Category: Politics

Let’s not change horses in midstream: The case for another Biden term


The news hadn’t bode well for Joe Biden even before his disastrous debate with Trump.

The NYT, tracking 47 polls, shows Biden trailing Democratic senate candidates in the upcoming election in all, but one poll, where he’s tied.

His low polling doesn’t come as a rebuke of his policies, at least among Democrats. If one rightly judges the merits of a presidency by its ability to promote change bettering America, Biden outpaces his predecessors, including Obama, putting him in good company with Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The problem is that most voters view Biden as lacking the physical and mental capacity to carry out the duties of office for another four years.

His ninety minute confrontation with Trump simply buttressed the public’s hesitancy.

Watching the debate was painful for me. Biden seemed laboring to reach the podium, stuttering repeatedly, losing his train of thought on one occasion, digressing in several of his responses, and looking down repeatedly as if searching for a response prepared by his handlers.

It was like watching a boxer, trapped in the ring corner, staggered by repeated blows.

Trump’s best line nailed it: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

A healthy, nimble candidate would have atomized Trump quickly in fact-checking rebuttal. Trump was his usual self, hyperbolizing and mendacious, though to his credit, he exercised discipline in not interrupting his opponent.

Though just four years younger than Biden at 77, Trump came across as consistently energetic. “It seemed like a thirty year difference,” one reporter said.

So where do we go from here?

Despite a groundswell of party cohorts urging his withdrawal from the race, seconded by formerly friendly media, Biden is unlikely to heed their counsel—that is, unless there occurs another stumble, both literally and figuratively.

But here’s my take: With six weeks to the Democratic National Convention, August 19-21, an open convention would produce political chaos with a rush of candidates, inadequately assessed.

Kamala Harris is the likely designee. Biden, of course, could immediately resign, allowing Harris to assume the presidency. Any other choice, say a white male replacement at the convention, would spell unmitigated disaster, and assure a Trump victory.

Black and brown voters would abandon ship. As Areva Martin, a California convention delegate pledged to Biden, put it: “If you pick a white man over Kamala Harris, black women, I can tell you this, we gon’ walk away, we gon’ blow the party up.”

The caveat, however, is the improbability of Harris winning in November, polls indicating she enjoys even less favorability than the president.

I say, better not to panic. I believe Biden can still win. Twenty percent of Republicans distain Trump. In a close election, they could provide the margin of victory for Biden, whether by crossing over or not voting a presidential preference. I think it reasonable they’ll do just that.

As for a future four years, if Biden can’t carry out his duties, he can either resign, with Harris succeeding to office, or the Congress can implement the 25th Amendment, Section Four:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Let’s not change horses in midstream. We can still win and smooth out any winkles. The alternative is unthinkable.

—rj

Sad news out of India: a vindictive government persecutes its critics

The news out of India is disturbing, violence and repression of those opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) daily occurrences.

Recently reelected to a third five-year term, but with diminished support that’s resulted in a loss of his parliamentary majority, Modi must now rely on a coalition government to maintain power.

This hasn’t proved a roadblock to his recent cabinet appointments, none of them Muslim, though India has a burgeoning Muslim population exceeding 200 million, presently 14% of the country’s population. Nor has it tempered his embrace of a Hindu hegemony (Hindutva).

Speaking out against his policies and the BJP risks severe consequences.

Many of his political opponents have been jailed on trumped up charges of corruption, while others are under investigation.

In March, 2024, Modi’s government froze the bank accounts of its main adversary, the Nationalist Congress Party, alleging non-payment of taxes.

In 2023, it eliminated the country’s chief justice as one of three commissioners overseeing elections. The BJP now enjoys a majority vote.

For another example, there’s the ongoing harassment of Waheed-Ur-Rehman, arrested in 2019 and held for two years, much of it in solitary confinement, for his opposition to the crackdown on Kashmir resistance to the suspension of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status.

Now comes the BJP’s newest outrage in pursuing prosecution of 1997 Booker Award winner Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) for her remarking in 2010 that Kashmir was never a part of India.

Kashmiri academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain, who appeared with her at the rally in Delhi, will also be prosecuted under India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (1967).

Roy has been a longtime critic of Modi policy.

If media pundits thought the Modi government would learn from its election setback, they’re sadly mistaken.

The BJP has become even more vindictive—more arrests, more violence.

In 2023, the Biden administration gave Modi a lavish welcome, replete with a state dinner. Talk about Kissinger, expediency is still in vogue.

Entrepreneurial moguls Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who view India as an investment quarry, sent their congratulations to Modi on his win.

At the just concluded G7, a lengthy queue assembled to do acquiescence to its invited guest.

The casualty is India’s secular constitution.

—rj

Dr. Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death


Am reading Henry Marsh’s And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. Marsh is a retired brain surgeon, who recently was diagnosed (2021) with advanced prostate cancer, presently in remission, but with a 75% chance of reoccurrence.

His previous books include Do No Harm and Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon, both well received. Professionally, he has published 179 papers in peer reviewed journals and performed 50,000 surgeries over a 40-year span.

In his fulsome writing, Marsh reminds me of the late neurosurgeon Oliver Sacks, gifted in eloquence, humble, and unfailingly compassionate.

Perhaps I’m stereotyping, but he’s unlike many in the medical sciences, consumed by professional interests and profit motive, insensitive or ignorant of the arts and, professionally, objectifying their patients rather than seeing them as individuals, each with gradients of need and longing.

One of his cherished accomplishments is the creation of two balcony gardens for neurological patients at St. George’s hospital

Impressively, he’s been working pro bonum with colleagues in Ukraine since 1992. Neither cancer nor the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine has deterred the good doctor visiting the country regularly to consult and advise colleagues.

At home, Marsh is an assisted dying activist.

Of his previous Do No Harm, now translated into 37 languages, The Economist wrote that it’s “so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell.”

Marsh reads widely, owns several thousand books, keeps a garden, raises bees, and enjoys woodcrafting.

I’m early in my reading of And Finally, so I’ll delay full commentary for another post when fully read. But let me share a passage I read this morning that amplifies Marsh’s writing talent infused with observation and an affinity for nature, under assault by climate change:

The {COVID} lockdown coincided with perfect spring weather – so fine, prolonged and warm that it spoke of climate change. The bushes in the little paradise of my back garden almost all burst into flower all at once, and the trees went from being bare winter skeletons to towers of spreading green leaves in a matter of days. The bees came rushing out of their hive in front of my workshop and shot up into the sunlight, rejoicing in vertical zigzags. And the lockdown brought complete peace and quiet. The air felt as fresh as if you were in the countryside and the sky was a clear and deep blue. The only sounds were of birds singing, children playing and the wind in the trees. And at night, at first there was a full moon, looking down kindly on the suddenly silent city, and you could see the stars. It was a vision of heaven, here in London, SW19. Time had stopped. Eternity is not the infinite prolongation of time but instead its abolition.

The silence and clear air, and the return of birdsong, reminded us of what we have already lost with cars, pollution and the changing climate, and the unnaturally fine weather told us that Nature is out of joint, and that there is much, much worse to come.

I feel it in my bones. This is going to be a great read.

—rj

 

Biden plays politics: The Gaza fiasco


On one hand, President Biden urges a ceasefire in the nearly six month Gaza conflict; on the other, he has stealthily authorized a potent new military aid package to Israel that includes jets, 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs.

Although 2000 pound bombs are capable of taking out whole city blocks and have been abandoned by most Western militaries for employment in urban locales, they have dominated Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, with the death toll currently estimated at 33,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Anonymous Pentagon sources disclose the armament transfer includes transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines at a cost of 2.5 billion.
Biden isn’t mandated to disclose any of this to lawmakers since Congress had approved the transfer in 2008, presently unfulfilled.

Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, receiving on average $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid annually.

Such aid incentivizes documented Israeli violations of Palestinian rights by humane organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They have included ongoing abusive detention practices (including the torture of prisoners), restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, the targeting of medical personnel and facilities, and severe damage to infrastructure such as water and electricity to Palestinian civilians prior to Israel’s current Gaza incursion.

It does not move the needle to a two state solution.

All of this comes even as Biden expresses concern over a pending Israeli assault on the alleged remaining Hamas stronghold of Rafah along the Egyptian border and UN warnings of incipient mass starvation. 1.2 million Gaza refugees have sought refuge in this enclave.

Jewish pressure weighs heavily on the Biden administration in an election year with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee donating millions to unseat Democrats deemed unfriendly to Israel. A recent Pew Research survey indicates 80% of American Jews regard aid to Israel as essential.

Those constituencies calling for suspension of aid to Israel are branded as anti-Semite, with surging efforts to pass legislation abridging their First Amendment right to free speech.

Republicans, even more than Democrat leaning Jews, have vigorously supported aid to Israel, though increasingly resistant to approving aid to a besieged Ukraine.

Biden would do well to mind an increasingly assertive Muslim-American electorate that threatens to boycott him in November.

Meanwhile, any full scale attack on densely populated Rafah, gateway for food convoys, would conceivably result in thousands, not hundreds, of killed and maimed.

The morally compromised Biden administration has been complicit in Israel’s blitzkrieg that includes mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps, abetted by American armaments.

For this, the U.S. proves deserving of world condemnation.

The elephant in the room is Biden; but then again, endeavors to dislodge him by voting for his Republican adversary are surely non sequitur.

Conversely, efforts to encourage divestiture at home and abroad of Israel merit encouragement. They brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime.

America must do what is right, not what is easy.

–rj

Democracy’s Failure

While democracy has been widely touted as the best form of government, it’s had many detractors in Britain and America, who fearing a working class majority of the uninformed, intellectually unprepared, politically manipulated by partisan interests, proposed education in the liberal arts as a safeguard for assuring an informed, discriminating electorate.

One thinks of Matthew Arnold’s classic Culture and Anarchy and John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University as examples. The truth is it hasn’t worked to salvage democracy. As Costica Bradatan comments in his insightful book, In Praise of Failure, “Populism and authoritarianism are flourishing today in places with remarkably high educational levels. For all the self-flattering talk about civic-mindedness and political engagement, the citizenry in the West is in no better shape than it was one hundred years ago. And we seem resigned to the situation.”

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, comments in his Universities in the Marketplace that the arts and sciences faculties “display scant interest in preparing undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a liberal education.”

Viewing our current political milieu, I see only the debris of a once heralded idea to make government truly feasible in the best interests of our nation. Alas, not since the Civil War, has America been so fractured in its allegiances.

Alexander Hamilton, suspicious of public sovereignty, supported the idea of the Electoral College. That certainly hasn’t worked.

Back in England, John Stuart Mill proposed a plutocracy of the educated allowed multiple votes. Fortunately, it wasn’t well-received.

As for the prototype Athenian democracy, women couldn’t vote, nor foreigners and slaves.

I confess I don’t know the answer, except to offer that democracy, for all its liabilities, surpasses those protocols previously attempted.

—rj

Oh, my god! The Political Morass Confronting Americans

Oh, my god! We’re all in trouble. Here we are, facing a presidential election, caught in a catch-22 situation, the choice between a president clearly showing incipient symptoms of mental decline, and an ex-President promising revenge and demagoguery. Biden’s lapses have been widely reported in the press for some time: tumbling on aircraft steps, lingering pauses in speech delivery, mix-up in identifying political leaders, befuddled recall of events.

Now comes the President’s frantically called press gathering, just 23 minutes warning in the aftermath of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s devastating findings on Biden’s alleged national security lapses: storage of top secret files in his Delaware home and sharing of classified information with the ghostwriter of his memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer.

Hur’s office considered charging Zwoniker, who has been cooperative, but the ghostwriter had previously destroyed the interview tapes with Biden when he learned of the special counsel probe, resulting in the improbability of a conviction for lack of evidence.

Hur found the president’s recall of how the classified documents ended-up in his basement as “hazy.” He had said he found them in his then rented house in Virginia.

What really instigated Biden’s frenetic press appearance was probably Hur’s reporting the President’s inability to recall when his son Beau died of brain cancer: “I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” the President angrily retorted.-

Biden couldn’t even recall the dates he’d been vice-president.

The reality is that his combative press conference only seems to lend credence to Hur’s allegations of a President of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

About to leave the room, Biden returned to the lectern to respond to a reporter’s belated question on the Gaza crisis. Committing yet another gaffe of mistaken identity, piling up in recent days to the chagrin of his staff, Biden confused Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”

Several days earlier in Nevada, he confused deceased French president Francois Mitterand with current French president Emmanuel Macron. Mitterand died in 2015.

This past Wednesday, Biden said he had interviewed Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021. Kohl died in 2017.

I think of Ronald Reagan in his second term, then America’s oldest president, falling asleep in cabinet meetings. A few years later, 1994, Reagan announced his Alzheimer diagnosis. The signs, however, of its progression had already been evident while in office.

I wish our President well, but I fear the fallout of mental facility in a nuclear age, the challenge of climate warming, the looming threat of a Russia-China-Iran alliance, and still more, to nightmare my sleep.

Hiding presidential infirmity has a long history, embracing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. We’ve mustered through so far, but why take the risk?

Faulting Republican Robert Hur constitutes its own partisanship.

As Democratic strategist James Carville candidly put it, “I don’t know how you get out of this.”

–rj

Martyr’s Day: Gandhi’s Vanishing Legacy

Today marks Martyr’s Day in India. On this day, January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, father of a free India, visiting New Delhi to address an evening Hindu prayer meeting, was gunned down by nationalist Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who fired three bullets into his chest, killing him. Godse believed Gandhi was overly conciliatory to Muslims.

Falling to the ground, Gandhi reputedly moved his hand to his forehead in the Hindu sign of forgiveness, his final words, “He Ram, He Ram” (“Oh God, Oh God”).

This happened a mere five months after India had won independence from British rule.

Committed to the Tolstoy principle of non-violence, Gandhi would be appalled at the changes sweeping across today’s India in the wake of a Hindu fundamentalism of tsunami proportions not adverse to employing violence against those perceived as threatening its interests, augmented by a Modi government keen to buttress its hegemony by supporting religious bias.

A few days ago, January 22, saw the dedication of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, said to be Ram’s birthplace. Ram is the seventh avatar of the god, Vishnu, and regarded as deity.

_=Ram Temple, Inauguration Day

Modi had promised the temple in his initial run for prime minister and was present to inaugurate the temple: “Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” said Modi.

Built on a 70-acre site previously occupied by the four century old Babri Mosque, torn down in 1992 by a frenzied Hindu mob, thousands died in the sectarian violence that followed. None of the perpetrators were sentenced.

Not that any of this mattered to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi, entrenched in power since 2014. The Ram Temple symbolizes the supremacy of both the BJP and a Hindu culture that discourages pluralism.

In contrast, India’s founding fathers, recognizing the myriad religious diversity of India—Muslims, Buddhists Christians, and Jains—eschewed pandering to any faction.

Ironically, India seems to be following in the steps of Pakistan, deliberately created as a Muslim state.

Chillingly, there’s the legacy of Hindu nationalist M. S. Golwalkar, advocating that “minorities in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”

Modi deemed Golwalkar one of his primary influences in his 2008 book, Jyotipunj (Beams of Light).

Today’s Hindu dominated India, 80% of its population, increasingly imposes Golwalkar’s dictum of a monolithic culture impervious to those it views as interlopers, deserving of restriction and possibly extinction.

In the first eight months of 2023, 525 attacks on Christians occurred. In the state of Manipur, 642 churches were torched by Hindu arsonists “receiving support from people in power,” said the United Christian Forum (UCF).

Notorious was the killing of Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines in 1999, along with his two sons, Philip (aged 10) and Timothy (aged 6), burnt to death by a Hindu Nationalist group named Bajrang Dal. Stains, a medical doctor, had come to India several years earlier to treat lepers and minister to the poor. He was accused of “forced conversions,” a common rumored charge among Hindu nationalists.

As is, Christians comprise a mere 2.3 % of India’s teeming population.

Indian Muslims, comprising the third largest Muslim population in the world, have likewise been continuously assaulted, often accused of cattle rustling.

2020 saw the Delhi riots, killing 53 people, 40 of them Muslim. In its aftermath, Modi denied his government discriminates against Muslims, despite the BJP’s legislating the Citizen’s Act, restricting citizen eligibility of undocumented immigrants, largely Muslim, and prohibiting proselytizing by Muslims and Christians.

An investigation of the Delhi riots by the independent Delhi Minorities Commission found the violence “planned and targeted” and several police actively participating in attacking Muslims. A subsequent video confirmed several policemen beating five seriously injured Muslim men lying on the street and forcing them to sing the Indian national anthem to prove their patriotism.

I won’t go into persecution of the Sikh population, increasingly viewed as disloyal citizenry, seeking establishment of an independent state. Canadian and American intelligence agencies have uncovered assassination plots, one of them succeeding in Canada, against Sikh diaspora leadership.

Meanwhile, President Biden went all out for the state visit of Prime Minister Midi, hosting a vegetarian dinner on June 21, 2023, despite protestors among Democrats and the urgings of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that he confront Modi on the matter of human rights in India. The President would later say he did so in private conversation with Modi, but if so, any details were excluded from his public closing summation.

India, which held so much promise for an enlightened democracy upon its emergence as a free nation, has altered its raison d’être over the last decade, increasingly disenfranchising its minorities and critics.

I have wondered how my friends are faring in Kerala, where the apostle Thomas ministered to the natives 2000 years ago. Its Christian community is India’s largest . Unfortunately, the Catholic leadership has cozied up to the BJP in return for its support of a good price for Kerala rubber. I find it a dubious Faustian exchange, prioritizing profit over the welfare of Christians elsewhere in the nation.

I think back to my privileged visit years ago to Gandhi’s simple bed, cup, and walking stick. I had read about him at age ten, which began my lifetime devotion to this great man, advocate of non-violence, charity to the poor, abolishing caste, proponent of women’s emancipation and, of course, India’s freedom. His impact on Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement is fully acknowledged.

It’s Martyr’s Day as I said at the outset. Is it conceivable Gandhi’s leading India’s into the promise land of sovereignty has transpired into a new tyranny of oppression, imposed not by a foreign entity, but by an Indian government weaponizing nationalism for its own ends?

Sadly, Modi and the BJP enjoy widespread favorability in today’s India, assuring long term oppression of India’s religious and political minorities, usurping the enlightened legacy of Gandhi and Nehru with their targeted bigotry.

–rj

US Complicity: A Lack of Political Will


KHAN YUNIS, GAZA -t. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

If ever there’s been a clarion call for the United States to abandon its military support for Israel, it’s now. Prime Minister Natanyahu has made it clear to Washington that there will be no Palestinian state on the West Bank, rejecting Secretary of State Blinken’s recent plea for a two state resolution as Israel’s surest means to security.

Nor will the Prime Minister, a friend of Donald Trump since the 1980s, scale back Israel’s offensive in Gaza until total victory and return of remaining hostages is achieved.

As I write, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children; hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps bombed; and a frightened civilian population, 1.9 million of them, or 80% of the Gaza population, herded into a southern corridor, and confronted with disease and starvation.

This constitutes the true genocide, which South Africa has brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), the UN’s highest court. Fifty-six other nations support the suit, but not the United States and UK. The European Union has chosen silence.

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – General view of buildings which were destroyed during Israeli bombardment. Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

South Africa has also filed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not to be conflated with the ICJ, though both are located in the Hague. The ICJ can issue arrest warrants, as it did for Vladimir Putin, who must now avoid signatory countries that include South Africa.

What’s not received ample attention is the economic plight Palestinians face. Before Hamas’ October 7 incursion, 400,000 Palestinians were employed by Israel, largely in construction, agriculture and service sectors. I87,000 Gazans have had their work permits canceled; similarly, 167,000 Palestinians on the West Bank.

In the meanwhile, Israel has set up worker recruiting offices in India and Sri Lanka, with the goal of importing between 50,000 to 100,000 replacements.

This may be part of a long term stategy by Israeli nationalists to encourage Palestinians to leave Israel. Take, for example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave, replaced by Israelis, who could “make the desert bloom.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration, despite its call for a cease fire and a two state solution, is unwilling to risk political capital and rebuff Netanyahu by suspending military aid to Israel.

By default, it’s rendered the US complicit in Israel’s criminality, angered Progressives, alienated the Muslim community, made the US a global atavar of hypocrisy, and risks dragging the country into a wider conflict, inflicting incalculable consequences, both home and abroad.

–rj

Fiasco at Harvard: A President Resigns

The headlines shout the news of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation.

It should have happened speedily, but not because she allegedly soft-pedaled campus protests calling for intifada while omitting Hamas’ atrocities and was consequently judged antisemitic by Israel supporters. I believe the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were essentially ambushed when they were interviewed—or is it interrogated?—by a House committee that had already made-up its mind.

As a former academic for nearly forty years, I firmly support the ACLU in its lawsuit defending University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, ordered deactivated in Florida’s public colleges by Governor DeSantis (ACLU defends).

Protecting the First Amendment is paramount and criticism of Israel shouldn’t be conflated with antisemitism. 

Despite the ruckus over her “it depends on context” when asked if threatening Jews with genocide violated Harvard’s code of conduct, I think she was right.

As I write, seventeen members of Biden’s campaign staff sent an anonymous letter to Biden, calling for a permanent truce in Gaza and suspension of arms shipments to Israel.

Is it antisemitic to want the killing of Palestinian civilians, now exceeding 21,000, to stop? Whole families have been wiped out by incessant Israeli bombings; thousands more, nearly half of them children, wounded. Survivors haven’t any place to go. Schools, mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps haven’t found reprieve from largely American supplied weaponry. Survivors face disease and famine. 

Was UN Secretary-General António Guterres antisemitic in saying Hamas violence didn’t happen in a vacuum”? Further, that “hospitals have turned into battlegrounds,” amid “the constant bombardment of all parts of Gaza” and rendered Palestinians homelessness and “without the essentials to survive”? 

Meanwhile, West Bank violence continues unabated, with little said about repeated settler incursion on Palestinian lands and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements, rendering any two state resolution increasingly implausible.

A recent poll indicates 61% of the American public fault Biden’s strident support of Israel. Are they therefore antisemitic as well ?

Would it surprise you to learn that most orthodox Jews are anti-Zionists?

And then there’s that gadfly Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. I better stop. I think you see where I’m coming from.

Harvard was right to initially support its beleaguered first black president and just second female holding that post in its nearly 400 year history.

At least, in the beginning. But then money has a way of changing minds. 

What began as a trickle became a tsunami, 1600 big spending Jewish alumni, some of them billionaires, pulling back from any more donations to the university. 

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will had said suspending giving wouldn’t dent Harvard policy, Harvard enjoying a 51 billion dollar endowment.

But he was wrong. 45% of Harvard’s 2022 $5.8 billion income came from donations. 

When it comes to Gay’s several instances of plagiarism, I part ways with Harvard. Like most academics—I taught college English for forty years—I take plagiarism seriously. Failure to attribute sources constitutes both theft and fraud. The unveiling of her academic misdeeds called for immediate termination of employment.

In an opt-ed yesterday in The Guardian, former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, decries what he sees as a threat to campus free speech, donators marshaling monetary divestiture to secure their political perspective. He has a point. 

Reich says, however, that he’s unable to comment knowledgeably on Gay’s alleged ¡plagiarism, but notes the bulk of the charges originated from the online conservative journal Washington Free Beacon (Robert Reich).

So what? Does the source taint its accuracy? It’s the old guilt by association trick McCarthy played so notoriously.

The Left were privy to the allegations for some ten days, but buried it. Not until conservatives persistently pursued the story, led by Christopher Rufo, did the budding scandal take hold in the NYT, The Guardian, CNN and elsewhere.

If you pressed me, I could show you the specifics of Gay’s many instances of lifted passages, fifty initially in number with six more added the day before her resignation after meeting with the Harvard Corporation.

Ultimately, the new revelations piled on top of spiraling donator backlash, proved the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Did she get banished from the campus? Don’t even go there! Harvard, which initially made light of the charges, subsequently helped her correct the faulty passages in eight of her publications and reappointed her to her professorship in the Political Science Department.

If the shoe were on a student’s foot, the frequent punishment at reputable universities is expulsion for a year.

Talk about a double standard and the blatant hypocrisy of its Veritas motto, Harvard, you don’t walk the talk.

Writing anonymously for the Harvard Crimson, a student on the Honor Council that tries such cases, wrote, “When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation unanimously stand in support of’ her.” (Harvard president).

But why did an illustrious Ivy League university prove so intransigent in all of this is the bottomline question.

In a recent op-ed, black law school professor and former Harvard graduate Winkfield Tryman, Jr., comments that the plagiarism charges “are well deserved” and “not racial in nature…No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first black president of Harvard. And yet, many are coming to her defense. Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the “top of her profession… as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had” (Newsweek).

Truth be told, this illustrious Harvard prez “at the top of her profession” has published a mere eleven papers and not one book.

Now that’s a first, but of a dubious kind. Her predecessor, Larry Becow, the son of immigrants, and whose mother survived Auschwitz, wrote four scholarly books and scores of peer reviewed articles.

Unfortunately, this debacle at Harvard unfairly triggers a mindset of suspicion of legitimate black scholars, deflating their credentials and singular achievements.

–rj

No Room for Palestinians: Israel’s Calculated Violence

The photos featured in today’s media of masses of Palestinians fleeing Israel’s incessant bombing validates the truth that “a photo is worth a thousand words,” but in a sad way.

As I write, more than 11,000 Palestinians have died, 4000 of them children, and 25,000 have been wounded. The violence continues, Israel stubbornly ruling out a cease fire, demanding Hamas first release its 240 hostages.

The news on the West Bank is dismal as well. An area much larger than Gaza and an Arab majority, it has seen 175 civilians killed, nearly all of them Palestinians, 33 of them children, since Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7. Israel holds several thousand West Bank prisoners, hundreds without charge or trial.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that more than 1000 Palestinians with title to their land have been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Bank since October 7.

This follow a long history of settler intimidation, abetted by Israel Defense Forces, targeting Bedouin herders, Palestinian olive groves and farms. Homes are burned and protestors killed, yet the media allows this criminality to go unreported. It cares only about normalization, not Palestinian grievances.

Al Jazeera has it right: “Were the American media and political establishment not so firmly committed to transmitting a thoroughly decontextualised version of this war – and of Israel/Palestine in general – perhaps a news anchor would ask whether it never occurred to Israel that the Palestinians would ever “retaliate” for 75 years of ethnic cleansing, suffocating blockades and massacres” (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/12/how-americas-bloodthirsty-journalism-cheers-on-israels-war-on-gaza).

While Hamas’ barbarism is surely condemnable, it’s the nature of Israel’s disproportionate response that troubles the international community. Disallowing humanitarian aid, curtailing food, water, and energy, bombing hospitals, ambulances and mosques, a refugee camp two days in a row, justifies growing international rage.

Ordering 1.2 million Palestinians to abandon their homes in north Gaza, with no real place to flee while denying them subsistence, constitutes a glaring war crime.

Concurrently, the United States, Great Britain, and France have contributed to Israel’s unmeasured response, accelerating arms shipments to Israel and making themselves complicit

Israeli repression of Palestinians, often violent, has its lengthy narrative. With the seizure of the West Bank following the 1967 War, a new chauvinism of a greater Israel ensued to the detriment of Palestinians in the Negev, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, resulting in the rise of Hamas, a Palestine offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1983, Israel conspired with Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in the massacres of several thousands of Palestinians and was found culpable by both the UN’s and Israel’s own subsequent investigations. The UN termed it “genocide.”

In the aftermath of 1948’s birth of the state of Israel and its victory over Arab armies, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, many of whom populate today’s Gaza and West Bank.

Five years ago, during the Great March of Return in Gaza, Israelis killed hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and wounded several thousand others.

While we hear a lot about a two state remedy, it’s unlikely, since it takes a marriage of minds for that to happen. Palestinians don’t trust Israelis, especially a government led by nationalist leadership under Netanyahu. They’ve also witnessed the second class citizenship of Arabs granted citizenship.

There do exist Israelis who want to address Palestinian grievances, but do so at great cost. Many have been arrested, their identities and addresses posted online, their families threatened.

In 1995, a religious extremist killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had sought to implement the Oslo Accords with its provision for Palestinian self rule in Gaza and the West Bank: “We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough… We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough.”

In the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu came to power, resulting in negotiations for a just settlement with the Palestinians being abandoned in favor of surveillance and military might. Hamas was to be controlled, not dismantled. Netanyahu needed Hamas to offset the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, open to negotiation. October 7 changed the venue.

Zionism is the real culprit here. Israel has never subscribed to the two state idea in which Palestinians would be masters of their own house.

Addressing Palestinian members of Knesset in 2021, far right Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Recently, Smotrich has voiced sentiment for a one state Israel: “Peace will not emerge so long as we maintain our hold on starting assumptions that this land is fated to contain two collectives with conflicting national aspirations. If this is the case, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren will inevitably be destined to live by the sword….The ‘Palestinian People’ is but a counter-movement to the Zionist movement. Those who choose not to let go of their national ambitions will receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.”

Is it conceivable that Israel’s vociferous response, defiant of the international community’s call for a ceasefire, is deliberately strategic? That not only Hamas should be eliminated, but the Palestinian presence once and for all? Make it so intolerable for them that they’ll leave?

Ominously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing his country on October 28, quoted Deuteronomy: 25:17: “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” If you continue to verse 19, you’ll read, “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Never forget!” In 1st Samuel 15: 2-3, the Hebrew Bible exhorts, “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”

He didn’t have to go on. He had made his point.

–rj