I am calling for a complete and total shutdown of all Middle East studies departments in American universities until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
Actually, we know what’s going on. Since the early 90s at least, the field has been captured by pro-Arab pro-Palestinian thinking and propaganda. It’s deeply embedded now and has been for a long time, producing generations of “scholars” with the same point of view, and students as well.
I believe this was jump-started by the highly influential Edward Said, about whom I plan to write quite a bit in a future post or posts. I first learned about him around the time I started blogging, which was almost twenty years ago, but although I’ve mentioned him before I don’t think I’ve ever written anything in-depth.
(1) Jim Jordan has made progress in his quest to secure the speakership, but it seems he’s still got a way to go. I hope he makes it soon.
(2) The Hamas terrorists wore bodycams on October 7th. They are proud of snuff films and have been for quite some time. I wonder if some of them watch the sort of violent porn that’s taken over online these days.
(3) Trump gag order is issued by the judge in the Jack Smith Trump trial. Of course. But all of this is not election interference – oh no, surely not.
The United Nation organization that works with Palestinian refugees and their descendants said Sunday that Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip had apparently stolen fuel and medical supplies meant for refugees from its premises in Gaza City, during the fighting triggered by the terror group’s deadly shock attack on Israel.
And then they deleted the message, and were met with this comment from the Israeli Foreign Ministry:
The Foreign Ministry mocked UNRWA for deleting the posts.
“Did Hamas also break into your Twitter account? Or are you just scared of disappointing your terrorist friends?” the ministry wrote on an X account it manages, known simply as “Israel.”
In one of the many bleak ironies of the Middle East, the UN is one of the terrorists’ chief enablers. Probably second only to Iran.
(5) This is a big topic, and I may return to it another time – but we’ve been hearing a great deal about “proportionality,” which is the idea that somehow Israel shouldn’t hurt the Palestinians too much. But what does the word really mean and what does the law of war say about Israel’s response, as opposed to how the press tries to tell it? You can learn the answer here as well as here:
(6) DeSantis expedites bringing Floridians back from Israel, and takes a very firm stand against receiving a single Palestinian refugee in this country.
Lehigh County, Pa., is on fire right now with the outrage of at least 70 families who are on a mission to have Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen, a “child abuse pediatrician,” fired from Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) and hopefully brought up on criminal charges. The families allege that Dr. Jenssen diagnosed all of them with the controversial “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” and accused them of child abuse when they brought their children into LVHN for various reasons.
This doesn’t surprise me, because I dealt with a similar case long ago. It was a single case, not a group, but I felt a parent with a sick child had been falsely accused. Fortunately, a medical diagnosis was finally made. But it was touch and go for a while.
I do think that Munchausen’s by Proxy exists, but it is very rare. If any doctor is seeing 70 such cases (or even as many as five), it should be a red flag – on the doctor.
The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims. That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.
What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and Muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs.
Lipson goes on to list many differences, such as – just to take one example – their attitudes towards homosexuality. Then he explains:
They deal with differences very simply: They never mention them when they act jointly, primarily against Israel and its supporters across the world. They have joined together to form a more powerful coalition against shared enemies. They would destroy that partnership by raising issues where they differ.
Far better to focus on their agreement, which goes beyond hating Israel to claim Western capitalism has oppressed, degraded, and ruined the world. Since the U.S. is now the world’s greatest power, it is tagged as the main source of that malignancy, at home and abroad. As they see it, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are poor because they have been oppressed by capitalist nations and their corporations. …
Both groups are fundamentally opposed to the forbearance of individual differences, including very different views and goals, that are essential to Western constitutional democracies.
I don’t disagree, but my emphasis would be quite different. I would say their most fundamental similarity is the principle that Humpty Dumpty espoused: ““The question is who is to be master – that’s all.” Both philosophies share the desire to control human thought, minds, and activities, and the more total the control the better. If it must be done through cruelty and force, so be it. They merely differ on what they want to control and how they want people to think. And ultimately they lock horns.
It’s an old old old story. Anyone who studies history should remember Iran in 1979, when the Left and the Ayatollahs joined forces to overthrow the hated Shah, who turned out to have been a much better ruler than either of them. Their alliance was one of the things that puzzled me deeply at the time, but later I felt I understood. The Left thought it was using the religious fundamentalists as a means to an end, and the end was that they would be master. But Ayatollah Khomeini knew he would get the last laugh and had no hesitation to murder them – or anyone else – if need be. His ascension to power in Iran was almost immediately followed by a bloodbath.
It’s still the same old story, on a larger world stage. The Left in the West doesn’t seem to understand the nature of what it’s up against. Recent horrific events in Israel have acted to peel away a few people on the Left who seem both outraged and surprised at their fellow leftists who continue to support Hamas and the Palestinians. They should not have been surprised.
For a change of pace, here’s Audrey Hepburn singing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “Show Me” for the My Fair Lady film. I understand why she was dubbed instead; there’s a lot of strain in her voice. But I like her version of “Loverly” anyway, because it fits and is of a whole. Her version of “Show Me” is less successful. Then again, why not use Julie Andrews, who could do it all? Hepburn herself is loverly, though. And so is that costume for “Show Me”:
The dubbed movie version of “Loverly” is here. No question that Marni Nixon and the technicians did a good job, but it’s somewhat in the Uncanny Valley for me:
I saw the stage original in 1956 with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews on Broadway when I was a small child. I remember it and I loved it.
… (a popular descriptive phrase on the left, uttered without any indication of what it might mean or why Gazans might be blocked by other Muslim countries such as Egypt), Hamas members are presently the wardens and guards. And Egypt has a role there, too, in keeping its own borders closed.
Since Friday the [Israeli] army has been urging Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate, indicating it is planning to significantly intensify operations there. On Saturday it said Hamas was actively preventing travel south with roadblocks on major roads. …
Al-Sheikh, secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Authority’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said the Palestinian leadership “rejects by all means the Israeli attempts to displace the citizens of Gaza Strip, considers this a war crime added to the series of Israeli war crimes and calls on the international community to intervene to stop this genocidal war in the Gaza Strip.” …
“If you care about yourself and your loved ones, go south as instructed,” the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesman, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“Rest assured that Hamas leaders have taken care of themselves and are taking cover from strikes in the region,” he added.
In response to the IDF’s call for civilians to move south, Hamas told residents to stay in their homes: “Do not follow the propaganda evacuation instructions.” The terror group is known to try and force residents to ignore such notices given by the military.
Hamas would like to maximize the Palestinian civilian casualties, and they are hoping that “the international community” will put the brakes on Israel in some magical manner. It’s happened before that Israel has backed off because of pleas from that community and/or pressure from the US. It may happen again, but that’s not what I predict will occur. Israel is fighting for its life, and the opinion of diplomats is not going to stop it from doing what it feels it needs to do. The Israelis themselves don’t want to kill civilians – I think they’ve made that clear for many decades, if people have eyes to see it. But they will not desist from a much more large-scale attack this time.
I think this is what Hamas wanted, thinking that Israeli retaliation and dead Palestinian children to show the press and the UN would be good for propaganda. It always has been that way in the past. I believe Hamas also thought their own terrorist brutality against Israelis would inspire and rally other Arab states and many Arab immigrants in Western countries, and it has. But I don’t think anyone except perhaps Hezbollah is eager to jump into the fray right now with boots on the ground. I could be wrong about this, but I don’t even think the diplomat crowd and their calls for “proportionate response” will matter this time, and even their voices sound somehwat more hollow than usual to me. And I think all of this is somewhat of a surprise to both Hamas and Iran.
In summary, please ponder this:
[Gaza’s] Al-Shifa Hospital is receiving hundreds of wounded every hour and had used up 95% of its medical supplies, hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia said. Water is scarce and the fuel powering its generators is dwindling.
“The situation inside the hospital is miserable in every sense of the word,” he said. “The operating rooms don’t stop.”
Selmia estimated that 40,000 displaced civilians were sitting under the trees in the empty grounds surrounding the hospital, as well as inside the building’s lobby and corridors, hoping they would be protected there from the fighting.
The hospital is widely reported to be sitting atop a major Hamas headquarters, with the terror group using the facility as a shield.
Here’s the type of person all too numerous in our own State Department. I’m not referring to Parry the admiral. I mean the other guy, the one who speaks first, Sir Richard Dalton:
Richard Dalton was educated at Winchester College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He joined HM Diplomatic Service in 1970, went to study Arabic at MECAS in the Lebanon and was posted as Second Secretary to Amman in 1973. His next posting was as Second Secretary, later First Secretary, to UKMIS New York in 1975, and he returned to the FCO four years later. …
From 1993 to 1997, Dalton was Consul-General in Jerusalem effectively becoming Ambassador to the Palestinian Authority during the early years of the Middle East peace process. He was appointed Head of Personnel in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1998, and was sent as Britain’s Ambassador to Libya in 1999, when diplomatic relations were resumed after a 17-year break. Between 2003 and 2006, Dalton was ambassador to Iran.
Somewhere along the line something happened to him, or maybe he started out that way. I knew someone when I was in law school who later became a diplomat, and he was already an arrogant and condescending leftist with a tendency to “go native.” I also did some socializing years ago with a group of retired diplomats and I would describe them the same way.
At any rate, Dalton was complaining back in 2014 about the undue influence of the Israel lobby:
One of the frustrations is that my colleagues and I are not pro-Palestinian, pro-Arab, pro-Israel, pro-anything. We want what is best for Britain. But there is a pro-Israel lobby and it’s active in trying to define the debate in order to limit the options that British politicians can choose to options that would be acceptable to that lobby.
I don’t see anyone stopping Sir Dalton from opining ad nauseam, so that “pro-Israel lobby” must have lost the power to “define the debate.” If you go to YouTube and look at the comments to that video, almost all of them express astonishment at his statements, for example:
Can someone please explain to me how refusing to supply the enemy, who is actively aggressing against you, with your own resources for their people, can be considered a “war crime”?
No one seemed willing to answer.
Or this:
A war crime?!?! What about what the Palestinian terrorist group did to Israel??!! If your tenant kills your family, will you keep providing them cable?! Geez get real buddy!
Hoping a determined sadistically aggressive enemy can be discouraged from attacking by you taking a morally superior pacifistic stance is so naive that it would be more honest to call it what it is – stupid.
Britain would have lost WWII, if they’d been forced to live by anything like the rules he feels that Israel must adhere to.
Admiral Parry’s remarks, on the other hand, are quite sensible in that video. If I were sitting there listening to Dalton, I would not be able to maintain such calm.
Here’s an example of the way some newspeople are covering this:
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appeals for Israel to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” after the Israeli army ordered more than one million people to evacuate north Gaza.
“The Secretary-General and his team have been working the phones. He’s been in constant contact with Israeli authorities, urging them to avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric tells reporters. …
He calls for the order “to be rescinded, avoiding what could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.”
The massacre on Saturday was a tragedy in that it was extremely sad, but it was also a war crime perpetrated by the government of Gaza. The order to evacuate northern Gaza was issued in order to help civilians avoid being killed by Israeli’s attempts to defang Hamas, the perpetrators. The situation is already “calamitous,” and telling Israel to desist merely puts Israeli lives further at risk at the expense of the Palestinians.
But I would expect nothing less of the UN for many reasons. The first one is that for decades the UN has become a cesspool of anti-Semitic anti-Israel rhetoric and condemnations, and pro-Palestinian activity. The second one is that the UN is the main agency running the Palestinian camps and providing for them. Palestinians are the UN’s most-favored refugees, until the umpteenth generation. For example:
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) announced the transfer of its operations to the south of Gaza, but he said some staff had asked to stay in the north.
“We are not pushing people to move. People have to make their own their own decisions,” he says.
There are “13,000 UNRWA staff members in Gaza, frontline workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, people offering psychosocial services. …
He says the UN was working with the Israelis and with Egypt to get aid in and create “areas of safety” for civilians.
“People should be able to be safe in their own in their own homes,” Dujarric says.
Indeed they should – even if they are Israelis. But when a nation wars on another nation, the citizens of that first nation become at risk. Israel is fairly unique in giving warnings for humanitarian reasons.
And what of this sudden mention of Egypt? The Palestinians could easily go to Egypt, but Egypt’s border has long been closed to them because Egypt doesn’t want any more of them. They’ve worn out their welcome with most of the Arab states many times over by their truculent desire to disrupt and take over every state they enter. Ask the people who fled Lebanon during the Civil War there, and ask the Jordanians who recall Black September.
The UN has been an enormous enabler of the keeping of Palestinians in camps and on the dole. See this:
Camps are set up by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to accommodate Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War or in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, and their patrilineal descendants. There are 68 Palestinian refugee camps, 58 official and 10 unofficial, ten of which were established after the Six-Day War while the others were established in 1948 to 1950s.
Whilst only a third of registered Palestinian refugees live within the boundaries of the refugee camps, Palestinian refugees “show extraordinary social and economic integration outside the camps and informal gatherings”. Many Palestinian refugees live in adjacent or nearby “gatherings”, defined as “the geographic area, outside the official camps, which is home to a minimum 15 Palestinian households.
The total number of registered Palestine refugees has grown from 750,000 in 1950 to around 5 million in 2013.
Those are the generations of their children and grandchildren and perhaps great-grandchildren, born and raised in these “camps” which are not exactly camps:
Refugee camps developed from tented cities to rows of concrete blockhouses to urban ghettos indistinguishable from their surroundings (effectively becoming urban developments within existing cities or by themselves), that house around one third of all registered Palestine refugees.
The funding for UNRWA activities comes almost entirely from voluntary contributions from UN member states. UNRWA also receives some funding from the Regular Budget of the United Nations, which is used mostly for international staffing costs
I don’t think there’s any other group in the world that’s been given such preferential treatment by the UN for over seventy years.
As for how many Palestinians don’t support and cheer the murder of Jewish babies, I don’t know. I am virtually certain there are some, but I don’t think it’s even a majority. I’m with this guy on the question:
