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Regarding the Fanaticism, Anti-Semitism, Historical Ignorance and Fascist Inclinations of Today’s Pro-Hamas Campus Protesters: Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yes, the giant monster chickens have come home to roost. The academics who have used the past decades to indoctrinate malleable students into their victim-obsessed, intersectional ideology while undermining core American values have spawned mutated anti-Semites who regard terrorism as social justice. If this social pathogen didn’t threaten damage far beyond the campuses of woke educational institutions, I would be tempted to respond, “Good! You broke it, you pay for it.” Unfortunately, what’s going on here is far more ominous and potentially destructive.

Just take the time to read the bonkers manifesto of The Drexel Palestine Coalition (DPC), which set up an encampment on the Drexel campus four days ago. You have to read the whole thing to truly appreciate the dishonesty and delusions of this mob, but here are a few highlights to whet your taste for what George Floyd, cynical wokism, the Squad and a feckless President have wrought inflicted on our society;

  • “Label what is happening in Palestine for what it is: a 76 year long genocide and settler-colonial occupation by the State of Israel”
  • “Criticisms of Israel and Zionism will not be mischaracterized as antisemitic or hateful. Furthermore, speech and imagery that express support for Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian liberation must be explicitly characterized as acceptable and supported under the University Code of Conduct.”

In other words, “It isn’t what it is.”

  • “Immediately terminate Henry Israeli, professor of Literature of Genocide and the Director of Jewish Studies…”
  • “Immediately terminate Drexel’s chapter of Hillel, a global zionist campus organization, whose primary purpose, funding, and operations are to facilitate birthright trips to Occupied Palestine”
  • “Abolition of DUPD – Drexel Public Safety should not utilize a police force, private or otherwise, given a demonstrated bias against people of color, specifically Black and brown students and (Black Bottom) community members who are primarily low income Black residents.”
  • “Closure of the Starbucks Cafe located in the Lebow Business School”

Close STARBUCKS???? OK, now they’ve really gone too far.

Demands

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Comment of the Day: “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

See? An Ethics Alarms Comment of the Day does not have to be the length of an honors thesis to qualify for the honor.

This one, courtesy of A.M. Golden, resonated with me the second I read it. The post commented upon was about my discussion last night with a very dear friend—one of those relationships in which it doesn’t matter how long you are apart, it picks up, unchanged, from exactly where it was whether it’s after five minutes or 20 years—who was noticeably wary about expressing a clear opinion on the Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck in our conversation. Here’s the Comment of the Day, on the post, “A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend,” and I’ll elaborate after you read it….

***

We’ve had more than one careful conversation with a family member here and there myself.

Isn’t it a shame that your Jewish friend felt he had to test the waters before expressing his opinion, though?

We’re losing something precious in this country.

***

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A Careful Conversation With An Old Friend

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I received a surprise phone call today from a freind I have not seen for many years, and not seen frequently for more than a decade since he retired with his wife to Boca Raton. There are not too many people that I’ve known in my life who are as essentially good to the bone as—well, I’ll call him “Micah.” He’s a talented artist in many mediums, intuitive, sensitive, kind and wise. We decided to meet for a beer.

We didn’t lack for things to talk about—there was my wife’s sudden death, of course, but we also know so many of the same people and have many similar interests. I don’t think in all the years we have known each other, political topics have ever come up. But we got on the topic of our kids and our friends’ kids, my son’s decision to eschew college, and from that onto the recent disaster at Harvard, as Micah mentioned in passing that my having a degree from there “didn’t hurt.” My brief but detailed exposition in response regarding Harvard’s ethics rot led to his off-hand comment, “The stuff around the war in Gaza is really upsetting.”

My old fiend was being careful: that could mean anything. He didn’t want to draw me into an expression of opinion that might lead to a rift, and in over 40 years, we’ve never had a rift of any kind. Then he said, still being careful, “I can certainly understand why Netenyahu feels he must do what he is doing.

Micah is Jewish, though that aspect of his life almost never comes up. He added, “I know a lot of innocent people are being killed.” Then he dropped a clue: “….although they might not be as innocent as people think.”

Ah! My cue! I replied immediately, “If you want your family, your children and yourself to avoid the consequences of being in a war, you shouldn’t elect terrorists to run your government. And if you want to make certain that the terrorists next door don’t kill your children, your only choice is to do whatever is necessary to get rid of them permanently.”

Micah turned to me with a look I could only describe as relief. “Thank-you,” he said.

There was only a brief coda to the exchange, after which we went back to pleasant subjects (well, other than the death of my wife). I said, “President Biden’s attempt to take both sides at once is indefensible.” Always trying to see the other person’s point of view as is his wont, Micah replied, “Unfortunately it’s an election year, and whatever position Biden takes will have negative consequences.”

I said immediately, “When that’s the case, it should be relatively easy to do the right thing.” He looked at me with relief again. “That’s how I feel about it too.”

Then we talked about theater, baseball, sealing wax, and whether pigs have wings….

[WordPress’s crack AI bot tells me to tag this “Bible study.”]

Unethical—But Revealing!—Quote of the Month: Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College, London

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Remember: Trust the scientists! They know best…

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

—British vulcanologist and climate scientist William J. McGuire, “Bill” to his friends, cheering on human death in a tweet he quickly removed after colleagues advised him “Uh, Bill? We’re not supposed to say things like this out loud…”

Of course, the professor might have been saying that the economically disastrous measures being proposed and in some cases adopted by foolish governments like the Biden administration won’t affect the climate sufficiently to make a difference, so the whole movement is futile, irresponsible, based on speculation, and, to be blunt, stupid, but of course he wasn’t. No, this scientist, who is among those we are supposed to trust and obey—you know, like the health “experts” who crippled the economy, our society and the educational development of our children based on guesses about the Wuhan virus that were represented as fact?—believes that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe (and we all want to do that, right?) is to have millions of people die as soon as possible, one way or another. A plague is a good way! Or we could just execute them, like Mao did. Of course, he shouldn’t be one of those sacrificed for the greater good, because his life is too valuable.

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Biden Stabs Israel in the Back to Keep His Anti-Semitic Vote and Gets Justly Hammered For His Betrayal? Mainstream Media To The Rescue!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

“Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!” To be fair, it’s past time to rephrase the oft-used Ethics Alarm catch phase as, “Nah, the mainstream media doesn’t just take marching orders from the Democratic National Committee to cover for Biden’s indefensible leadership!”

Too long, I know. OK, it needs some work.

Suddenly, all through the news media over the weekend, the tale of how President Ronald Reagan intervened with a threat to withhold arms that had already been approved for delivery to Israel to force the nation to change its military strategy was being thrown in the faces of Biden critics and Israel supporters. Huh. Where did that come from?

Surprise! It came from the New York Times, the flagship of the corrupt, partisan media, just in time to fuel the “advocacy journalists'” efforts over the weekend to help block Israel’s right to defend its existence and its citizens from terrorism.

Interviewing GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, and by “interviewing” I mean debating as she took the side of Democrats, the Biden Administration, the anti-Semitic students roiling campuses and Hamas, NBC News anchor Kristen Welker said, “As you know, former President Ronald Reagan, on multiple occasions, withheld weapons to impact Israel’s military actions,” Welker said. “Did President Reagan show that using U.S. military aid, as leverage, can actually be an effective way to rein in and impact Israel’s policy?”

What a perfect factoid to weaponize for an appeal to authority and Rationalization #32. The Unethical Role Model: “He/She would have done the same thing”! The timely Times revelation: in August of 1982, Israel was shelling Palestinian terrorist strongholds in Lebanon, then a failing state in the throes of a civil war, with Palestinian forces controlling territory on its southern border. President Reagan saw films of a Lebanese child horribly wounded in the attack, and called up then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to threaten a withdrawal of U.S. aid if the shelling didn’t stop. Begin gave in. The Times also informed its readers that President Eisenhower threatened economic sanctions and to cut off aid to force Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula after it invaded Egypt in 1956. So, the Times concluded, “If it was reasonable for the Republican presidential icon to limit arms to impose his will on Israel…it should be acceptable for the current Democratic president to do the same.” Well, the Times wrote “they argued,” meaning defenders of all-things Democrat, but we know, or should, that by “they” in such situations, the mainstream media means “we.”

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Unethical (and Telling!) Quote of the Month: Rep. Nancy Pelosi

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

“[T]hese poor souls who are looking for some answers….we’ve given them to them, but they are blocked by some of their views on the three G’s: guns, gays, and God—that would be a woman’s right to choose—and these cultural issues cloud their reception to an argument that is really in their interests.”

—-Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D-Cal.) appearing at an Oxford Union debate to take the position that populism  is a threat to democracy in the United States.

Let me get a compliment out of he way and on the record up front: Pelosi showed guts by appearing in this forum, and that is worthy of a measure of respect. Of course, her daring may be less attributable to guts than hubris, arrogance, or stupidity, because her position is indefensible from a Jeffersonian and Madisonian point of view and stating it in a public forum demonstrates that the totalitarian disease now rampaging through the Democratic Party has so corrupted its values that leaders like Pelosi no longer are capable of realizing how repulsive its ideology has become. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote of the Week: Ann Althouse

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“My working theory would be that Joe Biden has prioritized his own reelection. And he’s not even performing well at that. Ironically, his reelection theme seems to be that he — and not Trump — is a man of integrity. I would recommend that the old man step back from the tawdry exercise of getting reelected and actually behave with integrity.”

—Law professor/”Fiercely neutral” blogress Ann Althouse, characterizing President Biden’s contradictory and cynical treatment of Israel after he announced that the U.S. will withhold critical arms support for the attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah despite previously agreeing that Hamas had to be destroyed.

Ann adds, “But I suspect he’s too far gone to give us that.”

I was pondering how to frame a post about Biden’s craven perfidy regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict, as he literally tries to take both sides at once in order to avoid rejection by the Democratic Party’s pro-terrorism bloc, which has turned out to be a lot bigger than even critics suspected. Then I read Ann’s post highlighting Jon Podhoretz’s article for Commentary, “Biden’s Shameful Betrayal.” (Full disclosure: I know Jon, and like him: he was a member of my theater company’s board until he moved out of the District.) I don’t think Althouse has been red-pilled exactly—I’ll still lay odds that she ends up voting for Biden—but she seems genuinely disgusted by the age-addled President’s latest example of fecklessness and irresponsible leadership, as should we all.

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The Latest From Harvard Is So Irresponsible and Incompetent That It Shocks Even Me

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And I have absolutely no faith or trust in this arrogant and rotting (a bad combination) institution. But I still didn’t think its leadership could be this stupid. Hence my brains and skull fragments being all over the ceiling…

Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker will be Maria Ressa, the CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Sounds Harvard-y eneough, doesn’t she? Except that in January, Ressa signed a letter accusing Israel of “unabated killing of journalists in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war”while calling for “immediate end to the bombardment of journalists and apparent targeting in some cases of our colleagues in Gaza and the region.” (This a dubious accusation at best.)

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Progressives Have Settled On the Defenses For Their Indoctrinated College Students Supporting Terrorism and Acting Like Nazis…[Bad Link Fixed]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

They are not persuasive. In fact, both are desperate, dishonest and predictable.

Defense #1 is, of course, “It isn’t what it is,” Rationalization #64 and the mantra of the 21st century Left when their delusions, plans, policies and plots blow up in their faces likeone of the Coyote’s bombs intended for the Road Runner. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about supporting Hamas after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israeli civilians! There’s no reason for Jewish students to feel threatened and unwelcome on their own campus when masked protesters wearing the garb of a group that has pledged to eliminate Israel march and chant “From the river to the sea..” And heck, that ditty is completely innocent, like “Mary had a little lamb…” It doesn’t necessary mean “we’re going to wipe you Jews off the map.” You know, just like “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” was just epicurean commentary. Besides, calling out lies about Jews (there is and has been no genocide; there is no apartheid, and there is no such thing as a “disproportional response” when a neighboring region starts a war with a surprise attack on a nation’s citizens and children) and verbally threatening them is just free speech. After all, these aren’t “true threats”—it’s not like anyone would ever actually try to do anything harmful to someone just because they are Jewish. That’s never happened. These demonstrations are just like all those campus marches with students wearing hoods and sheets, chanting “Back to Africa!” and carrying burning…okay, okay, those haven’t happened. And they would be different.

Defense #2 is “Conservatives made them do it.”

I could devote this whole website to featuring and debunking the increasingly hysterical, wildly dishonest, furiously contrived arguments of progressive pundits as they feel the metaphorical walls closing in this year. It’s tempting: I’ve written about a few, but their efforts to somehow separate themselves and their fellow travelers from the outbreak of antisemitism on campuses while simultaneously avoiding the simple statement: “This is wrong” along with the more difficult “And we’re substantially responsible” should be self-indicting.

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Morning Ethics Wake-Up Call, May 4, 2024: Campus Anti-Semitism Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I’d say anyone celebrating Star Wars Day today (“May the Fourth be with you!”) on this May 4 needs to get out more.

In addition to being a day that promises further depressing developments on college campuses as the decades of progressive, anti-American, and Marxist indoctrination have their predictable (and probably intentional) consequences—though somehow the ivory tower revolutionaries in charge of those campuses were oddly unprepared for them!—this date has an ominous history.

The Vietnam protests reached their violent zenith with the National Guard shooting four Kent State students on May 4, 1970, a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the Boston Massacre. I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a student fatality in the current unrest yet: as always, the protest organizers are hoping for one to “radicalize” the campuses. Another development that seems inevitable is a terrorist attack in support of Gaza and Hamas. Today is a date that portends that, too: during a huge labor protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois on May 4, 1886, a someone threw a bomb among the 200 police officers attempting to break up the demonstration. Police then started shooting at the pro-labor crowd, killing more than a dozen protestors and wounding nearly a hundred, several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The protest had been organized by pro-labor activists to protest (and exploit) of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before, and about 1,500 workers participated. That episode galvanized both the labor movement and the progressive movement that produced Teddy Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, and Woodrow Wilson.

The anti-war rioting at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 also took place in Chicago, and where do you suppose the Democrats are holding their nominating convention this year? If nothing else, you can accuse the party of being superstitious. That call is the equivalent of naming a new cruise ship “Titanic.”

But wait! There’s more! On May 4, 1994, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement in Cairo on Palestinian self-rule, following the Oslo Accords signed in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1993. The agreement acknowledged Israel’s right to exist! Israeli agreed to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, all land won by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Arab nations collectively tried to wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinians agreed to avoid terrorism and maintain peace. and prevent violence in the famous “land for peace” bargain. The agreement transferred authority from the Israeli Civil Administration to the newly created Palestinian Authority, its jurisdiction and legislative powers, a Palestinian police force and relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Sounds promising, no? Almost immediately after the Israeli military withdrawal, the Palestinians began attacking Israel and its civilians. The periodic terrorism continued: there was never real “peace.” The promise to accept Israel’s right to exist was just words. Seven years later came the “Second Intifada” in 2000, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel that left over a thousand Israelis dead and thousands injured. The schism was complete when the Palestinians elected the openly terrorist organization Hamas to lead Gaza in 2006. The fable of “The Scorpion and the Frog” comes to mind.

I wonder how many of the campus protesters are conversant in this history?

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