Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck

Ethics Dunce: Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Bernhardt isn’t the only noodle-spined, terrorism-enabling fool running an American college or university right now, but he’s as good a representative as any. I’m familiar with Emerson (most people weren’t before its students started demonstrating for more Jew killing as if there hadn’t too much of that already) because it resides in my old stomping ground of Boston, and my aunt Bea, 97-years-old and still as progressive as they come, graduated from there.

Over 100 Emerson students were arrested in downtown Boston’s Boylston Place alleyway in an early morning confrontation with Boston police last week. The students were illegally participating in an encampment protest by the student organization Students for Justice in Palestine. They also fought with police as the cops tried to do their jobs. But in his letter of three days ago, Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt said that he will urge the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office to drop all charges. Four Boston police officers were injured during the confrontation, one seriously. Never mind, though. These are only adults who can vote, buy liquor and and otherwise have full privileges of citizenship, and they violated the law in support of terrorists. Their hearts were in the right place. They meant well. Anybody can make a mistake. For a full list of the inexcusable rationalizations being used to let these idiots escape accountability for their ignorant, illegal and violent actions, see here, at the Ethics Alarms Rationalizations List. I’m guessing at least 40 of them apply, maybe more.

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: A Case Study in How a News Aggregator Forfeits Trust

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The escalation overnight in the anti-Israel, pro-Jew-killing demonstrations at Columbia University, temporarily at the top of the campus progressives-showing-their-true-stripes and “Oops, I guess we indoctrinated these gullible kids a little too much!” hit parades, was the breaking news I woke up to at 5 am when Spuds asked to go out. I have some ethics observations about this whole disturbing development (the Gaza support on campuses, not Spuds’ bathroom habits), which the Biden administration deserves to have hung around its neck like a stinking dead albatross for signaling that the U.S. sympathizes with terrorists just so it might pick up some Muslim votes in Michigan. In the process of researching that post, I encountered the reason for this one.

Deciding that the immediacy of the 1968 flashbacks justified bumping another post that I have almost completed, I checked the usually reliable news aggregating site Memeorandum (Ann Althouse’s favorite!) to find some early reports and commentary on the student terrorism fans at Columbia taking over Hamilton Hall. And I found…nothing. The top stories as of this moment [remember, by the time you read this, the list may have changed]:

#1: The Kristi Noem dog story! You see, that’s a top story because it reflects poorly on Republicans.

#2 according to the site is an FBI report that crime in the U.S. is really decreasing under Biden—as if there is any reason to trust the FBI any more, and as everyone I know in Northern Virginia is terrified to go into D.C. This is second on the list because it is going to take a huge “It isn’t what it is” push to convince voters that all of those chains moving out of inner cities because of runaway shoplifting are really doing it because they are racist.

#3? Another hit on a Republican, this time from that paragon of objectivity, Rolling Stone.

Coming in at #4…well, I don’t have to belabor the point. There are seventeen more “top stories,” including one about India operating a spy ring in Australia, and the drama at Columbia isn’t anywhere to be found.

Eureka! Now I know that whoever is running this news aggregator site is manipulating the news and trying to mislead the public in support of Joe Biden and the Democrats. Similarly, we have learned that the eruption of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic passion across the nation is just one more example of what a terrible, weak, foolish POTUS Joe Biden is, and how ethically corrupt his party and its supporters have become.

Here’s a third: journalism in this culture is untrustworthy and a metaphorical dagger in the back of democracy….but we knew that.

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Time for Some Ethical Clarity Regarding the Hamas-Israel War…

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

1. Advocating for Gaza or Gazans is advocating for Palestinians and Hamas.

2. Advocating for Palestinians and Hamas is advocating anti-Semitism and genocide—of Jews.

3. Advocating for Palestinians and Hamas is also advocating for, rationalizing , enabling and encouraging terrorism.

4. Any public statements from President Biden or his administration critical of Israel’s handling of the war helps achieve Hamas’s objectives. Helping to achieve Hamas’s objectives as a consequence of its terrorist attack validates the use of terrorism as a means of achieving Palestinian ends.

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Ethics Quote of the Week: David Marcus

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Marcus is an American entrepreneur. His depressing but revealing (though hardly surprising quote is in this tweet, which also relates nicely to the previous post:

Hey Douthat! How About Coming Right Out and Stating That U.S. College Students Are Indoctrinated into Radical, Progressive, Marxist Ideology?

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Talk about burying the lede.

Sort-of conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat issued what might have been a useful column, What Students Read Before They Protest, about the reasons why students at Columbia and other “elite” educational institutions are demonstrating in favor of Hamas, terrorism, anti-Semitism, and wiping Israel off the face of the earth. But Douthat, who can write clearly and forcefully when he wants to (or, I suppose, when his woke and biased editors let him) instead buries his own objective in foggy rhetoric, Authentic Frontier Gibberish and equivocation to such an extent that 1) few will have the patience to read it and 2) the importance of his point is diluted and lost.

This is how Jonathan Turley used to write until he was red-pilled.

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From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

This really does speak for itself, but indulge me as I make a few comments…

1. The “money quote”: “I wish I was more educated.”

2. Ah, yes, the young protesting just to protest, meet people, have fun, threaten Jews! This phenomenon was rife when I was a student, and it so nauseated me that my bias against protests and demonstrations has lasted to this day.

3. When I was 18, I was certain that giving the vote to 18-year-olds was a mistake. People like these women informed that opinion.

4. Immature, uncritical, peer-driven Americans like this are easy marks for propagandists, cultists and hucksters. Imagine: similar zombie activists enabled Black Lives Matter to warp the U.S. culture

5. Good job, American educational system! Well done, parents! The life competence rules that one should never take action on a matter before thoroughly understanding that matter, and that one should never allow others to dictate your conduct absent your informed consent—informed is a key word—have apparently never been taught, explained or conveyed.

6. Nice to see that Rudy isn’t letting his persecution by the legal community for daring to represent Donald Trump, though.

Unethical (and Stupid) Quote of the Month: President Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

“I condemn the antisemitic protests.That’s why I have set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

—President Joe Biden answering a shouted question at an Earth Day event at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia outside Washington, DC.

Joe Biden saying something stupid, incomprehensible or dishonest is a virtually daily occurrence, but some of his statements have significant consequences, taking them out of Julie Principle territory. This one continues his astounding effort to try to pander to both sides of the Hamas-Israel conflict and their respective supporters simultaneously. It is such an obviously impossible and indefensible mission that it’s amazing that there is anyone who isn’t disgusted and insulted by it, for it is predicated on the belief that everyone is even dumber than Joe.

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Ethics Zugzwang as USC Silences Its Valedictorian

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

USC has banned this year’s graduating class valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, from Chino Hill, California, from making her speech during the university’s commencement ceremony. The justification: anti-Israel (or pro-Palestine…same thing, really) posts on Instagram, including thise calling for the “complete abolition” of Israel. 

Asna is a Muslim, not that there’s anything wrong with that. USC officials chose her from nearly 100 student applicants who had GPAs of 3.98 or higher. It seemed like a good idea at the time: certainly in this age of enlightened DEI, the woke school wasn’t going to choose any icky white male. Tabassum majored in biomedical engineering with a minor in resistance to genocide—wait, what??? USC has a “resistance to genocide” major?

The USC Provost explained the decision thusly:

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Hamas-Israel War Ethics Train Wreck Update: Biden’s Incompetent and Irresponsible Handling of the Crisis Defies Belief

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I have long thought Joe Biden was an idiot, even before he started losing brain cells like a scalp shed dandruff, and the complete fecklessness of the 21st Century mutation of the Democratic Party has been brain-blowing for quite awhile as well. This sequence, however, is signature significance for an administration without any internal logic or ethical compass at all:

1. Hamas (a.k.a. the government of Gaza) launches a brutal sneak attack on civilians in Israel, raping women, killing babies, and taking hostages. The U.S. condemns the attack and proclaims its full support of Israel.

2. Israel, appropriately and necessarily, declares war on Hamas (and therefore Gaza), vowing that it will not permit the terrorist organization to exist literally next-door. The U.S. provides economic aid and weapons to the effort.

3. Israel’s assault kills Gazans as well as Hamas fighters, which is how Hamas intends it, because the Hamas tunnels containing war material and fighters is deliberately positioned under schools, hospitals and other structures that turn Gazans into human shields.

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Ethics Verdict: Israel Is Right and the Biden Administration Is Cynical, Dishonest and Wrong Regarding Gaza

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Biden called for an “immediate ceasefire” yesterday in a phone call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, telling him that “strikes on humanitarian workers” and “the overall humanitarian situation” are “unacceptable.” Biden also, we are told, “U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action” and on steps to “address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.”

By pure accident, the first thing I saw was Pentagon spokesman John Kirby (he’s the smart and competent one of the two primary White House paid liars) gaslight the press when asked how the U.S. policy toward the support of Israel in the war could be “unwavering” (as described by officials) and yet the Administration is also saying that it is considering changing that policy in light of the civilian casualties in Gaza. Kirby, with a straight face. said that the two statements were not inconsistent, prompting incredulity from his questioner. Of course they are inconsistent; in fact, they are contradictory. This is one more example of Democrats deliberately playing to the ignorant and uncritical voter.

Why aren’t Democrats

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