Today a friend asked me "Why would the Left support the Mullahs?" It's a simple, but essential question. The answer exposes the fault lines in Western society and the moral corruption of the "Global Left" 🧵 The Left has been sympathetic to the Ayatollahs from the very beginning. Recall that Khomeini lived in Paris for years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution - and his biggest cheerleaders were Leftist intellectuals who romanticized it as another anti-imperialist “people’s uprising.”

To understand Venezuela, you must understand that the Liberal International Rules-Based Order established after WWII no longer exists. It was based on historically unique circumstances that haven't obtained for 30 years. Here's why that happened and how the world works now 🧵 Post-WWII the world was bi-polar, tense but essentially stable. The US established extraordinary institutions and diplomatic mores: The UN, World Bank, IMF, GATT, etc. But they only existed in the West-dominated world. The Soviet sphere was separate, mostly outside the system.

Something you may have missed in the Purim story: twice in the Megillah we see the statement that the Jews are fated to be saved and successful. Once by a Jew, Mordechai, which is very famous. But there is another by a non-Jew that is often overlooked. Do you know it?
🧵 When Haman returns home bitter at the King honoring Mordechai, his friends and wife Zeresh say 'If Mordechai, before whom you have begun to fall, is of Jewish stock, you will not overcome him; you will fall before him to your ruin.'

What?? Why??

The transformation of Mahmoud Khalil into a liberal icon is happening before our eyes.

It’s a manipulation, politically motivated by twin progressive obsessions: hatred of Israel and Trump. I fear it’s a turning point from which Democratic support for Jews may never recover.🧵 Khalil led a group that took over a building & blocked access, harassed Jews, assaulted a staffer leading to hospitalization, and distributed material in support of Hamas and Hezbollah. These are crimes, not speech, and support of a terrorist organization is a deportable offense.

Israel faces an impossible dilemma: cut deals to save as many hostages as possible, or fully prosecute the war/destroy Hamas, knowing some hostages will be murdered. The following, from a current soldier, speaks volumes about the personal dilemma felt by IDF soldiers: 🧵 “I want to save the hostages. I dream about it, I imagine it every time I'm on patrol scanning the bushes and hills and buildings around. If you asked me to join in a dangerous rescue I would sign on in a second. But I will not sacrifice thousands of lives to save them. If you

The situation at @Columbia is even worse than you think. Joseph Massad isn't teaching a course on just Zionism. The course is on "The History of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism."
The infuriating facts you should know: 🧵 The Jewish Enlightenment is a 19thC Euro/Ashkenazi phenomenon. Massad has no training in Jewish history and doesn't read Yiddish. Even if he weren't a raging antisemite, he's not qualified to teach a course on history he's never studied and literature he can't read. So why is he?

What’s happening in Syria and Lebanon is actually the default setting for most of the MidEast. It’s either chaos or empire there. The imposed nation state borders of the past century will be/are carved up by local factions, militias, and religio-ethnic groups, along w/ strong 🧵 adjacent states such as Turkey, Iran, Israel.

What the Arab Spring ultimately revealed is that the post-colonial states are failures, made of factions who hate each other and don’t want to live together. Only the power of empires (Ottoman, British, French, Persian) or dictators

9/11 was my 2nd week as exec dir of @RutgersHillel, at @RutgersU, the State U of NJ. The next day flyers went up all over campus inviting people to a special meeting of the Muslim Students Assoc on 9/13. Of course I went. Here is what I saw and heard. It haunts me to this day. 🧵 I thought half the campus would be there. Who wouldn't want to hear what the MSA had to say 2 days after Al-Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans? We could smell the smoke from Ground Zero on campus. But I was the only visibly non-Muslim person in a crowd of 200+. Wearing my kipah. ✡️

Proving there is nothing new under the sun, let's see how Dostoevsky, the brilliant Russian novelist, predicted today's world via the character Pytor Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a socialist revolutionary in his book "Demons."
Read to the end. You'll like this. 🧵 "The first thing is to lower the level of education, science, and accomplishment. A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always

Great article on The Roots of Progressive Radicalism by @jonkay. I'm especially intrigued by Musa Al-Gharbi's book on how the “woke” elite use the language of social justice to gain power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.🧵
quillette.com/2024/06/25/the… Al-Gharbi's thesis: Patterns of elite political radicalisation are recurrent in the West esp during times of underemployment among the well-educated. So they substitute what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "symbolic capital" for the real capital they want but lack.

The fanatical attachment of so many in the West to extremist Islam’s jihadi ideology, manifested as "Palestinianism," is one of the confounding dynamics of our age. Yet it is explained clearly by the philosopher Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer.🧵 Hoffer posits that fanatical movements (religious, social, or national) arise when large numbers of people believe their own individual lives to be worthless - or worse. So they join movements demanding radical change. But the underlying psychological cause is very different.

The presidents of @RutgersU, @NorthwesternU & @UCLA are facing a Congressional hearing today regarding their ailure to respond to #antisemitism on campus. They are not acquitting themselves well. My personal dealings with Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway and his testimony: 🧵 @RutgersU Pres. Jonathan Holloway was asked "Do you think Israel's government is genocidal?"

His response "I don't have an opinion on that phrase."

Asked again, he responded "I believe Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself."

Asked again, "Do you think Israel's

Antisemites corrupt everyone. Salma Hamamy, pres of the main pro-Palestinian group at @UMich posted on social-media “Until my last breath I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and worse.” So how is such a student treated?🧵1/4 She's among @UMich most honored students.

~Recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award for students “who best exemplify the leadership and extraordinary vision" of MLK. No joke.

~ @umichdaily_ endorsed her for student council president.
michigandaily.com/news/student-g…

🧵in depth analysis of Gaza tunnels by chair of urban war studies at West Point. Summary:

• Hamas does not have military sites separate from civilian sites
• scope of tunnels far greater than was known
• Hamas strategy is political not military

mwi.westpoint.edu/gazas-undergro… Hamas has built a tunnel network to gain not just a military advantage, but a political advantage. Hamas weaved its vast tunnel networks into the society on the surface. Destroying the tunnels is virtually impossible without adversely impacting the population living in Gaza.

Israel journalist @Roi_Yanovsky just published an amazing piece in Hebrew about what Gaza is REALLY like, based on his personal observations there. Here is an English translation that you NEED to read🧵

100 reserve days officially ended yesterday. Some initial insights: 1. Gaza is seen as a backward area, the "most densely populated in the world" which has been under Israeli "siege" for years. There is no bigger lie than this. Gaza is a modern, beautiful, developed city, with large modern houses, wide boulevards, public spaces, a promenade

I found an email dated 2/2/22, that I sent to my daughter when she was visiting a concentration camp site in Poland. Sadly, after the 10/7 Massacre, every word rings true. 🧵 "The world we live in has barely changed. There are still MILLIONS of people in the world who want to kill us. Given the opportunity they’d kill you, your friends, your brothers and sister, me, mommy. Today. Right now. The only thing that stops them is the will of Gd and the IDF.

Today is the 5th/6th of the Hebrew month of Av. #OTD 82 years ago, the Jews of my family’s ancestral shtetl of Vileyka were liquidated by the Nazis - the entire Jewish population was murdered. Here is their story: Multiple branches of my family came from 3 neighboring shtetls in what is now Belarus. The most prominent was Vileyka. We trace our family there back to 1766. Thanks to persecution and pogroms by the Russians, my immediate ancestors all fled to America 1890-1917. But not all.

The return of Jewish sovereignty to Jerusalem is one of the most unlikely events in the history of the human experience. But it happened 56 yrs ago this week. It’s hard to explain just how momentous an event this is - but I’m going to try. 🧵 In June 1967 Jewish sovereignty was returned to Jerusalem for the first time since the 2nd Jewish Commonwealth was conquered by Rome in 70 CE. During 2,000 yrs of exile Jews wrote countless psalms, poems, and songs about Jerusalem, from King David to Judah Halevi to Matisyahu.

#OnThisDay in 1972, Palestinian terrorists mutilated and murdered 11 Israeli athletes during the Olympics in Munich, Germany. The involvement of the German government and current Palestinian leadership needs to be known and shared. THREAD Future Palestinian President Yasir Arafat approved the operation and current President Mahmoud Abbas financed it. German neo-Nazi groups assisted. In 2019, Abbas dedicated a new university building in honor of the mastermind of the operation, Khalil Al-Wazir Abu Jihad.

Analyzing the current wave of terror attacks in Israel - it’s all about Iran.
THREAD
jpost.com/breaking-news/… Most of the recent terror attacks have been by Palestinians associated with ISIS or other Muslim religious extremists. People easily manipulated and paid to martyr themselves. So who’s doing the manipulating and paying?

Jews worldwide are under attack as anti-Israel protests become mini-pogroms, with synagogues vandalized and Jews assaulted. This happens whenever Israel is being targeted - Jews everywhere become a target, too. If anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism, why is this? THREAD A few examples from around the world. First, Britain.
A rabbi in London was beaten following a protest at which the mob shouted "Fuck the Jews, Rape their Daughters!"
metro.co.uk/2021/05/16/con…