, Gary Willcox — who in 1999 sold the Jo Malone London perfume company for millions of dollars to cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, whose son Ronald Lauder serves as the president of the World Jewish Congress — has denounced “the brutal oppression of Palestinians” by “an apartheid regime,” a reference to Israel.

Lol, the “apartheid regime” stuff cracks me up.

OOPS: Galactic Glitch: Spacewalks on Hold After ISS Leak.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE: Scientists found CO2 on Europa. Here’s why it’s important.

FLASHBACK: Thanks to someone who posted it in the comments, I ran across this 2009 piece by Bill Whittle on why Sarah Palin had to be destroyed.

Let’s wrap this up by getting to brass tacks here.

This isn’t a fight between Democrats and Republicans, or even between Liberals and Conservatives. This is a fight to the death between the populists and the elites.

Sarah Palin is the anti-Obama. He is urban; she is rural. He preaches dependency on the government and she leads a life of independence. He consistently apologizes for the sins of the country he was elected to lead, and she is unabashedly proud of it. He opposes the war in Iraq; she has skin in the game. And on and on.

And that is why she had to be destroyed, by the Democratic Party, by the New York media elites, and by many of the inside-the-beltway voices of various and sundry GOP “strategists.”

She needs to be destroyed because the one thing that can never be allowed to happen is this: you cannot have a voice in this political debate. You know who I mean. You rubes, you hicks out there in flyover country. Your job is pay taxes, vote for who they have decided over cocktails makes them feel better about themselves, and occasionally provide your inbred idiot sons and daughters for the army or police force or whatever you people without Ivy League educations do with your tawdry little lives.

Meanwhile, the Harvard-educated elitist geniuses will run the country according to their infinitely brighter intellectual and moral lights.

This week, in particular, has been a reminder of just how dim those bulbs actually are.

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The Next Big Solar Storm Could Fry the Grid. “We are entering a period of peak activity for our sun–the apex of its 11-year cycle will occur in mid 2024—that has already proved to be more violent than the solar cycles of the past three decades.”

THAT’S CRAZY TALK: Treat Men Like They Matter. “In my WSJ op-ed on why men turn to online influencers instead of traditional authorities, I noted that one reason is that online influencers treat men as ends in themselves, not just means by which to achieve some other goal. . . . Another very common approach in secular society is to describe the problems facing men in terms of the negative consequences that has for women. For example, the conservative New York Post ran a piece saying that broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects. . . . For the most part society is only interested in severe life challenges faced by men insomuch as they are affecting women. Men here again are a purely instrumental good that exist to enable women to fulfill their life ambitions.”

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE HAVE TOLD ME THAT IT’S OKAY TO PUNCH NAZIS:

The same society that pays wages to mass murderers and celebrates on the streets with sweets and shootings when Jews get killed. It is the culture that creates the types of monsters capable of the evil they themselves proudly show to the world through social media.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West. Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building. They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” But the world has now seen what “from the river to the sea” actually means. It is nothing less than a remake of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen.

It’s Nazi-punching time.

THE AGE OF INCOMPETENCE: How did Israel fail to see the Hamas attack coming? The same way the we failed to see 9/11 coming. There are far to many “not ready for prime time” players on our rosters.

They may be incompetent, but they’re properly politicized.