April 18, 2024

Jewish faculty reject the weaponization of antisemitism

https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2024/04/10/jewish-faculty-reject-the-weaponization-of-antisemitism/



Dear President Shafik,

We write as Jewish faculty of Columbia and Barnard in anticipation of your appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, where you are expected to answer questions about antisemitism on campus. Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses. We urge you, as the University president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism. Rather than being concerned with the safety and well-being of Jewish students on campuses, the committee is leveraging antisemitism in a wider effort to caricature and demonize universities as hotbeds of “woke indoctrination.”

Its opportunistic use of antisemitism in a moment of crisis is expanding and strengthening longstanding efforts to undermine educational institutions. After launching attacks on public universities from Florida to South Dakota, this campaign has opened a new front against private institutions. The prospect of Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of congress with a history of espousing white nationalist politics, calling university presidents to account for alleged antisemitism on their campuses reveals these proceedings as disingenuous political theater. In the face of these coordinated attacks on higher education, universities must insist on their freedom to research and teach inconvenient truths. This includes historical injustices and the contemporary structures that perpetuate them, regardless of whether these facts are politically inexpedient for certain interest groups.

To be sure, antisemitism is a grave concern that should be scrutinized alongside racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and all other forms of hate. These hateful ideologies exist everywhere and we would be ignorant to believe that they don’t exist at Columbia. When antisemitism rears its head, it should be swiftly denounced, and its perpetrators held to account. However, it is absurd to claim that antisemitism—“discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews,” according to the Jerusalem Declaration’s definition—is rampant on Columbia’s campus. To argue that taking a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza is antisemitic is to pervert the meaning of the term.

Labeling pro-Palestinian expression as anti-Jewish hate speech requires a dangerous and false conflation of Zionism with Jewishness, of political ideology with identity. This conflation betrays a woefully inaccurate understanding—and disingenuous misrepresentation—of Jewish history, identity, and politics. It erases more than a century of debates among Jews themselves about the nature of a Jewish homeland in the biblical Land of Israel, including Israel’s status as a Jewish nation-state. It dismisses the experiences of the post-Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jews who work, study, and live on our campus.

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April 17, 2024

'The picture did no justice': US athletes retreat from criticism of 'hoo haa' uniform

Initial release provoked debate over sexism in sport

Athletes say they are comfortable with choices offered

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/16/team-usa-uniforms-paris-2024-olympics-nike



In the moments before she fired off the Instagram comment heard around the world, Tara Davis-Woodhall could hardly believe her eyes. The American long jumper and world silver medalist had just seen a photograph of one of Nike’s Team USA uniforms for this summer’s Games, a high-cut leotard barely covering the bikini line that was unveiled at a launch event in Paris last week. The running publication Citius Mag had posted an image of the slinky uniform on a female mannequin alongside a male one-piece kit with longer legs. As the side-by-side comparison prompted an online furore over sexism in elite sport, Davis-Woodhall couldn’t help but enter the fray.

“Wait my hoo haa is gonna be out,” she commented, joining a chorus of athletes who hammered the company’s apparent decision to prioritize skimpiness over function. In response, Nike said female runners at the Games will not be limited to the high-cut leotard and that the new line offers nearly 50 styles to choose from, including shorts. Speaking on Tuesday at the Team USA media summit in midtown Manhattan, Davis-Woodhall was one of several US Olympians who attributed the backlash to the photograph. “It was the picture that did no justice,” the Texas native said. “I saw one [of the uniforms] today. They’re beautiful. They’re not like the picture. The cut does look a little bit different on that mannequin. They just should have had a second look with someone to choose that photo to post.”

Gabby Thomas, the Atlanta-born sprinter who took 200m bronze and 4x100m silver in Tokyo, was “initially shocked like everybody else” after seeing the uniform on the mannequin that quickly went viral. But Thomas said that she felt more comfortable after seeing US pole vaulter Katie Moon’s impassioned defense on social media, which stated that criticism ultimately attacks the athletes who may decide to wear it. “The point is we DO have the choice of what to wear, and whether we feel the best in a potato sack or a bathing suit during competitions, we should support the autonomy,” the Nike-sponsored Moon wrote.

“I love competing in the brief,” Thomas said on Tuesday. “I think I love wearing as little clothes as possible just because you’re sweaty, you’re being really active and moving, so I love that we have the option to wear that, but we also have the option to wear any uniform we want. We could wear the men’s uniform if we really wanted to. So I’m comfortable with what they put out there. The initial shock was warranted, but I think no one has anything to worry about.” Nike issued a statement quoting executive John Hoke as saying the company worked “directly with athletes throughout every stage of the design process”, a claim Thomas vouched for.

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April 17, 2024

Willoughby Road - Hampstead, London NW3 - Architect: Guard Tillman Pollock

“Light pours gracefully into the space from both glazed aspects, varying with the time of day and seasons”

https://www.themodernhouse.com/sales-list/willoughby-road/









Between Hampstead Village and the green expanses of the Heath lies this exquisite and highly accomplished architectural home. Designed by the architects Guard Tillman Pollock for an artist, the house was conceived as a contemporary reflection of and homage to the seminal modernist houses of Hampstead. Spatially and technologically innovative throughout, it was shortlisted for a RIBA Award in 2012. It provides around 2,800 sq ft of internal accommodation, with a current arrangement of five bedrooms, an artist’s studio and several living and garden spaces in adaptable, open layouts that mimic and enhance the arrangements of its Victorian forebears.









From the street and among the terrace of its period neighbours, the striking white façade of the upper level appears to float above a front wall of London stock brick. A portion of clean white render interrupts the mass of glazing, which, in a defining feature, is shielded from passing gazes and solar gain by a screen of PVC mesh. A steel gate opens to the beautifully planted front garden, where a pond forms a border between the house and a high wall to the street. Beyond a protruding wall, steel grates form a courtyard garden enjoyed from the living space within.









The house is set over four storeys and enters at a slightly raised ground level to a hallway with a study to its left. A series of pocket doors, controlled by recessed magnetic buttons, allow the plan to behave with complete openness in the absence of the desire for privacy and the spaces are united aesthetically by the deep hue of a polished concrete floor.









The living spaces are arranged to take advantage of long diagonal views. Each interlocking space generates its own natural light and relates to the private courtyard gardens in its own capacity. Ahead of the hallway lies the kitchen, and to the right is a sweeping reception with a front-facing living space containing a gas fire and a double-height dining area. The latter, lit by a towering mass of glazing, communicates visually with the kitchen and is overlooked by a first-floor gallery.

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April 17, 2024

Jennifer Rubin: The worst mainstream media habit: Distorting polls for clicks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/16/polling-distortion-new-york-times/

https://archive.ph/WbB5w



By now, my readers know full well what I think of national polls taken nearly seven months before the election: They are worse than meaningless. Pervasive polling obsession winds up misinforming (and freaking out) voters while crowding out the essential aspects of a historic campaign. For starters, constant polling hype frames the election as a horse race, devoid of moral or policy outcomes. Premature polling distracts us from what is critical and central — four-times indicted former president Donald Trump’s unprecedented attack on democracy. (When you want to “suspend” the Constitution, use a putsch to overturn the will of the voters, unleash the military on civilians and weaponize the Justice Department, you are pining to undermine democracy and turn America into something resembling Viktor Orban’s Hungary.)

At its worst, coverage of polling misleads voters. Consider the opening of a recent New York Times article. “President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy and his age, according to a new survey by the New York Times and Siena College,” writes Shane Goldmacher. This is false. The previous poll was well within the margin of error; the poll Goldmacher is hawking is within the margin of error. There has been no statistical change. The narrative of “Biden behind! Now, he’s catching up!” is mathematically inaccurate. And yet, the poll sets up a narrative and frames coverage — Why has Trump lost his lead? Can Biden sustain his comeback? — all based on a false premise.

Even if outlets presented polling honestly (i.e., “The poll shows the race is now statistically tied but our poll does not predict the future”), the obsessive focus on polling as if it were the news itself would distort perception of the race for a simple reason: We cannot know in April who will win in November. This realization will shock those grasping at polls for emotional solace during a hair-raising election season. However, too many people who will vote in seven months have yet to pay attention to the race. Moreover, too many events are still to happen between now and November to enable us to say the race then will look the way the polls do now. An infinite number of variables (e.g., Trump could be convicted, Trump could be acquitted, a wider Middle East war could break out, Biden could negotiate a Middle East peace deal) are at play. Just think how a single speech, Biden’s State of the Union, affected voters’ perception. Polling before that event that didn’t account for it appeared even less relevant in retrospect.

Poll defenders will say, “The poll just shows what would happen if the election were today!” But the election is not today — and everything between now and then will determine the outcome. So what’s the point of polling in April? Honestly, it is a cheaply obtained, lazy way to generate an audience. Early polling rarely reflects the outcome. Too much (it’s called “the campaign”) happens in the interim. That was true in 2020, 2016, 2012 and 2008. Pollsters struggle with extremely low response rates and uncertainty in determining who will vote months from now. But the problem is more basic. Brian Klaas, a political scientist and author of the fascinating book “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters,” told an interviewer in January: “I have no idea who’s going to win the 2024 election. It’s impossible to say, and that’s because the world is going to change drastically in the next 10 months or so.” He adds that “anyone who tells you, ‘Oh, I know exactly what’s going on,’ they’re just lying to you.” Maybe they are just desperately trying to sell newspapers, draw eyeballs and attract clicks.

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April 17, 2024

Deadly West Bank settler attacks on Palestinians follow Israeli boy's killing

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68830552


In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a group of Israeli settlers storm a Palestinian village and, captured on CCTV, a masked man sets fire to a car parked in a garage, under the watch of at least three Israeli soldiers. The incident was part of a rampage by Israeli settlers that, according to local officials, killed four Palestinians over four days. The violence was triggered by the disappearance of 14-year-old Binyamin Ahimeir, who went missing on Friday after leaving his settler outpost to herd sheep near the Palestinian village of Mughayir, in the Ramallah area. His body was found a day later, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said he had been killed in a "terrorist attack".

Amid the search for the boy, dozens of settlers, some of them armed, raided Mughayir. They burned homes and cars, and killed a 25-year-old man named Jihad Abu Alia with a shot in the chest, according to Palestinian officials. Sameh Abu Alia, his cousin, said Jihad, who would get married in June, was trying to prevent the settlers from storming the family's house. "It wasn't the first time settlers attacked us. But we weren't expecting a huge number of them," he said. "They shot at the water tanks, the electricity network, and the internet. They were planning to isolate us from the outside world."

Settlers, armed with guns and stones, returned to the village on Saturday. Shaul Golan, a photographer for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, said he was attacked by a group of between 20 to 30 people, some of whom were armed and wearing IDF uniforms, as he hid under a table in one of the burned houses while trying to cover the rampage. "They beat me mercilessly, breaking my finger and taking my bag to burn all of the photography equipment inside," he said in an interview published on the newspaper's website. "I laid on the floor, as every one of them kicked me in the head and stomach… They had hate in their eyes."


Violence spread to other areas. In the village of Dayr Dibwan, CCTV video shared by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group which monitors West Bank violence, showed masked settlers entering a private garage and setting a vehicle on fire, while Israeli soldiers stand watching. Responding to the footage, the IDF said the incident was being examined and that the soldiers would "be dealt with accordingly", Reuters reported. In nearby Beitin on Saturday a 17-year-old boy, Omar Hamed, was killed after being hit by a bullet in the head in an attack by a group of 30 settlers who had been accompanied by Israeli forces, Palestinian officials said.

https://twitter.com/Yesh_Din/status/1779501559379849229
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April 16, 2024

Whoever wins the US presidential election, the EU has no option but to underpin its collective defence.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-defence-industrial-strategy-beyond-the-rhetoric



PAUL MASON 15th April 2024

Last week the French president, Emmanuel Macron, called on France to become a ‘war economy’. He has placed €20 billion worth of new defence orders this year and ordered defence companies to crank up production, with the aim of replenishing ammunition stocks and supporting Ukraine. Poland, meanwhile, has pledged to ramp up its defence spending to 4 per cent of gross domestic product—twice the minimum commitment demanded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—while Norway has committed to a warship-building programme that will double its military spending by 2036. The trigger for this sudden surge in European defence spending is clear.


It is not just the need to supply Ukraine with the ammunition and matériel needed to survive but the realisation that the United States is becoming a strategically unreliable ally. A chorus of voices—from the European Council president, Charles Michel, to the Estonian premier, Kaja Kallas—have called on the European Union to finance a new round of defence investment, using pooled debt instruments rather than relying on national budgets. And last month the European Commission issued its first ever European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS). But the challenges facing European defence are huge. Not only have European states traditionally underspent in this arena: their own defence industries are fragmented and capital for new investment is scarce, leaving Europe’s armies chronically reliant on US equipment.

Grim reading

The EDIS, though high in ambition, makes for grim reading as an audit of current defence production—especially when viewed alongside the US response to the new danger. If EU member states had all met the NATO threshold of 2 per cent of GDP, between 2006 and 2020 they would have spent an extra trillion euro, a quarter of that on investment. So, as demand for ammunition and new kit surged in response to the war in Ukraine, 78 per cent of Europe’s expenditure on arms went abroad, with the US alone accounting for 63 per cent. Moreover, EU states do not routinely collaborate in their defence spending. Only 18 per cent of Europe’s military-equipment budgets go on cross-border projects—just half-way to the 35 per cent benchmark set by member states back in 2007. Europe’s armies, in short, are existentially reliant on the US for high-technology equipment, with South Korea emerging as a supplier of urgent, mass-produced tanks and artillery.

The European defence industry is replete with jealously protected ‘national champions’ which have shown little propensity to invest proactively and at scale. However puffed up, they are at best niche innovators, not capable—unlike their US rivals—of the generational leaps required by the threat from an authoritarian Russia and a Chinese dictatorship defying any rules-based order cemented by universal norms. The US, meanwhile, is moving fast. Its own National Defense Industrial Strategy, published late last year, diagnoses a different problem—a highly monopolised defence industry, focused on big systems-integrators such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. This leaves little room for small and medium enterprises and technology start-ups to change the game, and allows the big five defence companies to more or less design their own market. In response the US has pledged to open its domestic defence market to foreign ‘partnership’—rather than competition—and to buy from a broader domestic ecosystem, giving SMEs and digital-focused tech companies greater direct access, removing the gatekeeper role played by the big five.

Targets hard to achieve.............................

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April 15, 2024

Biden rolls back three pandemic-era executive orders, including COVID mask mandate for federal employees

April 15, 2024

Lithuania's Mykolas Alekna breaks discus throw world record that stood since 1986

https://apnews.com/article/alekna-world-record-track-3beef674d3c7e39a343c5addcbc09d63



RAMONA, Okla. (AP) — Mykolas Alekna of Lithuania broke a world record in the discus throw that had stood since 1986 on Sunday at the Oklahoma Throws Series competition.

Alekna’s throw of 243 feet, 11 inches (74.35 meters) eclipsed the mark of 243 feet (74.08 meters) set by Germany’s Jurgen Schult on June 6, 1986. Alekna’s throw was originally measured at 244-1 (74.41) but later revised, according to World Athletics. The record is subject to ratification.

The 21-year-old Alekna, a junior at the University of California, is a two-time medal winner at the world outdoor championships. He captured a silver medal at the 2022 worlds in Oregon and bronze last summer in Hungary.

His big throw bumped his father, Virgilijus, to third on the career list. Virgilijus Alekna had a toss of 242-4 (73.88) in 2000. Mykolas Alekna’s big day comes a day after Cuba’s Yaimé Perez recorded the longest women’s discus throw since 1989 at 239-9 (73.09).

https://twitter.com/beau_throws/status/1779637216819491047

April 15, 2024

One less piece of christofash hogshit floating about: Beverly LaHaye, influential evangelical activist, dies at 94

As the founder of Concerned Women for America, she organized an army of ‘kitchen-table lobbyists’ to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion and gay rights

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/04/14/beverly-lahaye-dead-cwa/

https://archive.ph/e5z0i



Beverly LaHaye, an evangelical activist who helped organize a powerful right-wing backlash to the feminist movement, rallying opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, gay rights and other perceived threats to “traditional family values,” died April 14 at a retirement home in El Cajon, Calif. She was 94. Her death was announced in a statement by Concerned Women for America, the Washington-based public policy organization she founded and once led. The statement did not give a cause. While her husband, Southern Baptist minister Tim LaHaye, preached about the “end times” and made a fortune as a co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic novels, Mrs. LaHaye developed a following of her own as the longtime president of Concerned Women for America, or CWA.

Formed in San Diego in 1979, the organization was envisioned as an evangelical answer to feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women and helped propel the rise of the Christian right through its advocacy efforts, legal campaigns and educational programs. Within a decade of its creation, the group boasted of having more than 500,000 members, with “Prayer/Action” chapters in all 50 states and an army of “kitchen-table lobbyists,” as Mrs. LaHaye called her supporters, who learned how to organize their neighbors and lobby government officials on behalf of school prayer, the criminalization of abortion, the teaching of creationism and other evangelical causes. The organization’s political clout was so strong that President Ronald Reagan delivered the keynote address at its 1987 national convention, praising Mrs. LaHaye as “one of the powerhouses on the political scene today, and one of the reasons that the grass roots are more and more a conservative province.”

Critics such as Gregory King, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, called Mrs. LaHaye “a professional hatemonger,” arguing in a 1993 interview with the Detroit Free Press that “she uses bigotry to make a buck” through her condemnation of LGBTQ+ people and others who shunned her right-wing views. But for the better part of two decades, she remained one of the most prominent female leaders in the new Christian right, a movement that was otherwise dominated by men such as Pat Robertson, the head of the Christian Coalition, and Jerry Falwell, who launched his Moral Majority movement in the 1970s with backing from Tim LaHaye. In 2001, Falwell called Mrs. LaHaye “without a doubt the most influential woman in America.” “Women have been the driving force of this movement in a lot of ways, particularly at the grass-roots level. I’m not sure that happens without Beverly LaHaye,” said Emily Suzanne Johnson, a history professor at Ball State University in Indiana and the author of “This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right.”

At a time when some evangelical churchgoers were uneasy about mixing faith with activism, and when politics was seen within much of the community as the work of men, not women, Mrs. LaHaye “gave a lot of women a language for understanding women’s conservative activism as absolutely necessary,” Johnson added in a phone interview. “It’s not just that women should join in to what men are doing, but that conservative voices are really needed to counter this narrative that feminism is women’s politics and the Christian right is misogynist.” Mrs. LaHaye, she said, was among the only leaders in the Christian right arguing that women “need to be part of this movement if it’s going to be successful.” Mrs. LaHaye rose to prominence while condemning mainstream feminism, which she considered “a philosophy of death” that was “threatening the survival of our nation.” As she saw it, “the churchwomen had been asleep” and needed to be awakened to the menace posed by “lesbianism, Marxism and extreme social change.”

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April 15, 2024

Why America fell for guns

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history

https://aeon.co/essays/america-fell-for-guns-recently-and-for-reasons-you-will-not-guess





In 1970, amid a national confrontation with the United States’ gun culture following the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the historian Richard Hofstadter struggled to make sense of how the country had become the ‘only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.’ Writing for the magazine American Heritage, he expressed grave concern for a country ‘afloat with weapons – perhaps as many as 50 million of them – in civilian hands.’ If the US was afloat then, it’s flooded now.

Half a century later, Americans own approximately 400 million firearms and the country carries the unfortunate distinction of being the only one in the world in which guns are known to be the leading cause of child and adolescent death. Today, Americans live with around 1.2 guns per capita – double that of the next-highest scoring country, Yemen. Despite having less than 5 per cent of the global population, the US possesses nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Moreover, in recent years Americans have witnessed a surge in gun sales and gun-related deaths, unfolding against a backdrop of increasingly lenient gun laws across states. In light of these developments, Hofstadter’s question takes on renewed urgency: ‘Why is it that in all other modern democratic societies those endangered ask to have such men disarmed, while in the United States alone they insist on arming themselves?’ How did the US come to be so terribly exceptional with regards to its guns?

From the viewpoint of today, it is difficult to imagine a world in which guns were less central to US life. But a gun-filled country was neither innate nor inevitable. The evidence points to a key turning point in US gun culture around the mid-20th century, shortly before the state of gun politics captured Hofstadter’s attention. Firearm estimates derived from gun sales and surveys indicate that, in 1945, there were somewhere around 45 million guns in the US at a time when the country had 140 million people. A quarter-century later, by 1970, the number of guns doubled, whereas the population increased by a little less than 50 per cent. By 2020, the number of guns had skyrocketed to nearly tenfold of its 1945 rate, while the population grew less than 2.5 times the 1945 number.



From the mid-20th century to today, guns also changed from playing a relatively minor role in US crime to taking centre-stage. Research by the criminologist Martin Wolfgang on Philadelphia’s homicide patterns from 1948 to 1952 reveals that only 33 per cent of the city’s homicides involved a firearm. Today, 91 per cent of homicides in Philadelphia feature a gun. Similarly, the national firearm homicide rate is 81 per cent. In addition, opinion polls traced the evolution over the second half of the 20th century from Americans buying guns primarily for hunting and recreation to buying them for self-protection against other people. Together, these findings reveal a sea change in US gun culture between the mid-20th century and the present day. So, how did this change happen? Until recently, it’s been difficult to say. The paucity of historical data on gun availability has left the origins of the country’s exceptional gun culture a mystery.

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