The Activists Who Raise Havoc over the Cultural Appropriation of a Taco Ignore or Justify Anti-Semitic Violence

Sept. 30 2021

According to a recently released survey of Jewish college students, 70 percent of those queried said they had experience anti-Semitism, and 50 percent reported having hid their identity to protect themselves from harassment. Bari Weiss sees in these results evidence of rapidly growing hostility toward Jews in America:

My own inbox is a microcosm of this acceleration: I used to receive a note every other week of a story that deserved to be told. Now I sometimes get word of several in a single day. Some of those stories have made headlines. The machete attack at a rabbi’s home in upstate New York during Hanukkah. The attack outside a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood during the recent war between Hamas and Israel. [The rapper and record producer] P. Diddy hosting Louis Farrakhan on Revolt TV for an Independence Day address last July.

But you probably missed the story of Rose Ritch, a young Jewish woman who was hounded out of her role as a student vice-president at the University of Southern California. “Impeach her Zionist ass,” her fellow students proclaimed, echoing Communist-party apparatchiks of another time. Or the book, published by Hachette, called In Defense of Looting, in which the author argues that Jews and Koreans are “the face of capital.” . . . Or the swastikas drawn on schools in Georgia in the days just before this Yom Kippur.

In . . . an era in which the past is mined by offense-archaeologists for the most minor of “microaggressions,” the very real “macroaggressions” taking place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on ḥasidic Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, which have become a regular feature of life there, are overlooked or, sometimes, justified by the very activists who go to the mat over the “cultural appropriation” of a taco. It is why corporations issue passionate press releases and pledge tens of millions of dollars to other minorities when they are under siege, but almost never do the same for Jews.

Read more at Common Sense

More about: American Jewry, American politics, Anti-Semitism, Political correctness

American Aid to Lebanon Is a Gift to Iran

For many years, Lebanon has been a de-facto satellite of Tehran, which exerts control via its local proxy militia, Hizballah. The problem with the U.S. policy toward the country, according to Tony Badran, is that it pretends this is not the case, and continues to support the government in Beirut as if it were a bulwark against, rather than a pawn of, the Islamic Republic:

So obsessed is the Biden administration with the dubious art of using taxpayer dollars to underwrite the Lebanese pseudo-state run by the terrorist group Hizballah that it has spent its two years in office coming up with legally questionable schemes to pay the salaries of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), setting new precedents in the abuse of U.S. foreign security-assistance programs. In January, the administration rolled out its program to provide direct salary payments, in cash, to both the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the Internal Security Forces (ISF).

The scale of U.S. financing of Lebanon’s Hizballah-dominated military apparatus cannot be understated: around 100,000 Lebanese are now getting cash stipends courtesy of the American taxpayer to spend in Hizballah-land. . . . This is hardly an accident. For U.S. policymakers, synergy between the LAF/ISF and Hizballah is baked into their policy, which is predicated on fostering and building up a common anti-Israel posture that joins Lebanon’s so-called “state institutions” with the country’s dominant terror group.

The implicit meaning of the U.S. bureaucratic mantra that U.S. assistance aims to “undermine Hizballah’s narrative that its weapons are necessary to defend Lebanon” is precisely that the LAF/ISF and the Lebanese terror group are jointly competing to achieve the same goals—namely, defending Lebanon from Israel.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Israeli Security, Lebanon, U.S. Foreign policy