The Ivies took a pounding, and New York Representative Elise Stefanik received a publicity boost more valuable than gold, and it couldn’t have come to a less deserving person.1 The supposedly brilliant scholars heading Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and M.I.T. came across as scripted robots, not responding actively to Stefanik’s leading questions—that “intifada”, which literally means “rebellion”, actually means “the genocidal elimination of the Jews”, for example—but rather letting her push them down whatever humiliating alley she chose.
Despite their presumed brainpower, President Claudine Gay (Harvard), Elizabeth McGill (Penn), and Sally Kornbluth (M.I.T.) were all maneuvered into sounding as though they were unwilling to condemn a genocide of the Jews, while what they “meant” was that they would not police the inner thoughts of their students, or even their spoken ones—it was “acceptable” for a student at Harvard to think, to vary the hypothetical, that Africans were genetically inferior to Europeans, and even to say it, but unacceptable to harass people of African descent on or off campus. The presidents could not make this argument, of course, first because these universities make extensive efforts to screen out any applicant possibly guilty of such an outrageous “thoughtcrime” or anything remotely resembling it—that some of the obstacles that black people in the U.S. face are of their own making, for example—and because, moreover, the Ivies, and great majority of the rest of American academia, have bending over backwards for the past decade to avoid “offending” the woke on any subject, most particularly, these days, Israeli oppression of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, which is very real, but the solution for which is not Hamas, an organization that is dedicated to the elimination of Israel if not the Jews.
Peter Beinart, who I admire greatly (most of the time), goes a little far, in my opinion, in explaining, and explaining away, the negative implications of such current catch words and phrases as “intifada”, “Palestine must be free from the river to the sea”, and “decolonization”.2 I can see the arguments (valid) for not banning them from the platform formerly known as Twitter (and elsewhere), but to claim that they can be used at the current time in a way that do not suggest a threat to Israel’s existence (rather than its continued efforts to expand its territory and “cleanse” the newly conquered land of Palestinians) strikes me as a bit thick. Speakers should know the obvious implications of their words and, most of the time, they do.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein, who is not my idea of a dispassionate kind of guy, nonetheless offers a “useful” guide to past actions of colleges and universities failing to defend the freedom of speech of the “wrong” people, while at New York magazine, Eric Levitz provides a “nice” take on the whole depressing matter. As might be expected, Andrew Sullivan offers aggressively pungent commentary on the three presidents’ various and sundry hypocrisies. Early on, pre-Elise, I offered my two cents here, with links to previous “thoughts” included as well.
Meanwhile, Daniel Larison is wondering why it is quite so important to worry about the woke contortions of academe when Israel is wreaking havoc on the two million helpless civilians in Gaza, in a “war” that, in Alan Vanneman’s opinion, is far more likely to damage Israel than its enemies.
Richard Haass, still covering Aass
Shortly after Henry Kissinger’s death, the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner went in search of wisdom to Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations—a very big mistake. I earlier gave the distinguished Mr. Haass a well-deserved beatdown for his absurd confessions of ignorance as to what the heck the deal was with our cahwaysy 2003 invasion of Iraq, the crown jewel of the Bush II administration,3 not to mention our splendid little war in Afghanistan. “They did very little planning” with the second venture, Mr. Haass “explained”, speaking a bit oddly of the Bush administration in the third person, since he was a prominent member of it—in fact, his title at the State Department at the time was director of “Policy Planning”.
Mr. Haass had more dubious words of wisdom for Mr. Chotiner, “explaining” for example, that even when Dr. Kissinger was, you know, wrong, he wasn’t really wrong. For example
I think what happened in, say, East Pakistan, what became Bangladesh, his prioritization of the relationship with Pakistan, whether it was because of his dislike of India and [Indira] Gandhi, or because of Pakistan’s role as a go-between with China, I just thought his priorities were misplaced. He was slow to see what was going on, and to react to it. The idea that he stood by the Pakistani leadership of the day was just wrong.
Well, no. That “analysis” was “just wrong”, as we say in the biz. Henry wasn’t “slow to see what was going on, and slow to react”. He knew what was going on, and his “prioritization” of the U.S. relationship with Pakistan obviously meant that he did stand with the Pakistani leadership, and if, during the Bangladesh genocide, also known as the “Gonohotta”, hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as three million—Bengalis were murdered, and several hundred thousand Bengali women were raped, well, you know what they say about omelets.4
Moral: If you want to hear something intelligent about foreign policy, don’t speak to anyone connected with the Council of Foreign Relations.
Ryan Grim and “The Squad”: the Good, the Bad, and the Missing
Ryan Grim, a reporter with the Intercept, a two-fisted, truth-telling outfit on the moderate left, which I find well worth reading, particularly when taken with an occasional grain of salt, has turned out an excellent read, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, which I found fascinating even though I have no interest in a political revolution and no belief that “the Squad”, however augmented, would be capable of generating one, and even though Ryan omits—inadvertently, I am sure—many pertinent details in his portrait of New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her original band of sisters, Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Soyini Pressley (Mass.), and Rashida Harbi Tlaib (Mich.), all winning office in 2018, since augmented by two more in 2020, and two after that in 2022.
Perhaps most fascinating to me were the furious efforts, well chronicled by Grim, of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, aka AIPAC, to rid the halls of Congress of representatives so impertinent as to question the will of AIPAC. As Grim points out, AIPAC has, since the events of January 6, 2021, contributed money to the campaigns of 60—yes, SIX OH—Republican congressfolk who voted not to approve Joe Biden’s designation as president elect on that date, proving that AIPAC doesn’t give a damn about democracy in America or anywhere else, that it’s strictly a “tribal” organization, believing that Israel should be a terror, rather than a light, to the nations. That makes it all the more bewildering (to me, at least) that Ryan, in his introduction to us of the Notorious AOC, gives us this vignette from the middle of the 2018 congressional campaign, which includes references to two of her campaign advisors, Corbin Trent and Saikat Chakrabarti:
In the middle of July, the stress finally caught up to Ocasio-Cortez, and she did the unthinkable: she took on the Israel-Palestine question unprepared. “Corbin and I put her in a bit of a vulnerable position,” Chakrabarti said, “on a topic that wasn’t her thing. She never really talked about Israel-Palestine, and that’s just not something she’d ever really thought a lot about, other than a little bit during the campaign.” Ocasio-Cortez was still surging in celebrity when she agreed to a sit-down interview on PBS’s Firing Line. In the midst of the primary campaign, she had attracted attention with her full-throated criticism of the Israel Defense Forces, which had fired on Palestinian demonstrators, killing many.
What follows is several pages of discussion over what Alexandra said during the interview, leading her ultimately to backtrack, pleading ignorance as her excuse, which Ryan clearly seconds, leading me to ask “Excuse me, but what did she say that was wrong?” Israel was occupying the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Israeli “security” clearly was running roughshod, to put it mildly, over Palestinian “rights”, which in fact scarcely existed. The only thing AOC needed to apologize for was her apology.
If Ryan is too “politique” in this case—a strange criticism coming from the likes of me—he is too “crafty” in others. He omits entirely AOC’s support of “BDS”—the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” “movement”, which, as I have repeatedly complained, treats Israel as somehow the worst nation in the world, when it is “merely” one bad actor among many, most spectacularly including the United States itself. I “support”, sans enthusiasm, the “right” of BDS to exist, and support the right of its supporters to press their case wherever they please, and to engage in all manner of BDS activities as an exercise in free speech, but I see it as little more than an excuse for “anti-Zionist” rhetoric and behavior that is very hard to distinguish from antisemitism. As Huckleberry Finn, commenting on the minimal differences between dukes and kings, might have said of an anti-Zionist, “When he’s drunk there ain’t no near-sighted man could tell him from an antisemite.”5
Ryan similarly downplays AOC’s calls both to “defund the police” and “abolish the ICE” (Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency). Regarding the latter, Ryan “explains”
As with “defund the police,” the policy behind the saying was nuanced, but the blunt language gave [Democratic] party operatives heartburn and allowed the right to caricature the position.
What’s “nuanced” about calling for “defunding” and “abolishing”? Isn’t it rather, “explicitly unnuanced”? Or perhaps “deliberately in your face”? Why say that it’s okay for AOC to make sweeping, “non-negotiable” demands on the grounds that she doesn’t really mean them?
The Squad love to talk about “kitchen table issues”, but when Ocasio-Cortez was elected, her first major policy proposal was the laughably utopian “Green New Deal”, environmentalism being most definitely not a “kitchen table issue”, but rather the classic cause of yuppie virtue-signaling. An apparent turning point in Ocasio-Cortez’s life came when she took part in the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was 1) entirely futile as a means of “protecting the environment”, because Canada would sell the oil no matter if it traveled through the pipeline or not, and 2) harmful to the working class, both by costing the hundreds of well-paying construction that would have been created if the pipeline had gone through and by increasing the price of energy, costing more jobs. In addition, any alternative method of shipping the oil, by boat, train, or truck, would, of course, burn more fuel and thus add to pollution. But, well, no matter. The environmental groups were passionately behind it because environmentalists found it exciting and because sponsoring the protests vastly increased donations, which was perhaps the heart of the matter. Stop the goddamn bulldozers! Just stop ‘em! That’s what environmentalism is all about! That’s what brings in the cash! Who cares if it makes any sense? We want passion, not sense!
For Ocasio-Cortez, and so many on the left, “passion”, if sincerely felt, becomes self-validating. Any “cause”, any slogan, that can generate the sort of ecstatic lift that many demonstrators do feel during a demonstration—chanting slogans, defying “authority”— cannot be “wrong”. It must have an innate moral and emotional significance regardless of its relevance to the real world, a significance superior to any “practical”, pragmatic, or empirical arguments made against it.
The core of the Squad’s message is, of course, “socialism”, chosen really as a “complete” rejection of the status quo. The return to prosperity is already weakening the “charm” of this argument, not to mention the losses the Democratic Party suffered in the House of Representatives in 2020 and 2022. I hope AIPAC does not defeat “the Squad”, but I cannot believe what the Squad believes—that if only “real” socialists ran in every congressional district, there would be 435 socialists in Congress. Whether AOC will turn out to anything more in the future than a fading media princess is anyone’s guess. And whether the others— Rashida Harbi Tlaib in particular—can avoid being goaded into taking costly “extreme” positions—on Palestine, for example—remains to be seen. And whether the Democratic Party will ever find leadership “sensible” enough to adopt the kind of skeptical centrism that I have outlined in this blog over the past 15 years—well, that sounds like waaay too much to hope for.
1. I have, in the past, harshly ridiculed Rep. Stefanik as the “Whore who went to Harvard”, but she totally deserved it, as National Review dude John McCormack, who phrases the issue more gently in his informative post, The Evolution of Elise Stefanik, but does point out that the once “moderate” Elise was one of the few right-wing reps/pluguglies who were not just “asking questions” about the integrity of the 2020 presidential election but actually claimed she knew that massive voter fraud had occurred—“more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased, and otherwise unauthorized voters — in Fulton County [Georgia] alone.”
2. This is a transcript from a podcast so the “flow” can be a little awkward.
3. My rant also touches on what happened to the confused Dr. Kissinger when he dared to attempt to add even a modicum of good sense to our national non-debate about the 2003 Iraqi invasion.
4. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary Bass, the title referring to a famous telegram sent by the Archer Blood, General Counsel in Dacca, capital of what was then East Pakistan, protesting against U.S. policy, tells the brutal story about the Nixon-Kissinger policy of callous indifference to Bengali suffering. Blood was fired by President Nixon, but when Herbert Spivak, Blood’s replacement, made it clear that he agreed with Blood, Nixon, and Kissinger, were stuck with bearing the burden of the truth about their heartless policies. Ini Beckman, who was stationed in New Delhi at the time, provides an excellent overview of the book.
5. One can, I think, reasonably argue that bringing Israel into existence was a bad idea, though the arguments in favor, again I think, were stronger, though not by a great margin. But now that Israel is in existence, and has been in existence for more than 70 years, it would utterly atrocious to attempt to dismantle the country. The problem is that Israel, on its present course, believes that its military power, uncritically backed by that of the United States, gives it the “right” to expand to its “Biblical” (“Biblical” as in entirely fictitious) borders. This is, I believe, a recipe for ultimate disaster.
