Posted on May 8, 2024 by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Higher education

The campus seen: A footnote

I want to add this footnote to my adjacent post on “The campus seen.” We can’t understand what’s happening in the current eruption of anti-Semitism on campus without understanding what has happened at Columbia University. Columbia University is ground zero of the intifada revolution. The video below features the deep thoughts of Columbia president Minouche Shafik in the satirical context afforded by reality.

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Higher education, Israel

The campus seen

I want to note a few reports on the campus scene. Attention must be paid. The scene should not be unseen.

I have been asking who is behind the kill the Jews crowd on campus. Park MacDougald takes a comprehensive look in his May 6 Tablet column “The People Setting America on Fire.” It is the best effort yet to turn over the rocks and look underneath. Park, by the way, is the son of our old Rathergate friend Harry MacDougald. Harry is the Atlanta attorney now representing Jeffrey Clark in the “conspiracy so immense” case brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

At the Free Press Francesca Block interviews two more Columbia custodians who have fought on the front line: “I Could Have Been Killed in There.” Like Mario Torres, they are so much better than the pathetic institution they serve.

At his personal site Jonathan Turley comments on Columbia’s cancellation of commencement: “Columbia caves.”

How goes it at Professor Turley’s academic home at George Washington University? Around 3:00 a.m. this morning, D.C. police began clearing the encampment and making arrests at GWU. The D.C. police department said in a statement that “a gradual escalation in the volatility of the protest” led to the police action. Today’s congressional oversight hearing likely played a role in forcing D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s hand. Marc Rod reports for Jewish Insider in “House turns its eyes toward George Washington University encampment, K-12 antisemitism.”

The Washington Free Beacon has kept a close eye on the eruption of pro-Hamas/anti-Israel action on campus. Today Jessica Costescu reports “At MIT, Administrators Allow Unlawful Encampment To Displace Lawful Israeli Independence Day Event.” Subhead: “President Kornbluth assured us … that the encampment would be removed in time for our Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration,’ letter from Jewish group says.” Jessica reported earlier this week “Columbia Law School Students Send Menacing Email to Jewish Classmates: ‘You Threaten Everyone’s Safety.'”

Yesterday the Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium reported “Middlebury Calls for Ceasefire in Gaza While Staying Mum on Hostages and Hamas.” The Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles adds a humorous sidebar: “Idiots Against Israel: These Student Protesters Misspelled ‘Palestine.'”

The University of Minnesota entered into an agreement with the pro-Hamas crowd in order to induce them to pack up their Gaza Solidarity Encampment. University of Minnesota interim president Jeff Ettinger has posted his related message to the community. One prong of the agreement required disclosure of university investments in Israel. The Star Tribune reports that the university has now “disclosed about $5 million in investments tied to companies based in Israel or defense contractors based in the United States…” Speaking as a law school alumnus and Minnesota taxpayer, I would prefer a no-negotiation with terrorist supporters policy.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby adds a then-and-now historical footnote: “When the Ivy League had no problem with Nazis.” Jeff’s father is a Holocaust survivor to whom Jeff paid moving tribute in his 2000 American Enterprise column “My hero, my father.”

Posted on by Scott Johnson in Anti-Semitism, Biden Foreign Policy, Democrats, Hamas, Israel, Joe Biden

Biden indicts himself

President Biden chose to revise and extend his mealymouthed comments on anti-Semitism with a 1600-word speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance Ceremony yesterday. The White House has posted the text of his remarks here.

The speech seems to me late and wanting. Revisiting the history of the Holocaust, Biden referred to “the perils of indifference, the complicity of silence in the face of evil that they knew was happening.” He did not identify who “they” were. To adapt the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, what you mean “they,” Kemo Sabe?

Biden comes to the return of Hitler’s project with the Hamas’s 10/7 attack and the supporters of Hamas on American college campuses:

We’ve seen a ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world: vicious propaganda on social media, Jews forced to keep their — hide their kippahs under baseball hats, tuck their Jewish stars into their shirts.

On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class.

Antisemitism — antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State.

Too many people denying, downplaying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th, including Hamas’s appalling use of sexual violence to torture and terrorize Jews.

It’s absolutely despicable, and it must stop.

If you have been paying attention you might find Biden himself “downplaying” the eruption of support for Hamas and its works in the heart of his party and in Democratic strongholds around the United States. Again, Biden does not identify the people “denying, downplaying, [and] ignoring the horrors.” Despite the worthy sentiments expressed, this seems to me a telling omission. One may infer that at best Biden is jumping through a hoop.

Indeed, Biden is working to preserve the Islamic heirs of the Nazi project in Rafah. He is working to undermine the efforts of the Jewish state to preserve itself from its mortal enemies. In a midnight story Steven Erlanger reports in the New York Times that Biden administration is “pushing [Israel] to agree on a cease-fire, and skip Rafah and the potential civilian casualties a large-scale operation would cause.” Biden seeks to pressure Israel to conform by withholding shipments of precision-guided missiles to the IDF.

Jonathan Tobin considers the contradictions between Biden’s words and action in his JNS column “Biden’s double game on Hamas should fool no one.” Tobin observes:

[O]nce the IDF had backed Hamas into the last enclave it held in Gaza, Biden stopped talking out of both sides of his mouth and made it clear that he opposed Israel going into Rafah and destroying the last operational Hamas military forces that had retreated there.

He’s gone to great lengths and expense to support humanitarian aid for civilians in Hamas-held portions of the Strip and blamed Israel for interrupting the flow of supplies there, including the building of a U.S. floating harbor to assist in the distribution of food and fuel. That has happened even though it’s long been obvious that if there is any real privation there, it is solely because Hamas is stealing the aid that arrives and reserving it for its own use.

Just as troubling, he’s put the full force of American influence behind an effort to broker a ceasefire deal with Hamas that will essentially hand the terror group a victory in the war it started.

The terms of the proposed deals that Washington has backed are appalling. They call for the release of some hostages, but only a percentage of those Hamas is still holding under who knows what horrible conditions. And the pressure that Washington has exerted on Netanyahu to take a deal on virtually any terms and conditions—along with the way it has coordinated this with Hamas’s ally, Qatar—has given the terrorists all the leverage. That’s why Hamas continues to turn down even the most lopsided of agreements; its leaders are convinced that Biden will not let them be defeated. That means they think they can hold out for a deal that will end the war and return the situation to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo in Gaza and still not give up all the hostages, let alone be held accountable for mass murder.

Tobin reasonably concludes that Biden’s actions speak louder than his words. I would add that his words seek to provide cover for his actions. In short, Biden’s condemnation of those who downplayed evil in the face of what “they” knew was happening indicts himself.

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Steven Hayward in Latin America

Will Argentina Save the West?

That’s not a headline I ever expected to write, even in satire. But the current experiment in Argentina, under the presidency of Javier Milei, is perhaps grounds for hope that at some point when things get so bad, voters return to their senses. (I’m looking at you, California and Minnesota.) He may not succeed, but the attempt is certainly inspiring.

Milei gave a speech a few days ago at the Milken Institute’s annual conference. Here are some of the best parts:

“The West is in danger. It is in danger because its leaders long ago moved away from the ideas of freedom. Ideas that made the West the most important civilizational achievement in the history of mankind. And instead of defending the ideas that generated the prosperity that everyone here enjoys, they listen to siren songs that lead inexorably to socialism, and consequently to poverty.

“In some sense, we Argentines are prophets of an apocalyptic future, which we have already lived. All those discussions of today, based on supposedly well thought out desires of wanting to help our fellow man, based on an erroneous idea about the nature and function of the State, sustained by economic theories that have been long refuted by data and empirical evidence, we Argentines lived them 100 years ago, and unfortunately applying those ideas have led us to ruin.

“Since the 19th century, and as a result of the industrial revolution, the GDP per capita not only increased but did so exponentially. In the last 150 years it multiplied by 15, generating an explosion of wealth that lifted 90 percent of the world’s population out of poverty, reaching the point that by the year 2020 only 5 percent of the global population lived in extreme poverty.

“Far from being the cause of our problems, free enterprise capitalism as an economic system is the best tool we as a species have known to end hunger, poverty, and extreme poverty across the globe.

“While the success of capitalism is easy to demonstrate, what is not so accessible to many is the counterfactual, where the systematic choice of a collectivist model leads. As I said before, perhaps the best example is the Argentinean example. Our entire history is a testimony of what can happen when the model of freedom is abandoned and replaced by collectivist experiments.

“Since 1949 the monetary base in the United States has multiplied 16 times, while in Argentina the figure multiplied the astronomical number of 25,000 trillions times. Yeah, it is a real number. I’m not making it up. I repeat it, the monetary base expanded 25,000 trillion times. That is the level of disaster that politicians can produce if they are allowed to deviate from the basic principles of the market economy.

“Those who lead the West have forgotten an elementary truth, and it is the moral responsibility of those of us who still remember it to defend and declaim it. And that inescapable truth is that economic freedom, in pursuit of individual interest, produces collective benefits, and therefore the entrepreneur who risks capital in pursuit of profit is a social benefactor.

“Those who lead the major nations and organizations in the West do not give enough credit to this idea and look at the economy from a theoretical framework that believes the market is imperfect, that it produces failures, and that it requires state intervention to perfect it. The problem with this conception is that it justifies interventions that bring more problems than benefits and undermine economic growth.

“The market, presupposing free competition and a system of free prices with clear signals, constitutes a mechanism for the extraction and transmission of information in which the greater the freedom the better is the performance. In other words, the free market is a process of discovery in which the capitalist finds, on the fly, the right course of action in a constant search for profit, and that translates into offering goods of better quality at the best prices.

“Those who insist with interventionism not only impede the virtuous functioning of the market, but on top of that they congratulate themselves and exchange medals of social responsibility in pompous ceremonies, while they end up promoting an agenda of values that opens the door little by little to socialism and consequently to misery.

“I do believe that the private sector has a very clear mandate of social responsibility, but it has nothing to do with being moralistic or guilty. The true social responsibility of the entrepreneur is a natural effect of the free functioning of his own economic activity. The mandate is to produce goods and services of better quality at the best price, linked to the maximization of profits. The social responsibility of the entrepreneur is to make money, and he can only do that by serving his fellow man with better quality goods at a better price.

“Entrepreneurs are social benefactors, far from the criticisms usually made of them by spendthrift and profligate politicians.

“Since free markets have existed we have crossed frontier after frontier. We have lifted the whole world out of poverty in 250 years. We have put men on the moon and now we are looking at Mars. And we have done it because of the ambition, creativity and optimism of men like you who partner with each other in pursuit of your happiness.

“We must not lose faith in that primal ambition that we humans have as our guide. We are a species of explorers, of creators, of inventors, not bureaucrats. And it is the adventurous entrepreneur, not the desk bureaucrat, the kind of man who embodies in the present this timeless quality of the human spirit.

“I look at Argentina with all the changes we are undertaking and I see that we are going in the opposite direction that the rest of the world, because while in the rest of the world the ideas of freedom are under siege, in Argentina there is a renewed faith in them.

“While the West turns towards control and imposition, Argentina turns towards trusting its citizens in the exercise of their freedom. While the West turns towards deficit, bureaucracy and the intrusive State, Argentina turns towards austerity, towards savings, and to retire the State from the economic activity. While the West turns towards economic shamanism and unsustainable formats of heterodoxy that endanger the future of all, Argentina returns to the path of reason, to the ideas of common sense.

“Our goal is to give back to the Argentines every peso we save, first by eliminating inflation and then, in the future, by reducing taxes as a consequence of economic growth. And we have as our north, to dismantle the tangle of regulations that Argentina has become, in order to free economic activity and unleash its productive force.

“For us, the only task of the State is to protect the life, liberty and property of Argentines, so that each one can be the architect of his own destiny. This is our vision. It is a vision similar to the one held by all the prosperous countries of the West in the great moments of their history. The task of the State is not to put invented money in people’s pockets, but to ensure the macroeconomic and legal conditions so that the private sector can develop on its own.

“I want to conclude these words by inviting everyone here, who are the heroes of the history of the progress of humanity… If you believe as I do in the superiority of free enterprise capitalism. If you believe as I do that the West is walking to a slow but sure retreat. If you believe as I do that merit, ambition, freedom and innovation and optimism are essential values of the human species that should be rewarded. I would like to invite you to bet on Argentina, to help me, you who are human progress personified, to make Argentina the new Rome of the 21st century.

“It is you who can prove to the bureaucrats of the world that they are destroying the West, that the ideas of freedom are the only way to achieve prosperity.

“Let us once again embrace the ideas of freedom with pride, let us be proud to be entrepreneurs, proud to be businessmen, because they are the true social benefactors, they are the ones who create wealth, they are the ones who have taken the world out of misery. To finish, I also ask you to accompany us, the Argentines, in this rebirth of the West.

I’m starting to think political figures with strange haircuts might be the way to go. (Except Boris Johnson. He came a cropper, despite his crazy hair.)

Posted on by John Hinderaker in China, Energy Policy, Green New Deal

What Energy Transition?

The press, and many politicians, constantly assure us that the world is in the midst of a transition from fossil fuels to “green” energy, which means wind turbines, solar panels, and mostly fictitious batteries. But is any such transition actually in progress? No. Robert Bryce has the numbers.

No such transition is taking place in the U.S.; on the contrary, last year natural gas-fired electricity generation increased 9.5 times as much as wind and solar combined:

But that’s nothing! The U.S. is rich enough to waste absurd amounts of money on pitifully inadequate wind and solar developments. Less developed countries can’t afford to be that stupid. Thus it is coal that contributes the most CO2 to the atmosphere. But when it comes to coal, the U.S. is irrelevant:

Worldwide, governments are spending absurd amounts of money to subsidize wind and solar, and that doesn’t even count the mandates that are the most insidious form of subsidy. Nevertheless, fossil fuel use is increasing 3.4 times as fast as “green” energy. Why? Because fossil fuels are vastly better: cheaper, more reliable, and far more energy-intensive:

Trillions of dollars can’t save expensive, unreliable and downright stupid methods of producing energy.

So, with all the hype about carbon dioxide destroying the planet–actually, it is necessary for virtually all life on Earth, but put that aside for a moment–and after governments spending trillions of dollars, ostensibly to promote a transition to “clean” energy, are carbon dioxide emissions actually declining?

Well, they have declined in the U.S. But that is irrelevant, as China produces most of the world’s CO2 emissions. Our reductions are immaterial:

As China’s population shrinks, most likely in half, and its economy implodes, India will largely take up the slack. But India has no intention of remaining poor by forgoing the world’s best source of energy, and therefore of wealth and societal well-being–fossil fuels. And other less-developed countries, like Indonesia and Vietnam, are building coal-fired power plants as fast as they can. While, at the same time, Africans want to modernize and have no intention of settling for expensive, occasional electricity via wind and solar. In that context, nothing we do makes any difference.

So if all this is true–and it is–where does the idea of a “green” energy transition come from? The answer is, from the American and international press. The transition concept is wholly imaginary, except in America’s news rooms. Check this out:

So the alleged energy transition is a creation of liberal reporters and editors, who deliberately mislead the rest of us, or else, equally possible, are so ignorant that they have fallen for propaganda from the “green” interests who hope to rip off–have already ripped off!–trillions of dollars in government money to enrich themselves, while impoverishing the rest of us.

Posted on by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy, Italy

Italy Goes Nuclear

It has been a very long time since anyone held up Italy as a model of a well-governed country. Not since Roman times, perhaps. But Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has Italy moving in a good direction. That applies to energy along with many other issues. Thus:

In a decisive shift from its past policies, Italy, under the leadership of Premier Giorgia Meloni and Environment and Energy Security Minister Gilberto Pichetto, is paving the way for the reintroduction of nuclear energy, with a focus on the latest in reactor technology: small, modular, and IV generation reactors. This move is not merely a policy change but a strategic recalibration aimed at bolstering national energy security and aligning Italy with modern, low-carbon energy technologies.

This trend is so obviously a good idea that it is hard to understand why more countries have not adopted it.

The backdrop to Italy’s renewed interest in nuclear energy is the stark reality of today’s geopolitical landscape, notably heightened by the energy uncertainties following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This scenario has laid bare the vulnerabilities in Europe’s energy supply, making the case for an energy diversification strategy that includes nuclear power compelling. Nuclear energy offers a stable, reliable source of power that can reduce dependence on external entities, the weather, and unpredictable global market shifts. The introduction of nuclear power thus represents a prudent step towards securing a stable energy future for Italy.

All of that is true. I don’t think Italy has much in the way of hydrocarbons, so it has a choice between putting its economy in the hands of foreign energy sources, or going nuclear. There are exciting developments in nuclear technology:

Central to Italy’s nuclear strategy is the adoption of small modular reactors (SMRs). Unlike traditional nuclear reactors, SMRs offer a range of benefits that align well with Italy’s strategic and environmental goals. These reactors are designed to be built faster due to their modular nature, which allows for construction in controlled factory settings and assembly onsite, leading to reduced construction times and potentially lower costs. Additionally, SMRs are considered safer due to their smaller size and innovative safety features, reducing the risk of large-scale nuclear accidents.

Italy shuttered its nuclear power plants in 1990, largely as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. But now, nuclear is back. Watch for many countries to follow the lead of Italy and, of course, France, which gets two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear reactors.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in 2024 Election, Biden Foreign Policy

Biden’s Two-State Solution

For a while now the joke has been going around that Biden’s two-state solution for the Israel-Hamas conflict involves the two states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. The more time passes, the more this seems not a joke at all. Biden is apparently terrified not only of the campus left, but that he could lose Michigan’s substantial Arab voting block, and hence the election, if he doesn’t placate them.

Here’s a riddle for the media (which means no one in the media will take it up): Biden has blocked delivery of precision JDAM munitions for Israel in an attempt to forestall the necessary attack on Rafah. I think Israel should say, “Fine, we’ll use imprecise munitions, then.” But never mind. I believe this munitions shipment was authorized by the recent congressional funding act for Israel and Ukraine. Didn’t President Trump get impeached for holding up a congressionally approved arms shipment to Ukraine? Shouldn’t Biden be held to the same standard?

Maybe there is some language in the legislation granting discretion to the president about the timing or conditions of arms shipments, or perhaps Biden’s decision can be justified under general executive powers (under the doctrine of the famous Curtiss-Wright case, perhaps). But even so this is yet another example of the mendacious double-standard at work in our politics today.