Day: October 27, 2023

U.S. prepares mass evacuation of Americans from Middle East, including 600,000 from Israel

  BY 

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/us-prepares-mass-evacuation-of-americans-from-middle-east-including-600000-from-israel;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

The US is preparing for a possible mass evacuation of Americans from the Middle East, including 600,000 from Israel.

In an Associated Press update:

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group held talks on Wednesday in Beirut with senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures in a key meeting of three top anti-Israel militant groups amid the war raging in Gaza.

In neighboring Syria, meanwhile, state media said an Israeli airstrike hit the international airport in the northern city of Aleppo on Wednesday, damaging its runway and putting it out of service.

According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration believes it “would be irresponsible not to have a plan for everything.” Imagine the shock of Americans whose loved ones were killed in Afghanistan and those who still have loved ones stuck in Afghanistan, when they read that line.

The Democrats helped create the current crisis in the Middle East (and threats beyond that region). They emboldened Iran and helped fill its coffers through an outrageous deal that was based on lies and Obama’s backroom deals. Consider for a moment more recent activity:

  • It was discovered that Iranian spies have infiltrated the Biden regime.
  • The Biden regime’s Iran envoy Robert Malley helped “fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments.”
  • Right before the Hamas attack on Israel, Iran seized upon a chance to get even more money from Joe Biden.
  • In an extreme act of insensitivity and even provocation to patriotic Americans, Biden announced the deal to send $6,000,000,000 to Iran in exchange for hostages on September 11, of all dates.
  • The Biden regime sent $148 million to Palestinian areas weeks before the attack on Israel.
  • Biden’s main goal of his Israel trip was to secure entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, not to help fortify Israel against its worst enemies.

There’s a pattern with the Biden administration that it is rooted in a longtime alliance with Palestinians. It prioritizes their interests over those of Israel. Even in Maui, Biden vacationed while Maui burned.

It would be a relief if Americans can be safely transported out of Israel and the surrounding region to safety. But how long can America stay safe on their own soil with a wide-open Southern border? National security should be a top priority; it is not under the Biden administration.

Biden has also been a stumbling block of interference in delaying the war on Hamas, buying the savage group more time to prepare, in cahoots with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, and Iran.

“US prepares to evacuate 600,000 Americans from Israel,” by Tony Diver, Telegraph, October 24, 2023:

The United States is preparing evacuation plans for up to 600,000 Americans in Israel in the event of a full-scale ground war in the region.

US officials have created contingency plans involving a major exodus of American citizens from the area, as Israel is poised to send ground troops into the Gaza Strip.

The Biden administration believes it “would be irresponsible not to have a plan for everything,” although a full-scale airlift is still thought to be a worst-case scenario, according to the Washington Post.

The State Department believes there are around 600,000 American citizens in Israel, although many are dual nationals.

Another 86,000 were believed to be in Lebanon when Hamas launched terror attacks on October 7, killing 1,400 people in Israel.

The UK and other Western states are also in contact with their nationals in the region, and both the State Department and British Foreign Office have advised against travel to both Israel and Gaza…..

NYC: Jewish students locked into college library to protect them from raging pro-Hamas mob

  BY 

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2023/10/nyc-jewish-students-locked-into-college-library-to-protect-them-from-raging-pro-hamas-mob;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

This wasn’t Berlin 1938. It was New York City 2023.

“Jewish Students at NYC College Cornered by Pro-Hamas Protesters, Told to Hide in Attic,” Jewish Voice, October 26, 2023:

Jewish students at Cooper Union, a private New York City college, were locked inside a library Wednesday as pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters beat their fists on the doors, screamed, and tried to gain entry.

Videos sent by terrified students trapped in the library initially were shared on social media Wednesday afternoon by Jake Novak, former media director at the Israeli Consulate in New York.

Novak reported that the New York Police Department was called “as soon as the protesters stormed the main Cooper Union building, but [officers] did nothing.”

New York City Council member Inna Vernikov said Thursday morning that she had spoken with four of the students barricaded in the library. No one was arrested in the incident, Vernikov said….

Novak said Cooper Union librarians “bolted the doors” to prevent pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters from entering the library, then told “identifiable” Jewish students to “hide in the attic if they wanted to.”…

Vernikov said Cooper Union faculty members not only canceled class to accommodate a walkout for the protest, but “encouraged students to participate and even offered extra credit” for participating. She also noted that faculty members joined the protest.

The Daily Signal sought comment from Cooper Union, including information on which classes were canceled and which faculty members encouraged students to participate. College officials didn’t respond by publication time.

The Jewish students barricaded in the Cooper Union library were evacuated through tunnels Wednesday evening, while the university and police left the protesters alone, Vernikov and others said.

Vernikov reported Thursday morning that Jewish students at Cooper Union were staying home for fear of safety and some are dropping classes. Three students who were barricaded in the library told her that they “will never walk in there feeling alright again,” Vernikov said….

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 12:29 AM ON OCTOBER 26, 2023
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/10/26/anti-semitic-academia-finally-getting-punched-in-the-wallet-n1737961;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet
AP Photo/Michael Casey, File
Ever since the terrorist murderers in Hamas attacked Israel almost three weeks ago, we’ve been witnessing the disgusting spectacle of American college students very vocally condemning Israel, some of which the esteemed VodkaPundit recently chronicled.

For being attacked.

Yes, parents, this is what a small fortune gets you when you send your kids off to have their minds polluted by the leftist filth that controls Academia.

These kids didn’t come out of the womb being virulently anti-Semitic, they had to be conditioned. To be sure, the American public education indoctrination mill helped get them there, but it’s the lunatics in Academia’s ivory towers who are responsible for the finished product. As I said in a recent podcast, the students are only working with the facts that their professors presented to them.

A handful of college presidents and boards of regents have issued statements condemning anti-Semitism and Hamas, but that can all be filed under “Too Little, Too Late.” The damage to young minds has already been done.

Wholesale changes in American public education and academia are long past overdue, but it’s been considered sacrilege — mostly by the left — to disparage the sainted teachers or institutions of higher learning. Eyes are being opened now, however. The corrupt agenda of the teachers’ unions that run K-12 public schools was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and got parents involved in curriculum decisions in great numbers.

Relevant: COVID-19 Has Exposed Teachers’ Unions as the Shakedown Artists They Really Are

The behavior of the rabidly pro-Palestinian/Hamas students at many elite universities has shocked a lot of people who aren’t online and consuming news for most of their waking hours.

There is, of course, BIG money in academia. It takes a lot to keep the hegemonic brain-washing apparatus humming. Obviously, the best way to fight it is to hit them where it hurts the most — in the bank accounts.

Shortly after I decided to write this column, my friend Ed Morrissey posted one of his own at our sister site HotAir which came at the money issue from a different angle than what I’m about to get into. Ed says that we should “decolonize” academia, and here are some of his suggestions:

Rather than launch destructive campaigns that will undermine the rights of all Americans, we need to address the issue at its core. The issue isn’t the NSJP, or the current flock of moral idiots on American campuses at the moment. The problem is the firehose of federal tax dollars propping up the Higher Ed Industry, and the way it gets manipulated to transform education into the kind of indoctrination that produced this anti-Semitic Hitler Youth Movement.

In other words, we need to end the student loan programs. We need to end Pell grants, and every scholarship from the federal government, even the ones for left-handed Laplanders with Lyme Disease. We need to end the transmission of every federal dollar into the bloated, corrupt Academia as it exists now and has existed over the last several decades. Its main product has become a blizzard of non-performing administrators and crops of moral idiots, the latter of whom emerge with crippling lifetime debt and nihilist fantasies that many of them will never outgrow.

To put it another way that might appeal to our progressive partners: We need to Defund the Fleece.

This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.

That’s a long quote from Ed’s piece, but I wanted to use it to set up what I was already going to write about.

Public funding is, as Ed points out, the biggest problem, but the tonier institutions of higher learning rely on the generosity of wealthy alumni to ensure that there is always a nice sheen on those ivory towers and that they’re fortified from reality.

Well, the frothing, pro-Palestinian/Hamas student minions are making reality crash in for some schools.

The Wall Street Journal:

Top universities such as Harvard and Penn are facing backlash from alumni angry about the schools’ reactions to the attacks and their aftermath. The alumni say their schools didn’t move quickly and forcefully enough to condemn Hamas and denounce antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, and that they have done a poor job since then protecting Jewish students as on-campus tensions rise.

Some say it was the final straw after years of growing disenchantment with the schools over what they see as a leftward political shift. Many big donors have announced plans to stop giving or said they are reconsidering future gifts.

The pullback could dent the finances of some universities that rely on big givers to fill their coffers. People giving $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations across surveyed U.S. universities, according to a study by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education covering the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022.

Donations from the “big givers” can usually be penciled into the donation ledger every year and not worried about. Now, thanks to the fruits of their indoctrination labors being on display for all to see, upper-crust universities are facing situations like this:

Retail billionaire Leslie Wexner’s foundation said it would cut financial ties with Harvard and end a program it funded at the school for Israelis. Wexner and his wife have donated more than $42 million to the Cambridge, Mass., university.

Forty-two million is a lot of money even in Harvard dollars.

Some might ask if this will really bring about any positive change in the long run. That’s impossible to predict, of course. The bully needs to take a few on the chin if he’s even going to think about leaving you alone though.

Those in upper management at America’s universities are obsessed with finances and fundraising. For a long time, they’ve been well-oiled machines when it comes to bloating their institutions’ bank accounts. When big, regular donors slam their checkbooks shut it’s a cause for overwhelming concern, if not outright panic.

We continue to see backlash against people who have long gotten away with ignorant anti-Israel, anti-Semitic world views. Those in academia had reason to feel more shielded from criticism than other inherently anti-Semitic groups; they’ve been getting rich off of their hatred for decades, after all. If it can’t be ended altogether, let’s hope that dangerous grift will at least be weakened now.