Roundup
(1) Here’s an interesting briefing on developments in Gaza.
(2) And here’s a DeSantis speech that’s worth watching.
(3) Erdogan does some saber-rattling.
(4) As predicted, the Democrats go after Mike Johnson. Blah blah blah.
(5) One Israeli hostage freed by the IDF. Good.
(6) The Arabs have given tons of money over the years to the Ivies to set up propagandist Middle East programs. Not a surprise.
It is long past time to kick Turkey out of NATO. That should have been done after Operation Iraqi Freedom, when Turkey refused to allow the 4th ID to stage in Turkey for an advance into Iraq.
Curiously, before Erdogan Turkey and Israel were on good terms.
If Turkey does go to war with Israel, NATO — not to mention the U.S. — will have some decisions to make.
IrishOtter:
However, as the old saying goes, maybe you’d rather have them inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
One of the more ironic things I heard from last week when I was going through the radio. I heard one of the local NPR hosts who is a complete democrat shill complaining about this.(No mention of how the dems triggered this and were behind this, they literally all voted in favor to do this.)
On the other hand, as Lincoln said, “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Or as Jesus said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste; and no city or house divided against itself will stand.”
By which I do worry that it might indeed be better to have Turkey on the outside pissing in, rather than sabotaging NATO support for Israel. Or even worse, leading NATO to take a stand against Israel, without which NATO might remain neutral.
Bill K:
Agreed that it might be better to have Turkey outside NATO, but I simply don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to happen, anyway.
when turkey was a secular state, pre erdogan, it might have had some use, it was a frontline state with iran, and against the Soviets, but now, after the ergonokon dual purges
I think NATO should have been shuttered after the Soviet Union went away. That view is at least partially in concordance with George Kennan’s views. From The Guardian in 2014:
In 1996, the 92-year-old Kennan warned that NATO’s expansion into former Soviet territory was a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/apr/23/project-syndicate-robert-skidelsky-kennan-revenge-russia-ukraine
maybe you’d rather have [Turkey] inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
I’d rather kick his dick before he can get started.
Re Kennan’s warning:
What, did he think refraining from expanding NATO would persuade Russia to change their aggressive belligerent bullying expansionist ways? Is that what you think?
Just watched what seemed to be a pretty straightforward news story on CNN about the surge of antisemitism, and outright violence against Jews around the world, and particularly on college campuses. All with no equivocation or insinuations that Israeli actions had something to do with it. Progress maybe?
WRT Arab money setting up Middle East centers, or whatever they may be called; is there money left over?
If it takes a million a year to run the center–hypo here–and the oil money is a million a year, the uni gets no free cash.
If the uni were going to have a Middle East center anyway, now they have one for free.
Do they need a Middle East center? Unless there is a diploma for Middle Eastern Studies, guys from other schools or departments who know the territory can put together an interdisciplinary selection of courses.
So, does the hypothetical Middle East center, costing a million a year, come with a bonus of another million a year for….non-instructional Middle East stuff, like smearing Israel?
Richard Aubrey:
My understanding of how it works – and I am by no means an expert on this – is that most universities have long had centers for Mideastern study, or at least departments. The extra money allows them to expand such centers and hire more people, usually of the fashionable woke and/or pro-Palestinian variety. I don’t know if there’s money left over, but it certainly saves the university money that might otherwise be used for their Middle Eastern departments.
Excellent speech by DeSantis. He made good points about the history of Gaza and the Palestinians.
I hate to see anyone die needlessly, but the Palestinians have arguably made some very bad decisions since 2005. Now they’re reaping the effects of those decisions. It’s awful, but they had other options.
Douglas Murray has written a book, “The War on the West.”
“It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.”
Judeo-Christian values are under attack. The Islamists are in the vanguard of those on the attack. Obviously, we’ve been infiltrated by a fifth column of Islamist propagandists. And we have a cohort of college students who were not yet born on 9/11. They have been indoctrinated not educated. It’s time for us to wake up and smell the cordite.
in re (1) – at about 8:40 in the video, the narrator briefly mentions the situation inside Israel regarding Arab & Palestinian citizens, presumably Muslims, saying that they had been mostly quiet, although “there were initial fears that um we would see recurrences of the violence um that we saw in May 2021 um where the large part of the Israeli Arab population rose up”
I had already wondered about that, as I hadn’t seen any news reports with that focus, and went looking.
There has not been total quiet, but certainly nothing like previous riots in support of Hamas attacks on Israel (those are easily found on-line), and that seems to be because the Israeli police and government are in no mood to allow them this time.
People openly supporting Hamas and Gaza are being doxxed and harassed; no surprise that a lot of them are students, and that they all seem to be responding with indignation that they can’t feed at the Israelis’ table and insult their hosts at the same time.
This is actually a Washington Post story, so the faux-impartial spin is baked in.
The authors also seem to be, ahem, “unaware” that “Israel’s far-right government” is now a coalition of all the major parties, including the WaPo’s usually-favorite leftists.
Please note that “checked and denied” is not the same as disproven, although that might be true; false allegations are legion on all sides of any altercation.
Also (as I suspected), Palestinian-Israeli leaders are urging calm, probably because they realize that pro-Hamas actions now would be throwing gasoline into a gunpowder warehouse and lighting a fuse.
It’s a long excerpt (sorry huxley!) because of the almost eerie parallels to the stories of Jewish students, especially in America, being — doxxed, harassed, and “not sure if they will ever feel comfortable” in their schools again.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/an-angry-mob-at-an-israeli-university-stirs-fears-of-jewish-arab-violence/ar-AA1j6R2v
Most of this next article consists of individual stories intended to elicit sympathy for the “victims,” although they ought to have some semblance of decency (or at least discretion for their own safety) in this situation, but few people do anymore.
Note that The Guardian itself is on the side if Hamas, based on their choices of focus and language.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/20/israeli-arabs-reprisals-online-solidarity-gaza
I stand with the acting mayor of Tiberias.
Does the Guardian ever wonder what happens to Palestinians in Gaza “expressing opinions diverging from the general trend” — I suspect that they don’t just get fired.
Contra to the above stories about the sad plight of the pro-Hamas Israeli-Arabs, is this story before about an Israeli-Muslim paramedic killed by Hamas while treating victims at the desert music festival; it did not make any difference to him, his family, or the mourners at his funeral what his religion was.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/arab-israeli-medic-stayed-to-help-wounded-at-festival-massacre-then-was-shot-dead-by-hamas/ar-AA1iLuN7
NYT (paywalled) also notes that many of the victims of the massacre were not Jewish. To Hamas, they are guilty by association — and indistinguishable from Jews by the barbaric violence used by the killers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/world/middleeast/arab-israeli-hamas-attacks.html
It’s a whole lot simpler:
They smell blood.
(For those who may have forgotten, or never saw it, see the masses of protesters—whipped up by Nasser and other Arab leaders in the days and weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, in late May, early June, 1967. They are NOT exactly shy. No, not at all.)
My contributions to the round-up:
(a) The most complete story about the Dagestan pogrom, excuse me, peaceful protest about Jews on an airplane.
https://www.thefp.com/p/dagestan-airport-antisemitic-mob-jews
The Free Press on Substack has reams of important stories, but today I will stay focused on the Israel-Hamas war. Most of the FP’s posts are written by “liberals mugged by reality,” which gives an interesting insight into the deepening chasm between Left and Right (caveat that conservatives are mostly opposed to extremist groups that are lumped with them on the right, but liberal/progressives have supported most of the extremists on the left).
This post is about individuals learning that their friends, colleagues in all their great progressive causes, are standing with Hamas rather than Israel, and suddenly finding that Jews are only welcome provisionally in the inclusive Left.
(b)https://www.thefp.com/p/the-great-betrayal
(c) Another group of liberals discovers what most of us realized long ago: the agenda of the Feminists is not the support of women, but the acquisition of power.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/feminists-are-consenting-to-hamas-rape-culture
No excerpts, because the author’s complaints will be obvious to most readers here, but worth looking at for the possible tipping points from Left to at lease Center.
(d) Another mugged liberal, who didn’t have the sense to keep his eyes open walking down the dark streets. Glenn Reynolds justifiably says, “I told you so.” (h/t Powerline)
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-party-pal
(e) A clear-eyed conservative, who taps a deep knowledge of the history of dark streets to explain why Israel’s choices now are very limited; see the comment by “Jim Reynolds” as well. (also via Powerline today).
https://victorhanson.com/a-therapeutic-middle-east-versus-a-tragic-one/
(f) Going straight to the root of the matter, Steven Hayward cites David Horowitz the archetypical Changer from Left to Right.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/10/the-issue-is-not-the-issue.php
Related:
David Harsanyi….
“Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism”—
https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/30/liberal-jews-have-no-reason-to-be-surprised-by-progressive-antisemitism/
H/T Instapundit.
Opening and closing grafs:
‘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?….’
‘ …Maybe, just maybe, giving unfettered loyalty to a president who played footsie with likes of Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright and who was good friends with former PLO spokesperson and agitprop Rashid Khalidi was a clue that this kind of thinking would be normalized on the mainstream left. Of course, not only did Obama (and, to a similar extent, Biden) bolster the Islamists in Iran — an effort to blunt Israel’s regional power — but he also reached out to Hamas and pumped millions into Gaza and Hamas.
‘ Our elite schools and protest movements where philanthropic Jews drop millions every year sign petitions defending baby killers? Intersectionality. Decolonization. They’re all intertwined with identitarianism and antisemitism. Berkeley, like most campuses, is teeming Jew-baiting race-hustlers and pseudointellectuals who function in closed-minded havens for extremists. Sooner or later, those extremists are going to be emboldened. Sooner or later, they were going to be in positions of power.
‘ Sooner is now. ‘
Oops. I see that that an article similar to Harsanyi’s was already linked to by AF…
Apologies…
Re Turkey – I’m not sure how much faith I have in our European allies vis-a-vis Israel. Turkey plus Europeans could put is in an interesting spot if we get drawn into war in the middle east.
Bauxite, as in fracture NATO? Or have Turkey turn against us?
The little monsters that run this paper are going fit right in at the NYT when they graduate.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/yale-newspaper-censors-piece-pro-israel-writer-unsubstantiated-claims-hamas-raped-women
Turkey and the lovely Tayyip have no business being in NATO.
Neo.
I think the question might be whether the/any university would have a Middle East Center if they had to pay for it themselves.
When I was at Enormous State University going on sixty years ago, you could aim your non-major required classes in various directions. I chose SubSaharan Africa. History, anthropology, econ, geography. There were profs in each of these fields who were specialists in the continent and between them coordinated an interdisciplinary course selection.
That took away from their more mainstream teaching hours, so additional instructors had to be found. That, as far as I know was the only added expense. No “Center” pushing issues outside the classroom.