In no surprise whatsoever, ISIS has claimed “credit” for the blast in Iran:
ISIS claims responsibility for a pair of explosions that killed at least 84 people near the grave of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force who was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq four years ago.
Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber accused Israel of having a hand in the attack, saying that “the representatives of the Zionist regime” had spilled blood with the blast.
Sure thing, Mokhber. We all know about those Zionists who control ISIS – not. But when in doubt, blame the Jews.
This is actually part of a Shiite/Sunni fight that’s been going on for just about as long as Islam has been going on. This is one of the current forms it takes: a bitter power struggle between ISIS and Iran. Although they two agree on hating the Jews and America, they are in many other ways opposed to each other – and, being Islamic jihadis and fanatics, this often takes the form of killing each other. The rest of the non-Islamic world cares a lot less about that, because there are no Jews involved, despite accusations.
Actually, it started over a month ago when I was out west and broke a tooth. Split it longitudinally down the middle between front half and back half, with the back half disappearing and leaving the front part looking quite normal. It’s something I’d never done before and which still puzzles me. I wasn’t even chomping on anything all that challenging.
Today was the day for the temporary crown. After I put my shoes on while getting ready to go out, one of my socks felt like it needed a bit of pulling up. So I slipped out of the shoe – they’re very easy-on, easy-off – and saw to my horror a large bug crawling out of the shoe, over the top and down, and then towards a crack in the wall where it mercifully disappeared. Will I now have to look inside my shoes with a flashlight every time I put them on? Did I mention this was a very large and revolting bug, one of those scuties I wrote about long ago?
I decided to assume it would tell it’s scutie friends beyond the wall to beware of getting into those black boats belonging to the weird creature on the other side. They may look cozy and comfy at first, but you run the risk of suddenly getting crushed.
My dentist is new and rather young. He bought the practice of my old dentist who was, well, old. I had a crush of sorts on the old dentist, who “got” my humor and used to joke back, and who was actually very attractive despite his advanced age (married, alas). This new dentist seems competent and kind, but I’d never had work done by him and this was apparently a challenging job.
So I was nervous.
I was there for three hours. I’m not a dental-phobic, but there’s always some tension and this was a bit more grueling than usual, with more drilling and other involved machinations. They had all these new-fangled gadgets – for example some sort of scanner probe that takes a topographic portrait of your entire mouth that ends up looking like a white mountain range with pink foothills. This is supposed to replace old-fashioned impressions (which I never found to be a problem) and lead to a better-fitting crown. And so I suppose it did, although the first crown wouldn’t fit and they had to make a second.
I found afterwards that I felt very tired. I think it’s because even if you are trying to relax and think you’re doing a pretty good job, there’s a low-level constant stress that leads to tensing of various muscles for a long time even if you’re unaware of doing that. Dentistry is an exercise in trust; you’re in the hands of two strangers poking around inside your mouth and inflicting discomfort at times or even pain, and you’re captive in that chair and will be paying a great deal for the privilege.
Explosions at an event honoring a prominent Iranian general slain in a U.S. airstrike in 2020 have killed at least 103 people and wounded over 140 others, state-run media in Iran reported Wednesday.
A senior official called the blasts a “terroristic” attack, without elaborating on who could be behind them amid wider tensions in the Mideast over Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. …
The blasts struck an event marking the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, who died in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. The explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman, about 500 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran.
I’m going to assume they certainly weren’t celebrating his killing – which occurred during the Trump administration – but mourning it.
As for who was responsible for this attack, it’s like an Agatha Christie novel: there are way too many suspects to say. But if it’s Israel – and I have no idea whether it is – it would be a way to remind Iran officials that we can get you, too.
Deputy Hamas chief Saleh al-Arouri was killed on Tuesday night in an Israeli drone strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a stronghold of the allied Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, signalling the conflict between Hamas and Israel could be expanding to engulf more of the region.
In response to questions from Reuters, the Israeli military said it does not respond to reports in the foreign media.
Lebanon’s national news agency said the drone struck a Hamas office. Two security sources said the strike had targeted a meeting between Hamas officials and Lebanon’s Sunni Islamist Jama’a Islamiya faction and left a total of four Palestinians and three Lebanese dead.
The strike marks the first targeted assassination of a Hamas official outside Palestinian Territories since the Palestinian group’s deadly assault on Israeli territory on Oct. 7. …
Hamas confirmed Arouri’s killing and said Qassam Brigade officials Samir Findi Abu Amer and Azzam Al-Aqraa Abu Ammar were also killed. …
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh on Tuesday said Arouri’s killing is “terrorist act,” a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and an expansion of Israel’s hostility against Palestinians.
Those killed were military leaders of the Gazan government, which on October 7 had perpetrated a vicious and widespread attack on Israel with no provocation. Israel has declared war in response. So this is neither a war crime nor a terrorist act, although the Hamas-lovers will believe it is.
And then there’s this:
Iran said the killing would further galvanize the fight against Israel, while Yemen’s Houthi movement expressed condolences.
In Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, hundreds took to the streets to urge retaliation, shouting “Revenge, revenge, Qassam.”
Like before they were restrained, and now they’re going to step it up? Of course, Hezbollah could step it up and/or Iran could step it up, but whether they do that and when they do that and how they do that will not be determined by Arouri’s death but by tactical and strategic considerations. Those parties on the Arab and Iranian side are committed to Israel’s destruction.
The Israeli press is somewhat more forthcoming about Arouri’s stature in the terrorist hierarchy [emphasis mine]:
Based in Lebanon, Arouri, 57, was one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, deputy head of the terror group’s political bureau and considered the de facto leader of Hamas’s military wing in the West Bank, though he has long resided elsewhere. He was regarded as the most notorious Hamas figure in orchestrating West Bank terrorism against Israel. …
Israeli intelligence officials believe that among numerous other attacks, Arouri helped plan the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens — Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Naftali Fraenkel.
He served several terms in Israeli jails, and was released in March 2010 as part of efforts to reach a larger prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit, an IDF corporal kidnapped by Hamas in 2006. Arouri went on to be involved in sewing up the deal that provided for the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in return for the freeing of Shalit in 2011.
That history of having been in Israeli prisons and released for Shalit was the case for so many of the masterminds of the October 7 attack. It was an incredibly costly trade which again points out how dangerous it is to trade terrorist prisoners for hostages. Of course, that already has been done recently in exchange for some of the October 7 hostages, but at least the prisoners exchanged in that deal were lower-level terrorists than those released in 2010 and 2011.
There had been a five million dollar bounty on Arouri’s head, but Israel didn’t get him till now. I’m curious what led them to him at this point, although I’m pretty sure I’ll never know. Are there more moles now? Have Israeli intelligence tools improved? Did someone in another Arab country that’s very threatened by Hamas’ behavior spill the beans on Arouri?
This is disturbing – a shortage of chemo drugs, as well as other generic medications. The reason seems at first to be one of those “unintended consequences” things:
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former executives affiliated with the generic drug industry described many risks that discourage a company from increasing production that might ease the shortages.
They said prices were pushed so low that making lifesaving medicines could result in bankruptcy. It’s a system in which more than 200 generic drugmakers compete, at times fiercely, for contracts with three middleman companies that guard the door to a vast number of customers.
In some cases, generic drugmakers offer rock-bottom prices to edge out rivals for coveted deals. In other instances, the intermediaries — called group-purchasing organizations — demand lower prices days after signing a contract with a drugmaker.
The downward pressure on prices — no doubt often a boon to the pocketbooks of patients and taxpayers — is intense. The group purchasers compete against one another to offer hospitals the lowest-priced products, which intermediary companies say also benefits consumers. They earn fees from drugmakers based on the amount of medications the hospitals buy.
“The business model is broken,” said George Zorich, a pharmacist and retired generic drug industry executive. “It’s great for G.P.O.s. Not great for drug manufacturers, not great for patients in some cases.”
But then we have the following, which seems to be something else entirely:
Prices fell in recent years for two of the three drugs that Ms. Scanlan was initially offered to treat her cancer. During those years, Intas Pharmaceuticals, a generics giant in India, steadily gained market share as other companies left, according to data from the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit that tracks drug shortages.
But the company had to halt U.S. production to deal with quality issues that the F.D.A. cited after a surprise inspection of one of its sprawling plants in India. Inspectors had discovered quality-control staff workers shredding and throwing acid on key records. The manufacturing shutdown set off a supply shock in February that would be felt nationwide.
Outsourcing production to places such as India is another way to save money, but it’s at the risk of quality control, as well as dependence on other countries. We learned a lot about that during the COVID years as well.
[NOTE: The article – from The NY Times – is sprawling and rather poorly written. But it does seem to be describing a troubling situation, although the causes seem to be multiple and somewhat murky.]
And of course it’s not just Harvard. Would that it were. But the problem is pervasive in academia and beyond.
This Legal Insurrection piece spotlights an excellent editorial by Rabbi David Wolpe in the Harvard Crimson. Wolpe, who is a visiting scholar in the Divinity School, had been on a Harvard anti-Semitism committee but resigned in December.
Here’s his Crimson article, which I especially recommend because it points out some things about anti-Semitism that I think are important to understand. I’ve made similar points here, but he expresses the ideas succinctly:
In the calculus of an antisemite, Jews are both subhuman and superhuman – vermin who control the world. Common antisemitic rhetoric places Jews at the center of conspiracies, secretly controlling anything and everything: America, the banks, the Middle East, a vast colonialist enterprise, immigration, the Federal Reserve, NATO, and even Taylor Swift’s concert tour schedule.
People hate Jews because they are communists, capitalists, foreigners, residents, immigrants, elitists, have strange ways, are unassimilated, too assimilated, bankroll the left (like George Soros) or bankroll the right (like Sheldon Adelson). People hate Jews because they are weak and stateless, or because they are Zionists and defend Israel.
That’s the thing about anti-Semitism: it’s protean and flexible, a versatile shape-shifter. That’s why there’s anti-Semitism of the right and of the left (and probably of the middle, too), although they emphasize different things. The ultimate question of “why?” has several answers (which I may take up in another post sometime), but I don’t think any of them are completely satisfactory although they all depend on the concept of hating the other and making it a repository for all the frustration of one’s own life or culture or country, or the demon blocking future aspirations (religious or otherwise). For example, there was Germany’s failure in WWI as well as its subsequent inflation, and the current abysmal state of much of the Arab world plus its religious fanaticism.
Wolpe goes on to discuss the anti-Semitism of Western academia, rooted in the post-modern Leftist view of the world:
One ideology common at Harvard is the colonialist settler ideology. Colonialists are people who come from one place, take a land, and now have two.
But, Jews are far from being colonialists. Jews come from Israel. In this ideology, the colonialists are almost always white, but the Jews in Israel are quite diverse. Colonialists do not share the land, but Israel gave the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt and has made many separate offers to share their land with Palestinians — which the Palestinians rejected. Further, Jews were kicked out of Israel by one colonial power — Rome — and returned by overthrowing the rule of another — Britain.
Much of Harvard is captured by an ideology that centers oppression, but dividing all of the world into oppressor and oppressed is dangerous. Once you divide humanity by race or creed or nation into two camps — the good and the evil — you have adopted the mentality of the despot. This is bad for society, as well as for Jews.
Indeed, as we’ve often said here.
Wolpe tackles the question of the underlying “why” of anti-Semitism:
Why all this hatred against one small people? We remained different, distinct. We would not become Christian or Muslim. We were outsiders, others, champions of diversity.
Moreover, Jewish culture — portable, book-focused, and one that venerates scholarship and learning — primes us for economies where information and mental agility lead to success. When you don’t like someone, seeing them succeed magnifies the antipathy.
Finally, Jews introduced the idea of ethical monotheism — the moral demands that one God makes on human beings — to the western tradition. As Jewish essayist Maurice Samuel said, “no one likes an alarm clock”; Jews represent conscience and conscience is a disruptive and painful partner in our lives.
Wolpe doesn’t offer a roadmap for changing this situation, and I can hardly fault him. Both post-modern anti-colonial theory and anti-Semitism are deeply entrenched at Harvard and elsewhere, and are particularly influential in young adults who have been macerated in these poisonous ideologies for much of their schooling and certainly their college years. The universities are loaded with tenured professors who are dedicated to this indoctrination of our youth, as well as administrators with the same beliefs. The overhaul needed is immense, and the voting public has already been tainted by these philosophies.
Colleges and universities therefore have no will to change this. The push has to come from outside: state legislatures (although that will only happen in red states), Congress if and only if Republicans take over with a fairly large margin rather than a small one, individual donors ending gifts, parents sending their children to schools that don’t teach this sort of thing, and the like. It’s certainly not just about anti-Semitism, although that’s an important factor. It’s about the future of Western civilization and the world.
I’ll close with this, which has appeared on this blog before:
I assume she’ll now achieve a sort of martyr status on the left: the racist right plus the Jews drove her out, or something like that.
At any rate, Gay has resigned. I believe it was more the plagiarism evidence than her Congressional testimony that caused her to finally quit, plus the defection of some donors. Perhaps no one of the three elements alone would have done it, but the combination was just too much, and even Jew-haters might be upset by the plagiarism and the loss of money (despite Harvard’s humongous endowment).
More:
Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University’s history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.
University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 will serve as Harvard’s interim president during a search for Gay’s permanent successor, the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — announced in an email on Tuesday.
If it hadn’t been for Elise Stefanik’s questions of the three university presidents, none of this would have happened. The plagiarism accusations probably wouldn’t have otherwise gotten much traction but for the sound bites of the testimony. Now the only president still in place of the three testifiers is MIT head Sally Kornbluth.
I have little doubt that Gay received messages that were racist. But that wasn’t what motivated the vast vast majority of her opponents. She doesn’t address the actual issues – her championship of DEI, her testimony in Congress, and her plagiarism – except to write this:
Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
It is distressing to have doubt cast on your commitment to scholarly rigor? How about the manifold objective evidence for your lack of commitment and rigor? How about your actual testimony to Congress? Why is your distress more important than answering the charges?
(1) There’s been large earthquake in Japan, and a tsunami warning. It’s hard to get a sense of whether there’s much loss of life, but it doesn’t seem as though there is. Plenty of property damage, though.
… 2023 saw more than a dozen states start to take action against the DEI hydra, with six achieving concrete steps that other states should follow. …
There is a limit to what states can accomplish. Democratic governors and legislators will not manage what is possible in states fully controlled by Republicans, such as Florida and Texas.
But as private companies also turn away from DEI bureaucracies, there is clear bipartisan momentum toward a solid response to DEI excesses. Ending mandated diversity statements for higher education hires is an easy first step all states should take.
Dan Crenshaw has proposed a bill to cut federal funding of schools with mandatory DEI statements.
(3) The Israeli High Court has done the following:
In a monumental, highly controversial decision, the High Court of Justice strikes down legislation passed earlier this year that curtailed judicial oversight of the government, annulling for the first time in Israel’s history an element of one of its quasi-constitutional Basic Laws.
The court split almost down the middle over the highly contentious legislation, which eliminated judicial use of the “reasonableness” standard — the only significant law from the government’s judicial overhaul agenda to have been passed so far. Eight justices vote in favor of striking down the law, while seven vote to uphold it.
The ruling establishes in legal precedent the High Court’s contention that it has, in limited circumstances, the right to annul Basic Laws, despite these being the basis of authority for all state institutions, including the court.
It’s a mistake to think of the Israeli High Court as the equivalent of our Supreme Court. The Israeli Court is far more powerful; I’ve written about the Israeli situation in this post and I strongly suggest you read it. The summary version is that the Israeli court is an unelected self-perpetuating body that appoints most of the new justices itself, and the “reasonableness” standard allows the court enormous powers unchecked by other branches of government.
… [Trump] came out in support of building the FBI a “new and spectacular” building. He also said that the bureau should not be decentralized but should be given an increased role in Washington, D.C.
(5) Here are the predictions of Legal Insurrection’s authors for the year 2024. I’m in there too, although this past year I’ve been less active at the site due to extreme busyness.
January first always feels like a clean slate day. And yet it’s really just a continuum.
But that “clean slate” feeling is why people make resolutions. I don’t make formal ones anymore – I know better. But I’m always resolving to improve, especially on two dimensions of my life: make more of a dent in my nightowl proclivities, and figure out a way to lose ten pounds. Whenever I mention that last bit on this blog, I get a ton of suggestions involving low-carb and/or Taubes and/or keto and/or intermittent fasting. I’ll say right here and now – once again – that I’m very happy those eating programs worked for you, but they don’t work for me for various reasons too tedious to go into here for the umpteenth time.
Do I sound grumpy? Well, maybe I am. I find I’ve been more short-tempered than usual this past year. The bad news of the world grates on me and of course Gerard’s death, which occurred close to a year ago now. I’ve taken time off since Thanksgiving from working on his book, and now I’m taking the task up again. I predict – loosely – that I’ll get it out about two months from now. For various reasons, the process has been far more complicated than I imagined.
I’m grateful for the friends and family I still have, especially my precious – although far away – grandchildren. And of course for all of you, my readers.
