Ye said Sunday night on Parler that he was told by his custody lawyer Bob Cohen that he will lose custody of his children if he keeps up his “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
“On my last and final meeting with Bob Cohen he told me ‘if I keep up anti-Semitic rhetoric you’ll loose custody of your children,’” Ye said.
“So let me get this straight,” he continued. “If I complain about Jewish business practices it’s considered anti Semitic So my custody lawyer was basically telling me If you complain about getting done wrong in business You will loose custody of your children And this was the guy on my side.”
“Bob Cohen was my custody lawyer,” Ye said in another post. “On our first meeting he had a black woman there I asked him why she was here He replied Chris Rock told me I needed to hire someone black He didn’t say She was a great lawyer He simply said I hired her cause she was black.”
The Jewish activist group StopAntisemitism called for Ye to lose custody of his children earlier this month.
TMZ’s Harvey Levin also suggested that Ye’s “anti-Semitic rants” and “mental illness” should be a factor in denying him custody of his children.
“To me, at the very least, I could see a judge saying at this point that there’ll be visitation [rights] but it’s going to be supervised,” Levin said.
Ye said in another post on Parler that he was suspended from Instagram “for telling Russel Simmons that I was going to make ‘you know who’ have better contracts and business practices.”
Simmons can be seen in the text urging Ye to “be the hero” in this situation by bashing white people instead of his “Jewish brothers.”
“[L]et’s be the hero in this it’s very possible you can be the bridge and fight white supremacy while getting out the frustrations that blacks have with their jewish brothers in a digestible way,” Simmons said.
“I’m staying in America,” Ye responded. “I gotta get the Jewish business people to make the contracts fair Or die trying.’
Simmons said last week that Blacks and Jews should unite against “white supremacy” and urged Ye to apologize to the Jewish community.
“We have common enemies, the blacks and the Jews, and great purpose together … we are joined at the hip in our fight against white supremacy,” Simmons said.
On Monday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on a potentially momentous case challenging the use of race in admissions decisions at Harvard University and our other academic institutions.
Over the last half-century, our system of Affirmative Action—preferences based upon race—has become an increasingly powerful and entrenched aspect of American society, so much so that any notion of rolling it back had long since been regarded as quixotic. But a small group of determined opponents persevered in their efforts, so many now believe that a legal victory might finally be at hand. No one had ever expected that Roe v. Wade would be overturned after nearly fifty years, and perhaps Bakke and its epigones may suffer a similar fate.
This legal challenge to Harvard admissions policy had centered upon the strong evidence of racial discrimination against Asian applicants. When the trial began in Boston federal district court four years ago, I published a long article analyzing the case and noting the close connection to my own original Meritocracy article published in late 2012, whose own tenth anniversary is now almost at hand.
Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.
Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or since. After it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.
Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later published an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke Have three decades of Supreme Court support for affirmative action been based on fraud?
Ron Unz • National Review • February 18, 2013 • 800 Words
There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast column entitled “The End of the American Dream.”
Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself. Many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.
Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.
For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence proved very difficult to ignore…
But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in my New York Times column:
Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.
Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.
This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.
The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.
This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.
It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.
My extremely long 2012 article ran more than 26,000 words plus several quantitative appendices, and only the first part dealt with the issue of Asian Quotas in the Ivy League. This was a matter of deliberate strategy on my part since I assumed that most casual readers would grow weary and stop at some point, long before they reached the central core of my material, which was even more controversial.
Among American journalists and academics, matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities constitute the deadly “third rail” of their professions and the quantitative analysis I presented was probably one of the most explosive published anywhere in many decades. As I explained in the closing paragraphs of my 2018 article:
The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.
The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.
Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.
For decades the primary pipeline for joining America’s political, media, financial, or academic elites has been represented by Harvard and our other elite colleges, and I demonstrated that the distribution of their students sharply diverged from that of our society as a whole or its highest performing segment. I discussed the striking ethnic skew:
The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.
Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.
When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.
However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.
Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.
Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.
Several charts and graphs effectively presented these remarkable findings:
These charts demonstrated the hidden reality that white Gentiles were heavily under-represented at elite colleges not merely with regard to their fraction of highest-performing students but even relative to their share of the college-age population. Academic administrators might publicly fret that blacks or Hispanics were not enrolled proportional to their national numbers, but the under-enrollment of non-Jewish whites was actually far more severe. To a considerable extent, the student bodies of our top colleges constitute the next generation of our national elites in embryonic form, and during recent decades white Gentiles had been increasingly excluded from that important pool.
All these meritocracy statistics were originally compiled ten years ago, but when I’ve occasionally updated them, I noticed that little had changed except that they had sometimes grown even more extreme. As mentioned, legal discovery eventually revealed that an internal Harvard study had largely confirmed my analysis of Asian discrimination but had been suppressed. Meanwhile, my much more explosive analysis of massive Jewish over-representation had never been significantly challenged despite the angry fulminations of a few agitated Jewish activists, but the topic had unsurprisingly disappeared from any public debate.
Faced with such seemingly insurmountable institutional and media obstacles, in 2016 I undertook a bold plan to rectify all these matters at a stroke, organizing the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate of candidates for the university’s Board of Overseers. Headed by longtime progressive icon Ralph Nader, we proposed that the stupendously wealthy university should abolish its undergraduate tuition while providing greater transparency in admissions, and if we had won and gained effective control of Harvard University, academic dominoes would have swiftly tumbled nationwide. But we lost.
American Meritocracy Revisited Elite Admissions, Asian Quotas, and the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Campaign
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 4, 2022 • 28,400 Words
Although our campaign failed, it may have had some longer-term consequences. Although neither our own slate nor that of our bitter opponents ever raised the issue of Jewish numbers, the front-page story in the New York Times announcing our effort must surely have reminded activist groups of the explosive contents of my original 2012 paper, and the risk that the astonishing facts I presented might eventually slip past the media blockade and reach the American public, perhaps with fateful consequences.
All my enrollment figures had been drawn from the public estimates annually provided by Hillel, the nationwide Jewish campus organization, whose numbers had been used for decades by academic researchers and media outlets. My article had noted that even slight declines in Jewish enrollment had sometimes provoked enormous public controversies and demands that they be immediately reversed. As I wrote in 2012:
Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.
Yet the year after our unsuccessful Harvard Overseer campaign, the Hillel website reported a massive, sudden collapse in Jewish enrollment at Harvard and every other American university, a decline of more than 50% that was totally ignored by both the national media and normally alert Jewish activist organizations, and this striking disappearance of Jews at elite colleges has continued down to the present day. However, I quickly determined that this shift seemed merely to be one of redefinition, with students apparently only counted in that category if they declared themselves to be practitioners of the Jewish religion, a change that had an enormous impact, as I explained in 2018:
These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel. Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.
In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.
It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?
Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.
Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.
For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.
One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.
As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.
My own Meritocracy analysis was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but such numbers represent merely a tiny sliver within the vastness of the Internet, and after a few months my explosive Jewish findings had permanently vanished from any secondary coverage or other public discussion. So although well-informed individuals interested in Jewish matters or elite college admissions must be aware of my results, the complete silence of the broader media has ensured that everyone else remained entirely ignorant.
As an example of this, a few days ago a friend of mine pointed me to a Tablet podcast series on Jews in the Ivy League entitled “Gatecrashers” and hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who often focuses on religious matters. Although I listened to the episode “Harvard and the End of the Jewish Ivy League,” I found Oppenheimer’s obvious lack of quantitative skills or any true understanding of the issues involved rather disheartening.
However, the podcast page did provide a link to a very helpful article in the Harvard Crimson, presenting the results of four years of Freshman surveys on a variety of lifestyle issues, including religious faith. During 2013-2016, there had been a very sharp decline in most religious affiliations, with the percentage of Catholics and Protestants together dropping from over 42% to less than 35% in just four years, and a corresponding, even stronger decline in followers of Judaism, while the combined category of Atheists, Agnostics, and “Other” grew from under 42% to nearly 53%. We can safely assume that a very substantial portion of the adherents in those latter categories are Jewish by ethnicity.
Freshmen who were religiously Jewish had dropped to just 6.3% in 2016, but during the other three years the percentage had closely clustered around 10%, which is also the figure currently reported for Harvard on the Hillel website. So if we assume that Harvard College attracts Jews who are average in their religious faith, this indicates that the ethnically Jewish fraction of the undergraduate population would be roughly 25% or perhaps a bit higher.
If this estimate is even remotely correct, the implications are quite astonishing, and we can easily understand why switching from ethnicity to religion was employed as a subterfuge to conceal this reality. Since 1980 every college and university in America has had to report the demographic characteristics of its student body to the National Center for Education Statistics. Our own website provides this public data in a highly-convenient form, allowing easy examination of the historical trajectory of all our thousands of undergraduate academic institutions. The 2021 numbers are not yet out, but I am able to provide a table showing the changing enrollment at Harvard College since 2012:
Harvard College Demographics Percentages
Year
White
Black
Hispanic
Asian
Foreign
2012
45.1
6.4
9.2
17.8
11.2
2013
44.9
6.5
9.3
18.1
11.5
2014
43.8
6.8
9.9
18.6
11.2
2015
42.7
6.3
10.4
19.2
11.7
2016
41.2
7.0
11.2
19.6
12.0
2017
40.4
7.6
11.6
20.2
11.5
2018
39.1
8.3
11.2
20.2
12.4
2019
37.6
8.6
11.1
21.0
12.3
2020
34.2
11.0
12.3
21.7
11.7
One of the most striking facts is that during the last five years the percentage of black students grew from 6.3% to 11.0%, a remarkable rise of 75%, certainly the most rapid increase in Harvard’s history. Moreover, the more recent numbers will surely be much higher, given that blacks were 14.8% of the students admitted in 2020 and a whopping 18% of the 2021 admissions.
The Iron Law of Arithmetic demands that percentages must sum to 100, so during this same period, Harvard’s white enrollment dropped more than 10 percentage points, steadily falling from 45.1% in 2012 to just 34.2% in 2020; perhaps this year it barely exceeds 30%. And if, as seems likely, ethnically Jewish students are in the approximate range of 25%, the inescapable conclusion is that although white Gentiles are 60% of the American population and probably over 65% of our highest-performing students, they have now been reduced to a single digit presence at our most elite college. As I noted in my original 2012 article, Harvard has long enrolled American blacks at a considerably higher rate than non-Jewish whites, but the former are now likely larger in absolute numbers even though the latter are more than four times more numerous in our society.
These shocking conclusions must be carefully hedged with a couple of caveats. It is possible that for some reason Jews at Harvard are far more religious than the Jewish population as a whole, which would impact our ethnic estimates. There also seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the lure of Affirmative Action admissions has increasingly persuaded some white students to falsely claim non-white status, and perhaps those numbers have become large enough to impact Harvard’s official statistics. But aside from these two possible factors, both quite difficult to evaluate, the astonishing conclusions I have drawn seem irrrefutable.
The increasing elimination of non-Jewish whites from Harvard and other top colleges is real, but the underlying factors responsible are far from certain. However, I should quote a relevant paragraph from my 2012 article, which noted the close historical parallel presented in Jerome Karabel’s magisterial volume The Chosen:
It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry,[80] and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.[81]
When I published that article a decade ago, probably half of the eight Ivy League colleges had Jewish presidents, and that figure is higher today, with these including the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; the ratio had been even greater last year before Amy Gutmann left the presidency of Penn to become our ambassador to Germany.
Relatively few Americans ever consider applying to Harvard or the other elite Ivy League schools. Indeed, I suspect that much of our citizenry probably regards the composition of those student bodies as totally irrelevant, far less significant than the identities of our top professional athletes or pop music stars. Yet as I have repeatedly emphasized, those educational institutions tend to provide the next generation of America’s ruling elites, and this applies to the world of politics as well as many other sectors.
Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, and Chief of Staff. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.
President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
Chief of Staff Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)
In 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Moscow’s Jewish Center and noted in his remarks that 80-85% of the first Bolshevik government was Jewish. Although that statement was probably somewhat exaggerated, it does seem a very reasonable characterization of today’s American government, despite Jews constituting less than 2% of our population.
When a nation’s top leadership is drawn from such a narrowly insular, almost incestuous circle, in which standards of strict meritocracy have long since been replaced by shared ideological beliefs and perhaps even widespread implicit ethnic nepotism, enormous problems may develop. Our current inflation rate is now the highest in forty years, and a few days ago, prestigious Foreign Affairs, mouthpiece of the American political establishment, carried a major article discussing the looming possibility of a simultaneous war against both Russia and China and how we could successfully triumph in such a difficult conflict. Since my infancy, no American president has seriously contemplated a war with either Russia or China, but our current national leadership seems quite eager to embroil us in a global war with both of them at the same time.
Following the 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, some observers noted with unease that the United States was left as about the only remaining large and fully-functional multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent collapse and disintegration of ethnically diverse Yugoslavia merely strengthened these concerns. China is sometimes portrayed by the ignorant American media as having large and restive minority populations, but it is 92 percent Han Chinese, and if we exclude a few outlying or thinly populated provinces—the equivalents of Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico—closer to 95 percent Han, with all its top leadership drawn from that same background and therefore possessing a natural alignment of interests. Without doubt, America’s great success despite its multiplicity of ethnic nationalities is almost unique in modern human history. But such success should not be taken for granted.
Many of the Jewish writers who focus on the history of elite university admissions, including Karabel, Steinberg, and Lemann, have critiqued and rebuked the America of the first half of the Twentieth Century for having been governed by a narrow WASP ascendency, which overwhelmingly dominated and controlled the commanding heights of business, finance, education, and politics; and some of their criticisms are not unreasonable. But we should bear in mind that this dominant group of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—largely descended from among the earliest American settlers and which had gradually absorbed and assimilated substantial elements of Celtic, Dutch, German, and French background—was generally aligned in culture, religion, ideology, and ancestry with perhaps 60 percent of America’s total population at the time, and therefore hardly represented an alien presence.[119] By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America’s current population, one which is completely misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form.
Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”[120] The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.
Over the last few decades America’s ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them.
Here’s the video that got be censored, fired, and canceled by Next Star media, which owns The Hill and Rising, a show I’ve been a weekly contributor to for three years.
Thanks to Breakthrough News for making this video with me and actually being an independent and uncensored media outlet. @BreakThrough News
As The Ukrainian forces and their Western backers celebrate their recent military advance, the fate of ethnic Russians in the reclaimed territories looks bleak now that local and national leaders have declared a reckoning against those whom they consider to be collaborators and traitors.
It’s a policy that originates from the early stages of the conflict based on a law passed in March that threatened anyone who co-operated with the occupying Russian authorities with up to 15 years of imprisonment together with the confiscation of property. Hitherto there have been many arrests of those accused of pro-Russian collaboration, including the leader of Ukraine’s official parliamentary opposition Viktor Medvedchuk, and assassinations of officials such as Alexei Kovalev, deputy head of the military and civil administration in the Kherson region. But as the Ukrainian forces wrest back territory from Russia, a wide net is being cast against alleged collaborators that extends well beyond officials to include teachers, social media warriors and victims of unsubstantiated claims of snitches, shedding light on the intentions of Ukrainian authorities in the unlikely event of total victory.
Ukraine is a culturally heterogenous population in which linguistic affiliation is complex, being governed by both cultural and social situations. At least 17 per cent of Ukrainians claim Russian heritage, with about 14 per cent declaring Russian as their main language and a further 17 per cent Russo-Ukrainian bilingualism, with an unknown number opting to converse in a hybrid Surzhyk dialect. Russian speakers are overwhelmingly concentrated in the eastern and southern regions of the country. It’s a situation, moreover, that has reflected the electoral geography of the country of both parliamentary and presidential elections with the eastern and southern parts of the country exhibiting close affinities with Russia.
Starting as a reasonable initiative at nation-building that intended to correct the inequalities of institutional Russification of the Soviet era, language policy came to be weaponised by nationalist political forces that sought to use it to marginalise Russian culture. Although a cultural reset was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union to redress years of Russification, its initial steps were measured, such as the Law of Languages of 1989, which extended legislative protections to Russian as well as other languages. For Ukraine’s increasingly influential nationalists, overwhelmingly located in the West of the country, the Law was intolerable and unsurprisingly fell victim to the Maidan coup of 2014, that replaced the Russophile President Viktor Yanukovich with Petro Poroshenko.
While its provisions were maintained by Ukraine’s subsequent leadership, following international condemnation of its revocation, the decision of the Constitutional Court to deem the Law unconstitutional was viewed by the Russian minority as a sign of a broader assault on Ukraine’s Russian heritage and served to fuel separatist sentiment in the Crimea and the Donbas. It also played into the hands of Vladimir Putin who could now claim to be the champion of Ukraine’s oppressed Russian speakers, by military means if necessary. Such fears were not unwarranted as in 2019 a new language law sought to end the hitherto ad hoc implementation of existing legislation and subject transgressors to severe fines. Poroshenko, who was campaigning for re-election, weaponised Ukraine’s language policy with his election slogan ‘Army, faith, language’, declaring that ‘the only opinion that we weren’t going to account for [in drafting the legislation] is the opinion of Moscow’. Salt was further rubbed into the wounds of the third of the country which rejected it by its being signed off by the Speaker of Parliament, Andrei Parubiy, a former activist in the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, who warned chillingly that ‘those people who try to revise the language law . . . will soon feel the whole anger of the Ukrainian people’. Remaining loopholes were filled in January 2022, just before Russia’s military incursion, which for instance compelled Russian language print media to produce Ukrainian translations for all publications in a move that de facto targeted Russian for discrimination.
To indigenous Russian speakers, such rhetoric marked the creation of an ethnic state in which they were not welcome. The escalation of the war in 2022 seemed to confirm their worst fears as not only did Russian become ‘the language of the enemy’ but things Russian, political parties, music, literature were officially shunned, banned or marginalised in a policy that hitherto had been executed only by the far right nationalists of Lviv City Council in West Ukraine. Whereas then the likes of Canadian and British ambassadors joined Moscow in condemning such action as ‘just plain dumb’ and intolerant, now such nationwide ‘de-Russification’ initiatives were met with silence.
International opinion recognised Ukraine’s language policy as conflict-bearing due to its increasingly divisive and discriminatory nature. The scrapping of minority language provisions by Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in 2014, for instance, raised concerns in the European Parliament which deemed it as ‘undermining any notions of justice, freedom, civilisation, progress and democracy’ and called for the EU Commission to ‘condemn the action of the Ukrainian Parliament and the nationalistic attacks on minority communities in Ukraine’. The 2019 law came under similar criticism from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional affairs, which declared that it threatened to become ‘a source of inter-ethnic tensions within Ukraine’. It reiterated its conclusion following the passing of the January 2022 Law, noting that ‘historical oppression of Ukrainian . . . may lead to the adoption of positive measures aimed at promoting Ukrainian, but this cannot justify depriving the Russian language and its speakers of the protection granted to other languages’.
Both the intra-parliamentary brawls and street standoffs between Ukrainian and Russian speakers during the passage of the language legislation were chilling portents of what was come. Although the escalation of the war in 2022 has seen some ethnic Ukrainian Russian speakers distance themselves from ‘the language of the enemy’ and embrace Ukrainian as their main language, it has also seen ethnic Russians fortify their Russian identity. While this in itself has demonstrated the complexity and malleability of identity in Ukraine, it has also reinforced pre-existing cultural fissures, leaving ethnic Russians with no option other than to embrace Mother Russia as their homeland.
While the conflict in the Donbas since 2014 rendered reconciliation between the Ukrainian authorities and the Russian minority problematic, as the failure of the Minsk agreement testifies, the escalation of the conflict has entrenched pre-war hatreds. With the national conversation decisively turning against the reintegration of Russian culture and language into Ukraine’s social fabric, it is difficult to see how a status quo ante bellum with even rudimentary cultural and linguistic protections for ethnic Russians is possible were the Ukrainian state reconstituted within its pre-war borders. In fact, everything points towards mass retribution and ethnic cleansing on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the Second World War, in a scenario that is likely to overshadow the grim events of the conflict itself. Ukraine’s Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, certainly didn’t mince his words on a recent Ukrainian talk show in calling for the ‘complete disappearance of the Russian language from our land’ in what sounded like incitement to ethnic cleansing.
Nothwithstanding the difficulty such actions would present for social reconstruction, the questionable legality of extra-judicial killings of officials and political persecution of ‘collaborators’ threatens to draw attention to atrocities committed by Ukrainian paramilitary forces during the Second World War against Russians, Jews, Poles and other minorities. These crimes, together with the ritualistic celebrations by Ukraine’s highest political authorities of those who perpetrated them like nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera, have been conveniently whitewashed so as to not tarnish the image of a virtuous Ukraine that has been carefully cultivated over the past few months. The sources which once regularly condemned Ukraine for not only celebrating wartime collaboration but also tolerating a revival of neo-Nazi paramilitarism now declare similar condemnation by Russia as hostile propaganda. A Ukraine seen to be persecuting minorities again would be a propaganda disaster for its Western backers.
Dividing Ukraine’s population into ‘the people’ and ‘the rest’ where the latter were made to feel subordinate in their ancestral lands to the former was always going to lead to conflict. Yet just as wise counsel of the likes of George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski warned of the grave risks of Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders, so warnings came aplenty of the dangers of a divisive language policy. To Ukraine’s detriment, however, neither was heeded and now a reckoning against ‘the rest’ will be as useless in knitting back together shattered communities as the pre-war language policy was in solving peaceful coexistence between Russian and Ukrainian in a single public space.
A midterm national election will be taking place in the United States in two weeks. American voters will, at least to a certain extent, be expressing their approval or disapproval on major issues like management of the economy and immigration, though they will curiously have no one to vote for if they are appalled by the nuclear brinksmanship that the Joe Biden administration has been engaging in with Ukraine and Russia. One can blame the propaganda machine in Washington supported energetically by the mainstream media for that, as the acceptable Ukraine narrative presented to the public has drowned out nearly all the alternative arguments for a much less aggressive foreign and national security policy. Tulsi Gabbard, who recently resigned from the Democratic Party over its woke-ness and also its war policy, was one of the only politicians who dared to speak out against the prevailing bipartisan desire to “get Russia.”
Another issue that has oddly enough surfaced amid the current political turmoil has been the concern over what is being described as anti-Semitism, which is, according to those who stand to gain from that perception, reported to be “surging” worldwide. Anti-Semitism is the gift that keeps on giving for the Israelis and their rabid band of diaspora supporters, but it is particularly entrenched in the United States where it goes by the generic and relatively inoffensive label the “Israel Lobby.” Recent articles citing what are called anti-Semitic incidents, as defined by groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), have guaranteed that there will be no serious media coverage of Israeli atrocities directed against the Palestinians as any criticism of Israel is considered to be ipso facto anti-Semitism. The shooting of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers is at an all-time high, occurring almost daily, but one would not know that from reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, which together celebrate Israeli/Jewish victimhood by ignoring that country’s war crimes and focusing instead on alleged conspiracies against Jews. One would certainly without a doubt find multiple articles all about the alleged anti-Semitic remarks recently attributed to Donald Trump, Kanye West and Mel Gibson.
Donald Trump is not known for his precision in the use of the English language, particularly when he is expressing something complicated. Trump’s recent “warning” to American Jews would be comical, but it also reveals much about both the perception and the reality of Jewish power in the US as well as the role of Jews as dominant political donors entrenched in both political parties. Trump posted his comment on his Truth Social network on October 16th: “No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story — highest approval rating in the world, could easily be P.M.! US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — Before it is too late!”
The fact is that President Donald Trump was second to none when it came to pandering to Israel even when that country’s interests do real damage to the United States, though his claim that he is so popular in Israel that he could be elected Prime Minister is absurd. He is not a Jew and could not even emigrate to Israel even if he chose to do so. As president, he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he accepted brutal Israeli settlement and control of the Palestinian West Bank, approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, and ignored repeated Israeli war crimes using US provided weapons. Nevertheless, the response from the usual suspects was immediate, with the ever-vigilant Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL calling the Trump comments both insulting and disgusting while his colleague Oren Segal goes one step further, claiming that the statement has “shattered” a general feeling of safety among American Jews. Ukraine-born Jew and Trump critic former US Army officer Alexander Vindman also joined in with a predictable “Trump is executing the fascist playbook to turn his mob on Jews.”
On the following day, the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also denounced the remarks. She said that “Donald Trump’s comments were antisemitic and insulting both to Jews and our Israeli allies.” She also observed that Trump had consistently “aligned with extremist and antisemitic figures. And it should be called out.” To further establish her bona fides as a true-blue friend of the Jewish state, she also announced that Israeli president Isaac Herzog would visit Biden in Washington on October 26th, presumably to give the US president his marching orders. In a subsequent statement, she said the visit would serve to reaffirm “the enduring partnership and friendship” between the two nations.
It should be noted that the Trump remarks were criticized immediately by Jewish leaders and many others for including the suggestion of “dual loyalty,” alleging that diaspora Jews often have their primary allegiance to Israel, not to the country where they live. Others also criticized Trump for lecturing American Jews on their own religious obligations. Of course, the rage exhibited by the leaders of Jewish organizations reflects the fact that many American Jews do have what one might call “dual loyalty.” A Pew Research survey released in 2021 found that 45% of Jewish adults in the US viewed caring about Israel as “essential” to what being Jewish means, with an additional 37% saying it was “important, but not essential.” Only a small minority of 16% said caring about Israel was “not important.”
More recently, additional comments by Trump revealing a lack of understanding of Jewish hyper-sensitivities have surface as part of a clear attempt to damage Republican prospects for the upcoming election. Of course, Donald Trump is whistling in the wind if he seriously interested in getting Jewish voters to cast their ballots for him or for the GOP. Jews overwhelmingly vote liberal. An estimated 75% of Jewish voters supported Joe Biden in 2020 and that is unlikely to change no matter what Trump says or does for Israel as the Democratic Party is, if anything, as completely in the Jewish/Israeli pocket as are most of the Republicans. Much of the rhetoric is really about money, with Jewish donors constituting a majority of financial supporters of the Democrats as well as significant supporters of pro-Israel Republicans. Trump ally casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, now deceased, reportedly contributed $100 million to the GOP electoral coffers in 2016-2020 and was the force driving the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Music mogul Kanye West, who is being compared to Adolf Hitler, has also come under fire after complaining about Jewish control over the media relating to his various enterprises while actor Mel Gibson, due to appear as a witness in the sexual battery trial of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, was also denounced for his reportedly expressed dislike of Jews, meaning that he would not be impartial in the evidence he provides since Weinstein is a Jew.
So, when in doubt, call something anti-Semitic and it will make the problem go away. The United States uniquely has an Ambassador whose sole responsibility as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism (SEAS) is to go around the world seeking to expose anti-Semites. Israel routinely uses the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims. That narrative relies on the so-called holocaust and the slogan “never again” to generate the moral authority and outrage that makes the entire otherwise unsustainable imposture work. And work it does. The Israel Lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights is not a response to any real anti-Semitism. That twenty-four state governments’ have passed Israel Lobby promoted legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not a response to anti-Semitism. That is the real story, all about the maintenance of Jewish and Israeli power in America and the abuses that are derived from that, and it has nothing to do with genuine anti-Semitism.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The EU seeks to outright confiscate Russian assets rather than just freeze them, but the bloc has yet to lay the legal groundwork for doing so, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.
The official delivered her remarks during a conference devoted to the rebuilding of Ukraine, which was attended by a number of Kiev’s prominent international donors.
“Our aim is not only to freeze, but to seize the assets,” she said, although cautioning that establishing a legal base for such a move is “not trivial.”
According to von der Leyen, the EU has created a task force that includes various international experts “not only to map out what has been frozen,” but also to see what the legal preconditions would be for seizing Russian assets and using them for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
“The will is there, but legally it is not trivial, there is still a lot of work to reach that goal,” she reiterated, noting that the EU adheres to the rule of law, and therefore this process has to be “legally sound.”
Responding to von der Leyen’s remarks, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that in reality the EU Commission president wants Russia to “exhaust itself being dragged through courts” while trying to retrieve its funds.
During the conference, von der Leyen stated that the World Bank had estimated the cost of the damage to Ukraine at €350 billion ($345 billion). Meanwhile, after Russia launched its military campaign in Ukraine in late February, a multinational task force froze $30 billion in funds belonging to Russian individuals, as well as $300 billion in assets of Russia’s central bank.
Russia strongly criticized the freezing of the funds, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying that the West had essentially committed theft.
Western officials have repeatedly expressed the desire to confiscate Russian assets to benefit Ukraine. However, in July, during another conference on rebuilding Ukraine, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis opposed such a move, arguing that it would establish a dangerous precedent.
“You have to ensure the citizens are protected against the power of the state. This is what we call liberal democracies,” he said at the time.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price alleged on 20 October that Israel is “unfairly targeted in the UN,” in the wake of a scathing report released by the ongoing UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) investigating human rights abuses committed by Tel Aviv during the 74-year occupation of Palestine.
“Israel is consistently unfairly targeted in the UN system, including in the course of this commission of inquiry,” Price told reporters during a news conference on Thursday.
“No country, the record of no country, should be immune from scrutiny, but no country should also be targeted unfairly. And that’s the principle that we seek to uphold,” he claimed.
In their report, the COI determined that “the occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli government’s de facto annexation policies.”
The COI report also refers to numerous statements made by the UN secretary general and UN member states concerning the Russia-Ukraine war, in which officials reaffirmed that the “unilateral annexation of a State’s territory by another State is a violation of international law and is null and void.”
Speaking to reporters, COI chair Navi Pillay stressed that just last week, “143 member States including Israel … voted in favor of a General Assembly resolution reaffirming this.”
“Unless universally applied, including to the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, this core principle of the United Nations Charter will become meaningless,” she added.
In a second report also released on Thursday – and set to be presented to the UN General Assembly on 27 October – the COI requested an urgent advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) “on the legal consequences of the continued refusal on the part of Israel to end its occupation.”
“Actions by Israel constituting de facto annexation include expropriating land and natural resources, establishing settlements and outposts, maintaining a restrictive and discriminatory planning and building regime for Palestinians and extending Israeli law extraterritorially to Israeli settlers in the West Bank,” the UN officials conclude in their report.
Since the start of this year, at least 105 Palestinians – including 26 children – have been killed by Israeli troops, making 2022 the deadliest year since 2006 for Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
On top of this, Tel Aviv currently holds 4,500 Palestinians in prison, 730 of whom are held without charge and mainly on the basis of ‘secret evidence.’
Children as young as 12 are subjected to arbitrary arrests and detention measures by the occupation government. Just last month, a seven-year-old Palestinian boy fell to his death after being chased by Israeli soldiers.
But despite the countless deaths and wanton destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip and violent raids across the West Bank, Israeli authorities maintain a policy of “not apologizing” for their war crimes, under the full support of the US.
The Israeli regime has implemented strict rules on all foreigners or Palestinians holding dual nationality who intend to come to the Occupied Palestinian territories, where it limits their ability to enter and stay in the occupied West Bank.
A 90-page authoritative order came into effect on Thursday despite international criticism, as reported by The Guardian, which will create complications for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families who hold dual nationality and are already having a hard time maneuvering a complicated permit system.
COGAT, the Israeli body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs issued the rules, which are to be allegedly implemented over a two-year pilot period. The strict rules are expected to suffocate the Palestinian economy and academia and the work of aid agencies, where all foreign internationals coming to volunteer, study or work in the West Bank will be granted a single-entry visa valid for only three months.
There are no guarantees they will be granted a visa again, and they will have to leave and wait between visas in some cases for more than one year before they are able to reapply for entry. In most cases, residency is limited to a 12- to 27-month period, making family life and long-term employment almost impossible.
Palestinian academics, business leaders and rights groups expressed outrage over the policy when it was first outlined in February.
“This is going to cause major issues. Some of our board members come here frequently and they need to be able to see their investments. They are destroying Palestinian businesses,” said Bassem Khouri, chief executive of a pharmaceutical company in the West Bank, adding, “Who can live and work here is supposed to be a Palestinian decision. This is designed to isolate us.”
Meanwhile, Jessica Montell, executive director of HaMoked, an Israeli human rights group that has challenged the rules in court slammed the ordinance, saying, “The Israeli military is proposing new restrictions in order to isolate Palestinian society from the outside world and keep Palestinian families from living together.”
In a move that controls the lives of foreigners and Palestinians as well, the rules stipulate that only 150 foreign students a year may register at Palestinian colleges and universities. The major they chose to study must be pre-approved, and there is a quota of 100 foreign “distinguished” lecturers that will be determined by the Israeli occupation regime.
Also, Palestinians holding dual citizenship will have to hand the Israeli apartheid regime a list of names and ID numbers of family and friends they plan to visit beforehand, even before they travel.
Students, teachers, journalists working for Palestinian media outlets, tourists, and Palestinian family members including siblings, grandparents or grandchildren will all have to undergo these new rules.
The rules also read that if a foreigner starts a relationship with a Palestinian, “the appointed COGAT official must be informed as part of their request to renew or extend the existing visa.”
According to Montell, none of the rules have any legal ground. “Under international law, the Israeli military is only allowed to work for the interests of the occupied population, or its own security needs. These restrictions obviously advance neither.”
The new procedures apply only to Palestinians, and not Israeli settlers living across the area in violation of international law. Nearly 700,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements built since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.
On Wednesday, a group of illegal Israeli paramilitary colonizers assaulted many Palestinians and international peace activists picking Palestinian olive trees in Kisan village, east of Bethlehem, and stabbed a female activist.
The olive orchard owner, Ibrahim Obeyyat, said the colonizers invaded his land and assaulted the locals and the international peace activists who came to help in picking the olive trees, especially since the area is subject to constant Israeli violations.
Obeyyat added that the international peace activist was stabbed in the back and suffered a fracture in her leg after the colonizers struck her with a bar.
He stated that the colonizers also uprooted at least 300 olive saplings and sprayed many olive trees with chemicals in his 90 Dunam olive orchard.
The colonizers repeatedly target Kisan, its farmers, and lands, and have stolen agricultural supplies, uprooted trees, and frequently attack the farmers and the shepherds.
This headline in the Israeli newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, only tells part of the story: “The Lions’ Den, Other Palestinian Groups are Endless Headache for Israel, PA.”
It is true that both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority are equally worried about the prospect of a widespread armed revolt in the Occupied West Bank, and that the newly formed Nablus-based brigade, the Lions’ Den, is the epicentre of this youth-led movement.
However, the growing armed resistance in the West Bank is causing more than a mere ‘headache’ for Tel Aviv and Ramallah. If this phenomenon continues to grow, it could threaten the very existence of the PA, while placing Israel before its most difficult choice since the invasion of major Palestinian West Bank cities in 2002.
Though Israeli military commanders continue to undermine the power of the newly formed group, they seem to have no clear idea regarding its roots, influence and future impact.
In a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Israeli Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, claimed that the Lions’ Den is a “group of 30 members”, who will eventually be reached and eliminated. “We will lay our hands on the terrorists,” he declared.
The Lions’ Den, however, is not an isolated case, but part of a larger phenomenon that includes the Nablus Brigades, the Jenin Brigades and other groups, which are located mostly in the northern West Bank.
The group, along with other armed Palestinian military units, has been active in responding to the killing of Palestinians, including children, elders, and, on October 14, even a Palestinian doctor, Abdullah Abu Al-Teen, who succumbed to his wounds in Jenin. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, over 170 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza, since the beginning of the year.
The Palestinian response included the killing of two Israeli soldiers, one in Shuafat on 8 October, and the other near Nablus on 11 October.
Following the Shuafat attack, Israel completely sealed the Shuafat refugee camp as a form of collective punishment, similar to recent sieges on Jenin and other Palestinian towns.
Citing Israel’s Hebrew media, the Palestinian Arabic daily, Al Quds, reported that the Israeli military will focus its operations in the coming weeks on targeting the Lions’ Den. Thousands more Israeli occupation soldiers are likely to be deployed in the West Bank for the upcoming battle.
It is difficult to imagine that Israel would mobilise much of its army to fight 30 Palestinian fighters in Nablus. But not only Israel, the PA, too, is terribly concerned.
The Authority has tried but failed to entice the fighters by offering them a surrender ‘deal’, where they give up their arms and join the PA forces. Such deals were offered in the past to fighters belonging to Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, with mixed degrees of success.
This time around, the strategy did not work. The group rejected the PA’s overtures, compelling the Fatah-affiliated governor of Nablus, Ibrahim Ramadan, to attack the mothers of the fighters by calling them ‘deviant’ for “sending their sons to commit suicide”. Ramadan’s language, which is similar to language used by Israeli and pro-Israel individuals in their depiction of Palestinian society, highlights the massive schisms between the PA’s political discourse and those of ordinary Palestinians.
Not only is the PA losing its grasp of the narrative, but it is also losing whatever vestiges of control it has left in the West Bank, especially in Nablus and Jenin.
A senior Palestinian official told the Media Line that the Palestinian “street does not trust us any more”, as they “view us as an extension of Israel”. True, but this lack of trust has been in the making for years.
The ‘Unity Intifada‘ of May 2021, however, served as a major turning point in the relationship between the PA and Palestinians. The rise of the Lions’ Den and other Palestinian armed groups are but a few manifestations of the dramatic changes underway in the West Bank.
Indeed, the West Bank is changing. A new generation that has little or no memory of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), had not experienced the Israeli invasion then but grew up under occupation and apartheid, feeding on the memories of the resistance in Jenin, Nablus and Hebron.
Judging by their political discourse, chants and symbols, this generation is fed up with the crippling and often superficial divisions of Palestinians among factions, ideologies and regions. In fact, the newly established brigades, including the Lions’ Den, are believed to be multi-factional groups bringing, for the first time, fighters from Hamas, Fatah and others into a single platform. This explains the popular enthusiasm and lack of suspicion among ordinary Palestinians of the new fighters.
For example, Saed Al-Kuni, a Palestinian fighter who was recently killed by Israeli soldiers in an ambush on the outskirts of Nablus, was a member of the Lions’ Den. Some have claimed that Al-Kuni was a leading member of Fatah’s Brigades, and others say he was a well-known Hamas fighter.
This lack of certainty regarding the political identity of killed fighters is fairly unique to Palestinian society, at least since the establishment of the PA in 1994.
Expectedly, Israel will do what it always does: amassing more occupation troops, attacking, assassinating, crushing protests and laying sieges on rebellious towns and refugee camps. What they fail to understand, at least for now, is that the growing rebellion in the West Bank is not generated by a few fighters in Nablus and a few more in Jenin, but is the outcome of a truly popular sentiment.
In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, translated by Al-Quds, an Israeli commander described what he has witnessed in Jenin during a raid:
“When we enter (Jenin), armed fighters and stone throwers wait for us in every corner. Everyone takes part. You look at an old man … and you wonder, will he throw stones? And he does. Once, I saw a person who had nothing to throw (on us). He rushed to his car, grabbed a milk carton and he threw it on us.”
Palestinians are simply fed up with the Israeli occupation and with their collaborating leadership. They are ready to put it all on the line; in fact, in Jenin and Nablus, they already have. The coming weeks and months are critical for the future of the West Bank and, in fact, for all Palestinians.
Belatedly, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has issued a statement of clear mistrust in US diplomacy towards Palestine. “We don’t trust America and you know our position. We don’t trust it, we don’t rely on it, and under no circumstances can we accept that America is the sole party in resolving a problem,” Abbas told reporters before meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan last Thursday.
Despite being beholden to the international community’s diplomacy and, more recently, to Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz’s concessions which allow Abbas to consolidate his hold in Ramallah, it is clear that the PA does not trust Washington. Even though Abbas’s statement does not reflect the complete reality of the situation, particularly the PA’s dependence on the US for its own survival, his call to reduce America’s role is significant.
This comes at a time when Russia has threatened to cut diplomatic relations with Israel if the latter sends military aid to Ukraine. The US, meanwhile, does not relish a secondary role to Russia, with Abbas stating that the US can still be part of diplomatic negotiations only within the Middle East Quartet. Washington’s response, ironically and hypocritically, was to berate Putin’s threat as “a far cry from the type of international partner needed to constructively address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The US should take a look at its own global track record of foreign intervention under various “constructive” guises. Does Operation Condor in Latin America ring any bells in the White House, for example? Likewise, Libya’s destruction under a NATO umbrella, albeit it was a planned US intervention post-9/11? Both expose the sham of Washington’s “commitment” to human rights.
President Joe Biden’s administration is actually worse than its predecessors in terms of its hypocrisy. Biden’s electoral victory brought no real change other than him being an alternative to Donald Trump, whose belligerence can at least be credited with exposing US diplomatic double standards. Trump’s overt concessions to Israel, alarming as they were due to their swift approval, were the culmination of decades of covert US diplomacy.
Biden’s promise to revert to the two-state paradigm, defunct though it is, has been particularly problematic for Palestinians due to it being just a veneer for sticking to Trump’s damaging policies. Washington’s disappointment at Abbas’s words is undoubtedly feigned, and ignores its own dismal record when it comes to Palestine. How is sending billions of dollars in military aid to Israel every year conducive to bringing about an “independent and viable Palestinian state”? Or how does preserving Abbas’s presidency — his mandate expired in 2009 — to prevent a democratically-elected alternative from entering Palestine’s political arena, help democracy and the aforementioned Palestinian state? The PA and Abbas might distrust the US, but both depend on Washington for their survival.
The US commitment to the so-called Abraham Accords is gaining ground internationally, eclipsing a defunct paradigm which Biden claims to support. Russia is within the fold of international consensus regarding the two-state compromise, even when it is clear that decolonisation is essential for the political aspirations of the Palestinian people. The PA stands in the way of decolonisation by begging the international community to keep the two-state “solution” alive.
Abbas cannot be taken seriously in anything he says or does; his leadership is tied to international donors and Israel’s colonial expansion. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that the US might lose its prominence in terms of involvement with Palestine deservers to gain traction, particularly if Fatah loses its iron grip on Palestinian politics and the people of occupied Palestine get the chance to experience a democratically-elected government which thrives less on hyperbole and more on the Palestinians’ own narrative.
Malaysia-based daily newspaper The Straits Times uncovered on 17 October the arrest of a Mossad-affiliated hit team, involved in the kidnapping of a Palestinian in Kuala Lumpur, on behalf of Israel.
The Mossad team was able to locate two Palestinian computer programming specialists while they were leaving a diner near Jalan Yap Kwan Seng by car, just after 10 pm.
The “snatch-and-grab” team consisted of four local Malaysians who kidnapped the driver of the car and took him into one of the two vehicles used for the operation, leaving the second Palestinian behind and allowing him to escape – something that would later come back to haunt them.
The vehicles left the scene and arrived at the chalet they were headed to, where the Palestinian IT specialist was tied up in one of the rooms and put on a video call with Israeli Mossad operatives who started to bark questions at him, inquiring about Hamas’s cyber unit.
The call was organized by two men, who interrogated the specialist for 24 hours, while the Malaysian team was on standby to torture the victim when answers were unsatisfactory.
The Straits Times learned that the Mossad wanted insight into his experience in software development and his role in assisting the Cyber unit of Hamas to develop new weapons.
Additionally, the Mossad wanted to uncover his associates in the hierarchy of leaders in the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
Meanwhile, the other specialist who was able to escape sensed the gravity of the situation and alerted the security personnel at a hotel nearby, initiating the pursuit to arrest the cell.
Remarkably, it was revealed that the Mossad had prepared another chalet room for the second specialist. A team was waiting overseas to interrogate him as well, but miscommunication confused the kidnappers.
According to Al-Jazeera, the second specialist was a more valuable target. However, had he not been able to escape, the Malaysian police would have remained oblivious to the entire operation.
Reportedly, despite the cell’s training in Europe by Mossad operatives, the recruits failed to notice the CCTV cameras and used fake plates, giving the police enough information to locate them.
“Had the Malaysian police not acted swiftly, the victim would have likely disappeared,” informed sources told The Straits Times.
The newspaper added that the police arrived halfway through the video call, surprising the Israelis at the other end, who terminated the call as soon as they heard the chaos outside and saw the police.
The two Palestinian IT specialists, said to be natives of Gaza, have since left Malaysia for an undisclosed country.
There are no official relations between Malaysia and Israel, and this plot is one of several Mossad operations in southeast Asia. Nonetheless, its impact on the secret ties between both countries is questionable.
Back in 2015, then-prime minister Minister Najib Razak visited the Hamas-run government in Gaza and expressed his support for the besieged enclave in southern occupied Palestine.
“We believe in the struggle of the Palestinian people. They have been suppressed and oppressed for so long,” said Razak.
Nonetheless, data released by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reveals that Malaysia imported $1.457 billion worth of products in 2014, a 24 percent increase since the previous year. Economic ties are unaffected as of today.
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.