Aid groups want to prolong war, dodging the tariff apocalypse and other commentary
Humanitarian groups are refusing to 'have anything to do' with Israel's new 'plan to renew food aid to Gazans,' fumes Commentary's Seth Mandel. The United Nations whines that the plan 'is 'designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic.' ' Translation: It lets Israel 'feed the Palestinian population without sustaining Hamas' — which executes non-Hamas Palestinians who try to access aid storage facilities. Fact is, funding from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which goes to schools that 'serve as Hamas battle stations' and promote a 'medieval antisemitism' curriculum, is meant to prolong the conflict 'until Israel is destroyed and the Jews can be wiped out.' Aid groups' 'refusal to feed Gazans' unless 'they and Israel acquiesce' to Hamas rule 'serves the same purpose.'
Conservative: Dodging the Tariff Apocalypse
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'The doom that was supposed to follow President Trump's tariff revolution,' notes The Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker, 'has so far stubbornly failed to materialize,' Yes, it's ' much too soon to celebrate,' since 'actual tariffs imposed so far' are 'still relatively modest.' And 'anecdotal, real-time and small-set data from ports, transportation companies and retailers are unsettling — they speak of the hit to come from tariffs if they aren't negotiated down or away, especially the 145% duty on imports from China.' 'But there are opportunities too: more-secure supply chains' and 'a chance to nurture high-end domestic manufacturing and reduce our financial dependency on the rest of the world.' Trump's tariff plan is 'yielding not the apocalypse that was forecast, but a set of thorny economic challenges all the same.'
Culture critic: Everyone's Cheating in College
'In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments,' reports New York magazine's James D. Walsh. Collegians everywhere now 'are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education,' as they can't 'resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences.' Professors fear AI's 'short-circuiting' the learning process, yet 'the ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT.' Heck, the 'speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.'
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From the right: Biden's Decline Was No Secret
'There is an inside story' and 'an outside story of Biden's decline,' argues the Washington Examiner's Byron York after new insider revelations about efforts to cover up the then- president's 'senescence.' Both the White House and its media allies denied 'that the president had a serious problem' though it was evident to the public. 'Another way to put it would be to say that the inside story was the effort to deny the outside story existed.' Clearly, White House aides 'went beyond simple denial' while supporters in the media 'attacked those who said Biden had a problem.' Only now are Americans 'learning more about the lengths to which the Biden team and its many allies in politics and media went to conceal the truth.'
Ed desk: Crimson vs. Orange
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'The battle is on between Harvard, which did not want battle, and the Trump Administration that sought it,' warns Harvey C. Mansfield at The Harvard Crimson. 'A major concern among the Trump Administration is Harvard's lack of viewpoint diversity'; 'Harvard's one-sided fondness for the left' provoked the fight. 'Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society; it's worth the money!' Yet 'to depend on the courts to defend its independence is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege.' And 'this gratuitous partisan attitude' will not 'preserve Harvard's independence' but endanger it. 'There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to share our company.' 'A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have' served the school far better.'
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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