Tag Archives: Israel

Will it be on the watch of tough-talking Trump that Iran finally goes nuclear?

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President Trump enjoys campaigning. The first campaign was in 2016 when he criticized the ill-advised deal that Obama had struck with Iran the year before.

Under that deal, Iran promised not to develop nukes – but only for a few years. Moreover, the inspection requirements were toothless, and Iran began violating them immediately by continuing its nuke program.

Trump rightly called that deal “a disaster” and “the worst deal ever” (which is saying quite a lot when it comes to deals made by Obama). After he was elected in 2016, Trump cancelled the deal.

And Iran continued its nuke program.

Trump’s second campaign was in 2020 when he promised that “as long as I am President of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump lost the election.

And Iran continued its nuke program.

Trump’s third campaign was in 2024 when he declared that if elected, he would exert “massive, maximum pressure” on Iran to end its nuclear program. He won that election.

And Iran continues its nuke program.

Trump’s “massive, maximum pressure” has not included new sanctions on Iran, even while the United States Senate is considering bipartisan bills to impose those sanctions whether Trump likes it or not.

Trump’s fourth campaign is ongoing as you read this. He seems unconcerned that there’s no election going on; campaigning is what he does. Tweets, anyone?

When it comes to Iran, his campaigning substitutes for governing. Tough talk substitutes for tough action – or even moderate action.

Even the tough talk gets watered down. A couple of weeks ago, Trump announced that he was “very close” to a new deal with Iran, as if he could close the gap with wishes and charm.

On Wall Street, stock traders evaluating the tariffs have an acronym. It’s “TACO,” which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In the face of a stock market rout, the tariffs Trump announced in April have quietly been withdrawn or at least re-drawn.

Note that Wall Street doesn’t say “TACO” as a political attack. They’re in the business of making money, not the business of politics. They say “TACO” in the same way they say, “Buy low, sell high.” It’s a truism.

Wall Street’s smart money has probably judged Trump correctly; being correct is why they’re on Wall Street while you and I are just on Main Street.

And so, we should expect a similar chickening out by Trump with respect to the Iranians. The Iranians themselves certainly do.

There will be a deal, alright. Trump will compromise to the point that it will be much the same as the 2015 deal that Obama struck. There will be promises by the Iranians, again, but no real teeth in the deal to enforce those promises, again. And there will be a zillion-dollar payment to the Iranians, again, which they’ll use to fund worldwide terrorism, again.

In short, the Iranians will get their nukes, and we’ll give them money to fund terror – and Trump will campaign on his success in striking a fake deal for them not to get their nukes.

Just like Obama.

In the big picture, western leaders have resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran. The fake deals are merely to mollify the masses. The leaders know that Iran will break the deals and get its nukes, and are already planning to say, “I’m shocked! They broke the deal!”

I’m not surprised that the Europeans act out this dishonest dance. Nor am I surprised that the Obama/Hillary/Biden crowd join in. But I expected something different from Trump – because he promised something different.

Ah, but there’s a wild card in this charade. It’s the Israelis. If the Ukrainians can take out a third of the strategic bomber fleet of Russia, imagine what the Israelis can do to the nuke program of Iran.

When it comes to the Jews saving the world, you know, there’s a precedent.

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.

Hating on Jews is all the rage

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Young people are slaves to fashion. (That’s one vice I’ve never been accused of, even when I was young.)

You name it – mustaches, bell-bottom jeans, Barack Obama, hula hoops, big hair, Burt Reynolds, electric cars, transexuals, solar panels, line-dancing to country music, etc., etc., etc.

Someday, there may be a fashion convergence on Netflix where we have a mustachioed Barack Obama, sporting big hair and bell-bottomed jeans, line-dancing to country music with a transexual Burt Reynolds playing with a hula hoop as they both get run over by a Tesla fired by a solar panel.

Meanwhile, we have antisemitism.

It’s all the rage. Ignorant college students chant “from the river to the sea” but can’t tell you the name of the river or the name of the sea.

These kids believe that Jews are racists for “occupying” the land between those two unnamable waters – for some 3,000 years. And so, they hate them and their Jewishness.

The reason they believe this is (1) because they’ve been told it’s true by the kids who are cool because their skin is dark and their foreign accent is strong, (2) because human nature is such that hate produces pleasurable endorphins, and (3) because it’s fashionable.

They still celebrate the torture and massacre of Jews on that horrible October 7, even as they caution (sometimes, but not usually) that it’s not the Jews they want massacred, but the Israelis. At the same time, they harass and persecute Jews on campus who have no attachment to Israel other than Jewishness.

Like most fashions that come around, this one has been around before. The first Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. The second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The subsequent Jewish diaspora scattered thousands of Jews through Europe where they were persecuted for two millennia through soft bigotry and hard pogroms.

The discrimination reached an apex in a holocaust. Until the middle of the 20th century, that word meant “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale.” Now, the word is inseparable from an event of unspeakable horror, “The Holocaust.”

European bigotry immigrated to the Americas. As late as the 20th century, Harvard refused to admit Jews. Even now, they impose an informal limit on the number of Jewish admittees. Those who are admitted have been advised not to wear a visible Star of David, lest they trigger the Jew-haters.

When prestige schools occasionally protect the Jewish students, it is reluctantly and ambiguously. The leftists running these outfits smugly justify their tolerance for bigotry and even violence on the grounds of academic freedom. “Free to Hate” could well replace “Veritas” at Harvard.

As it has for thousands of years, Jewish merit overcomes much of this bigotry. Although Jews comprise only about 0.2% of the worldwide population and only about 1% of the American population, some 22% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish.

But the soft discrimination continues in matters not governed objectively by merit. For example, Americans have never elected a President or Vice President who was Jewish. (To their credit, the Jews have not clamored for one. That’s not the way they roll.)

Antisemitism particularly burns in the Middle East. Jews have been essentially expelled from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – practically all of the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Jews are not so much discriminated against in those countries – they’re banned.

You might think that Israel has responded in kind, but they haven’t. Non-Jews exist side-by-side with Jews in Israel. In fact, about 21% of Israelis are Muslim.

It is this Jew-hating bigotry for which the young idiots on college campuses are useful. While they enjoy sunny springtime hijinks designed mainly to prove up their fashion consciousness in the college cocoon, Jews in the real world are actively discriminated against, threatened existentially, and occasionally raped, taken hostage, beheaded and murdered.

Fads pass and fashion is fleeting. If only this one were.

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.

Why do American Jews vote against Israel?

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For a hundred years, American Jews have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat candidate. Franklin Roosevelt received about 80% of the Jewish vote each time. This dramatic tilt toward the Democrats continued up through the turn of the century, when they gave Al Gore about 79%. They gave Obama 78% in his first election, and even gave him 69% in his second – after Obama’s antipathy toward Israel became impossible to overlook.

Some of this Jewish support for Democrats is understandable. Like most immigrants, the Jews suffered discrimination at the hands of silk-stocking Republicans. American intellectuals in the early- to mid-20th century took their cue from Europe, where antisemitism was rampant (and still is). Two generations ago in America, there were still Jewish country clubs because the ordinary Republican-dominated ones denied admittance to Jews.

All of that is shameful, and, I’m glad to say, nearly all of that is now behind us.

In this century, it’s the Democrats who exhibit an antisemitic undercurrent. It was evident in Barack Obama’s support for Iran – a Jew-hating terrorism state that denies there was a Holocaust in the past while openly urging one in the future.

Obama was willing to let Iran get nukes, ostensibly not for the purpose of making good on their Holocaust threat (wink, wink). He even sent them billions that they used to fund their nuke program.

In the Biden administration, the Democrats’ anti-Israel stance grew. They begged the Iranians to rejoin the one-sided deal that Obama gave them (and Trump revoked) and also stopped enforcing international sanctions. That allowed them to resume lucrative oil exports to fund their nukes again – and to fund terrorists attacking Israel.

After the October 7 pogrom, many Democrats equated Israel’s effort to defend itself, on the one hand, with Hamas’ invasion, rapes, beheadings, torture, random rocket attacks, and kidnapping and murder of men, women and children, on the other hand.

I assumed that these last four years of Democrat hostility toward Israel would finally tilt the Jewish vote toward Republicans in 2024.

I was wrong. Jews voted 68% for the Democrat in 2020, and this year they still voted somewhere between 66% and 79% for the Democrat (it’s difficult for exit polls to get a fix on the number). And this was for a Democrat who openly pandered to Muslim radicals.

So, what’s up with American Jews?

I have a theory.

But first, let me admit the ignorant and the speculative nature of my theory. I grew up in the wilds of Colorado, and literally had never met a Jew (at least not knowingly) until I went away to college. My current Jewish friends tend to be strong Israel supporters and, likewise, strong Republicans; my generalizations therefore do not apply to them specifically. I now have tremendous respect for both Judaism and Jewish culture (and have often written about it) but cannot claim any real expertise in the subject.

Subject to all that, here goes.

Somewhere around seven million Jews live in America – nearly as many as in Israel. Together, those two countries comprise 80% of the world’s Jewish population.

Israeli Jews are different than American Jews. Israeli Jews are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants to Israel. Jews who immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel tend to be practicing Jews, unsurprisingly. A disproportionate number are Orthodox Jews. They believe deeply in Judaism and they believe deeply in Israel. 

American Jews, not so much. While many are devout, at least a third are not observant of their religion at all. (This is not intended as a criticism. Most self-identifying Christians are not observant of their religion either.) Deeply religious Orthodox Jews are relatively rare in America.

The result is that American Jews are less invested emotionally in the Land of Abraham.

That’s hard to dispute. But I submit that it goes beyond that.

Many American Jews have not just failed to embrace Judaism, but have casually or consciously rejected it. People who reject long-standing family and religious traditions tend to feel some guilt and need some rationalizations. Rejection of one’s heritage typically morphs into hostility toward that heritage.  

In the case of the many non-observant American Jews, it’s possible that their ambivalence toward Israel – which seems to manifest in outright opposition every four years at election time – is rooted in a rejection of their ancestral faith which naturally morphs into hostility toward it.

In agnosticism, as in religion, there’s no zealot like a convert.

The Western Wall

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Note to readers: I originally published this piece ten years ago after some treks in Israel. I thought of re-publishing it yesterday but decided that I as a Christian cannot possibly speak on October 7 to the horror of that day last year, especially in view of the ambivalent reaction of many people since then. It would be like crashing a Shiva. So here it is, a day late. Or perhaps right on time.

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Muslims have the Taj Mahal and Mecca. Catholics have St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican. Jews have a wall.

The Western Wall is a stack of massive stone blocks a few dozen feet high and a couple of hundred feet long. It’s all that’s left of Jerusalem’s second Jewish temple, a structure that astonished even the Romans. The Romans destroyed it to punish the Jews for their Great Revolt in 70 A.D.

That wasn’t the first time. It’s called the “second” temple because it replaced Solomon’s temple, which had been destroyed by the Babylonians six centuries earlier.

For millennia, this fragment of the second temple has been sacred to Jews, reminding them of their culture, their religion, their diaspora, their return, and their faith that someday there will be a third temple.

I visited the Western Wall a few Fridays ago, just in time for the start of the Jewish Sabbath at sundown. I expected to see Orthodox Jews in traditional garb praying there, and I did.

But I saw more than that. I saw non-Orthodox Jews, heads bowed, trembling hands on the wall, tears running down their faces.

And among the prayerful were thousands of Jews singing and dancing to traditional music. Imagine a Jewish wedding reception — a really big one.

There was more than just Jews. Understand that hours after the United Nations created Israel in 1948, four surrounding countries simultaneously attacked it. Israel survived the attack, but its attackers killed or expelled all Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem.

For years thereafter, the occupiers of the Old City literally used the Jewish Quarter for mortar practice. Of 35 houses of Jewish worship there, 34 were obliterated. The Western Wall was routinely spat upon, and worse.

The ongoing destruction, banishment and desecration continued until the Six Day War in 1967 when Israel was again attacked from all sides. In those six days, Israel crushed its enemies, established protectable borders and reclaimed the Old City and the Western Wall.

Since then, the Israelis have welcomed all faiths to the Old City. In fact, two-thirds of the residents are Muslim. Their Dome of the Rock built next to the Western Wall and over the site of the first and second Jewish temples was left in their hands. Likewise, the traditional site of Christ’s tomb, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is in Christian hands.

And so among the singing, dancing and praying Jews on that Sabbath evening a few Fridays ago were singing, dancing and praying Christians, Arabs, Asians and Africans. They invite everyone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They loaned me a yarmulke – they ask only that you cover your head – and watched me silently pray at their wall. They invited me into their celebration. One named Goldberg joked that my Scottish name sounds vaguely Jewish if only I would spell it B-E-I-T-O-N. I told him his Jewish name sounds vaguely Scottish if only he would spell it M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D.

Another was Romanian by ancestry. Out of an extended family of 32, his father was one of two who survived the Holocaust. (The Romanians surpassed the Germans in implementing the “Final Solution.” The Romanians were just shooting Jews on sight; the Germans intervened in order to send them to the death camps for “proper” extermination.)

Another was Moroccan by birth. His ancestors had been expelled from Spain in the Jewish expulsion of 1492. (Spain announced in February that he and other descendants of expelled Jews could return and reclaim the citizenship that was stripped from their ancestors 522 years ago.)

Several were friends of three Israeli teenagers who’d disappeared a week earlier. We didn’t know it at the time, but terrorists had already kidnapped them, murdered them and dumped their bodies.

Which brings up one other thing that struck me that Friday evening. Some of the praying, singing and dancing men and women were Israeli soldiers. I’ve done a lot of things, but never before had I danced in a circle with my arms around the muscular shoulders of young Jewish men wearing yarmulkes, combat boots, fatigues and automatic weapons. That we were of different faiths was the least-strange thing in the picture.

The Israeli soldiers were necessary because their wall is a target of terrorists, just as their children are. The mortars are gone from the Old City, but the suicide bombers are not. All this praying, singing and dancing — all this freedom — comes at a price.

Surrounded by psychopathic child-killers and totalitarian madmen vowing a second Holocaust, the people of Israel pay the price for freedom.

And in the shadow of the remaining fragment of their twice-destroyed temple, they invite the world to join them in celebrating that freedom.

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.

How long before they chant “Gas the Jews”?

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First, let me apologize to my Jewish readers. I realize that hearing those three words must be painful. Many of you have parents or grandparents whose friends or family were gruesomely murdered in that very manner.

The reason I use those words is that today in the year 2024 we are closer to such horror than we’ve been for 80 years, and we must not pretend otherwise. The Jewish nation that promised “never again” is being explicitly threatened with “again.”

This moment comes in the wake of the atrocious murdering, raping, beheading, burning alive and hostage-taking committed by Palestinians against civilian men, women and children playing peacefully on a pretty fall day in Israel last Oct. 7. The Palestinians since then have rejected numerous proposals for a cease fire in exchange for the hostages they took, apparently because they’ve already tortured, raped, beheaded, burned and, finally, murdered those hostages.

Alive, the hostages would have been more useful to Hamas. Dead, the hostages are no longer hostages, but just bodies. But, alas, the Palestinians’ temptation to torture, rape, behead, burn and murder was apparently irresistible to them.

Such depravity is consistent with the Palestinians’ broader conundrum. Israel has repeatedly offered them land for a Palestinian state if only they would agree to peace. But they don’t want peace; what they want is the eradication of the Jewish state and the Jews. Their ambitions for a nation are hostage to their hatred of Jews.

If these so-called people had been around at the time of Solomon (they weren’t) they would have wanted the baby cut in half.

These bloody terrorists have found recruits in naïve young American students. These kids don’t know what Hamas is, don’t know the history of the Jews, have scarcely heard of the Holocaust, and when they chant “From the River to the Sea” they don’t know what river they’re chanting about nor what sea.

As for their sloganeering that the Jews are committing genocide in seeking to prevent yet another pogrom by an outfit that just committed one and promises another, well, excuse me but there’s something obscene about accusing the Jews – the Jews! – of genocide.

These protesting students are foolish, ignorant, useful idiots looking to be cool.

They’re too young to falsely claim they were at Woodstock, as their grandparents falsely claim. But it’s not too late to support people with darkish skin and to persecute people with lightish skin.

Their notion of data-gathering is to notice that most Israelis have lighter skin than most Palestinians, and so the Israelis must be wrong and the Palestinians must be right.

With that, it’s . . . to the barricades! (Their own grandchildren will be so proud of them – this is their Woodstock!) At our once-great universities and elsewhere, they skip classes (it’s spring, after all) to chant:

“Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”

“Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too!”

“Death to Israel”

“Death to America”

“We are Hamas”

“Hitler was Right”

To answer my own question in the headline, the chant “Gas the Jews” has already been used by a mob in Sydney, Australia – not exactly a sister city of Auschwitz. This same hatred is increasingly evident in places that in the past have made easy boasts about their tolerance and anti-bigotry, such as Boston, New York, Berkeley and Ann Arbor.   

It will soon be in Peoria. Let’s be ready this time.