Tag Archives: palestine

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.

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.

DSC01970

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.

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.

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.