“Oct 7 2023”

How Soviet propaganda survived the USSR

Antisemitism is on an alarming rise as Israel continues to respond to the Hamas massacres of October 7. But the particular strain of antisemitism that we see today, in which Israel and Jews are cast as oppressors subjugating their Palestinian victims, arose long before the Hamas attack and has roots in a time and place that many no longer consider: the Soviet Union. In fact, the very notion of distinct Palestinian nationhood emerged from a Soviet project devised under the banner of national liberation.

Cries of “From London to Gaza, globalise the intifada!” rang out as tens of thousands of pro-Palestine activists marched through the capital on Saturday.

As the crowd wound its way from Bank in the City of London to Whitehall, sections also chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, regarded by many Jews as being a hateful call for the destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state.

One hand-drawn placard showed a star of David, symbol of the state of Israel, being pushed into the sea, with around it the words “The Final Solution?” – a clear reference to the Holocaust.

The Intifada they call for has already been ‘globalised.’ 9/11, 7/7, Bataclan, Manchester Arena, London Bridge (x2), Westminster Bridge, on and on… https://t.co/XmcduzekgR

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) December 9, 2023

You have seen the video of my daughter Naama Levy. Everyone has. You have seen her dragged by her long brown hair from the back of a Jeep at gunpoint, somewhere in Gaza, her gray sweatpants covered in blood. You may have perhaps noticed that her ankles are cut, that she’s barefoot and limping. She is seriously injured. She is frightened. And I, her mother, am helpless in these moments of horror.

On October 7, Naama had been sleeping at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and was awakened by the chaotic sound of a missile barrage. At 7 a.m., she sent me a WhatsApp message: “We’re in the safe room. I’ve never heard anything like this.” That was the last I heard from her.

The president of the University of Pennsylvania, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned on Saturday, four days after her testimony at a congressional hearing in which she seemed to evade the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be disciplined.

The announcement, in an email sent to the Penn community from Scott L. Bok, the chairman of the board of trustees, followed months of intense pressure from Jewish students, alumni and donors, who claimed that she had not taken their concerns about antisemitism on campus seriously.

More than twice as many Democrats (50%) as Republicans (21%) say that the Israeli government bears “a lot” of responsibility for the war against the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip.

That’s according to a new poll that the Pew Research Center conducted of 5,203 adults between Nov. 27 and Dec. 3.

.@Harvard president: “it really depends on the context” pic.twitter.com/nzuVUiqf4v

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) December 8, 2023

It’s no secret that the schools run by the UNRWA—The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the UN agency created in 1949 exclusively to aid Palestinian refugees—use textbooks that glorify terrorism and incite children against Israeli Jews, both in Gaza and the West Bank.

However, the organization’s structural problems run much deeper than just the textbooks, and the entire UNRWA must be dismantled to end the Islamist indoctrination that fuels Hamas’ perpetual war against Israel, Knesset Member Sharren Haskel warned at an event organized by MEPs of the European Conservative and Reformist (ECR) Group. The event, “How to stop radicalisation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” was held in the European Parliament on Wednesday, December 6th.

The US Congress has had some disturbing hearings in its time. But few have been more so than this week’s, when the heads of some of America’s top universities appeared in front of a special hearing on anti-Semitism in US campuses.

The hearings came after an upsurge of anti-Jewish hate led not just by students but visiting speakers. Inexplicably, invitations for outside speakers have included Roger Waters, who is perhaps better known today for accusations of anti-Semitism than his music. What exactly does he have to teach Ivy League students?

The IDF knew of Hamas’s plan — and made the logical call

The bad-faith reporting of Israeli news in The New York Times can overcome even the simplest arithmetic. Last month, there was a day-long rally for Israel in Washington that filled its Mall, with police attendance estimates ranging between 250,000 and 300,000. In the pages of the NYT, however, this became a gathering of “tens of thousands”.

The new policy could largely affect Muslim immigrants, who, studies have shown, are far more likely than other Germans to display antisemitic attitudes.

A German state has called for the denial of citizenship to migrants who hold anti-Israel views as the country continues to contend with a surge of antisemitism since the October 7th massacres by the terrorist group Hamas, with the state urging other regional governments to follow their lead.

The state of Saxony-Anhalt, located in Germany’s east, has stated that all migrants looking to become German citizens will be required to write that they do not support the dismantling or destruction of the state of Israel.

The rot in the western world that has accrued in the last few years, revealed with particular clarity since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, showed its depth in a heretofore unparalleled manner this week in Washington, D.C. The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania appeared at a congressional hearing to face questions about the rise of antisemitism on their respective campuses (a phenomenon duplicating itself across the academic landscape).

I watched the event unfold with the same sense of surreal disbelief that has surrounded me more and more frequently over the last decade, as the academic world and the broader culture it shapes have succumbed ever more completely to the faux-compassionate blandishments of the radical left.

Their heads are filled with falsehood

“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath,” opens Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. The goddess Homer summoned isn’t named, but it is usually assumed he meant Calliope, the muse of epic poetry —and much later, circus music. But Homer might have meant Lyssa, the Greek goddess of mad rage and frenzy. She was well known to the ancients. The Romans called her Furor or Rabies — which gets the idea across fairly well. The Norse had two versions: Odr, who represented fury and frenzy, and Fenrir, a giant wolf who represents uncontrollable savagery.