Responsibilities

The subheadline illustrates the misunderstanding of where responsibility lies.

School officials reap what their politically monoculture faculties have sown.

The WSJ‘s editors then went on about how those thinking antisemitic bigotry are exaggerating are mistaken, pointing out in their examples the rampant antisemitic bigotry on college campuses.

Antisemitism has too often been tolerated within Near Eastern Studies departments. On October 8, 2023, Columbia professor Joseph Massad praised the “awesome” scenes of the October 7 massacre “witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs.” In 2018 Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi posted on Twitter (now X) that “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” could soon be traced to “the ugly name of Israel.”

Misunderstood Difficulty

Hamas terrorists are resuming their presence in northern Gaza Strip, months after the IDF had initially cleared the Strip except for the far south of the Strip: Rafah and a couple small villages near Rafah.

[R]enewed violence, in areas Israeli forces had previously largely cleared of Hamas, serves as a sobering example for Israel’s forces of the difficulty of consolidating gains as they prepare an offensive in Rafah, the militant group’s last major bastion.

It’s certainly true that clearing an area of the remnants of a terrorist entity that operates as a dispersed network and that is skilled at (literal) underground operations and keeping that area clear is deucedly difficult.

Cowardice

Columbia University’s managers have abjectly surrendered to terrorist supporters masquerading as pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are doing their best to prevent Jewish students from attending classes and to prevent Columbia from operating at all.

Columbia University was holding classes virtually Monday as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to engulf the campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik said she wanted to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

Instagram’s Nudes

Meta’s—Mark Zuckerberg’s—Instagram says they will, under certain circumstances, start blurring nude images sent over its program.

Instagram is now taking a meaningful step to contain the problem, by automatically detecting and blurring nudes in its direct-messaging service.

Whoopty-do. There’s this:

Apple stopped short of notifying parents if children under the age of 13 viewed or sent nudes, because of potential privacy issues. Instagram also won’t notify parents.

Meta still is insisting it’s a better steward of child safety than are the child’s parents. So is Apple. Typical arrogance, and unacceptable.

Toddler Temper Tantrums and the Fears of the Timid

Karl Rove may be whistling past the graveyard in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed. He opened his piece with this lede:

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans will lose the US House this fall. That may be right.

Then he ran a counterargument.

Progressive-Democratic Party’s War on Christianity

As part of the White House’s Easter celebration and Easter Egg Hunt, the White House held an Easter Art Event. This year, thought, that art contest was censored.

Children of National Guard members are not allowed to submit artwork with religious symbolism for the White House’s 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” event [apparently separate from Jill Biden’s EGGucation theme].
This year, the Adjutants General of the National Guard requested on behalf of First Lady Jill Biden for the children of parents in the National Guard to submit artwork with the theme, “Celebrating our Military Families.”
According to the rules, the Easter egg design “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements.”

More Revisionist History

The Food and Drug Administration has decided to remove social media posts and online materials commentary that overtly disdained and recommended against the use of Ivermectin as a Wuhan Virus infection treatment.

It’s good for the FDA to correct its dismal performance regarding Wuhan Virus treatments, but trying to pretend—even if its pretense is public this time—its dismal performance never happened by deleting those posts is just dishonest. The honest thing to do would have been to bring those posts back to the fore and append to them the FDA’s corrections regarding Ivermectin’s efficacy and safety.

Well, NSS

The United Nations—all these months since the terrorist Hamas attacked Israel and butchered 1,400+ civilian men, women, and children, raping women and children(!)—has finally concluded

there are grounds to believe sexual violence, including rape, occurred during the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and that there is clear and credible evidence that female hostages were raped.

Because the reports of the women who were raped and lived to tell the tale, or the men and women who were eyewitness to the rapes, weren’t enough in real time, either in their words or in the numbers of women saying those words.

“Structural Changes”

Programmers in Alphabet’s wholly owned subsidiary Google wrote a chatbot, Gemini, that has demonstrated an appalling level of bigotry in its programming.

Gemini, a chatbot based on the company’s most advanced AI technology, angered users last week by producing ahistoric images and blocking requests for depictions of white people. The controversy morphed over the weekend into a broader backlash against the chatbot’s responses to different philosophical questions.

One such philosophical question and answer:

Question: Who has done more harm: libertarians or Stalin?
Gemini: It is difficult to say definitively which ideology has done more harm….

Don’t Risk a Government Shutdown?

The Progressive-Democratic Party’s House representatives are urging Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) not to take that risk—to the extent the risk from a partial shutdown even exists—in their letter to him last Friday. They want no spending cuts, or policy changes, in any bill that would avert such a shutdown; those are poison pills in their lexicon.

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ veiled threat that they will shut down the government if they don’t get their own way entirely, and they’ll blame the Republicans for that shutdown.