Category: Political Commentary
It’s Nice To Be Right, But At What Cost?

It’s Nice To Be Right, But At What Cost?

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It’s nice to be right, and I’ve been right a lot in the past seven years since I started this blog. But after seeing President Joe Biden’s performance in last night’s presidential debate, I have to ask at what price has all this correctness come?

We saw, in vivid detail, how the sitting president is utterly incapable of serving in the office he holds, much less is capable of another four years as Leader of the Free World. I know his handlers and his unscrupulous wife will continue to prop him up so he gets through the next seven months, but what if — admittedly a long shot at this point — he should be reelected either by a fair vote or, as the Democratic Party has shown itself more than capable of doing, through some sort of dirty trick, staged crisis, or just plain old-fashioned corruption? Can this country sustain more of what it’s endured for the past three and a half years?

Before I get ahead of myself, let me point out just some, but by no means all, of the things I’ve been right about, giving the lie to the attacks I’ve sustained from denizens of the left during all that time:

— Joe Biden is saddled with growing dementia and is incapable of serving as President, something I’ve been saying since before his election in 2020  — right, as we clearly saw last night.

— We don’t know who is in charge in the White House, but it clearly is not Joe Biden — right, as we also saw last night.

— The Hunter Biden laptop is and was real, and it clearly ties Biden into an ongoing criminal enterprise, and Biden just blatantly lied about it — right.

— The state media has corruptly propped Biden up even in the face of the obvious, endangering both democracy and the country’s security — right again.

— This administration, with collusion by the state media, has peddled a raft of lies to the electorate. That includes a ploy they employed during the debate last night, and which can only be described as Soviet in its absurd level of dishonesty, that Biden had a cold, which accounted for his poor performance in the debate — right.

— That the government worked hand-in-glove with social media to suppress valuable information while promoting falsehoods the government supported — right.

— That the essential weakness and misguided policies of this administration led directly to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as well as the barbarism Hamas wreaked on innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023 — right once more.

— That the Russia hoax foisted on the country by Hillary Clinton, Democrats, and the corrupt media, was just that: a hoax — right from the beginning on that one.

— That everything from an open border to rising crime and abuses committed by the administration are not the results of mere incompetence, but is deliberate — right.

— That Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan was the biggest disgrace in our nation’s history, and a line can be drawn directly from that to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the rising level of adventurism by America’s opponents — sadly, right.

I could go on, but I think the point is made. And so here we are today, a society and economy in disarray, in the midst of an unprecedented invasion by illegal aliens, facing growing wild fires around the world, and with a man supposedly at the helm of the country obviously incapable of steering the ship of state. If you had any doubt that I was using hyperbole when I said you wouldn’t trust this guy to drive your kid’s school bus, I’d think that doubt was dispelled last night.

It was clear, even to partisan observers, who was most physically and mentally prepared to hold the nuclear codes in his hand, and it wasn’t Joe Biden. Most of the post-debate talk, on both sides of the political divide, was how Biden could be eased out of the run he has envisaged and be replaced by someone more up to the job. And to beating Donald Trump. While the chatter among Dems was how shocked they were — why remains a mystery since Biden’s deterioration has been there for anyone to see all along — the best they could do to counter Donald Trump was accusing him of lying. Aside from the blatant lying done by the present incumbent, is that really the best they can offer? And in fact, most of their accusations were based on their own falsehoods.

It became so painful to watch Biden even Trump seemed to take compassion on him. At one point the men started arguing over their respective golf games and handicaps, and Trump finally said they should stop with the childishness. This coming from Trump, no less.

Where the Democratic Party will go from here remains an open question. It’s generally acknowledged that Biden will need to voluntarily step aside to allow his delegates to be free to vote for a new candidate at the party’s convention in Chicago in August. By then it will already be late in the game, with the first early voting in some states beginning in September. But if there was any doubt, Biden made it clear today while on the stump in North Carolina that he doesn’t intend to step aside. And clearly Doctah Jill, the First Lady and Chief Elder Abuser, isn’t encouraging her fading husband to step aside, regardless the cost to the country. Or, for that matter, to her husband.

That last part, about the cost to the country, is what concerns me most. What will be the country’s fate with another four years of this man? It’s hard to imagine, given how bad things already have become. When the country saw the damage done by Jimmy Carter it voted him out. But it is a different country today than it was in 1980, and will the country have the good sense and the courage to vote Joe Biden out? One hopes so, and the current polls show a majority are ready for a change, but there are so many unknown variables and wild cards that could be dealt between now and November, nothing can be assumed.

One wild card is the role third-party candidates — most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr, — will have in pulling votes from one cadidate or the other. RFK Jr. is still working to get himself on more state ballots, fighting an uphill battle against the Dem power brokers. Many would have liked to see him on the stage last night as a counterpoint to both major candidates, but he narrowly missed meeting the guidelines set down by the debate organizers.

I will say, much to my surprise, the debate moderators — Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, both of CNN and both rabid Trump haters — did an amazingly balanced and measured job. Moderators of previous debates justifiably have come in for much criticism, but in all honesty, Tapper and Bash actually did a decent job, and they had some difficult questions for both candidates. Their fairness was at least in part responsible for leaving Biden to his own devices, which clearly proved insufficient.

All this said, I’m continuing with my plans to relocate out of the country. While I’m likely to implement those plans regardless who wins in November, the urgency will become much greater if it’s Biden. Nightly I see how we are sooooo fucked, but we’ll be even more fucked, exponentially so, should this shell of a president be reelected.

As I said in 2020, maybe you don’t like Trump’s tweets or some of this statements or his demeanor. I get it. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I strongly urge people to get past their TDS and attitudes brewed by the unrelenting venom shot at him by the state media, and consider the good of the country. At this point, it’s borderline treasonous not to put that first. I’m happy to claim vindication for all the things I’ve reported and opined on in the past seven years, but the cost to the country has been enormous. I hope we can start to lessen that cost.

Featured Image, Bewildered Joe, CNN, used under Fair Use.

Trump and Biden Split Screen, MSNBC, used under Fair Use.

A Tale of Two Debaters, CNN, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
Who is really in charge in the White House?

Who is really in charge in the White House?

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The question of who is really in charge in the White House has been a lingering one throughout the three and a half years of the current administration. Anyone with reasonably functioning eyes and ears and who isn’t sold out either to what can safely be called the state media or is so ideologically impaired that they can’t see the truth knows it can’t possibly be Joe Biden. His mental impairment, already visible even prior to his election in 2020, grows more evident by the day, almost by the minute (though his handlers are sure that his exposure to public view is limited to just minutes a week, not a day).

Speculation has focused on Joe’s former boss, Barrack Obama, and clearly many of the same incompetents who were part of Obama’s administration, such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, haunt the current White House. Biden’s time in office has been called Obama’s Third Term, many of the similarities are so striking. Other speculation has focused on the power-hungry First Lady, Doctah Jill Biden, who has been so willing to engage in elder abuse of her own husband for the sake of power. And of course there is the cadre of faceless handlers who prop up Biden, write his speeches which he still manages to garble up, get him to wear shoes less likely to cause him to trip and fall, and surround him on walks out to Marine One so his stilted gait is less visible to the White House Press Corps.

Any of these explanations are plausible enough, but I think there is something larger and more sinister in play. I think there is a kind of ideological force, what I would term a kind of hive mind, that pervades the administration and has spread like a plague across the country. It has occupied college campuses for many years and increasingly has filtered down to the K-12 level, and it has found its way into the so-called justice system, into the military, into sports, and even into corporate board rooms.  It is this hive mind that thinks men can be women, women can be men, that the citizenry is too simple-minded to make its own decisions on everything from whether to own a gas-powered or electric vehicle, what kind of bulbs to screw into their lamps, to what kind of stove or dishwasher they put in their kitchen.

It is this same hive mind that believes open borders, allowing a dozen million unvetted aliens into the country and turning them lose on society, is a positive thing, and which will only further the objectives of the hive mind (the last part undoubtedly true). It is the hive mind that leads the administration to favor our natural enemies, such as Iran. And it is this hive mind that says criminals have more rights than law-abiding citizens and need to be treated with deference to undo centuries of supposed injustice, regardless the cost and injury to the rest of us.

Like bees in a hive, the hive mind governs everything these people think, do, and impose on the rest of us. It is a kind of mental affliction that puts its governing ideology above all else, which would accept having a doddering old fool who scares us domestically whenever he appears and who embarrasses us on the international stage, as Biden did recently at the G-7 gathering in Italy, and which would destroy our democracy on the false premise that it is saving it. It counts on the lack of awareness and good information, fostered by a corrupt media and the deaf-and-drunk show that is social media, to fend off questions about its premises. And we’re told to believe the fictions the bees weave and not our lying eyes.

As has been evident, and as I’ve said for a long time, the systematic destruction of the country and society cannot be explained by mere incompetence. It is clear that it is deliberate, and the seemingly benign phrase “to transform the country” embodies this hive mind’s intent to turn everything upside down and inside out. A more correct reading of that phrase would be “to destroy the country,” and that is embedded in the basic belief system behind the hive mind. Essentially stemming from a Marxist/leftist ideology, its intents and methodology mirror cultural and political revolutions from Russia to Cambodia, and stretching back to the French Revolution. We see it on the streets, in the courtrooms, on college campuses, and in the White House.

It is the blind ideology of the hive mind, further afflicted with the mental illness known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), that prevents the bees in the hive from seeing, much less understanding, why so many ordinary people want no part of the bogus honey it produces and does its utmost to peddle.

Saddled with a Chief Executive you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, much less fly your airliner, I keep returning to the point I’ve been at for some years now: We are soooo fucked. We really are. We have one chance and one chance only to turn this ship around before it grounds hopelessly on the rocks this hive mind has set its course for, and that is the election coming up in less than five months (and actually, due to the perversion known as early voting many states have adopted, in as little as three months). If we don’t make a firm statement that the goals of this hive mind are simply unacceptable for the country, the society, and our future, I see little hope. I think we all need to do what little or much as we can to grab hold of the wheel and change course. This is my small contribution to that effort.

Featured Image: Bee Hive, Mostafa Eissa, Pexels, used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.

 

 

 

 
Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

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The piece below first ran four years ago tomorrow, January 4, 2020. Four years ago today, January 3, 2020, Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to take out the mastermind of Iranian terrorism in the Middle East, Maj. Gen. Qadam Soleimani. The dire predictions of the naysayers at the time never came to pass, and in recent decades the world has never been more secure than it was on January 4, 2020.

Compare the world on the day after Soleimani’s assassination with the world today. Afghanistan was not run by the Taliban terrorists. Putin’s Russia had not launched its murderous invasion of Ukraine. Hamas had not conducted its vile rape and slaughter of innocent Israelis, and Israel had not been forced to root out the Hamas terrorist leadership through a brutal war in Gaza. The Houti rebels in Yemen, inexplicably removed by Biden from the terrorist list, were not attacking civilian shipping or U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea. The Abraham Accords were in process to bring peace to the Middle East. China was not openly talking about invading Taiwan. North Korea was talking more and flexing its threatening muscles less. And a villainous Iran was largely contained.

In the three years that the feckless Joe Biden has been in office, all that has been undone, and the world is arguably in a more perilous state than it has been since at least the end of the Cold War. Extending the weakness of the Obama years, with the same misguided so-called “security” team pushing Biden’s buttons, the U.S. has lost its hard-won position as the ornery bear the bad actors of the world were afraid to poke.

The bombings in Iran today that killed more than 100 and injured more than 200 of those going to pay their respects to the deceased Soleimani have all the marks of a terrorist attack. Ex-CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, in an interview earlier today with radio and TV personality Brian Kilmeade, expressed the view that it was probably either al Qaeda or ISIS, both Sunni terrorist groups, providing pay back to Shiite Iran. The internecine tit-for-tats go on as a subset of the bigger world conflicts. It’s not just the U.S. or the West that have legitimate scores to settle with Iran.

It’s more than sad, but extraordinarily tragic and costly in lives and peace, that the lessons of the Soleimani assassination have been forgotten or, more to the point, never learned by the appeasers of this administration. Sensible people can draw comparisons between what works and what doesn’t. But blinded by their ideology and a misguided world view, these people never learn.

Here is my piece from January 4, 2020:

Ding-Dong! The Wizard is Dead

In the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East is killed when Dorothy’s house, spirited off to Oz from Kansas by a cyclone, lands on her. In 2020 real life, the Wicked Wizard of the East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, was killed when he came into the crosshairs of an American drone flying over Baghdad’s international airport in Iraq. Ding-dong! The wizard is dead.

As the Munchkin Coroner states in the 1939 film, “As Coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

Ditto for Soleimani.

Just as the Munchkins rejoiced at seeing the wicked witch’s stockinged feet protruding from under Dorothy’s transplanted house, there is grounds to celebrate the demise of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s deadly Quds Force. Unfortunately, the figurative kingdom is rife with naysayers and handwringers, and political divisiveness seems ever-ready in contemporary America to overcome any shared sense of victory.

While it is Pollyannish to expect that there won’t be some consequences in the targeting of Soleimani, regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran’s arcane political structure, it is just as Pollyannish to think that there wouldn’t be consequences were he still alive and having breakfast this morning on Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.

The havoc and death wreaked by Soleimani stretches back four decades to when, in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the Iranian revolution and, beginning in the Iraq-Iran War of the early 1980s, he rapidly advanced within the hierarchy. In 1998 he took over command of the Quds Force, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Sometimes called “the world’s number one bad guy,” consider these feats of Soleimani and the Quds Force he headed:

Taking out Soleimani wasn’t just a random act. It followed an attack by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, in which the attackers had penetrated the entrance to the compound and burned a reception area. While no one was kllled in the attack, the U.S. responded by sending in 100 Marines to secure the compound, given the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its internationally mandated requirement to protect diplomatic facilities.

There was more involved than the embassy attack, though. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that reliable intelligence indicated that a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks against U.S. assets in the region was being planned and was imminent. And, of course, Soleiman was brazen enough to show up at Baghdad’s international airport, exposing himself to the drone attack that killed him and also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN. “The risk of doing nothing was enormous. Intelligence community made that assessment and President Trump acted decisively last night.”

Pompeo said hundreds of American lives had been at risk. He later told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the attack also had saved European lives, though he hadn’t gotten the kind of support he expected from European allies.

“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well,” he said.

Milley said the U.S. had intelligence that was “clear, unambiguous” that Soleiman was planning a campaign of violence against the U.S., leading to the decision to attack him. Targets included American military outposts in Syria and diplomatic and financial targets in Lebanon.

“By the way, it still might happen,” Milley said.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasem Soleiman
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, deputy head of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, right, both killed in the U.S. strike.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Ismail Qaani to replace Soleiman as head of the Quds Force and, predictably, pledged revenge. Qaani said the Quds agenda would remain unchanged.

As predictable as Khamenei’s reaction was, so was the response in Congress, which broke down along party lines. The anti-Trump Dems, for whom the President can do nothing right, were quick to criticize the action, going so far in some cases to say the strike on Soleimani was illegal, though reportedly legal departments at both State and Defense, as well as at Justice, approved the strike.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that Congress hadn’t been consulted on the planned attack on Soleimani – no surprise there, given the tendency of Congress to leak like a rusty old sieve – and she had the temerity to call the killing of the man who had murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, “provocative and disproportionate.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the killing of Soleimani an “assassination” and introduced legislation to block funding of any military action in the region. Most of the other candidates in the race piled on with criticism of the attack.

There was some push back, though, even within the parties. Another Dem candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quick to strike back at Sanders, calling his “assassination” claim “outrageous.”

“If he was talking about killing the general . . . this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”

While prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio, expressed strong words of support for the attack, another Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his libertarian view on foreign affairs, said the Trump administration should not embark on a war in the Middle East without Congressional approval.

As the naysaying and handwringing goes on, and will in the days and weeks and more to come, if there is one prediction that will always be correct it is forecasting violence in the Middle East. If that’s anyone’s prediction, they’d be right, with or without Soleimani. In anticipation of Iran’s reaction, the U.S. is sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region. Soleimani may be really, most sincerely dead, but the seething animosities of the region most certainly aren’t, and there are no ruby slippers, like the ones that passed to Dorothy from the deceased Wicked Witch of the East, to magically bring them to a close. So stand by. Film at 11.

Disclosure: The author was an intelligence analyst with the State Department covering the Middle East.

Featured image: Gargoyle, Donovan Reeves, Unsplash, used with permission.

Al-Muhandis and Soleimani images, AFP via Getty, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
That was then, this is now

That was then, this is now

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is largely a personal account tracing my experience with events and dissent over the past 54 years, beginning with opposition to the Vietnam War and culminating with today’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations sweeping the country. I don’t pretend that it is a comprehensive view or account, which could easily take multiple book-length volumes. But it does give my perspective of the transition of attitudes and beliefs and ways of expressing dissent over those years until now.

I don’t think I’m in that photo above, but I could be. That was the line of protestors marching by the Executive Office Building in Washington on the night of Friday, November 14, 1969, in what was called the Death March, the prelude to the largest anti-war protest in U.S. history. Holding signs bearing the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam, it was a somber but dramatic demonstration of the reality of the war going on on the other side of the globe.

It was a cold and windy night, and we struggled to keep the candles we also bore, in little paper protective cones, from being blown out in the persistent breeze. The march began across the Potomac, near Arlington National Cemetery, and wound its way in single file across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial, along the National Mall, up 17th St. NW, past the Executive Office Building to Pennsylvania Ave., and then along the fence past the White House. We wondered whether President Richard Nixon was watching from an upstairs window in the White House as FBI or Secret Service agents made no effort to hide themselves as they shot photos of the demonstrators filing by.

It wasn’t our first brush with the FBI. Earlier that day, on the charter bus down from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, people — young people, not unlike us, claiming to be with the march organizers — came aboard at the toll booth on the Delaware Turnpike and told us there was no room in D.C. and we should turn back. We had a quick consultation and decided these were government agents trying to dissuade protestors from making their way to the capital and we should go on. And we did. And they were.

People had come from all over the country to make their voices heard. That was the night, waiting in the dark across the Potomac for the march to start, that I met Sally, still a friend today, and Anne, to become one of the loves of my life, and later their friend Norman, who with some other classmates had come from St. Louis to participate. The next day, filling the National Mall and spreading out beyond it, a mass of humanity — officially set at a half million people, but by our count closer to a million — protested the war. Peacefully. With decorum. With hope and determination. With a presence that could not be ignored. Though Nixon said he watched sports on television as the demonstration unfolded.

Later in the day, when the crowd had broken up and people began fading back into the fabric of the country from which they had come, there were a relative few demonstrators who resorted to violent protest and drew tear gas from the police. But as The New York Times reported, “The predominant event of the day was that of a great and peaceful army of dissent moving through the city.”

Non-violence in protection of an ROTC building

In March of the following year I drove out to St. Louis with a friend to visit Anne and Sally. Arriving late at night with a wounded car, we were greeted by scores of people running over a hill at Washington University shouting, “They’re beating heads! They’re beating heads!” It was a tense time, the anti-war sentiment running high, and in the coming days we got caught up in the swirling events that seized the campus. Along with listening to open-air speeches by leftist professors — to dispel any idea that leftism on college campuses is just a recent development, it was alive and spreading even in 1970 — we also found ourselves in nighttime demonstrations.

Anne and Sally were committed to non-violence, which coincided with my own beliefs while further reinforcing them. One night during our visit I found myself with my friends in a line of non-violent people standing between other demonstrators of a violent persuasion and the Air Force ROTC building they were intent on burning down. We succeeded in holding our line and saving the building, but all the time I wondered why I was putting my life at risk to save an ROTC building. Violence just seemed to me, as it still does, the wrong way to go about things.

The result of our efforts were short-lived and the building was burned a couple of months later, on May 5, 1970. Earlier, on the preceding Dec. 9, an attempt had been made to burn down the Army ROTC building on my own campus. And a more successful attempt at burning it down occurred a year after my graduation from Rutgers, on April 25, 1972.

I’m not going to pretend that all was peace and light at that time. Those were, indeed, exciting and dramatic times, even at my own college. And across the nation, there was the Weather Underground, with its Marxist orientation and goal of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and other radical groups committed to violence and domestic terrorism. Years later, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn — indicted, and in Dohrn’s case convicted, for inciting riot and bombing government buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol — intersected with Barack Obama, who in 1995 launched his first Illinois state senatorial race at the Ayers-Dohrn home. Obama’s association with Ayers stretched over several years, and should tell you a lot of what you need to know about Obama.

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” an unrepentant Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

“The traitor is dead!”

In the early 1980s I was in graduate school at the University of Florida. In my second year I was selected for a federal grant to study Africa, especially North Africa, and the Middle East, and also to study Arabic. Our Arabic instructor, whose name was Ilham, was Palestinian. On the day following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, as we settled into our seats in the classroom, we saw what Ilham had written in big chalk letters on the board: “Great news! The traitor is dead!”

I recall very well how shocked most of us were to see this on the board. Many of us exchanged uneasy glances around the room, unsure of how we should respond. If there was any enthusiasm for that shocking display of her views it was among the few Iranian students in the room. At the time I was mainly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but I also knew that assassination of Sadat, who had made peace with Israel and agreed to a framework both for peace in the region and resolution of the Palestinian issue, was not going to be positive for anyone. It also seemed outrageous that Ilham, a guest in our country, could make such a statement, with no attempt at discussion or persuasion. It was a pure statement of her hostility, even hatred, and prejudice, and in no way pedagogical.

I contrast our measured, and probably better informed, response then to the kind of mindless support for Hamas and hatred for Israel and Jews on campuses today, and I can see how both the realities and the nuances of one of history’s most complex conflicts have been lost on much of a generation that has simply lost both historical knowledge and perspective, as well as a moral compass.

Rejecting terrorism

Fast forward from 1981 to Sept. 11, 2001. The nation awoke to the biggest terrorist attack ever mounted on U.S. soil. It took just 19 terrorists to kill nearly 3,000 people in a few hours, bring down two of the country’s most iconic buildings and seriously damage a third, and reveal to the country both its vulnerability to terrorism and the ruthless and inhuman nature of those who choose terrorism as the means to making their point, whatever that point might be.

I was living in Greece at the time and word of the attacks came to me by way of a phone call from an Irish friend. My Algerian girlfriend at the time, later to become my wife, and I rushed upstairs to turn on the tube and watch, in horror, as the events of the day unfolded thousands of miles away. One thing that stuck in my mind was how Farida was as horrified as I was, and how she said, standing there staring at the screen, “If these are Muslims, I am no longer a Muslim.”

At the time I think most Americans, and probably most Muslims, shared a common abhorrence of terrorism and what it wreaked on Sept. 11. Probably more than we should have, as a country we were collectively willing to give up rights in a shared will to prevent further terrorist attacks. And as Spain and France and the U.K. and Jordan and Indonesia and other countries suffered attacks, we remained relatively unscathed in the decades that followed 9-11. But time, apparently, has a way of eroding memory, along with resolve.

On a personal note, with 9-11 receding into the rear view mirror, Farida — still a Muslim — later would ask me if I thought she was a terrorist since she would express support for the terrorist acts committed by Palestinians, of whose cause she was a huge supporter.

“No, I don’t think you’re a terrorist,” I’d tell her. “But you support what terrorists do.”

I think the same can be said for many of today’s demonstrators and others who openly express support for Hamas, one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world, whose brutality is inflicted not just on Israelis but on its own people.

And this is now

I don’t claim that all college professors are as blatant in their anti-Semitic hatred and advocacy of violence as UC Davis’s Jemma Decristo is, but as recent events demonstrate, they’re more prevalent than one wants to think. And those professors, and in many cases administrators, have a major influence on the vulnerable and ill-informed young minds in their tutelage. And rather than adhering to the precepts of what education is supposed to be about — to “lead forth,” not to “cram down” — they exploit their positions of influence and trust to indoctrinate, not educate, their students.

I could excuse those students, but I don’t, and neither should you. Just as we, many of us, questioned the indoctrination that professors of earlier eras attempted on us, these students also can question that indoctrination today. As much as we might have been fond of Ilham and others like her, our values and knowledge transcended that affection to question when she attempted to cram down her particular view on us. This issue goes well beyond the instant issue of Israelis v. Palestinians, but reaches to the kinds of values these kids are taught at home, what they get from social media, the peer pressure they’re subject to, and a general lack of instruction in basic civic and social values. As I presented in my last piece, The ugly reality of American education, there is a pervasive crisis throughout the entire American educational system.

I’m sure growing up, as I did, imbued with the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, with half my extended family Jews who had experienced those horrors themselves, living in the New York Metropolitan Area and absorbing Jewish culture, I have a different view of anti-Semitism than many of these kids. But does one really have to have grown up with experiences such as mine to not know that prejudice and hatred of any sort is simply not acceptable? And what of adults who express the same kind of hatred? What can one say of them?

It was just 22 years ago that we recognized, on our own soil, the barbarity of terrorism and its infliction on innocent people. But somehow those sensibilities have been lost by many — even members of Congress — who now condone the murder and beheading of infants, the rape of girls and women, burning people alive, and kidnapping men, women, children, and even babies. What has short-circuited in these peoples’ brains? In their value systems? Is this the same process that took place in 1930s Germany, leading to the concentration camps and wholesale murder of millions, or in countless other societies, resulting in the most horrible barbarisms? Are we really at that point in contemporary America, or in numerous other countries formerly thought of as civilized around the globe?

In closing, let me say I am not unaware of various policy choices and implications that have shaped events and life on the ground in the Middle East. These are things I’ve lived with for most of half a century. There are legitimate arguments that can be made for different courses of action. Injustices have been committed, by both sides. And indeed, resolving the differences — as implausible as it seems at this moment — that have divided the Palestinians and the Jews for centuries is a matter of critical concern, if peace is ever to come to the region. But as long as hate and prejudice and violence are allowed to exist and to perpetrate themselves, no policy will ever succeed.

Featured image: Death Marchers pass Executive Office Building, Nov. 14, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

National Moratorium, Washington, Nov. 15, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Assassination of Anwar Sadat, 1981, from rarehistoricalphotos.com, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Twin Towers Attacked, from the Los Angeles Times, Chao Soi Cheong, Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Hateful Tweet, from X, SRS-One. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.
The ugly reality of American education

The ugly reality of American education

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If you’ve been following the news since the barbarous attack Hamas launched against innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, you’ve seen the ugly reality of American education laid bare. One has to wonder what kind of education these kids are getting that they can openly support the butchering, burning, raping, and kidnapping of defenseless infants, children, women, and men. This goes well beyond one’s political views, which of course allow for policy disagreements over the seemingly endless and intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and goes to a profound darkness implanted in their young minds and souls.

Things we thought were laid to rest decades ago, such as Anti-Semitism — hatred of Jews for being Jews — have been on full display on college campuses and on public streets in cities across the nation. These same young mush brains — joined by some not so young — who cringe at mis-pronouning someone and demand safe spaces from so-called “micro-aggressions,” apparently have no problem with beheading babies, burning children alive, or raping, kidnapping, and murdering women, all in the name of the cause célèbre they have been brainwashed to believe is the One Twue Answer.

As awful and terrifying as it has been to observe this display of hatred, it is indicative of an even more dangerous tendency that begins not just at the university level, but long prior, in elementary and high schools across the nation. As we’re seeing in not just so-called blue states, but in red and purple ones as well, increasingly the emphasis by those who purport to be educators is on social issues and not the basics of education, actually teaching the skills needed to function effectively in society and (heaven forbid!) reasoning and analytical skills. I’ve been bitching about the latter ever since I was in high school some six decades ago, so that is not new, though I think it has reached new levels of mindless conformity. The other part, however, is relatively new, just a few decades old, and also is now reaching ever higher levels of incompetence.

Does anyone wonder why it is so easy to indoctrinate a generation among which many can’t read or write in cursive, if at all, can name the most obscure celebrity but can’t name their congressperson, senator, or even the vice president, have absolutely zero knowledge of history or American constitutional values, and get what passes for news (again, if at all) from social media?

Roots of the Problem

See those two tearing down posters with photos of kidnapped children and women and laughing as they do it? They’re students (along with a third not shown in the photo) at New York University, one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of “higher education.” The one on the left is Yazmeen Deyhimi, a junior and — frighteningly — pre-law student. She once worked for the Anti-Defamation League but now apparently has lost her way. This is her feeble excuse for doing what she did:

“I have found it increasingly difficult to know my place as a biracial brown woman, especially during these highly volatile times,” she wrote. “I have felt more and more frustrated about the time we currently find ourselves in, and that misplaced anger into actions that are not an accurate representation of who I am as a person.”

“In this age of social media and digital footprint,” she babbled on, “these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed, and not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family had raised me to be.”

Buried in the verbiage are all one needs to know about how these students’ minds and spirits have been hijacked:

“as a biracial brown woman” — read racial and sexual politics foisted on students from before kindergarten.

“highly volatile times” — read a lack of knowledge of world history and events.

“I have felt more and more frustrated . . . and that misplaced anger . . . these moments of anger are selfish and self-absorbed” — read as an unhealthy focus on the self, leading to free-form anger and rage, and the kind of mindless behavior she was caught engaging in.

“In this age of social media and digital footprint” — read where much of the biased and misguided “information” Gen Z gets originates.

“not reflective of who I am as a person or who my family raised me to be” — read as a failure to accept responsibility and acknowledgment of who she really is, who she has become. Her family may or may not have had anything to do with that, but it’s on her now and she need not deny that reality.

Blatant Hatred and Anti-Semitism

See the girl holding the racist pink sign that reads “Please Keep the World Clean” with a garbage can holding a Star of David and into which the Jews are to be placed? She is Fahima Karim, a 19-year-old high school student at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn. She was not alone in carrying that sign, and unlike Deyhimi, she makes no attempt at concealing her blatant racism.

“I really don’t give a fuck about white lives,” she said in a previous street interview. “I don’t like white people . . . I just don’t . . . for no reason.”

In response, her school put out a mealy-mouthed statement about how it had always supported “the voice and power of our young women.”

“Unfortunately today,” the statement said, “one of our community members made a serious error in judgment. She exercised that voice and power to spread hate and anti-semetism” — misspelling anti-Semitism. It went on to promise “a thorough investigation” (as if the visual and Karim’s former statements weren’t sufficient evidence of where her sentiments lie, and the “error in judgment” apparently was in allowing herself to be photographed displaying them) “and using our restorative justice tools to heal the harm in our community and outside our school.”

And there you see the other element of the problem. School administrators and teachers who tolerate and condone certain kinds of behavior, for which there are no real consequences, but have no tolerance for speech or behavior that is contrary to their own views. Call for racial cleansing of Jews — “investigate and use restorative justice (whatever that is) tools.” Mis-pronoun someone or say biological males shouldn’t be allowed to compete in sports against women or use school rest rooms of their choosing — grounds for the most serious sanctions.

The bigger problem

It’s not just a truism to say that the future of the nation lies with its young people and their education. Prejudice, hatred, repression of free speech and ideas don’t just exist on college campuses or within the walls of schools. Those same students graduate, get jobs, enter into professions, and their misguided notions spread throughout society. We see the evidence and results of that in virtually every walk of life: In the legal profession, among judges, among academics, in politics, in Big Tech, in journalism, in the military, in sports, in entertainment, and in the further propagation to new teachers.

If you have any doubt about where the sentiments of many school administrators lie, just ask Riley Gaines, whose photo is above. Riley Gaines was denied the honors she had earned on the University of Kentucky swim team, for which she had worked all her life, when being forced to compete against a transgender biological male, Lia Thomas, in intercollegiate competition. Gaines has taken it upon herself to speak out against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports, in an effort to preserve their integrity. But after working for decades to further and protect the rights of women, the current generation on many college campuses — with the support of their schools’ administrators, the Biden administration, and many sports and other organizations — are now more than willing to gut those rights.

Gaines was physically attacked, maligned, and forced to barricade herself in a campus room for hours until police arrived to escort her out after giving a speech at San Francisco State University in April of this year. She was accused of transphobia — which she explicitly denies — and instead of listening to her position a group of student bigots chose to assault her. Bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators was far worse. Instead of condemning the violence and attempt at shutting down free speech, they came out in support of those things.

“Last Thursday, Turning Point USA hosted an event on campus that advocated for the exclusion of trans people and athletics. The event was deeply traumatic for many in our trans and LGBTQ+ communities, and the speaker’s message outraged many members of the SF State community,” SFSU President Lynn Mahoney wrote to the campus community. She called the attack on Gaines an “unfortunate disturbance . . . that delayed the speaker’s departure.” Nowhere was there any apology to Gaines for the attack nor any recognition of her position on preserving women’s sports. For their part, the police made no arrests.

Further doubts? Ask federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was heckled during a speech to — I’m not making this up — law students at Stanford University, supposedly one of the country’s preeminent schools of “higher learning.” His crime? Refusing to use an accused sex offender’s preferred pronouns during a 2020 opinion. And when Duncan turned to the dean officiating the event to bring order to the room, instead she sided with the hecklers, saying Duncan causes “harm” through his work as a federal judge and she was “uncomfortable” with the anger that Duncan’s presence on campus led to.

Perhaps no surprise, this was Tierien Steinbach, the law school’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. One might well interpret those words, which are spreading like a plague across the landscape, as Conformity, Selective Inequality, and Exclusion. In this case, unlike in the SFSU one, at least Stanford’s administration took some action and Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne eventually apologized to Duncan. Steinbach was reported to be “on leave.”

For his part, Judge Duncan was criticized for being argumentative and calling the students “appalling idiots.” Watching their behavior, I’m inclined to agree with that description, and given how conservative speakers have been treated on college campuses in recent years one might better understand why speakers like Duncan have their guard up.

“They are forcing you to think the way they want you to think”

That’s Yeonmi Park, who at age 13 escaped North Korea with her mother, in the photo. After being held by traffickers in China the pair made it to South Korea and then, finally, to the U.S., where Park is now a citizen. She came here expecting the country to be the beacon of freedom that had attracted her. And then she went to Columbia University.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News in a 2021 interview. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

The warning signs came during orientation. Park had the temerity, thinking it was a good thing, to tell a university staff member that she loved classical literature, such as novels by Jane Austen.

“Then she [the staff member] said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”

Things only got worse from there, and in every class students were asked to express their preferred pronouns.

“English is my third language,” she said. “I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?”

“It was chaos,” she told the interviewer. “It felt like the regression in civilization . . . Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”

Park’s experience at Columbia led to her second book, While Time Remains, published earlier this year. Her first book, published in 2016, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, detailed her escape from North Korea and the journey that led her to America.

Watching the outpouring of support for the barbarity of Hamas coming from 31 student groups at Harvard, one need not wonder why what is supposed to be America’s preeminent university ranked dead last — 248th out of 248 schools — in FIRE’s annual rating of free speech on campus. The school, whose ironic motto is “Veritas” (“Truth”), officially scored zero, but FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — said Harvard’s actual score was -10.69, “…more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”

Michigan Technological University, with a score of 78.01, ranked first.

There is a huge amount more than can be said about all of this, including comparisons with my own experiences in college and grad school in earlier decades that illustrate the stark differences then — even in times of major student protest and upheaval — with now, but I think this initial installment sets the scene and provides the background for an overview of the issue. I’m sure more will follow, and this problem is one that is going to be with us for a very long time.

Featured Image: Anti-Israel students protest at Columbia University, Jeenah Moon, Reuters, via Aljazeera. Used under Fair Use.

NYU students tear down hostage posters, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

Hate on Display, Daily Mail. Used under Fair Use.

Riley Gaines, Outkick. Used under Fair Use.

Yeonmi Park, Fox News, via Insider.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.