Tag Archives: gaza

How many genocides result in a net increase in the population?

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After Hamas invaded Israel two years ago to behead babies, rape women, torture men, burn people alive, and take hostages, they gleefully promised to do so repeatedly.

Israel sought to prevent that. They went into Gaza to root out the barbarians from their underground tunnels. In the process, some people got killed.

Sometimes that was because Hamas put civilians in harm’s way. Sometimes they did so for the purpose of hiding behind them, as when they set up their military headquarters in civilian hospitals. Sometimes they did so for the very purpose of getting the civilians killed in order to increase the overall body count.

Israelis often went out of their way to avoid civilian casualties. Sometimes they issued warnings to civilians about an upcoming military mission, even though they thereby lost the element of surprise and also endangered their own soldiers. Israel literally tried to protect the enemy’s people more than the enemy themselves did. 

Tragically, civilians did die, despite the efforts of the Israelis and due in part to the counter-efforts of Hamas. Hamas sees civilians as expendable propaganda tools in their war on the Jews.

As Hamas intended, the worldwide Left took this Hamas propaganda and ran with it. They seized on the casualty figures to claim that Israel was conducting a “genocide” against the Gaza residents.

Let’s apply some simple math to that claim.

Hamas reports that Israel killed over 60,000 Gazans out of a population of over 2,000,000. (That figure from Hamas is clearly overstated, but even if it’s a fraction of that, it’s a tragedy.) Let’s accept Hamas’ overstated figure for purposes of this discussion.

To judge this purported “genocide,” we need to know the net reduction in population. In the gold standard of genocides, the population of Jews in Europe was reduced by two-thirds in the Holocaust – about six million people were murdered. To this day, the Jewish population in Europe is less than half what it was in 1939, while the overall population of Europe has nearly doubled.

Back to Gaza. The birthrate in Gaza is very high, about 3.9. That means women in Gaza have an average of 3.9 children over their lifetimes. That produces a doubling of the population about every 20 years. (For comparison, the birthrate in the United States and most of Europe is less than 2.0 – which results in an ever-declining population.)

Given this birthrate of 3.9, how many births occurred in this Gazan population of 2,000,000 over the two-year period since Hamas started this war?

You can do the math (exponential equations, anyone?) or you can ask AI to do it. The answer is around 140,000.

In summary, even if you accept Hamas’ exaggerated figure of 60,000 deaths, the 140,000 births in Gaza more than offsets that. In fact, it means that the population of Gaza increased by a net of about 80,000 over the last two years.

As genocides go, the Israelis’ “genocide” of the Gazans was conducted ineptly and failed miserably. It’s almost like the Israelis didn’t even intend a genocide.

In contrast, the Gazans and their Leftist colleagues on American college campuses and elsewhere are fond of chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” (Chants have always been a specialty of the Left.)

That river is of course the Jordan River east of Israel, and that sea is the Mediterranean west of Israel. If the Israelis were expelled from the River to the Sea, they would be exterminated.

It’s the Left that is seeking a genocide – the second in less than a century.

The whole world celebrates impending peace in Gaza – except American “peace” protestors

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The indefatigable Trump team looks to have achieved the impossible. They secured the support of a diverse and conflicted world for a peace plan in Gaza, they persuaded the parties who mutually hate one another to accept it, and they got it signed.

All remaining hostages are being released by Hamas, the Israelis are freeing over 1,000 terrorists and prisoners of war, and Israel has commenced a cease fire and partial withdrawal from Gaza.

People are jubilant – in both Israel and Gaza. How many wars end with jubilation on both sides?

In Tel Aviv, they’re chanting “Donald Trump!” In Gaza City, they’re chanting . . . well . . . “Donald Trump!”

Even CNN and MSNBC have admitted that this is a diplomatic triumph – by a person who is not known for being particularly diplomatic. If diplomacy was to succeed here, it would require a different kind.

Trump was exactly the right person at the right time to deliver this different kind of diplomacy. Diplomatic niceties are not effective with baby-beheading Hamas, and probably not very effective with Israel’s hard-bitten, former Special Forces member, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Hamas, especially, understands only force. Trump permitted the Israelis to deliver that force. The result is peace, at last, at least for a while.

Ah, but not everyone is celebrating.

There’s no celebration in Russia or China or North Korea or . . . among American Democrat protestors.

The Democrat leaders have of course said what they are obligated to say. But the thousands of anti-Israel and antisemitic protestors on college campuses and elsewhere have said nothing. No celebrations, no statements, no candle lighting, no congratulations to the people of Gaza or the people of Israel or the people of the world.

They’re literally dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv and Gaza City to celebrate the peace, while the protestors on American college campuses who purportedly protested for peace, sometimes violently, are, for once, silent.

I’m left wondering, if it wasn’t peace that they were protesting for, then what was it?

What do you do with two million Gazans?

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Question: What do you call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the sea?
Answer: A good start.

Old lawyer joke

Generally speaking, the people of Gaza are barbarians. That’s not true to a person, but it’s true as a people.

Their education level is extremely low, even in comparison to the education levels in Democrat-controlled big cities in America.

They live in abject poverty. Their economy is primitive and much of it is barter-based. Their currency, to the extent they use one, is the Israeli shekel but U.S. dollars and Jordanian dinars are in regular circulation as well.

Their unemployment rate is thought to be around 80%, though figures are hard to come by. There’s scarcely any industry. There are few stores, and their shelves are empty.

Most of this squalor is endemic. The Israeli occupation — which the Gazans brought on themselves — has worsened things, but things were already very bad.

About 98% of Gazans are of a religion that, according to many adherents, advocates the violent conversion or death of “infidels,” which are defined as anyone who does not believe in that religion, or who believes in it but interprets it in a manner deemed apostatic by the powers du jour.

The most hated infidels are the Jews of neighboring Israel. The Gazans are indoctrinated informally by friends, family and culture, and formally by the few schools in operation there, to hate the Jews, to kill them, and to destroy the nation of Israel. No hatred in the modern world equals the hate that Gazans feel for the Jews.

It’s likely that Nazi Germany hated the Jews less than the Gazans do.

Gaza is a cesspool of humanity, and the world would be better off without the Gazans. That sounds moralistic, and it is.

But not entirely. Ancient barbarians and, to some extent, even modern ones are the product of their culture. If I were born and raised in Gaza, to Gazan parents and surrounded by Gazan friends, family and propaganda, would I be any less barbaric than the Gazans? I like to think the answer is yes, but I doubt it. Civilization is not in our genes, but in our culture. Bad cultures produce bad people, and the Gazan culture is bad.

In any event, we have Gaza, and we have Gazans. Over two million of them. Their reproductive rate is among the highest in the world – they nearly double their population every generation. At this rate, the population of Gaza will exceed the population of the United States in 150 years. (Ah, the miracle of compounding!)

On this sad two-year anniversary of their barbaric incursion into Israel to slaughter, rape, torture and take hostage innocent men, women and children, it’s worth asking, what now?

What is the long-term solution to this? (I won’t ask, “What is the final solution?”)

The short-term solution is fairly obvious. Hamas will release the few still-alive and many dead hostages it has taken. There will be a disarming, of sorts, of the terrorists and potential terrorists (which means essentially all males over the age of 10). Promises will be made and broken. Peace will come, a little, and go, a lot. The Arab nations will have some say and little responsibility.

But what about the long term?

Readers know that I’ve always been a strong supporter of Israel, particularly since the horror of two years ago. Israel must do what’s necessary to survive. They have, and I’m very glad of that.

That said, the long term will include a new Middle East nation of “Palestine.” (I use scare quotes here because “Palestine” is a misleading word, but, alas, that will be the name of the new nation.) Two million people, going on four million, cannot be under Israel’s guardianship forever. It’s not fair to Israel to impose the burden of guardianship on them, nor is it fair to unborn Palestinians to be guarded.

Their state will not be the West Bank, north of which is the Sea of Galilee, west of which is the Israeli coast, and south of which is Jerusalem, the ancient and modern capital of Israel.

When you separate people who are engaged in age-old lethal warfare, you can’t put them within a stone’s throw of one another. Over the long term, the West Bank will be part of Israel, formally.

Will the new state instead be the 4-mile-wide strip that is Gaza? Same problem.

Will a new nation be carved out of the relatively abundant Arab lands in the Middle East? Good luck getting the Arabs to agree to that.

The problem seems insolvable.

Until a permanent solution evolves, the Trump proposal that has been endorsed by the Arabs and almost the entire rest of the world (with the predictable exception of outlaw states like Russia) is the best we can hope for. With that in place, humanitarian aid can flow freely (assuming the terrorists can be prevented from intercepting it).

Trump probably deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Imagine the creative and tireless behind-the-scenes negotiating and jawboning and strong-arming that he and his administration have put forth to get the world’s buy-in for his peace proposal. It turns out that to “give peace a chance,” you have to work at it, not just chant it.

Trump and his team put in the hard work. It’s hard work that his predecessors never had the energy or will or organizational skills or raw boldness to undertake.

By the way, those aid packages to the Gazans should include birth control pills.

Well played, Mr. President

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In what is already being called “The 12-Day War,” the bad guys have surrendered.

It took a bit longer than its namesake, The Six-Day War, but it was every bit as heroic. Israel beat an opponent that outnumbered it nine to one. An opponent that was on the verge of nuclear weapons to make good on its decades-old threat to obliterate Israel from the River to the Sea. An opponent that has fomented terrorism throughout the Mideast. An opponent that militarily, financially and logistically supported the horrible October 7 pogrom, a slaughter of unspeakable cruelty.

This time, Israel got some help in the end. Only one country on earth is willing to publicly ally itself with the Land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Fortunately for Israel and the world, that country is the United States of America, a country still armed with the most powerful military in history – a country that is still the arsenal of democracy.

Israel pilots (the second best in the world), Israeli intel, and Israeli stones did the dirty work of neutralizing the Iranian air defenses.

Then, it was the U.S. of A. that destroyed the Iranian nuke sites with stealth bombers that Iran never saw coming and couldn’t have intercepted if they had, carrying bunker-buster bombs that went half way to China. (Are you listening, China?)

In a face-saving move of retaliation, Iran then lobbed a few missiles toward an American air base. Although there was no danger of them hitting their target, Iran made sure by phoning in an advance warning.

The Democrats and the Never-Trumpers have been waiting and praying for a catastrophe for 12 days now. Sadly for them but happily for the world, it seems there won’t be one. But they will continue to hope.

OK, it’s not technically a surrender by Iran. It’s merely a permanent cease fire. Technically, it’s possible that Iran could restart hostilities if they decide they’d like another dose.

I’m betting against that.

I’m also betting that Slo Joe and Kamala-lala would not have had the stones or the brains to pull this off. For that matter, I’m not sure George W. Bush or Richard Nixon would have.

President Trump did.

I admit that I’ve had my issues with Donald Trump. In fact, I recently expressed doubt that he would follow through on Iran. I’ve had other issues with him, as well.

But on balance I’ll take him over any of the alternatives. That – and this – is why I voted for him three times. God bless him.

Hurrah for the IDF, but does Iran already have a nuke in Tel Aviv?

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This war has been distinctly one-sided so far. It’s been all Israel and no Iran.

But we won’t know for days or weeks how successful the Israeli Defense Forces were in their main objective of disabling Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

Israel says it intends to pound Iran for two weeks. If that pounding entails anything like the strikes yesterday which involved about 200 aircraft, and if Iran’s air defenses don’t improve (in fact, they are apt to deteriorate even more from the bombings) then Iran could be crippled for decades.

I’m all for it. But here are some known unknowns:

First, Iran might already have nukes. We think that’s not the case, but, as everyone now knows, that thought is only as good as our intel on the matter. When it comes to intel, remember Russiagate? Remember Hunter’s laptop? I’m betting that the Mossad has better intel operations than we do, but that bet is no sure thing.

Let’s assume the intel on Iran’s development of nukes is accurate – that they’re still weeks away from enriching uranium to bomb-level enrichment concentrations.

That doesn’t mean Iran doesn’t have a bomb. There are thousands of nukes in the world, held by bad guys that are friendly to Iran because Iran is hostile to the west. That includes North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan and India on some days. Nothing would stop one or more of those bad guys from simply flying or trucking a nuke over to Tehran, especially if Iran paid them some real money to do so.

The explosion from a nuclear bomb is all out of proportion to its size. A bomb that fits in an ordinary truck – not even a semi – could easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ah, you say, but Iran lacks the hardware to mount this bomb-in-a-truck onto one of their thousands of ballistic missiles. So how would they deliver their bomb-in-a-truck to Tel Aviv?

In the truck.

The Ukrainians delivered truckloads of drones thousands of miles across Russia. Surely a single truck could be smuggled into Israel and parked in a storage unit in Tel Aviv.  

Nukes are most destructive if they are detonated a few hundred feet above the ground. So, this bomb-in-a-truck detonated in a storage facility in Tel Aviv would be only, say, 30% as destructive as it could have been if detonated a few hundred feet in the air.

It could still easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ever since I was an aerospace engineer for Boeing, I’ve been puzzled by the inordinate interest in bomb delivery vehicles. Cruise missiles can deliver a warhead across a thousand miles of complicated terrain by flying a few feet off the ground – under radar detection. That’s marvelous, I thought, but why don’t we just rent a U-Haul?

I assume (though I was never privy to such information even when I had a security clearance from Boeing) that we did indeed rent U-Hauls, and so did the Soviets. I assume that we had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the Soviet Union, and they similarly had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the U.S. I assume that Russia took over control of those nukes when the Soviet Union fell, as they took over the rest of the Soviet Union’s nukes. I assume that China, similarly, has nukes residing in the U.S.

It would be military malpractice not to. I’m afraid that the answer to the question I asked myself at Boeing – why don’t we just rent a U-Haul? – is, “Because Boeing doesn’t make U-Hauls.”

The million-dollar question is, does Iran have a nuke – or access to the detonator of a nuke – in Tel Aviv? We’ll probably know one way or another within days.

In a life prior to law school, Glenn Beaton was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.

Will Trump punish Iran as much as he’s punishing Harvard?

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Harvard deserves punishment. For years, they boasted in their published materials that they had a policy to favor certain ethnic groups.

Accordingly, they favored a Native American with the improbable name of Elizabeth Warren to fill a law professor position. When called out for their discrimination, they said that – in violation of their stated policy – they had not favored her.

Comically, it turned out Warren wasn’t Native American anyway. And so, in her case, Harvard failed at racial discrimination despite their best efforts. Usually, however, they’ve succeeded.  

One egregious area where they’ve succeeded is in discriminating against Jews and Asians. For Asians, their SAT scores had to be substantially higher than for whites and about 400 points higher than for Blacks.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court outlawed this discrimination against Asians in a decision two years ago. The suspicion is that Harvard has not stopped doing it, however, but has merely stopped advertising it.

Harvard’s discrimination against Jews is worse, if that’s possible. Harvard encourages Jew-hate. It’s probably not a coincidence that many of these antisemites are foreign students that pay full tuition.

But that’s not the only reason. The Jew-haters are egged on by many faculty members.

But at least Harvard has not promised to nuke the Jews. They may chant for the eradication of Israel (as in “From the River to the Sea”) but at least they are not advocating the eradication of Judaism, for the most part.

President Trump has rightly declared war on Harvard. He has cut off federal money until they comply with the Supreme Court rulings on racial discrimination, and protect Jewish students and other racial and ethnic groups.

Harvard has vowed to fight for their “right” to discriminate, and their “right” not to protect Jewish students, and their “right” to hate or love in admissions and hiring on the basis of skin color.

Naturally, they express this neo-Nazi skinhead language in more flowery terms – it’s all about academic freedom, they preen. To preserve their academic freedom to hate, they’ve filed lawsuits in their backyard of Boston in front of Democrat-appointed judges who are predictably disposed favorably to their position.

But it will go to the Supreme Court, and there will be supreme judgments, and Harvard will lose supremely.

Then there’s Iran.

Iran’s formal policy is not to fail to protect the Jews. It’s to kill them. For many years, they’ve armed proxies in the Middle East to do precisely that. Hezbollah, ISIS, Hamas . . . you name it. The Iranians see no group as too violent, too cruel, or too barbaric. The more violent, the more cruel, and the more barbaric, the better.

And so, on that horrific October 7, there were babies beheaded, grandmothers burned alive, young women raped in front of their husbands, and hostages taken, tortured and killed.

At Harvard, they cheered, and that was very bad. But in Gaza, it was even worse.

So, President Trump, will your punishment of the Iranians be at least as severe as your punishment of Harvard? Will you impose sanctions to cut off their funding, as you have with Harvard?

Moreover, will you put an end to Iran’s decades-long quest for a nuclear weapon to carry out their promise to destroy Israel?

Or is all your talk just . . .  big talk? Is it something like the tariff talk – a negotiation posture that you’ll climb down from and compromise on when the going gets rough?

It’s one thing to declare war on Harvard, but it takes some guts to declare war on Iran. The world is watching.

Columbia is led by a mom. They need a leader.

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Moms are wonderful creatures. They soothe, and they smooth. They resolve conflict with milk and cookies. Without moms, we wouldn’t be here.

Not all women are moms. Joan of Arc was not a soother or a smoother, and was never a mom. Nor was Amelia Earhart or Queen Elizabeth I.

Even among strong women who were mothers, not all were moms. Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher had children but, to the public at least, they were not moms. Some women can change from a skirt into pants and back again, depending on the setting, and maybe Meir and Thatcher did. Others can’t.

My point is, a “mom” is a collection of feminine traits possessed usually by women (and occasionally by men) which are very useful in the right circumstances.

Being in charge of Columbia University in the year 2025 is not the right circumstance.

Let’s back up. Universities have been left-leaning for at least two generations. That leftism has been reinforced in recent years by federal money. Both public and private universities receive billions in federal tax dollars. Politicians on the left always liked that, because they liked the leverage they get with that money.

“Promote leftist ideology, or we’ll withhold the money,” they told the universities. It’s not that they needed to bully universities into promoting leftist ideology – the universities were happy to do that without being bullied – but lefty politicians bullied them anyway because they just enjoy bullying people.

After the October 7, 2023 massacre, Columbia became a hotbed of terrorist sympathizers. The sympathizers sought not just to support terror abroad, but to import it into America. They terrorized Jewish students and violently advocated the eradication of Israel along with its Jewish inhabitants.

The leaders of Columbia turned a blind eye to this terror. That’s because Columbia is a leftist place, and the left hates Jews.

The reasons the left hates Jews is a bigger issue, but it boils down to: (1) They see Judaism, correctly, as a pillar of Western Civilization, and they hate civilization; (2) They see Jews as typically being very meritorious, and they hate merit because it interferes with identity politics; and (3) They just hate Jews.

The left often gets a pass for their Jew-hate on the grounds that Jews are usually not dark-skinned. After the horror of 10/7, our leading universities not only equivocated in their condemnation of the terror, they seemed to sympathize with the terrorists.  

The gentlepersons of Congress invited the leaders of Columbia, Harvard, Penn, MIT and other universities to testify about this misplaced sympathy for terrorists.

Those leaders suggested – apparently in coordination beforehand – that calling for the annihilation of Israel, harassing Jewish students, and encouraging violence in antisemitic protests might or might not be acceptable depending on the “context.”

History is still being written on the ultimate outcome of that testimony, but the history-writing is over for at least three of those university leaders. Public outcry forced them out of their presidents’ offices and back to the safe ivory towers of their professorships.

The replacement president of Columbia joins a long and distinguished line of presidents there, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. This new one is a doctor – a real one, not a “Doctor” Jill. She’s a smart woman.

She’s also a mother of three and, as I’m about to explain, a mom.

President Trump is not. As promised, he has taken higher education to the woodshed. He has demanded that universities put an end to their systemic antisemitism. He has threatened to cut off the federal money spigot if they don’t rejoin civilized society.

The mom who is newly in charge at Columbia did what moms do in such circumstances; she smoothed and soothed. Trump had a list of about three principal and principled demands. She said “yes, yes and yes.”

Then she went back to Columbia and got an earful from the leftist faculty there, demanding that she rescind her agreement with Trump. To the faculty, she said “OK, OK and OK.”

Then the Trump administration got wind of her rescission. They demanded that she publicly and humiliatingly reiterate her earlier agreement to their demands. They demanded she rescind her rescission.

She again said, “yes, yes and yes.”

Now neither side trusts her, for good reason. Whatever she does, both sides will suspect and allege she’s not doing what she promised them she would do.

I doubt milk and cookies will smooth this over.

Hezbollah just received hormone therapy

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One of the treatments for cancer is often hormone therapy. Men with prostate cancer sometimes get what might be called anti-hormone therapy.

Prostate cancer cells need testosterone. Take away the testosterone, and they mostly stop growing and stop multiplying. This is accomplished with drugs that eliminate testosterone. It’s usually not permanent.

This treatment is not without side effects. Testosterone aids in numerous male functions, especially muscular strength and emotional aggressiveness. It’s the main reason that “women” who are really modified men who have gone through male puberty have a big advantage in women’s sports.

Testosterone is manufactured in the testicles. Hence the expression “He’s got real balls” to describe male machismo.

Which brings us to the Mideast. There’s a cancer in the Mideast. It’s been there for centuries, but lately it has grown more virulent and malignant.

This cancerous terrorism came to Israel again last year, this time starting south of Israel, in Gaza under the regime there called Hamas. They invaded Israel and butchered the residents. They beheaded babies, raped women, and took hostages back to Gaza to torture, kill and display their mutilated remains in public and on the internet. The world has not seen such an exhibition of barbarous cruelty in generations. 

The terrorism sympathizers in Gaza cheered. So did the ones at Columbia and Harvard.

Israel is now surgically removing the Hamas terrorism from Gaza, but in the meantime a strain called Hezbollah has metastasized north of Israel. This Hezbollah strain rains missiles and bombs down on Israeli cities and towns. Lately, it has launched missiles targeting Tel Aviv a hundred miles away.

These bombs and missiles have no military objective. They are directed at civilians for the purpose of killing, maiming and terrifying them.

Hezbollah is officially a terrorist organization according to the U.S. State Department. Its stated aim is to destroy Israel, completely. And by any means necessary, as they say in the fever swamps of American college leftism.

Hezbollah receives about $700 million a year from other terrorists who own and operate the nation of Iran a thousand miles to the east, beyond Iraq.

The nation of Iran is Persian by ethnicity, not Arab. They have no natural interest in Israel or the Palestinian problem far to the west. 

Their interest is in simply hating on the Jews.

That hatred has little historical basis. It appears to be simply a gimmick. It’s designed to be a point for the people to rally round in support of the ruling theocrats who oppress women, toss gays off buildings, and commit other atrocities, all while keeping their people entrapped in the 11th century.

Iranian Jew-hatred thus has the purpose and methods of a giant pogrom. The Jews are a scapegoat for a failed regime, much as they were in post-WWI Germany and countless other times in history.

This nation of Iran that funds Hezbollah terrorism is the same nation of Iran to which Barack Obama’s outgoing administration delivered wooden pallets of about $1,700,000,000 in Euros and Swiss francs (the cash was in foreign currency in order to get around U.S. sanctions passed by Congress).

Obama assured us that Iran had assured him that none of this nearly-two billion dollars of cash would be used to fund terrorism. As if we’re all gullible enough not to know that cash is fungible.

Hezbollah has used its billions from America via Iran to construct a massive terrorism machine, directed mainly at Israel. It’s the biggest non-governmental military in the history of the world.

Israel has had to resort to hormone therapy to battle this cancer. Here’s the treatment protocol.

Hezbollah is apparently chock full of individuals capable of being infiltrated. The Israelis did so. They learned that Hezbollah was in the process of purchasing new smart phones and pagers. Israel intercepted the shipments, and either modified or replaced the phones and pagers with ones that were tricked out.

To explode. Israel then placed calls to the phones and pagers to detonate the implanted explosives. All at once.

People typically keep their phones and pagers in their front pocket. In men, that places them in proximity to the above-mentioned organ of the male body that produces testosterone. Most of the terrorists were not killed, but only injured. This was by design or by accident, but I suspect by design. The Israelis are not prone to accidents.

The end result is that the terrorists are now money-rich with Iranian funding but testosterone-poor with Israeli hormone therapy.

These much-reduced testosterone levels will probably cause the terrorists to be less aggressive in the future. (And their bosses may find it difficult to recruit replacements.)

But cancer is resilient. More treatment will likely be necessary.

N.B. No offense is meant to cancer patients. I’ve been one myself, though never a recipient of hormone therapy.

Will the terrorist sympathizers be awarded honorary PhDs?

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For months, “mostly peaceful” protesters have harassed and harangued Jewish students at what used to be our best universities, all on the grounds that, this time, Jews on the other side of the world are defending themselves against barbarians right out of the 11th century.

The protesters’ mini-pogroms are not retribution for the Jewish students’ support of Israel – the protesters have no idea of whether those Jewish students support Israel or not – but are retribution for Jews being Jewish. This has happened before.

The protesters set up tents in the university commons, with all the deliberate connotations of military encampments. I remember when tents were set up in the woods, but now tents are a symbol and reality of anti-Americanism. You got a gripe? Get a tent. Put it up in the park and poop in the gutter.

That’ll convince everyone that you’re right. Or it will at least convince yourself that you’re a victim, which in today’s so-called society is better than being right.

When not pooping in the gutter, the dirty miscreant quasi-military university tent campers chanted antisemitic slogans at Jews as they made their way to class, and anyone else unfortunate enough to happen by.

Meanwhile, they demanded that the universities make meaningless gestures amounting to a statement that when light-skinned people defend themselves against dark-skinned terrorists, or any other circumstance involving light-skinned people and dark-skinned people, the former are oppressors and the latter are oppressed.

The faculty were not exactly the grown-ups in the tent. Some joined the terrorists sympathizers and became terrorists sympathizers themselves. Others expressed sympathy for the terrorist sympathizers. Sympathy is almost as good as victimhood nowadays, and requires just as little effort.

Some of the terrorism majors demanded room service – breakfast in bed in their tents. They complained that it was inhumane for the university to deny them food and drink during their trespass. They opined that it might even be a breach of contract. After all, they or their dark money sponsors had paid good money for a dormitory meal plan, right?

They expressly compared themselves to the protesters at Kent State. Being denied breakfast in your tent bed isn’t exactly like being shot, but it’s a start – and a lot less painful.

The Democrats initially applauded all this as an exercise of “free speech,” which is what Democrats call an insurrection when it’s committed by Democrats. President-ish Joe Biden had a “fine-people-on-both-sides” moment where he mumbled that both sides were right or perhaps both sides were wrong and in any event there are fine voters of both sides . . . and . . . look, a squirrel!

Then he fell down.

OK, he didn’t fall down that time but his poll numbers did. In all the battleground states, he’s now trailing a guy who’s been indicted 847 times, most recently for paying off a blackmailing slut but failing to use campaign money to do so.  

The terrorist sympathizers and their terrorist sympathizer sympathizers not only got away with all this, but seemed to be having a splendid time of it until those election polls woke up the “woke” Democrats and the barbarians burst the gate at the Columbia Dean’s Office. Setting up tents in the commons to threaten the extermination of the Jews while simultaneously accusing them of genocide is one thing, but setting up a tent in the Dean’s Office and driving down the approval ratings of a Democrat president in an election year is something altogether worse.

So, Columbia finally sent in the newly un-defunded cops. It took the cops just a few minutes to clear the grounds, reclaim the Dean’s Office for the absent Dean, and replace the Palestinian flag with Old Glory.

The usual suspects have already announced that in five years the terrorists, their terrorist sympathizers and the terrorist sympathizer sympathizers will be seen as courageous and sympathetic heroes. Whenever the left loses an argument, you see, they revert to boasting that they’re nonetheless on the right side of history.

Uh huh. Sort of like the Soviet Union in 1917. Or Fidel Castro in 1959. Or Pol Pot in 1976. Or the BLM riots of 2020. Or the defunding of police departments in 2021. Or Oregon’s legalization of hard drugs in 2022. Or genital mutilation of children and cross-dressing men competing as women in 2023.

On the other hand, bear in mind that history is written by historians – mainly university professors. It is indeed possible that history as written by those historians will heroize the terrorist sympathizers, even if the rest of us see them for the spoiled, foreign-funded, violent, antisemitic and anti-American anarchists that they are.  

They probably won’t be awarded honorary PhDs, but I wouldn’t rule it out. That’s a measure of how far the left has taken America down.

I’m rooting for the protesters

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At places we used to call institutions of higher learning, ignorant kids who don’t know any better and their ignorant professors who should, but also don’t, are trespassing in support of the raping, beheading, kidnapping, burning alive hostage takers of Hamas.

It’s a revolting scene. Even in Nazi Germany they tried to hide their atrocities. In contrast, Hamas posts them on the internet, and their sympathizers at American universities embrace both the terrorists and their terror like the latest hula hoop fad. (Watch out, trannies, you’re so-o-o-o 2023. And watch out, BLM, you’re so-o-o-o 2021.)

Much as these terror-sympathizers disgust me, and much as I’m rooting against the terrorists with whom they sympathize, and much as I’m rooting for the Israelis in their existential struggle to survive, I hope the university protests continue.

Here’s why.

Because the protests are revealing the rot in American universities. The system that used to be the envy of the world – the best and brightest everywhere came here to learn – has strangled under the stultifying, anti-intellectual yoke of DEI, wokeism, anti-merit, one-party rule that is delivered by greedy, wasteful, heavy-handed, over-numerous, group-thinking bureaucrats.

College tuition has gone up at double the rate of inflation for as long as I can remember. Students pay far more than ever before, even after adjusting for inflation, and get far less. At Columbia, tuition alone is $67,000 a year. Nobody gets charged the sticker price, of course, except the Jews.

American parents and their kids can now plainly see what many of us have known for years. Unless you want to be a doctor or lawyer, college is a monumental waste of time and money. It’s a scam.

Good careers are available without a college degree. In Switzerland – which is not exactly a banana republic – only a third of kids go to college. The rest find interesting work as electricians, carpenters, programmers and tradesmen. They make a good living at those professions, and are not looked down upon. They’re respected, they’re happy, and they’re debt-free.

Here in America, the industrial-education complex contrived to convince the people that they’re losers unless they spend a couple hundred thousand dollars for a useless degree. And they convinced voters to support that scam with taxpayer dollars, and, now, to use taxpayer dollars to forgive outlandish unpaid loans to the foolish people who were scammed.

These protests offer a moment to reconsider all this destruction and waste. Barack Obama in a different context called such moments “teaching moments.”

Speaking of whom, here’s an added benefit to the protests: they’re embarrassing to the Democrats. Most Democrats know that the Hamas terrorists are worse than animals, but they are reluctant to say so because the Hamas supporters are mainly Democrats. These protests pressure the Democrats to take a side, publicly.

Because Mr. Biden knows there are voters on both sides, he has tried to side with both. That doesn’t work for long in wartime.