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Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
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It is simply wrong.
Posted at: Oct/27/2023 : Posted by: Mel
Related Category: People, Perspectives, Society,
Just hours after the October 7th attack at an Israeli music festival details began to emerge of the brutality and barbaric cruelty perpetrated by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist. As the details of the cruelty enacted on Israeli civilians came to light, University of Michigan President Santa J. Ono joined a select club of campus leaders: those willing to publicly condemn the atrocities and stand with their devastated and traumatized Jewish students. College campuses have historically been a bastion for teaching right and wrong and speaking out against evil. As University of Florida's President Ben Sasse later remarked, it "shouldn't be hard" to denounce crimes against humanity. But apparently it was. As opportunity allowed, I quickly did a web search of the Ivy League Universities across our country. These are the colleges more than any others who believe they are the source for our elite leaders of business and politics for future generations. I expected to find on their websites strongly worded statements that unequivocally denounced the horrific violence unleashed as Israeli families observed the Sabbath on Simchat Torah—the last of the fall season's Jewish high holy days. All these universities had severe pronouncements when Russian forces rolled into Ukraine in February 2022. I came up empty, even though by the time I started looking many of the horrors that had befallen the people of southern Israel had already been widely reported in the mainstream media: entire families burned alive (CNN Oct-10); parents murdered while protecting their children (Washington Post Oct-10); party-goers gunned down at an open-air music festival (PBS Oct-10) ; a baby sliced from the womb of a pregnant woman (Daily Mail.UK Oct-12); the young and the elderly kidnapped (BBC Oct-12); and dead bodies of women paraded on the streets of Gaza (Daily Mail Oct-11). By Oct. 11, days after these atrocities had garnered considerable press coverage, only a handful of strong university pronouncements had been issued. Most leaders had still not spoken out against the carnage, even as they have been quick to respond to past crises and acts of violence around the globe, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Kurds being displaced at the Syria/Turkey border. A few had released inadequate statements that failed to even mention Hamas. Take the statement issued by Kimberly Goff-Crews Yale Vice President for University Life; “As we watch the violence taking place in Israel and Gaza, we deeply mourn the loss of life. Our hearts are with the millions of people who are suffering in the region and globally, and especially, with our students, faculty, staff, and alumni who work, live, and have other deep ties in the area.” Reading this statement, the administrator referenced “violence taking place in Israel and Gaza” making it sound more like a tragic earthquake than a barbaric attack executed in a savage manner. There is no moral equivalency that justifies what Hamas did! There are more than 3,900 degree-granting universities in the United States and surveying all of them would be impossible. But there is a select few who clearly view themselves as a tier above, this list would include Columbia, Yale, Harvard and a handful of others. These institutions are tasked with teaching our young people how to think, how to problem solve and how to listen. Instead, they are being taught what to think, which specific problems to solve and which specific groups you should only listen to. To my disappointment there is has been a deluge of on campus protests supporting Hamas and the Palestinian cause, many arguing for the destruction of Israel. Many Jewish students at these universities do not feel safe and considering the lack of support from their college administrators that seems well founded. We have an American tradition of trying to look after the minority groups. Blacks represent 13% of the U.S. population but are disproportionately close to half our prison population and are over represented below the poverty line; these are issues we need to solve. Native American’s were displaced from their lands by American expansion and now represent 2.9% of our population, yet we are spending billions trying to raise them out of reservation poverty. Jews are 2.4% of the U.S. population but are clearly not being treated as a protected class. The threats of violence from hate speech at our universities is overwhelming and not being condemned. Nearly every Synagogue and Jewish Temple in the United States currently has armed security for the protection of the facility and its congregation. How often do you see armed guards at a church or mosque? There has been a lot of comments referring to the Israeli – Palestinian relationship as “Apartheid”. The Palestinian people elected Hamas to be their political leaders, then all further elections were canceled while the Hamas leadership continued to speak for the complete destruction of Israel. The Palestinian people of Gaza may not be to blame, but their leadership bears the burden of how this unfolds. In theory, there is a thing called the “rules of war.” In practice, war seldom has many rules. Most wars are dominated by using military resources to attack military and political targets, then the one that runs out of an ability to fight first loses. There have throughout history been attempts to attack the civilian population with the goal of breaking their will to continue warfare. In practice, this notion has always had the exact opposite effect. Unfortunately, even attacking strategic targets there will always be collateral damage and civilian loses, but there was no viable strategic target at the music festival. We equate 9/11 as being the worst single attack on American civilians in our history with 3,000 deaths. If we scale the Israeli civilian life lost in the attack to our population, it would be over 45,000 causalities. Ultimately, the attack on civilians at the music festival by Hamas equates to the single greatest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It is reasonable to expect that Israel will retaliate. While the targets may be Hamas leadership and rocket site, as long as these are imbedded in the civilian Palestinian population, there will be unfortunate collateral loss of life. As an American Jew of the “baby-boomer” generation I grew up learning a lot about World War II and the Holocaust. These lessons were taught in Sunday school, in public school and at home. I was also taught about antisemitism but growing up in America that always seemed like a distant term. Antisemitism didn’t happen here, it happened elsewhere. In America you didn’t worry about antisemitism, now I am not so sure. Our colleges have for a long time been drifting politically more and more to the left. I guess with liberal professors interviewing and hiring like-minded professors that is to be expected. Nevertheless, I never expected so much antisemitism at our universities when the faculty was so Democratic leaning. Being Democratic and being anti-Semitic are not terms I would have thought went together. America is clearly not the place I thought it to be. How can Jewish and Israeli students on campus feel like they are respected and belong if it's considered acceptable to make excuses for last weekend's butchery and even to praise the deaths of Jewish children? Such an utter disregard for their distraught and shaken Jewish peers is appalling. Yet, university leaders on most campuses said nothing about it. There are some exceptions. Michigan’s college president published a statement on October 10th expressing concern for the Jewish and Israeli students on his Ann Arbor campus. The following day hundreds of his faculty signed a circulating petition criticizing his statement. Fortunately, there are plenty of U.S. academics who don't share their moral confusion and have been standing up for heartsick Jewish students. At Harvard, an open letter has now been signed by over 350 faculty members, sharply castigating the school's 35 registered student organizations for issuing an appalling statement that basically condones the mass murder of civilians while "terrorists were still killing Israelis in their homes." Another, signed by faculty at the University of Southern California, offers its support to the people of Israel and to all students and members of the campus community affected by the "unimaginable tragedy." These interventions can make a difference. Most significant, at the University of Arizona, a planned protest was cancelled by the school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after its "Day of Resistance" toolkit and messaging were condemned by President Robert Robbins as "antithetical to the university's values." On Oct. 7, Israel experienced a great and horrendous evil that cannot be justified under any ethical standard. We look to our young adults and their unabashed idealism to recognize right from wrong. This would be the logical outcome if we were teaching how to think rather than what to think. Between student organizations and college administrative leadership the responses at some of our most noted universities was anything but ethical and compassionate. Massacres like what Hamas did on October 7th are beyond political debate or difficult conversations. They are simply wrong.
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I absolutely agree with you except for a few quibbles. As to strategic vs. population bombing, it's true that bombing civilians had the opposite of the claimed effect on civilian morale and support for the war effort, but what it did do was target the workforce rather than the factories themselves since the factories, refineries, etc. were easier to protect. In Germany and Japan, it had a marked effect on those countries' ability to keep producing arms at scale. As to the issue of antisemitism, it's rather ironic that Germany was actually the most open country in Europe for opportunity for the Jews before the rise of the Nazis. There's a reason most American Jewish surnames are Germanic, although many are also Eastern European and Russian. The French and Spaniards did a very thorough job of eliminating their Jews albeit by somewhat less horrific means. "Ironically", expelling the Jews from a country seems to always lead to a decline in that country's science, technology, and literature. Gee, who'da thunk? We baby boomers actually grew up in a golden age for American Jews, so perhaps our perspective is skewed. Before WWII, those same Ivy League universities deliberately discriminated against Jews in their admission policies. The East Coast upper-crust did not want to have their 'anointed' heirs have to compete on an even playing field with 'those Jews'. Many Jews who became members of the ruling class (cough, Alan Dershowitz, Chuck Schumer) were/are secular Jews, who venerate their culture but not the religion that built it, the equivalent of what we Christians call Easter/Christmas Christians. It's important to 'show the flag' at the High Holy Days, but little else. "People of the Book" is indeed an accurate way to describe the Jews, in my opinion. In fact some time ago, I remember reading that South Korea had instituted teaching the Torah and Talmud because they wanted to copy the Jewish advantage and teach their people to learn to think and reason as the Jews have always taught their children. Although I only have second-hand knowledge, I understand that a big part of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony is the candidate's (I don't know what the about-to-be adult is called.) not only learning the law but being able to give a discourse on part of the law to explain it. When I first got into the software business in the early 80's, I used to joke that 90% of us were either Jews or Catholics, because education and reasoning were considered part of our religious tradition. (That's a separate subject to expound upon another time.) Now of course, it's more Asians because they also culturally revere learning, and consider it the path to success for their children. (Insert Jewish mother joke here.) When Russia invaded Ukraine, I of course sided with the Ukranians as the unjustly injured party, but was made quite uncomfortable by the very enthusiastic, unanimous agreement of 'all the right people'. I had the feeling that the word had gone out JournoList style, and, like most Americans, I only had a dim view of the realities in Ukraine and Russia. Similarly, the word has gone out about Gaza that Zionists Israelis Jews must be destroyed for their 'evil' deeds. I hope that is proving quite a shock for leftist Jews. Reading the section of a biography of Reagan about his presidency of SAG gave me some insight, but reading Witness by Whitaker Chambers gave me a much deeper understanding of how these things work. Ask me about Dalton Trumbo sometime. The power of the Communist/True Believer is that they never compromise. They take the received position and follow it totally. Others in our culture, like the naive academics of our youth, believe in compromise. To a Communist/True Believer compromise can only be strategic when circumstances place them in too weak of a position. They compromise on the surface, only to work to undermine that compromise with all their might by less open means. One more thing before I close this overlong response is that I was puzzled by the concept of Hamas thugs videoing and broadcasting their cruel atrocities. It seemed to me to be irrational and counter-productive. A writer I follow explained the strategic goal. He contends it's a practice that has been ongoing in the Balkans since the Kosovo war. You spread word of your vile brutality in order to scare the mothers of your enemy, convincing them they and their children will be at risk of such atrocities if they move to the territory that the enemy wants to claim, thus essentially surrendering it to the perpetrators of those atrocities.
Posted at: Oct/27/2023 : Posted by: Frank Hood
