The common policy of the last three administrations tacitly assumes that the costs to the United States, to the Middle East, and to the world of a nuclear-armed Iran, while certainly unwelcome, would be manageable

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

THE JERUSALEM STRATEGIC TRIBUNE
The United States, Iran, and the Lessons of the Last War
Michael Mandelbaum
July 2023

…The present policy rests on the conviction that confronting Iran with the threat of war would likely lead to war, and that such a war would follow the pattern of Afghanistan and Iraq, proving as costly to wage and as unsatisfactory in its outcome as those conflicts were. Neither proposition is necessarily correct. Successfully deterring the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is feasible, given the vast military superiority the United States enjoys over the Islamic Republic, provided that the Iranian authorities are convinced that the United States would in fact unleash its armed forces to stop them from getting the bomb. Various measures that the American government has thus far chosen not to take would enhance the credibility of such a threat: a more emphatic declared policy to that effect, military exercises that simulate an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, and actual but limited military reprisals for Iranian provocations…READ MORE

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A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions and it destroyed his life

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto
Rupa Subramanya and Ari Blaff
August 3, 2023

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States. “Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.” It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity. Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.” READ MORE

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DeSantis went wrong almost immediately by choosing the wrong strategy

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

REAL CLEAR POLITICS
DeSantis Has Only One Path Back From Failed Launch
Charles Lipson
August 1, 2023

Two decades before “Mad Men”-era advertising executives downed their martinis and bedded their secretaries, a brilliant predecessor came up with a powerful idea still in use today. The best way to sell any product or service, he said, was to highlight its single best quality – the one that truly stands out from the competition and benefits consumers directly. That ad man, Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company, dubbed it the “unique selling proposition.” Eight decades later, advertisers and marketers still rely on it. The failure of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to identify his own “unique selling proposition” is the best explanation for his failure to surge in the polls, despite the high anticipation with which he entered the primaries. READ MORE

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from passing the first of his proposed judicial reforms, will next tackle an even more contentious proposal: democratizing the process through which judges are selected.

Posted on July 27, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

BREITBART
Israel’s Next Judicial Reform: Democratize Selection of Judges
Joel Pollak
July 26, 2023

Currently, judges are chosen by a committee that includes judges, members of the Israeli bar association, and a number of members of the parliament, or Knesset. In practice, the judges and the bar association form a bloc that allows the judiciary and the legal profession to control the process. The result has been a judiciary that is left-leaning and ethnically skewed toward the secular, Ashkenazi elite, which damages the courts’ credibility. As the Jerusalem Post notes, Netanyahu’s proposal, which he suspended in the spring to allow for negotiations, “would have removed the Bar Association representatives and introduced an expanded panel with more elected officials.” Critics complained that the proposal “would have created an automatic majority for any coalition” in parliament. That might surprise observers in the U.S., where elected politicians control every aspect of judicial selection. READ MORE

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Judicial reform facts you’ll never hear amid pearl-clutching over the “death of Israeli democracy” — this is all about power

Posted on July 25, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

CAMERA BLOG
David Remnick’s Ignorance Knows No Bounds
Alex Safian
July 23, 2023

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine, once remarked “It’s one thing to be ignorant, it’s another to parade it as sophistication,” which has to rate as one of the greatest self-owns in history. For it’s hard to imagine a more apt description of Remnick himself, whose fatuous ignorance and faux sophistication are nowhere more evident than when he writes about Israel. The latest example is Remnick’s Is This the End of Bibi?, the usual rehash of anti-Netanayahu propaganda, relying on the usual hack reporters like Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer, whom Remnick would have his readers believe is “a leading Israeli journalist.” READ MORE

Caroline Glick explains the “reasonableness law”

 

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Yet again, a major movie has cast a non-Jew to play a famous Jew. This may be part of a deeper erasure of Jews — and antisemitism — going on under the surface of storytelling

Posted on July 25, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH CHRONICLE
Oppenheimer liked to pretend he wasn’t Jewish — like the film
David Baddiel
July 27, 2023

Another day, another film/TV show/play in which a famous Jew is played by a non-Jew. I have talked and written about this many times — about how it’s a question not of acting but of context: minority casting being presently dominated by the notion of authenticity, the question is why that doesn’t apply to Jews, and what that means for how people see Jews — so I shan’t rehearse it again. But there is another, more complex issue thrown up by the casting in Oppenheimer. Any biopic on such a serious subject as the creation of the atomic bomb needs to delve deep into the psychological underpinnings of the narrative. My sense of a possible omission in that regard was alerted reading Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian saying that the film “doesn’t quite get to grips with the antisemitism Oppenheimer faced”. READ MORE

NEWSWEEK An Irish Actor Playing Oppenheimer Proves Once Again That Jews Don’t Count Oppenheimer was raised a secular Jew, and much has been made of the strain of internalized shame and self-hatred that ran throughout the course of the scientist’s life. Oppenheimer was noted for denying his Jewishness, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that he encountered antisemitism at almost every turn, facing discrimination at Harvard, the University of Göttingen and U.C. Berkeley, where after lobbying faculty head Raymond Birge to hire fellow scientist Robert Serber, he was told “one Jew in the department was enough.”

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The Opposition characterizes a program that seeks to restore a semblance of balance between an all-powerful court and judicial apparatus and the legislative and executive branches as a “coup” and “anti-democratic,” even though it would clearly make Israel’s system more rather than less democratic

Posted on July 24, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Who is actually doing the burning?
Jonathan S. Tobin
July 27, 2023

…Even the passage on Monday of the first part of the package, which would stop the court from ruling on issues merely on the basis of the judge’s arbitrary ideas about what is “reasonable” rather than on the laws, is being treated as the end of democracy. As such, it has provoked more mass demonstrations, blockages of highways, potential strikes that could devastate Israel’s economy, and, even more dangerously, large-scale refusals to serve on the part of military reservists who oppose the government’s policies. Considering that this provision was, at least at the start of the debate earlier this year, the least controversial element of the judicial reform package and one that even many in the opposition conceded was necessary, it illustrates how deep and bitter the polarization has become. READ MORE

JNS Melanie Phillips: Why compromise is unlikely in Israel’s crisis The protesters won’t stop until they bring Netanyahu’s government down.

CAMERA Alex Safian: Is Judicial Reform a Threat to Israeli Democracy? If you believe certain prominent outlets and pundits the recent Israeli elections foreshadow the demise of Israeli democracy and the rule of law, all because the new government has called for fundamental legal reforms to fix what it views as vast overreach and power grabs by the Supreme Court and by other elements of the legal system.

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Calls from across the political spectrum to end Israeli aid, but for different reasons

Posted on July 21, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH PRESS
Buoyed by the Usual Suspects, NY Times Pushing for an End to US Military Aid to Israel
David Israel
July 23, 2023

On Saturday, NY Times pundit Nicholas Kristof, decidedly not a member of the we-all-love-Israel club, to put it mildly, wrote, “This is not about whacking Israel,” but “does it really make sense for the United States to provide the enormous sum of $3.8 billion annually to another wealthy country?” In an op-ed titled, “With Israel, It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable,” Kristoff admitted that “in reality, it’s not so much aid to Israel as it is a backdoor subsidy to American military contractors.” And so, he cited former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer who said in an email: “Israel’s economy is strong enough that it does not need aid; security assistance distorts Israel’s economy and creates a false sense of dependency. Aid provides the US with no leverage or influence over Israeli decisions to use force; because we sit by quietly while Israel pursues policies we oppose, we are seen as ‘enablers’ of Israel’s occupation.” READ MORE

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The American Anthropological Association joins the #BDS mob

Posted on July 21, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

THE COLLEGE FIX
Anthropologists vote yes on BDS-influenced Israel academic boycott
Terrance Kible
July 24, 2023

The American Anthropological Association voted this morning to boycott Israeli academic institutions in a move inspired by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The AAA’s membership voted 2,016–835 in support of the resolution, with 37 percent of eligible members voting…“The Israeli state operates an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” according to the resolution’s preamble, which continued, “Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the Israeli state’s regime of oppression against Palestinians.” READ MORE

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As a defender of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been called a murderer, Nazi, psychopath, colonialist, apartheidist, or simply an animal on social media

Posted on July 21, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
I Have a Right to Live in Judea and Samaria
Malkah Fleisher
July 20, 2023

On June 20, four Jews near the town of Eli were just going about their day when they were targeted and shot to death. Some in the midst of enjoying warm bowls of fresh hummus and pita, others were casually gassing up their cars. Three beloved sons in the prime of their lives and a father were gone—cruelly plucked from their families and communities. Heartbroken by the terrible murders, I posted to Twitter, expressing my condolences to the Jews of Eli, a town in Samaria named after the High Priest of Israel who raised Samuel the Prophet at the Mishkan (tabernacle) in nearby Shiloh. Here are some of the responses that came pouring into the comments…READ MORE

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