Signature Significance: The American Left’s Mass Ethics Whiff On The Israel-Hamas Conflict [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

This isn’t a disagreement or a dispute over values. The response of progressives, academia, the mainstream media, Democrats and others in the now fully-dysfunctional American Left is a symptom of underlying ethics rot, the product of too many factors accumulating over decades. At what point will U.S. voters and reasonable citizens finally conclude, after so much evidence before this: “Run away!”? Well, we shall see.

Rather than recap how progressives got here, it is more useful—and easier—to show where they are. As Robert Spenser wrote this morning, “What kind of sickness overtakes people that they can see what the “Palestinian” jihadis did to innocent people on Saturday and think, “I’ve got to speak out in support of the attackers,” or even worse, ‘I’ve got to give those people some money’? It’s a rhetorical question. The sickness is Marxist, leftist cant and indoctrination, and it is as obvious on progressives and Democrats—and the news media, of course—as the buboes on a plague victim.

The ugly tell in this instance is the proclamation of a false equivalency between Hamas and Israel after Hamas launched a full-scale terrorist attack against civilians three days ago. The partner to that intellectually and ethically untenable delusion is that a ceasefire should immediately follow: Hamas attacks, slaughters, kidnaps, and Israel is asked to show “restraint.” To the contrary, Israel has promised to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth. Bingo. That is the ethical response, completely and unequivocally. Israel has shown restraint, and this was its reward. (I’m waiting for Sonny Hostin or some other idiot to explain that Israel ‘turning the other cheek’ is the Christian thing to do.)

Let’s see:

1. 31 Harvard student organizations collectively published a letter entitled, “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” including Harvard’s affiliate of Amnesty International. The unforgivable letter starts, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it continues. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”

As they should. Who is responsible when a population elects a terrorist organization as its lawful government? Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers wrote that he was “sickened” by the failure of Harvard’s leadership to condemn the statement. “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” tweeted Summers. That’s right, but Summers was also complicit in turning Harvard into the one-view ideological indoctrination factory that it has become.

2. Hilariously, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, desperately hustling to stem the bleeding after a vicious attack by Iran-sponsored Hamas quickly followed on the heels of his addled boss unfreezing $6 billion for Iran, tweeted a call for a cease-fire, then pulled the tweet after a backlash that any fool could have predicted, and had his own Department disavow his tweet as “unauthorized.” So now it’s up to the media propaganda hacks to cover for Biden and Blinken. On “Meet the Press,” new host Kristen Welker parroted Blinken’s statement that the $6 billion was not a factor in the attacks. Luckily, Nikki Haley was on hand to debunk that talking point, saying, “When I was at the United Nations…when those planes full of cash [were] sent by Obama to Iran,…What happened was those funds were sent to Hezbollah and Lebanon. They were sent to Hamas and Gaza. They were sent to the Houthis in Yemen. They go and spread terrorism every time they get a dollar.”

And Biden released the billions anyway.

3. CNN featured a guest who claimed, without contradiction, that Hamas had really only targeted “military installations” and that most hostages were soldiers. Appearing on Fareed Zarakia GPS, Mustafa Marghouti also insisted the attacks were the fault of Israel because of “the longest occupation in modern history” and “[a] much worse apartheid” than the one “in South Africa.” Showing that American journalism could get even worse, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its reporters not to refer to the Hamas terrorists who attacked innocent civilians, kidnapped those they did not kill and are threatening to murder them on live TV as “terrorists.” The CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards, George Achi, stated, “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists. The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact.” The New York Times isn’t calling them terrorists either: its euphemism of choice at the moment is “militants.”

See Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.”

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Confronting My Biases, Episode 3: Illiterate People

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

An infuriating story yesterday reminded me of a long standing bias, which is in truth not my greatest problem with the tragedy that occurred in Oregon, Ohio.

Police responded to a call about a 4-year-old boy outside, apparently alone except for a dog. When they they found the child and returned him and the dog back to their home, the police learned that the mother had been asleep. They reminded her of “safety measures that need to be taken to ensure the well-being of her children,” the news accounts say.

Somehow, I don’t think this is sufficient when a mother allows a toddler to wander out of the house unmonitored. Good dog, though…

For some reason, the mother never mentioned to the officers that her younger son, 2-year-old Marcus Hall, had also apparently wandered off. Why wouldn’t she do that? Was she afraid of getting in trouble, as she should have? Did she forget she had two boys? Was she stoned?

About 45 minutes later, sleepy mom called 911 to report that Marcus was missing. Again officers arrived, began a search, and found the little boy dead—drowned— in a neighbor’s above-ground pool directly behind the Hall family’s property. The pool was not fully enclosed. “Police noted that Marcus’ unidentified 4-year-old brother was unharmed in the incident,” the news story says.

That’s nice. I wonder for how long he’ll remain unharmed.

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Flat Ethics Learning Curve Of The Last Two Decades: Progressives And Democrats Calling For A “Cease-Fire” Before Israel Can Respond Appropriately To The Hamas Terror Attack.

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This tweet was taken down, though only after 12 hours had passed. Watch: the Biden Administration will now soon claim it was posted by a rogue intern. [ UPDATE: I was close!] The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem also tweeted for “all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks” on the very day of Hamas’s invasion of Israel. That post also was deleted.

Satire though it is, the Babylon Bee’s reaction is spot on:

“It seems that US Secretary of State Blinken deleted yesterday’s tweet where he ‘encouraged’ Hamas-supporting Turkey arranging a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. Are there any actual adults in charge in Foggy Bottom?” tweeted retired US diplomat Alberto Miguel Fernandez. Who is surprised? Many on the Left opposed any military action against Afghanistan after the 9-11 bombings. Meanwhile, as the whiff of moral equivalency wafts through the wokified air, Hamas has threatened to execute civilian hostages on live TV, stating, “From this moment on, we announced that any targeting of innocent civilians without warning will be met, regretfully to say, by executing one of the hostages in our custody and we will be forced to broadcast this execution.” The ethical distinction should be clear, but to frighteningly many, it is not:

Maybe Biden will make more billions of dollars available to Iran if it can get Hamas to stop…

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Pointer and Source for the cartoon above: Instapundit.

Ethics Hero: ADL CEO Jonathan Goldblatt

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I have some reservations about designating anyone an ethics hero when they declare that they “love” MSNBC. Loving MSNBC is a mark of partisan bias and corruption, as well as making someone who regularly appears on the network’s propaganda-spewing shows complicit in the damage being done to civic discourse and democracy by this truly unethical, racist, divisive and destructive network.

But…

After MSNBC’s hosts and guests had been, predictably, mouthing the Palestinian, Democratic Socialist (including “The Squad”) cant about how the massive terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas was somehow justified, and periodically calling for “context,” which is like the Left’s “root causes” narrative after the attacks of 9/11, reliable knee-jerk progressive (he was one of Obama’s aides) and ADL head Goldblatt directly and unequivocally condemned the MSNBC coverage, looking straight into the camera to do it.

MSNBC deserves some praise too: it allowed Goldblatt to finish his long and very articulate spontaneous speech without any attempt to interrupt or cut away. Such instances where the news media is confronted honestly about its disgusting conduct are too rare, and we should pat our respects when they do occur.

Mid-Day Ethics Cargo, 10/9/23, Or “Columbus Sailed All That Way For THIS?”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Almost every item in the collection that follows is annoying….

1. In St. Louis, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier of Tower Grove East, and Aldermanic President Megan Green proposed legislation to “expand the rights of homeless people” at the expense of turning the city into a toilet. Among other things, the proposed law would exempt the homeless from the city’s laws against urinating and taking a dump in public. “After every sporting event, after Mardi Gras, we see (other) people engaging in public urination,” Green said at a news conference after the board meeting. “But … enforcing those laws against that segment of the population is not the same as the enforcement we see against our unhoused population.” So, obviously, rather than enforce the law uniformly, her solution, as woke as woke can be, is to allow some people to drop feces wherever they please. “What are we doing?” Alderwoman Pam Boyd responded, “This is not a third world country. This is St. Louis, Missouri. That’s so disrespectful to us as a community. That’s unhealthy.” Ya think? “Does society have any rules any more?” asked Alderman Tom Oldenburg, of St. Louis Hills. “Give me a break. Homeless people who need to relieve themselves should go to a shelter. That’s where bathrooms exist.”

There go those crazy conservatives again!

2. Larry Tribe strikes again! Showing that not only Democratic Presidents can leak IQ points, once-admired Harvard Law law professor (now Emeritus), made an ass of himself on Twitter/X, and not for the first time. Leaping to “X” to take a cheap shot, Tribes’ reaction to Israel declaring war on Hamas for a brutal surprise attack that killed Americans as well as Israelis was: “Is Netanyahu wagging the dog of war to take attention away from his own war on the independent judiciary? Can anyone put that past him?” This time, Tribe got so much flack that he backed down from his cretinism, which he hasn’t usually done since his brain turned to cream cheese. He wrote to Fox News: “I sent the tweet in response to Netanyahu’s reported comments before I saw the news of what Hamas had actually done, at which point I immediately deleted the tweet as a clearly premature, ill-informed and inappropriate response to incomplete information. I obviously condemn Hamas’s terrorist attacks and unthinkable atrocities against the Israeli people, including the murder and abduction of civilians, in the strongest possible terms and fully support Israel’s right of self-defense, notwithstanding my long-standing condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and its activities in the West Bank.” 

Imagine, this jerk was once promoted by progressives to be an Supreme Court Justice. If he had been black and female, he might be.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures”: The Revenge of the Wackadoodles

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

by Curmie

One of my favorite lines from the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon is “Just when you thought it was safe to be bored / Trouble waiting to happen.”  That lyric came to mind when I happened across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Hamline President Goes on the Offensive.”Well, that lyric and one of my most oft-used phrases, “Oh, bloody hell!”. 

This rather lengthy article—over 3000 words—deserves to be read in its entirety, even if it involves a registration process for free access to a limited number of articles per month, but I’ll try to hit the highlights here.  The author is Mark Berkson, the Chair of the Religion Department at Hamline University.  His was for a very long while the only voice, or at least the only audible one, on the Hamline campus to come to the defense of erstwhile adjunct art history professor Erika López Prater as she was being railroaded by the school’s administration on absurd charges of Islamophobia.

You may recall the incident.  Jack first wrote about it here; my take came a little later, here.  Dr. López Prater was teaching a course in global art history, in which she showed images of a couple of paintings depicting the prophet Muhammad.  Recognizing that there are some strains of Islam in which viewing such images is regarded as idolatrous, she made it clear both in the course syllabus and on the day of the lecture in question that students who chose not to look at those particular photos were free not to do so, without penalty.

Ah, but that left too little room for victimhood.  So student Aram Wedatalla blithely ignored those warnings and (gasp!) saw those images… or at least she says she did, which is not necessarily the same thing.  Wounded to the core by her own sloth and/or recklessness, she then howled to the student newspaper and, urged on by Nur Mood, the Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs and Strategic Relations (also the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, of which Wedatalla was president), to the administration.  The banner was then raised high by one David Everett, the Associate Vice President of Inclusive Excellence.  (Those folks at Hamline sure do like their pretentious job titles, don’t they?)

Anyway, Everett proclaimed in an email sent to literally everyone at Hamline that López Prater  had been “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”  To be fair, he didn’t identify her by name, but there weren’t a lot of folks teaching global art history.  Everett was just getting warmed up.  He subsequently co-authored, or at least jointly signed, a statement with university president Fayneese Miller that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”  Not at any university worthy of the name, it shouldn’t.  Anyway, López Prater was de facto fired, because destroying the careers of scholars for even imaginary offenses has become a blood sport for administrators (and, in public colleges, for politicians).

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Eventually, We May Have To Call It “The Great Stupid Day”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

It’s Columbus Day, and The New York Times’ way of celebrating it is to publish an op-ed  by a Hispanic anti-Columbus freelance audio journalist who complains about there being a gigantic statue to the explorer in Puerto Rico. After all, she reasons, the island is in “the part of the world that suffered Columbus’s brutality firsthand.”

Columbus’s “brutality,” of course, is not what’s being celebrated or honored by Columbus Day.   In 2019, before the Dawn of The Great Stupid, I re-posted both essays I have authored on Ethics Alarms about Columbus, the first, from 2011, explaining why it was an ethical holiday; the second, from two years later, taking the ethical position that Columbus is a problematical figure to honor. The comments the dual post inspired were diverse and excellent, and none of them endorsed contrarian post #2. 

2019 seems decades away now, with the annus horribilis of 2020 yawning between then and now like, well, the Atlantic Ocean. One bit of the Times op-ed perfectly crystalized why I cannot embrace the anti-Columbus Day movement—-even Massachusetts is considering making it “Indigenous Peoples Day,” meaning the Mayflower is next on the airbrushing list—and it was a CBS story linked to it about all the other Columbus statues that have been toppled lately (while the one on Puerto Rico, where Columbus is mentioned in the national anthem, still stands) “explains”:

After George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25, protests flooded the country and forced America to reckon with its past. Many protesters across the country flocked to local statues, demanding their removal and in some cases taking them down themselves. Almost 60 Confederate monuments have been removed, relocated and renamed since Floyd’s death, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Yeah, THAT makes a lot of sense. A non-racial incident in Minnesota involving an over-dosing habitual criminal trying to resist arrest and ending up dying in the midst of negligent restraint by a bad cop makes people want to cancel an iconic 15th Century explorer. Brilliant. Yet it is also fitting, somehow: the same episode was permitted to launch the Great Stupid and its prevailing ethos that only the negative consequences created by something matter, the somethings including free speech, rules, laws, law enforcement, men, romance, white people, the Founders, literature, “Gone With The Wind,” gestating babies, industry, civilization, and the United States of America, among others. The one really bad line of my anti-Columbus (but not anti-Columbus Day) piece was this: “And who is to say that the world would be better today had pre-Columbian civilizations persisted without European interference?”

Ugh. NOBODY can say the world would be better today if those primitive cultures had not been overwhelmed by a superior one. Well, the can say it, but it would be incredibly stupid. A satirical article linked to a comment in 2019 made the point nicely with its facetious list of ways to “not be a bigot on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” The list (with explanations; read the piece):

  1. Perform human sacrifice
  2. Massacre neighboring indigenous peoples
  3. Collect scalps of your enemies
  4. Enslave other humans
  5. Eat people
  6. Steal everything
  7. Torture your enemies
  8. Complain about Europeans doing the same thing you did

The article concludes, “If you don’t do these—at least one of them—you’re a bigot.”

Well played.

Here are the two Columbus articles again. I no longer endorse the second, but it’s worth including for the counterpoint. It’s also worth including this Comment of That Day, though it wasn’t recognized at the time (mea culpa), by Steve-O-in NJ:

I hate to break the news to you, but this isn’t about Christopher Columbus and what he did or didn’t do. This isn’t about the Indians and how they should or shouldn’t have been treated. This is about two things leading to a third thing. First this is about dividing society, not just between the Italian-Americans and the Indians, but between those who choose to celebrate, or even who choose to leave it alone, and those who oppose to appear “woke” or “forward-thinking” or just not to appear racist. Second, it’s about an attack on the West, its history, and its traditions by those who hate it and all it stands for, and can’t wait to try to make this place into the illusory utopia people like Bernie Sanders promise. It’s from both those things that a few folks hope to score political points and generate political capital.

It’s rich to call those who choose to celebrate Italian-American culture and contributions racist. We were treated pretty badly upon arrival, and not really even considered white initially. The biggest lynching ever in the US was of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans. It was also a year before we were allowed to join the fight in WW2 because we “passed the test” according to FDR. We might not boast a heavily decorated UNIT from that conflict like the 442nd, but we do boast several highly decorated INDIVIDUALS, like John Basilone, Vito Bertoldo, and Ralph Cheli.

It’s also rich to call the third most influential person (after Christ and Mohammed tied for first and Guttenberg second) in history a villain for making everything that is America possible. Don’t give me that Leif Erickson was first nonsense, he established no lasting link. But while we’re on the topic, if Leif truly was first, doesn’t the guilt transfer to him? Don’t bother answering, the question was rhetorical. And please don’t throw out that pseudohistory about the Welsh Indians and Chinese villages on the West Coast before Columbus. Here’s one you can answer, though: Do you really think that, once it was known there was a whole untouched hemisphere, the rulers of Europe would have written some kind of treaty banning any European from sailing west out of sight of the Pillars of Hercules? Do you think such a treaty would have lasted more than a generation? Do you really think that the world would be a better place had the United States never come to be? Yes or no, please, no equivocating. If the answer is no, then why the fuss? If the answer is yes, why are you still here?

Viva Italia! Viva America! Viva Colombo!

The two posts….

I. Celebrate Columbus Day, Honor Columbus

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Oh, I Can’t Let THIS Pass: David Brooks Abuses A Baseball Metaphor To Lie About Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I read this yesterday, decided that it was a double Julie Principle abomination (“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Biden’s demented, the Times gotta lie…“) and too outrageous to be worth even my pathetic time, and then it kept ticking away in my skull like a home-made bomb until I couldn’t stand it any more.

New York Times Stockholm Syndrome columnist David Brooks, once a conservative with intellectual pretensions, not just another Times progressive toady, actually wrote…

“The Republicans who portray [Biden] as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher. People who work with him allow that he does tire more easily, but they say that he is very much the dynamic force driving this administration. In fact, I’ve noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged. He used to try to cram every fact in the known universe into every answer; now he’s more disciplined. When he’s describing some national problem, he is more crisp and focused than he used to be, clearer on what is the essential point here — more confidence-inspiring, not less….”

I’m pretty sure I’ve been watching Joe Biden longer than David Brooks has, and I’m dead certain I know more about baseball than he does, so I must offer this correction. If you must compare Biden to a pitcher, it would not be one who once had a 94 mph fastball (actually, today that’s not very impressive, as most successful pitchers throw at least 96 or so), but rather a journeyman hurler who at his peak could throw maybe 86 or 87 at best, and who has bounced around from team to team as an innings-eating mop-up man for an inexplicably long time, never being more than the guy who barely makes the last slot on the squad out of Spring Training, never given a start in a big game or brought on in relief in a “high leverage situation,” and who holds on to a job by being an upbeat presence in the clubhouse, loyal to his managers, and encouraging to younger, more talented pitchers coming up. There is no baseball analogy to Biden after that, because when pitchers obviously decline in their abilities and those abilities were nothing to get them on a Wheaties box in the first place, they get cut. If they are lucky, maybe they get a job as a pitching coach on a minor league team in Altoona.

[I should mention that the geezer making that horrible pitch in the GIF above is the great Nolan Ryan.]

Almost no pitchers who weren’t Hall of Fame level at their peaks can survive if they lose 7 miles an hour off their fastballs. As it happens, the Boston Red Sox this season learned this the hard way. Corey Kluber was a two-time Cy Young winner, one of the best pitchers in the game, when he threw 93 miles an hour. Then little by little he lost it, had arm trouble, and by last year barely managed a .500 record with a team that played winning ball, the Tampa Bay Rays. They wisely didn’t re-sign him, but the Red Sox did, though Kluber’s best fastball was then about 87. He got clobbered, ending the season with an earned run average over 7, which is the level of a batting practice pitcher.

But Kluber was at least a great pitcher once. Nobody ever thought Joe Biden was a great U.S. Senator. I was writing about what an obvious dummy he was decades ago, and I was far from the only one. I think it was about 2018 when I noticed that what little glint of intelligence that had been in Joe’s eye had vanished, along with his energy level and orientation. I was stunned that he ran for President, stunned that his wife and family allowed him to do it, and I would have been stunned that the Democratic Party nominated him except by that time I realized that it had become so Machiavellian that it would have nominated—oh, pick any celebrity moron—if it calculated that he would attract more votes than the awful group of 2020 election contenders.

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Integrity Check For The News Media And The Trump-Deranged: Trump Was Right About The Consequences Of Releasing Billions To Iran. Biden Was Wrong. Who Will Admit It?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I’m betting just about no one. You?

This social media snark is going viral now, and it should, though what Trump predicted should have been assumed by the administration, and apparently was. Of course, Trump’s post is marred by his typical bluster and name-calling, but that shouldn’t outweigh the fact that he was right. As one analyst this morning admitted, without Iran’s support, Hamas wouldn’t exist. Biden’s defenders are arguing that, well, the US didn’t really give all that money to Iran, because it was Iran’s money to begin with. Weak. Iran was given access to funds they didn’t not have access to, in exchange for hostages, and Iran seeds terrorist groups. Hamas launched a deadly sneak attack on Israel, guaranteeing war, and almost certainly would not have done so were it not assured of receiving financial support from Iran.

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Smoking Gun: The LA Times Shows How The Next Election Should Be “Stolen” And Calls It Responsible Journalism

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Proving that Alexa is right, the LA Times recruited Tom Rosenstiel, a former reporter and current journalism professor ,to author a candid but frightening essay that demonstrates exactly how deep the unethical cesspool of American journalism is today. The article is “How not to cover Donald Trump’s bizarre 2024 campaign for president,”and it broadcasts its bias and intellectual dishonesty at every turn, including the headline: Trump’s campaign is bizarre only because Democrats have taken the unprecedented and dangerous step of trying to stop a political adversary by using the criminal justice system as a partisan weapon.

The column states outright that it is the obligation of good journalists to cover the Trump campaign and candidacy in such a way that it fails. “It’s a dereliction of the press’ duty to ignore powerful dissemblers and liars in public life,” the professor writes. “We have an obligation to explain what’s false and offer clear and persuasive evidence of the truth. We have to help the public understand.”

If that last sentence doesn’t cause the date “1984” to start flashing in your brain, it should. These people really believe that their “understanding” is the right understanding. They are the perceptive ones, they are the arbiters of all disputes, disagreements and controversies. The arrogance is chilling, particularly because, as Ethics Alarms has pointed out repeatedly, journalists are not especially smart, wise, erudite or creative people. Some are, of course, just as one of my smartest and most ethical friends had driven a delivery van for 30 years. But the idea that reporters and journalists have the critical thinking skills, the breadth of knowledge and the depth of experience to tell the public “what’s false” would be hilarious if it didn’t do so much damage to the proper functioning of democracy.

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