Globalizing Naziism
It takes severe depravity, not to mention sheer stupidity, to believe that shooting an unarmed couple in the back as they stand at a crosswalk is somehow going to "Free Palestine," which is what the cowardly killer yelled into the Washington night as he was led away by police.
If they didnt realize it before, Americans have now learned precisely what kind of demons are being summoned up when pro-Hamas demonstrators on college campuses chant "Globalize the Intifada." No one in Israel needed to be told. Theyve known for a long time.
The "Second Intifada" was burned into Jewish memory at the dawn of the 21st century by a series of gruesome attacks known in Israel by their place-names: the Dolphinarium discothèque in Tel Aviv, Sbarro Pizza and Café Moment in Jerusalem, Maxim Restaurant in Haifa, the Park Hotel in Netanya.
The Dolphinarium was blown up on June 2, 2001, by a suicide bomber who took the lives of 21 young people - most of them Jewish teenage girls from Russia and Ukraine.
Two months later, seven Palestinian terrorists with ties to Hamas carried out the bombing of the Sbarro pizza parlor. Sixteen people were killed, including three Americans and a pregnant woman. Half the victims were children. One of the Americans, a mother named Chana Nachenberg, spent 22 years in a coma before dying in 2023. Ahlam Tamimi, one of the masterminds of the crime, was released in a 2011 prisoner exchange. She lives freely in Jordan today and is unrepentant - saying in one television interview shed do it again.
The deadliest single attack of the Intifada, known in Israel as the Passover Massacre, took place on March 27, 2002, at the Park Hotel along the Israeli coast. The killer disguised himself as a woman, and carrying a suitcase bomb entered the hotel dining room, where 250 civilians were celebrating Seder dinner. Thirty people, most of them elderly, were killed, and another five dozen wounded. Some of the victims were Holocaust survivors.
Hamas leaders boasted about the Passover attack, while Israeli government spokesmanGideon Meir spoke for most Israelis when he said, "There is no limit to Palestinian barbarism." Apparently fearing what did, in fact, later ensue (a fierce IDF crackdown on the West Bank) even Palestinian Authority officials condemned the attack.
By the time the second Intifada waned, more than 1,000 Israelis were dead, most of them civilians.
Two of the terrorist attacks in particular foreshadowed the Wednesday evening murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim at the Capital Jewish Museum. The event featured humanitarian organizations that use interfaith dialogue in places like Gaza and Syria to alleviate civilian suffering.
Café Maxim had a similar ethos. Co-owned by Jews and Christian Arabs, the Haifa restaurant was a tangible symbol of peaceful co-existence when a female suicide bomber - a lawyer from Jenin - destroyed the place two days before Yom Kippur in 2003.
Jewish and Arab Israeli customers dined together in that place - and they bled and died there together, too. Twenty-one people perished, including three children and an infant. Among the dead were four Arab employees of the restaurant.
On May 2, 2004, a Jewish social worker named Tali Hatuel who was eight months pregnant, was driving with her four daughters when she was ambushed by two Palestinian gunmen. After it was disabled, the killers walked up to her car and shot the four girls and their mother at close range. Islamic Palestinian groups praised the deed as "heroic."
That was 22 years ago. But it was only last week that Tzeela Gez, an Israeli mother of three being driven to the hospital to give birth, was shot and killed in the West Bank, a murder lauded by Hamas as a "heroic act."
Thats what the word "Intifada" signifies. What happened seven days later in Washington is whats meant by "globalizing the Intifada."
Typically, segments of the legacy media struggled to find moral clarity, or even simple coherence, in Wednesdays awful news. X.com was full of such examples, including one confusing passage from an NPR story that seemed to accept the Washington, D.C., killers logic. ("Many U.S. and Israeli officials identified the attacks as the latest in amarked rise of antisemitic incidentsin recent years - and more notably, as Israel ramps up its offensive in Gaza, where the risk of famine looms for a population ground down by a months-long blockade.")
Bari Weiss, as usual, cut to the heart of the matter. Writing in The Free Press about the double murder outside an iconic Jewish landmark in the capital city, Weiss unspooled "the culture of lies that created the climate for his murderous rampage."
She details many of them; Ill fill in others. The list of culprits is long.
It starts with college presidents who accepted money from sketchy Arab autocrats who buy peace in their own country by fomenting bigotry and intellectual dishonesty in ours.
Next are the faculty cadres who spread specious theories such as critical race theory aimed not just at the United States, but at Western culture in general. The apotheosis of this insanity is grafting the dubious "colonizer" label onto Israelis, who occupy a land inhabited by Jews 2,000 years before the advent of Islam.
Democratic Party politicians whove repeated these toxic lies, or at least not objected to them out of fear of alienating the kookiest elements of their progressive base. On Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes issued a forceful denunciation of antisemitism. Yet last year she was supportive of the pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia. "At Columbia University they call for Intifada constantly," former Columbia student Jonathan Epstein explained on CNN. "Theyre not doing it quietly. Theyre loud … You can hear it. They make recordings of themselves."
Liberals who repeat the spurious slander about "genocide" in Gaza - on behalf of a movement that openly calls for the destruction of Israel and murderous attacks on the Jewish diaspora around the world.
Islamicists working for the U.N. who aided and abetted the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities.
Useful idiots in the Western media who repeat Hamas propaganda uncritically, particularly the deliberately deceptive exaggerations about famine and wartime casualties.
Performative posers who glamorized political violence by swooning over accused assassin Luigi Mangione.
"Words matter," we are constantly told. Its true and its a lesson we learned anew this week.
On Tuesday British diplomat Tom Fletcher, U.N. Undersecretary General of Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, told the BBC that if food trucks didnt start rolling into Gaza, "14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours."
This was nonsense, as Fletcher knew. The report he cited actually claimed that 14,000 children under the age of six would be at risk for malnutrition in the coming 12 months if the situation remained static.
The BBC didnt check Fletchers specious claims. Neither did the British prime minister, nor the hysteric members of the House of Commons who repeated them. His line was regurgitated ad nauseam by the U.S. news media and uncountable numbers of social media "influencers" around the globe.
By Wednesday, the BBC and the U.N. had backed off this assertion. Perhaps its unrelated, but by then a man with a pistol and evil intent had boarded a plane from Chicago to Washington and bought a ticket to a humanitarian event attended by Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics and executive editor of RealClearMedia Group. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Politico
26 minutes ago
- Politico
Graham wants to punish Russia with ‘bone-crushing' sanctions. It could backfire.
Sen. Lindsey Graham has pledged that his expansive sanctions bill would be 'bone crushing' for the Russian economy. But if enacted, the South Carolina Republican's proposal to impose 500 percent tariffs on any country that buys Russian energy would effectively cut the U.S. off from some of the world's largest economies — including allies in Europe. 'A 500 percent tariff is essentially a hard decoupling,' said Kevin Book, managing director of Clear View Energy Partners, an energy research firm. Graham appeared to acknowledge as much on Wednesday, when he proposed a broad carve-out for countries that provide aid to Ukraine. This exemption would spare the European Union, which continues to import almost 20 percent of its gas from Russia. But experts remain skeptical that the sky-high tariffs proposed in the Sanctioning Russia Act are in any way feasible. India and China buy roughly 70 percent of Russian energy exports, but several other countries that buy any oil, gas or uranium from Moscow — and aren't included in the carve-out — could also be exposed to tariffs under the bill. The United States, which is still reliant on imports of enriched uranium from Russia to fuel its nuclear reactors, could also run afoul of the bill. Edward Fishman, a senior researcher with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said countries in the crosshairs of the bill would struggle to halt their imports of Russian energy overnight. Tariffs of 500 percent on imports of goods made in China would send prices soaring, disrupt supply chains and could drive up U.S. unemployment to recessionary levels. Most likely, it would lead to a screeching halt in U.S. trade with China. 'It would hurt Americans quite a bit,' Fishman said. The legislation's goal, co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), is to starve Russia's war economy, which continues to earn hundreds of billions of dollars from energy exports. There is widespread support for the overall objective, with 82 senators signing on to Graham's bill so far, and growing support for a companion bill in the House. The bill is likely to change significantly as it moves through Congress and in consultations with the Trump administration, said Matt Zweig, senior policy director of FDD Action, a nonprofit advocacy organization affiliated with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It may also take a long time. 'With sanctions legislation, you're also normally dealing with iterative processes where you would want to go through every nook and cranny,' Zweig said. Still, the widespread bipartisan support for the legislation suggests there is a high degree of support among lawmakers for tougher action on Russia. 'What Congress may be doing is pressuring the executive branch to act,' said Adam Smith, a partner at the law firm Gibson Dunn. 'There is a sense in the Senate that more sanctions on Russia need to be imposed, or ought to be imposed,' added Smith, who was a senior adviser to the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control during the Obama administration. Graham, the bill's most vocal Republican advocate, said as much in a meeting with reporters in Paris over the weekend, where he described the bill as 'one of the most draconian sanctions bills ever written.' 'The Senate is pissed that Russia is playing a game at our expense and the world's expense. And we are willing to do something we haven't been willing to do before — and that is go after people that have been helping Putin,' Graham said. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed concerns that the bill is too harsh. 'We need to make Putin understand he has to stop screwing around and come to the table. But we also need to follow it up and make clear we will be tough,' she said. Not everyone agrees. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has long been skeptical about the effectiveness of sanctions to change the behavior of U.S. adversaries, bashed the bill on Monday as 'literally the most ill-conceived bill I've ever seen in Washington,' he said. 'It would be a worldwide embargo on 36 countries.' Meanwhile, Russia and Ukraine have made little progress on peace talks. Officials from both countries met in Istanbul on Monday and agreed to a further prisoner swap, but failed to achieve any major breakthroughs. Graham and Blumenthal visited Ukraine, France and Germany during last week's congressional recess, where they discussed the sanctions bill, as well as efforts to push Russia to the negotiating table. The proposal has been welcomed by European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, who met with Graham in Berlin on Monday. 'Pressure works, as the Kremlin understands nothing else,' Von der Leyen said in a statement. 'These steps, taken together with U.S. measures, would sharply increase the joint impact of our sanctions.' Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated Monday that the chamber could take up the legislation later this month. Republican senators have said they would like to secure the approval of the White House before moving forward. The proposed use of blanket tariffs to target countries that continue to do business with Russia's energy sector is novel and appears to be pitched to Trump's interests. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump viewed sanctions as 'a tool in his toolbox,' but declined to comment about his position on the bill. Trump appeared to be inching closer toward supporting the bill in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, which linked to an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting the legislation. Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump indicated he wanted lawmakers to secure his approval before moving forward with the bill. 'They're waiting for me to decide on what to do,' he said, describing the legislation as a 'harsh bill.' The president has liberally wielded tariffs to advance his foreign policy agenda, but his implementation has been spotty. Wall Street has even adopted a trading strategy referencing Trump's capriciousness called TACO, which stands for 'Trump Always Chickens Out.' Tariffs of 145 percent on China, imposed in April, lasted a month before being dramatically scaled back to make way for trade talks, which have so far failed to secure a breakthrough. As it stands, the bill includes some levers that Trump could pull to forestall the tariffs, requiring the president to make a formal determination that Russia is refusing to negotiate or has violated any future peace agreement. Nahal Toosi, Joshua Berlinger, Phelim Kine and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Harvard withheld their degrees for participating in a pro-Palestinian protest. They don't regret it.
'It felt like a culmination of things that had already been happening,' said Joshi in an interview this week with the Globe. 'It felt inseparable from the way they were treating pro-Palestinian protests in general.' A year since Harvard refused to award degrees to the 13 graduating seniors who participated in a pro-Palestinian encampment on Harvard Yard, the students say the experience left them feeling disillusioned about their Ivy League education and frustrated with what transpired, but grounded in their activism and largely unscathed. A handful are now pursuing graduate degrees from other elite universities, and others are working. Some are still participating in protests. A pro-Palestinian protest encampment behind a gate of Harvard Yard in April 2024. Andrew Burke-Stevenson for The Boston Globe Advertisement All were eventually awarded their Harvard degrees in the months after their intended graduation, the graduates said. After the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas began, the 2024 tent encampments on Harvard Yard became one of the key symbols of a pro-Palestinian student movement that spread across the nation. At Harvard, both Jewish and Muslim students reported feeling uncomfortable, while a Advertisement On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people from Israel. Gaza health authorities have said that Israel's retaliatory offensive has The Harvard student protesters agreed days before commencement in 2024 to dismantle the encampment; university leaders Days later, the students found out they wouldn't graduate since they were not in 'good standing' with the university due to multiple campus policy violations related to the encampment. That prompted another wave of outrage among students and faculty, more than 1,000 of whom reportedly Graduating students walked out of the 373nd Commencement at Harvard University to call attention to the plight of Palestinians on May 23, 2024. The university's top governing board rejected the recommendation of faculty to allow 13 pro-Palestinian students who participated in a three-week encampment in Harvard Yard to graduate with their classmates. Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff Some protestors, including Joshi, were allowed to don their caps and gowns at Harvard's 2024 Commencement and walk across the stage. Joshi said she was handed a piece of white cardboard instead of a degree. Others, however, were barred from commencement. Syd Sanders, 23, was told to withdraw from the university (a directive that he says was later dropped) and was banned from graduation. He had several ongoing student disciplinary cases at the time related to what he described as 'a long and storied career' in on-campus activism. 'They kept trying to evict me,' Sanders said in an interview this week, 'They would go by my dorm and be like, 'Why is all your stuff still here?'' Sanders was the final of the 13 students to receive a degree, to his knowledge. Advertisement 'They mailed it to me in February,' Sanders said. In a statement, Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo said that the university does not comment on student matters and did not further comment for this story. The impact of the withheld degrees varied by graduate. Phoebe Barr, 24, was among the protesters who were placed on an involuntary leave by the university, meaning she lost access to her dorm room and could not work at her on-campus job for the remainder of the semester. 'I was homeless and unemployed very suddenly,' Barr said. She stayed on the couch of someone who offered her a place to crash. Those are the memories of Harvard she wants to recall, she said, the acts of kindness in the community. 'For all the hostility we received, we also saw a real outpouring of support from the community of Harvard students, faculty, and those who lived around us in Cambridge,' she said. Barr was denied access to the Harvard campus at the end of her senior year. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Barr's temporarily withheld history and literature degree also impacted her search for a job after college: She could not list her undergraduate degree as her highest level of education. Not knowing when she would get her degree, she said, was difficult and stressful as she cobbled together cover letters and resumes. To potential employers, she wrote that her degree was still pending. Her degree was conferred in July last year; she got a job at a Boston University library that fall. Joshi's probation was initially to last until May 2025, meaning she would graduate a year later than planned. That timing was a problem: If she weren't in good standing with the university, she'd lose her Harvard fellowship to fund a master's degree at the University of Cambridge in England. Advertisement The funding securing her spot at Cambridge eventually came through after Harvard conferred her degree over the summer. Sanders, however, said that, at least for him, the lack of a degree didn't have any impact on his professional life. He still moved to California and got his dream job as a union organizer. 'I can't imagine a career in college activism was an inhibitor to becoming a union organizer — it was probably an asset," Sanders said. The encampment taught him how to do effective community organizing, lessons he said he is applying today as he helps organize support for immigrants targeted for Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests. 'It was the most sacred moment of community I have ever felt in my life,' Sanders said of the Harvard encampment. 'No regrets.' A protester hung a Palestine flag in the pro-Palestinian encampment in Harvard Yard on May 7, 2024. Lane Turner/Globe Staff Sanders is now an activist in Oakland and is working as a bartender and waiter (he quit his union organizing job). 'Just like everybody else who graduated on time, I'm figuring life out,' Sanders said. He's thinking of applying to grad school or getting another union organizer job; he still participates in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Had the protesters' probation resulted in them walking at graduation this year, they would've been at a much different ceremony. This May, Garber was greeted by 'It was pretty jarring,' said Barr, who attended the commencement to take part in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. 'Last year, he was booed by the audience.' Advertisement While she is glad to see Harvard fighting Trump, she said it does not negate her frustrations with how the university handled the encampment last year. Joshi added that while there is a lot of excitement for Harvard's stance against Trump, the school's stance on free speech and academic freedom still 'rings hollow' to her. She is now finishing a master's degree in sociology at the University of Cambridge — funded by the Harvard fellowship that almost didn't materialize — and writing her dissertation on South Asian involvement in the Palestinian movement in the UK. After graduation, she plans to find legal work at a nonprofit. Overall, she remembers the Harvard protests as a success: They drew attention to the thousands of children who have died in Gaza and will never have the chance to grow up to get a degree, she said. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Erin Douglas can be reached at
Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
Elon Musk couldn't change Trump's mind on electric vehicles
is a correspondent at Vox writing about climate change, energy policy, and science. He is also a regular contributor to the radio program Science Friday. Prior to Vox, he was a reporter for ClimateWire at E&E News. Elon Musk and President Donald Trump — two of the most powerful, outspoken billionaires in America — are still tangled up in a messy breakup over a variety of issues. It's no shock that these two men with huge egos would have friction, but it's interesting to look at some of the specific things that seem to be causing trouble between them. In particular, Trump's and Musk's differing views on climate change and clean energy have evidently become an irritant again. Recall that Musk, CEO of the electric car company Tesla, participated in White House councils during Trump's first term, but left after Trump began the process of pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement. But Musk began to drift to the political right. He publicly backed Trump's campaign for a second term — onstage and with money — and was rewarded with a high-profile quasi-governmental post as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency that laid off thousands of federal workers. It seemed like they were accomplishing their mutual goals. Trump even turned the White House into a sales lot for Tesla and got one himself. However, Tesla made about one-third of its profits over the past decade from selling compliance credits to other carmakers in states that adopted California's vehicle emissions rules as well as in several other countries. The Trump administration is also targeting the programs that created this line of business through executive orders. The back-and-forth over the years between Trump and Musk was mirrored in the perceptions of Tesla's products. The sleek electric cars were once rolling billboards projecting that their owners were concerned about climate change and are now attacked as endorsements of fascism. More broadly, it shows that there are stubborn political divides on how people view clean technology — electric vehicles, renewable energy, battery storage, and so on. A poll this week from the Pew Research Center showed that Republicans have less and less favorable views of clean tech. The exception is nuclear energy, which has seen increasing support among both Democrats and Republicans. Pew Research Center But on the flip side, Republicans tend to strongly support fossil fuel extraction from offshore oil drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and coal mining — far more than Democrats do. California and 11 other states now plan to end the sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035. Two-thirds of Americans say they are against this idea, but here, too, there's a political divide, with 85 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in opposition. Looking back over the past five years, it's apparent that even when Trump and Musk were in alignment, they couldn't change the political valence of electric cars. Pew Research Center Now, at least one more Republican has soured on EVs: Trump is reportedly looking for a buyer for his red Tesla Model S after his dustup with Musk. It will take more than a thumbs-up from the White House or the enthusiastic backing of a billionaire to change Republicans' minds about technologies that help limit climate change. There are some outliers, though, like the Iowa Trump supporters who also back wind power. Related Meet the Trump supporters who love wind energy But the momentum behind these tools is massive and mounting. Wind, solar, EVs, and grid batteries have all seen tremendous price drops, huge performance gains, and surging deployment in recent years. The Trump administration's policies could sap some of this momentum, but they can't stop it.
