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Academics and artists for Palestinian terror — 39 Comments

1. Their deep ignorance of the precepts of the implications of a true worldwide caliphate with its attendent Sharia law, and what it would truly mean for the “life and freedom” of these academics and artists to be reduced to dhimmitude (at best), is sad, absurd, and comic. They know not what they’re advocating for.

2. They know not what they’re advocating for.

   Yes, they do.

3. Frank Furedi has a good Substack today, on academics calling for blood and slaughter as “decolonization”:

   https://tinyurl.com/22wh23b3

4. Charles dance often plays a villain

   Most recently he was mountbatten in the crown

   the son of a british army officer now he wants to be one along with non conformists
   Like swinton and coogan who would the first to get the settler treatment by hamas

5. Sadly, a large number of the 260+ slaughtered at the music festival were Jews who favored peace and coexistence with fanatic Islam. There can be peace between neighbors who respect each other. There can be no peace with neighbors whose only goal is to kill you.

6. John Anderson interviews Victor Davis Hanson, in the course of which they touch firmly on this very subject — see mins 16 to 22 and 34 to 42 — as well as many other current issues: https://youtu.be/FG0cgViEcc8?si=5z1kikfj6t0JPmhC

7. A character in my novel a spymaster turned contractor who is an arabist like sir dalton i pictured like terence stamp or anthony hopkins but i settled on charles dance

8. I waded through some of the names at “Artists for Palestine.” A lot of names are Arabic in origin. There are some nominally Jewish names. There was an Israeli actor, Doron Ben-David. I gave up around “F” in the alphabet.

   They should be sent graphic photos of what Hamas did. Of EVERY victim. Make them look at over 1000 photos of people, children, babies, murdered, tortured… See how much they support those animals after that.

9. See how much they support those animals after that.

   They will continue to support those animals.

   The rot in American society is worsening, accelerating.

10. There’s irony in that I’m sure these people want ‘hate speech’ prosecuted as crimes with jail time.

11. Unfortunately, I fear that the rot is so deep that it cannot be exorcised.
    We see stories of benefactors “closing their checkbooks” to various elite Universities. Well and good, but for the most part their endowments are already obscene. Ever wonder what they do with all of that money? They certainly don’t lower the cost to paying students.

    There are suggestions that people forego college and go directly into the workplace. Not only would it help to break the grip that the academic cabal has developed, it would save the individuals a great deal of money. That is a fine idea, whenever possible. Again, unfortunately, the claws are so deep into many fields that require degrees, even meaningless ones, at the minimum for entry. The entry requirements continue to escalate as advanced degrees are often the threshold.
    One example. My younger daughter entered the Physical Therapy profession some decades ago with a Bachelor’s degree, and joined the staff of a nationally renowned rehab hospital. But even then the prevailing norm was a Master’s. Now it takes a Doctorate to get your foot in the door. (She did go back a few years ago for hers in part to keep up because her staff increasingly have Doctorates. The beat goes on.)
    Nearly seventy years ago, I entered USN flight training as a Cadet with two years of college (really smart people could enter directly from enlisted ranks with less). The Air Force requirements were similar. No longer. But, as the pool of the willing becomes smaller, that may change.

    A significant percentage of former cadets went on to distinguished careers. Invariably, at some point, those individuals obtained degrees, or graduate degrees, one way or another because we cannot have senior officers who lack the appropriate credentials. (The ever generous American taxpayer financed my own BA/MS after 15 years of under educated service.)

12. Maybe Republican politicians might, you know actually do something about this in the states in question, by smashing higher education’s rice bowls.
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    1. End government grants to corporate bodies and persons with institutional addresses. That includes higher education, big time.
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    2. Limit federal tuition vouchers for students in higher education to ROTC, veterans’ benefits, analogues to ROTC for those seeking to work in certain civilian federal agencies, staff development for federal employees, a selection of Americans living abroad, military dependents, dependents of those in itinerant civilian occupations, reservation Indians, and residents of the low census insular dependencies. (The bulk of the expenditure in this schema would be to ROTC and veterans’ benefits; the rest are niche clientele).
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    3. Phase out federal guarantees on student loans, liquidate Sallie Mae, and phase out undue protection for creditors in the student loan market.
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    4. In public employment at the state and federal level, restore impersonal civil service examinations for recruitment and promotion, end generic educational qualifications to enter applicant pools, limit specific qualifications to the fancy professions which are commonly licensed, and accept certification examinations in lieu of specific degrees.
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    5. Repeal employment discrimination law applicable in the private sector bar in re the contents of collective bargaining agreements and employment by natural monopolies.
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    6. In state corporation law, institute a general prohibition on the distribution of grants by private corporations to others, then carve out a few exceptions. The exceptions: political parties and contribution bundlers could give to campaign committees; charitable and religious corporations could give to individual persons and to households; and foundations could give to a menu of philanthropic agencies which perform actual services.
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    7. Debar foundations from any activity but donating their income and assets. Debar contribution bundlers from any activity but making donations to campaign committees. Require campaign committees, contribution bundlers, and foundations to liquidate under court supervision within a specified period of time (say, two years, twelve years, and sixty years). Lawful destination of assets would be donors and the descendants, service performing philanthropies, and a government holding fund distributed among taxpayers at the close of each fiscal year. Unlawful destinations: other foundations.
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    8. Limit the use of self-regenerating boards to philanthropies founded in the last twenty years and to evanescent philanthropies. Limit the use of partially self regenerating boards to agencies founded in the last sixty years.
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    9. Require the boards of all private non profits have boards with somewhere in the range of 5-19 members, with the precise number a function of the size of the body of legally defined stakeholders. Require rotation-in-office rules for trustees. Require that all trustees be elected for four year terms and that all elections be conducted the same year of a quadrennial cycle. Require that such elections be by a postal ballots supervised by state and local boards of elections. Stakeholders with a franchise would have to be registered voters in the state and meet threshold requirements specified in law to be considered stakeholders. In the case of higher education, someone who was in residence at a school for at least one academic year and obtained a bacclaureate, master’s, first-professional, or research degree from the school would be a stakeholder.
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    10. In the case of state colleges and universities, constitute boards of trustees in the manner indicated above.
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    11. For schools which recruit across state lines, require in federal law that they publish an audited disclosure statement on the school’s demographics, stock and flow. Provide for criminal prosecution of the school and specific officers thereof for lying. Data would have to be provided on the faculty, student body, and other employees. Data on students would have to include the median board and achievement test scores of the various demographic segments, and the associated standard deviations.
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    12. For schools which recruit across state lines, debar offers from a school to prospective employees currently resident in other states which include a promise of continuous tenure upon hire or at some future date.
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    13. For schools which recruit across state lines, debar contracts between the school and prospective students in other states to provide for study toward a baccalaureate or master’s degree. Instead, require such agreements be for 30, 60, or 90 credit hours of study of a discrete academic subject or 30, 48, 60, or 90 credit hours of study of a discrete occupational subject. Require that schools grant degrees to students who successfully complete each 30 credit subset
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    14. For schools which recruit across state lines, debar contracts between the school and prospective students in other states to provide for study toward a first professional degree outside of music, medicine and allied occupations, law, veterinary medicine, and clinical or school psychology; likewise, debar contracts between the school and prospective students in other states to provide for study toward a research degree in aught but the academic arts and sciences, music, the study of business, public policy, law, engineering, public health, and clinical laboratory sciences.
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    15. In particular states, have state legislatures enact a glossary of permissible degree and concentration programs at state schools, with capsule descriptions of each. Provide for state auditors to issue injunctions shutting down programs which do not respect the boundaries of the capsule descriptions.
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13. Going to be funny/sad when Jews discover their safe spaces are NASCAR events and Baptist churches.

14. When I was young and intoxicated with art in various forms, especially literature, I had the idea that because good or great artists are so insightful in the exercise of their art their political views must be equally insightful and therefore more likely to be correct than the views of the ordinary person. As I turned toward the political right I realized that that was not true, and then came to the further realization that artists are actually *less* likely to be correct in their political assessments, because they see the situation in aesthetic-dramatic terms.

    Performing artists, especially actors, are by far the worst. Not surprisingly. Drama is their business.

15. My new post at Ricochet: The Power of Information Dominance

    https://ricochet.com/1505061/the-power-of-information-dominance/

16. re Artists, a comment at X/Twitter:

    “I strongly believe we’re dealing with a generation of crazy ppl that have incoherent/ insane views abt the world who should’ve become artists, but instead became “thinkers”/ academics/ journalists.”

    https://twitter.com/RuxandraTeslo/status/1714983183748411470

    My response was:

    “I suspect that many of them lack the talent to be actual artists, and that their unhinged political activism is a substitute.”

17. “They know not what they’re advocating for.
    Yes, they do.”

    Do they? Are they prepared to be on receiving end as well as be a cheerleader?
    I think not.

18. I think they don’t think they’ll be on the receiving end.

19. I think all these actors, academics, and students need to be bluntly reminded it is they who are perpetuating Hitler’s Final Solution.

20. I suspect that many of them lack the talent to be actual artists, and that their unhinged political activism is a substitute.

    David Foster:

    I’m sure there’s some truth to that.

    However, actual artists with real talent, for instance most artists and writers, from the 1910s on, have also been on the Left. Think Picasso. Plenty o’ talent there.

    It’s hard to recall exceptions. T.S. Eliot, the later John Dos Passos, Nabokov, the Fugitive poets. Thank God for Tom Wolfe. Visual artists are harder.

    Modern art was born in the shocks of technology, revolution and world wars of the 20th C. It’s not surprising art since has had a radical bent.

    I consider Robert Hughes’s “The Shock of the New” documentary indispensable for understanding modern art. You can see the whole series starting here:

    –“The Shock of the New – Ep 1 – The Mechanical Paradise”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3ne7Udaetg&t=4s

    Coinservatives may be surprised that Hughes ultimately concludes radical modern art has reached a dead end and must return to earlier standards of beauty and skill.

21. Something Else Conservatives Really Do Not Get

    The arts are insanely competitive. Hardly anyone makes a living making art. However passionately they work or even how talented they may be.

    It’s brutal.

    Successful artists in any medium work full-time at making it. No small part of that requires networking and “fitting in” with the right people and the right beliefs.

    For most artists “fitting in” is now Job One.

22. huxley:

    Neruda.

23. Re: Neruda

    neo:

    Not sure of your point. Neruda really was a leftist, a communist, and a sincere one. I wish he weren’t.

    It remains a genuine possibility that he was murdered by injection by the right-wing Pinochet regime.

24. huxley:

    My point is that Neruda is a really good example of this observation of yours: “actual artists with real talent, for instance most artists and writers, from the 1910s on, have also been on the Left.” Neruda not only was a great poet who was on the left, he was a Communist and used his art to write poems in praise of Stalin. This to me is a paradox, as it apparently was to Octavio Paz:

    Although Paz still considered Neruda “The greatest poet of his generation”, in an essay on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he wrote that when he thinks of “Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages of the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith […] but insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves becoming entangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits, and perjuries, until they lost their souls.”

    He came to reject Stalin later, but remained a staunch Communist for life:

    Despite his disillusionment with Stalin, Neruda never lost his fundamental faith in Communist theory and remained loyal to “the Party.” Anxious not to provide ammunition to his ideological enemies, he would later refuse publicly to condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky, an attitude with which even some of his staunchest admirers disagreed.

25. How I love Neruda!
    How I wish he weren’t a communist!
    How I still understand.

    Here’s the first poem of the book which brought him fame when he was 19 years-old. It’s not from a political collection.
    _____________________________

    Body of a Woman

    Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
    you look like a world, lying in surrender.
    My rough peasant’s body digs in you
    and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

    I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
    and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
    To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
    like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

    But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
    Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
    Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
    Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

    Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
    My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
    Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
    and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

    –Pablo Neruda, “Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada — Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” (trans. W.S. Meriwn)

26. Neruda not only was a great poet who was on the left, he was a Communist and used his art to write poems in praise of Stalin.

    neo:

    Even when I was a 70s post-hippie poet in New Orleans I knew there was something wrong with Neruda’s Stalin poems.

27. “See how much they support those animals after that.”

    That is a very unfair comment. Most species are not that bad.

28. Neo says, “It seems clear to me that the people making these statements – be they in academia or in the arts – are largely unafraid of any backlash. I doubt they’ve experienced anything of the sort before, and most may not even be experiencing much of it now, although some have seen some negative consequences.”

    One possible sign of change: Russell Rickford, the Cornell prof who described Hamas’ brutality as “exhilarating,” has been induced (how, no one is saying) to apologize. His apology was printed in the Cornell student newspaper, the Sun; you can read it here:

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/cornell-professor-apologizes-for-comments-about-being-exhilarated-by-hamas-attack-on-israel/

    As one of Prof. Jacobson’s commenters noted, the apology “sounds like it was written by a damage control firm.”

29. It’s hard to recall exceptions. T.S. Eliot, the later John Dos Passos, Nabokov, the Fugitive poets. Thank God for Tom Wolfe.

    Also Mario Vargas Llosa. And plenty are at least apolitical, or at least don’t wear their politics on their sleeves. I couldn’t tell you what Faulkner’s or Hemingway’s politics were.

30. I remember there was an AMC production, an inconvenient woman, with maggie gylennhall, which proferred the Gaza narrative that was a few years ago,

31. I couldn’t tell you what Faulkner’s or Hemingway’s politics were.

    Jimmy:

    Hemingway wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which firmly took the side of the left in the Spanish Civil War, albeit with reservations about the Soviets.

    Faulkner’s politics are murkier, but there’s no question where he stood on civil rights and race relations in the South.

32. Vargas llosa had left politics in his youth, but he turned strongly against the castro regime, and their proxies in peru, he ran for office on a tom wolfe like campaign in 1990, I wrote a newspaper piece about it for the college paper,

    his son wrote the classic primer against anti American idiocy, which was unlearned in the 00s

33. Speaking of embarrassments in academia, whatever happened to the Duke University Group of 88? They falsely accused the Duke lacrosse team of gang rape and, I think, escaped any consequences.

34. in other related news

    https://deadline.com/2023/10/israel-war-wga-no-support-statement-1235579991/

35. “It’s hard to recall exceptions. T.S. Eliot, the later John Dos Passos, Nabokov, the Fugitive poets. Thank God for Tom Wolfe. Visual artists are harder.”

    Some conservative 20th century writers:

    Evelyn Waugh
    Anthony Powell
    Philip Larkin (whose “This Be The Verse” PA+Cat shared in another thread)
    Kingsley Amis (Larkin’s buddy)
    Robert Frost
    John O’Hara
    John P. Marquand
    Flannery O’Connor
    John Updike (not just his Vietnam essay, but his stories about the Maples)

    I’m sure there are others; these are the ones that come to mind. The novelist Robert Stone wasn’t a conservative, but, as a disillusioned member of the 1960s counterculture, he had a very jaundiced view of the Left.

    Visual artists are indeed harder. Among American artists of the 20th century, I suspect N.C. Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Tom Lea, and Harvey Dunn would have fallen on the conservative side of the political spectrum, to the extent they were political at all. Lea and Dunn were war artists.

36. You forgot Dos Passos who had an awakening in the Spanish Civil War, he hated Wilson with a passion, probably for the wrong reasons,

37. Flannery O’Connor’s work and public utterances do not map well to political disputes that were abroad during the period running from 1943-64. She was a loyal Southerner who with her mother preferred to have a gathering on the anniversary of Georgia’s secession than on the 4th of July. OTOH, she gave up on segregation, not when she was living in New York, but when she was living with her mother in Milledgeville.

38. Art Deco: “Flannery O’Connor’s work and public utterances do not map well to political disputes that were abroad during the period running from 1943-64.”

    Or now. It’s definitely a stretch to put either the conservative or liberal stamp on her. She was not a political animal. If memory serves she voted for JFK in 1960. It may have been that election in which she described going to vote with her mother so they could cancel out each other’s votes. Could have been Ike-Adlai I guess–similar antimony in any case.

    Of late she has been tried and convicted of racism, on the basis of several statements and incidents, such as refusing to meet with James Baldwin. A few years ago someone well known in literary circles (I can’t remember his name) published a piece that got a lot of attention called something like “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” I was so irritated by the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife framing of the question that I refused to read it. I think some college un-named a building that had been named for her. Fools.

39. A few years ago someone well known in literary circles (I can’t remember his name)
    ==
    It was Paul Elie. Not that well-known. He was on the masthead at Commonweal if I’m not mistaken. We have one of his books, an assemblage of short biographies.

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