President Biden is confused. Israel appears to have commenced its long-delayed operation to take Hamas’s refuge in Rafah. John noted it here yesterday. With its “ceasefire deal” card Hamas plays the press for willing tools — because they are. They can’t be that stupid.
Biden spoke yesterday with Prime Minister Netanyahu by telephone. The White House has posted its readout of the phone call here. After an exchange of pleasantries, Biden supposedly provided an “update on efforts to secure a hostage deal[.]” Barak Ravid reports on the Israelis’ frustration with Biden on this point here at Axios.
Hamas is apparently discussing the release of 33 hostages in exchange for which Israel is to empty its prisons of terrorist murderers. I’m quite sure Biden did not advise Netanyahu how many of the 33 hostages are alive because Hamas won’t say.
Biden is confused by the report that the IDF has commenced an operation to take out Hamas in Rafah. The readout concisely concludes: “The President reiterated his clear position on Rafah.” In other words, Biden said “Don’t.”
The Times of Israel has more on the call here. As I say, the readout leaves off there. It provides no hint of Netanyahu’s response. We can only infer it from the IDF operation. For his part, Biden will do his best to assure the survival of Hamas. He does not want to offend the friends of Hamas in Michigan and elsewhere in the United States.
Mario Torres is the Columbia custodian depicted in the viral photograph that I posted via X here. The photo shows him fighting off one of the thugs breaking into Hamilton Hall last week. I commented that he deserves recognition as a man of the year. He is so much better than the pathetic institution he serves.
Now Free Press’s Francesca Block has tracked him down for an interview that is posted here in an unembeddable 20-minute video. Drawing on the interview, Block reports:
At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”
Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I’m thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”
Torres has not been to campus since the incident. He says he does not feel safe. “When it comes to the public safety, the workers’ safety, people don’t feel comfortable walking through a mob to punch in to get into campus. That’s crazy,” he said.
He added that he’s worried Columbia might take disciplinary action against him for speaking out. He worries about losing a job he loves. He worries about supporting his young family.
“Is Columbia going to retaliate and find a reason to fire me? Is someone going to come after me? So I’m taking a big risk doing this, but I think that they failed. They failed us. And I think that’s the bigger story. They failed us. They should have done more to protect us, and they didn’t.”
I stand by my comment of last week, to which I would add only that Mr. Torres sounds smarter than the pro-Hamas/anti-Israel Columbia students from whom we have heard so much over the past month and that a GoFundMe page has been set up for Torres under the heading “Support Our Heroic Janitor’s Fight for Justice.”
• Remember when Mitt Romney was dubbed a moral monster for putting his family dog on the roof of his family station wagon? Good times, good times!
• But regarding Joe Biden’s vicious rogue dogs Commander and Major (who bit 25 people at the White House before being banished), I demand proof-of-life evidence they are still alive. Maybe we’re going to learn that Gov. Noem’s doggie degringolade is a 3D chess move to expose another Biden mishandling of things.
• Does anyone else think that Trump might actually want to be sent to jail by the judge? It would be the only thing the country talks about 24/7 for the next several news cycles. People might even start to forget about Kristi Noem’s caninicide.
• Will the Dem convention in Chicago in August be a repeat of Chicago 1968? The pro-Hamasniks want it to be, and are apparently organizing. But conventions today, not to mention police tactics, have evolved since 1968 (a much wider perimeter around the convention hall and main hotels for one thing), but a man can hope, can’t he?
Norman Mailer in 1968:
Children and youths, and middle-aged men were being pounded and gassed and beaten, hunted and driven by teams of policemen who had exploded out of their restraints like the bursting of a boil. . . It was as if war had finally begun, as if the gods of history had come together before the television cameras of the world and the eyes of the campaign workers and the delegates’ wives and half the principals at the convention . . . as if the Democratic Party had broken in two before the eyes of the nation.
Let’s hope for a repeat of this feel-good story.
• So now Columbia University has canceled commencement ceremonies. Just as USC already did. Columbia and USC say “safety” and security are the reasons, but I think they really know that, like Michigan over the weekend, the ceremony will be disrupted by protesters among the students. The simple expedient of revoking the diplomas of any protesters seems not to have occurred to anyone, but then you wouldn’t expect it among the spineless invertebrates that run our universities.
But there is perhaps an upside to this. Graduates will be spared the banal bromides of the liberal commencement speakers (like Hillary Clinton or Oprah Winfrey, or Ohio State apparently) typically featured at elite college commencements. I actually pity the poor graduates whose commencements go ahead as usual because the parade of leftist speakers this year will surely reach for some profound bromide about the current moment, and come up with cliches so embarrassing that, to borrow Ray Bradbury’s famous phrase, they won’t even make a sub-moron’s mouth twitch.
Maybe Columbia and USC graduates should breathe a sigh of relief.
After a long delay, apparently caused at least in part by opposition from the Biden Administration, Israel has finally begun to attack the Hamas stronghold of Rafah. The move on Rafah was, or should have been, inevitable: Israel can only win the war if it crushes Hamas, and it can’t do that without attacking the terrorist organization’s final redoubt. To me, it seemed that the delay in going into Rafah was a mistake. Israel’s offensive lost momentum, and its enemies had time to regroup and plan new strategy. But Netanyahu’s administration is weighing many factors that are unknown to the rest of us.
As soon as Israel issued instructions to inhabitants of Rafah to move to a safer location, evidently in preparation for an attack, Hamas pretended to accept the terms that Israel had offered for a cease fire. It was a typical Hamas ploy, intended to sow confusion and score political points. And it seems to have worked to a considerable degree. Not only has Joe Biden again called Netanyahu to repeat his opposition to a move on Rafah, but various parties are scrambling to analyze offers and counter-offers to evaluate the significance of Hamas’s purported acceptance of Israel’s terms–an acceptance which is obviously fictitious. Gazans, meanwhile, are lighting fireworks and celebrating in the streets.
That isn’t the worst of it, as Israelis, including families of hostages held in Gaza, are blocking roads and otherwise demonstrating in support of a demand that Israel’s government accept Hamas’s terms.
Hamas is in the same situation as pretty much every party that is losing a war and wants the fighting to stop. There is a clear path to a cease fire: all Hamas needs to do is surrender and put down its arms. For reasons I can’t explain, international pressure is entirely on Israel, the victim of the October 7 massacres and the winner of the ensuing war, to give up its war aims, rather than on Gaza to surrender. This is a perverse response to which Israel, and only Israel, is subject.
In my opinion, Israel should rapidly pursue the war to a successful conclusion, killing all Hamas fighters who do not surrender and imprisoning those who do. The IDF will of course try to minimize civilian casualties, but they are up against Hamas’s strategic goal of maximizing casualties. And in any event, in Gaza it is often hard to tell who is a “fighter” and who is a civilian. Whatever happens, all casualties on both sides are exclusively the fault of Hamas and its civilian Gazan supporters, i.e., a majority of Gaza’s population.
Finally, an absurd coda was added to all of these events when reporters asked Kamala Harris to comment on Hamas’s purported acceptance of Israel’s cease fire terms. To be blunt, the woman is an idiot:
“Shrimp and grits.” Momentous events are occurring, and Harris hasn’t a clue, and obviously isn’t in the loop.
“The song of the sixties is over,” noted Peter Collier back in 2018, “but the melody lingers on.” Consider, for example, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” from 1965. The “Eastern world” was exploding, and if “the button is pushed” there would be no one to save, so “take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy.” That invites a look around America in 2024.
China and Russia have nukes, and Iran is working three shifts to develop a nuclear weapon, courtesy of the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. As Tablet’s David Samuels noted in “The Obama Factor,” an interview with Garrow, the composite character was obsessed with the Iran deal, and “helped precipitate the disaster we are living through now.” That was before 10/7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Mobs of neo-Nazi leftists now occupy college campuses across the land, but they are hardly the only concern. As Victor Davis Hanson notes “we are now well beyond the dangers of open borders, ten million illegal aliens arriving since the Biden inauguration.” The Biden Junta let in the 10,000,000 – about the population of Tajikistan – with no criminal background checks. Ponder the possibilities for violent crime, conventional sabotage, car-bombs and worse. Nuclear landmines are easily transported, and rumors of Soviet-era nuclear “suitcase bombs” have surfaced in the Ukraine conflict.
The prospect of those weapons deployed stateside is bound to scare you, boy, and as Barry said, “there’s no runnin’ away.” Fortunately, the famous sixties’ poster provided guidelines on what to do in case of a nuclear attack:
From our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, some measures of the magnitude and persistence of inflation under President Biden and previous presidents. But remember, Joe told us that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show any more.” Someone forgot to tell this to inflation.
Chaser—Slow Joe might not want to count on a rate cut from the Fed just yet:
Thirteen federal judges have written to Columbia University to announce that, absent major changes, they won’t hire any Columbia graduates—from the law school or the undergraduate college.
