January 26: The Federal Government Embraces “Indigenous Knowledge”

U.S. pauses UNRWA funding; Biden freezes LNG permits; Keystone Cops at the FBI

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The Big Story

On Friday, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History announced that it would be indefinitely closing nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space featuring Native American artifacts to comply with new federal regulations “that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items,” according to a report in The New York Times. These regulations, issued in December 2023 as updates to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), state that “museums and Federal agencies must defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations” when deciding which tribes to repatriate objects to—as opposed to scientific evidence regarding the objects’ provenance. 

While the new NAGPRA rules may seem bizarre in isolation, they are part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to incorporate “indigenous knowledge” into federal policymaking. In September 2023, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—elevated to a cabinet-level agency following Biden’s campaign promises to “follow the science”—“directing more than two dozen federal agencies to apply ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ to ‘research, policies, and decision making.’” And this wasn’t mere window dressing. The memo ordered agencies to “include Indigenous Knowledge as an aspect of the best available science” and said it could be cited in “Highly Influential Scientific Assessments”—a bureaucratic term of art referring to official scientific assessments that are “novel, controversial, or precedent-setting” or that could have a potential economic impact of more than $500 million (examples include the Environmental Protection Agency’s integrated scientific assessment on lead pollution). The Beacon also reported that a Native non-profit had asked the administration to “shield any Indigenous Knowledge from public access through mechanisms like Freedom of Information Act requests” on the grounds that the knowledge is “proprietary.”

In a recent essay at the Substack “Reality’s Last Stand,” anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss argued that the government’s increasingly explicit deference toward Native spiritual beliefs could amount to an unconstitutional preference for Native religion. Earlier this month, for instance, the White House met with representatives of the Navajo Nation to hear their objections to a private expedition to the moon that would deposit the remains of cremated individuals there—an act the Navajo consider “desecration,” since the moon is sacred in the Navajo religion. The White House demurred on the grounds that it had no authority to block a private flight, but why would it take the demand seriously enough for a meeting in the first place? Weiss also notes that NASA has incorporated Navajo spiritual beliefs in its educational materials for children and that the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center has prevented female anthropologists from handling certain artifacts out of deference to Inuit religious beliefs.

These developments are bad for science and education. Reached by email, Weiss said of the new NAGPRA regulations: 

NAGPRA’s regulations will likely extend to the destruction of anthropological data, such as casts of bones used for teaching collections; ethnographic materials, such as photos of tribes used to understand past cultures; and historic documents. NAGPRA’s compromise has fallen, and our ability to understand the past will be buried, but also these changes will hinder our ability to teach the next generation of forensic anthropologists and hinder our ability to improve the identification of skeletal remains in ways that could bring justice to the families of homicide victims and prevent future crimes.

The bigger problem, however, is that the regulations are indicative of a broader trend of moving government decision-making away from objective criteria and official processes and toward the delegation of authority to various activist nonprofits, community organizations, and other self-styled representatives of “marginalized communities” that the Democratic Party considers to be its clients. A 2006 Canadian academic assessment cited in the Beacon article criticized the use of indigenous knowledge in policymaking on the grounds that because it is vague and non-falsifiable, it “could be used to justify any activity.” That’s right, of course, but we suspect that the vagueness and lack of transparency is precisely the point.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Ruth R. Wisse on the Kafkaesque evil of the International Court of Justice

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The Rest

→The U.S. State Department announced Friday that it is temporarily pausing funding to UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency for the Palestinians, over allegations that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. If you’ve been reading The Scroll, those allegations won’t come as much of a surprise. But apparently they do to the Biden administration, which said it is “extremely troubled” by them (per a Friday press release), as is UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, who professed to be “horrified” while pledging to fire any UNRWA employees found to have “aided and abetted” terrorism. We’re shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in this casino.

But wait. Isn’t that a little out of character for an administration that just two days ago told Israel Hayom that “UNRWA is a partner that the U.S. can trust” and that it will “be a central element of stability after the war in Gaza”? The interpretive key here is a Friday X post from journalist Barak Ravid, which reported that “Shin Bet and Israeli military intelligence provided information that pointed to the active participation of UNRWA staffers” in the attack. 

Here’s our translation: The United States told the Israelis that UNRWA was going to help rebuild Gaza, and the Israelis responded that UNRWA, in addition to operating as a U.S- and European-funded jihadist welfare system, employs people who literally participated in the mass murder of Israelis. The United States then decided that to avoid embarrassment, it needed to crack down on UNRWA’s “bad apples.” So, we’ll have a very serious investigation, after which a few unusually stupid or reckless UNRWA employees will be terminated, and the United States will go on funding the agency just as before. 

→The Biden administration on Friday froze approvals for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export permits, pending a review by the Department of Energy that will evaluate how the approvals will affect climate change. The decision—which follows pressure from environmental activists such as Bill McKibben and 25-year-old TikTok influencer Alex Haraus, who met with White House officials earlier this week—imperils proposals for 17 new LNG terminals, including Calcasieu Pass 2, a proposed terminal on the Louisiana coast that would be the largest in the country. The United States was the world’s largest LNG exporter in 2023, and industry advocates have claimed that expanding U.S. export capacity is critical to reducing Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. In a statement, the White House said that “this pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”

→The FBI is recruiting special agents with mental illnesses, histories of drug use and drunk driving, and arrest records for fighting with police in order to cope with flagging recruitment numbers and to satisfy DEI mandates imposed by FBI leadership, according to a whistleblower report jointly published this week by the House Judiciary and the House Oversight and Accountability Committees. Among the whistleblower anecdotes included in the report:

• A candidate whose application was pushed through due to her race and sex, despite the candidate being 50 lbs. overweight and failing the Bureau’s physical fitness test

• A special agent whose writing skills were so poor that she could not fill out a standard FBI Interview Report Form or write an affidavit, and was ordered to attend remedial English classes at a local community college. After complaining of this agent’s performance, the whistleblower’s supervisor was told that “we need minority female agents.”

• A new agent trainee who repeatedly injured his hands from punching the walls of the FBI gymnasium because, as he explained to a supervisor, “I am filled with self-hate and rage”

• A long-term unemployed, self-described “gamer” in his or her 30s, whose application was pushed forward by FBI Headquarters “despite objections from the FBI Field Office”

→An Afghan-born Canadian security guard lit Molotov cocktails and opened fire with a “long gun” inside Edmonton City Hall on Tuesday to protest the “genocide” in Gaza. Bezhani Sarvar, 28, a security guard with the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires, fired “several rounds” inside city hall before surrendering to another security guard. No one was struck or injured in the attack. In a video recorded before the attack, Sarvar delivered a message to the “leaders, officials, and anybody who has hands into this corruption, into this genocide that’s going on in Gaza”: “You should feel ashamed of yourselves, and inshallah we will rise against you and we will put you on trial.”

→Chart of the Day:

That’s from a poll released earlier this week by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that nearly 30% of Gen Z adults (those aged 18-25) identify as queer. As you can see from looking at the chart, Zoomers identify as gay or lesbian at the same rate as millennials but are twice as likely to identify as bisexual or “something else,” which suggests that what we’re seeing is more of a change in social identity than in behavior. As political scientist Eric Kaufmann wrote in 2022, about a previous survey showing similar results, a majority of the increase in LGBT identification is driven by “very liberal” women who engage in exclusively heterosexual behavior but nonetheless identify as “queer.” 

Read the rest here: https://www.prri.org/research/generation-zs-views-on-generational-change-and-the-challenges-and-opportunities-ahead-a-political-and-cultural-glimpse-into-americas-future/ 

→Twenty-two–year-old Jannik Sinner of Italy defeated Novak Djokovic three sets to one in the men’s semifinal of the Australian Open on Friday. Djokovic, 36, has won five of the last six Australian Opens, and he had not lost a match at the tournament in six years prior to Friday (he was prohibited from playing in 2022 due his refusal to receive a Covid-19 vaccine). The loss also snaps Djokovic’s perfect 10-0 career record in Australian Open semifinals. Sinner advances to his first Grand Slam final, where he will face Russia’s Daniil Medvedev on Sunday.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Debates Over—and Within—‘Classical Education,’ by Maggie Phillips

As the educational movement is embraced by the religious right and seen by others as a Trojan horse for Christian nationalism, its leaders seek to transcend political associations

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Kafka at the International Court of Justice

'The Trial' was angst; this is evil

by Ruth R. Wisse

“Are you reminded of Kafka’s The Trial?” a reporter asks me, echoing cries of “insane” and “Kafkaesque” that I've been hearing from many of my fellow Jews about proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) where South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide for defending itself against the explicitly genocidal attacks of Hamas. But no, the case before the ICJ is not like the work Kafka wrote in German in Prague during the First World War. Der Process was angst; this is evil.

Kafka’s classic novel opens on a mystery we expect the rest of the book to solve: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” A regular legal case reveals who is leveling the accusation and provides relevant details of the alleged crime. But Joseph K. never learns what he stands accused of, by whom, or under what authority. In this state of indeterminacy, no man can prove his innocence. Unable to figure out the system that has put him on trial, he is ultimately killed. “It was as if the shame of it must outlive him.”

Joseph K.—the deracinated Jew with a truncated identity who stands politically and metaphysically at the mercy of forces he no longer understands—became a universal symbol of modern man’s fate at the hands of the very institutions he looks to for guidance. But Kafka himself came to realize the implications of what he had written, and by the time of his death in 1924 he was studying Hebrew with the intention of moving to Palestine. Several members of his Zionist circle did move to Jerusalem, and one brought with him Kafka’s archive, where it now rests in the National Library of Israel.

By the time Kafka’s sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, several waves of Jews had established the infrastructure for statehood in the land of Israel that had been under foreign occupation for 2,000 years. That return of the Jews to political sovereignty is one of the great chapters in human history. Had the Arabs, their fellow Semites, accepted the principle of coexistence, the Middle East—numbering one Jewish state among more than 20 Arab neighbors—would have flourished in peace and prosperity. Instead, Arab and Muslim factions still compete over who can best whom at destroying the Jews.

Hamas recently beat the competition with a demonstration of savagery unlike the earlier improvised pogroms in Europe to which it has been compared. October’s slaughters were plotted with crucial input from Gazans employed in Israeli homes they had scouted and mapped for the purpose, making this the first military campaign designed to culminate in acts of beheading, torture, and rape of predetermined victims. As attempts to destroy Israel through conventional warfare had only made Israel militarily stronger, the new tactics aimed at destroying the Jews’ will to remain among antagonists sworn never to leave them in peace. More than to intimidate, these attacks were made to demoralize.

Survivor-witnesses describe new refinements of psychological warfare. Hamas murdered parents and children in each other’s presence so as to sharpen the survivors’ agony. They took hostages—not, as others do, for eventual exchange—but to taunt the country with images of prisoners’ suffering, and fear that many would never be returned. Every Jewish value—respect for women, honoring the human being who was made in the image of God—was gleefully defiled.

As for the Jews living in nearby Gaza, many of them self-described Jewish “peaceniks,” they had prided themselves on the medical help and hospitality they extended to their Gazan neighbors, persuaded that cooperation was obviously to everyone's benefit. The terrorists exploited the Jews’ desire for peace as a means of entrapment and further opportunity for torment. By attacking on a Jewish holiday and a secular festival, they intended to destroy the Israelis’ joy in life. Anyone reading Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s exhilarating book about the collective strengths that constitute The Genius of Israel will recognize how Hamas turned precisely those virtues into weapons of torture to tear the Jewish people apart.

Nor does this exhaust their inventiveness. The Arabs’ strategy of martyring generations of their own people in the cause of eliminating Israel dates back to the 1947 refusal of Arab leaders to accept the partition of Palestine into two states—in order to keep Arabs perpetually homeless. Arabs were to remain permanently displaced as evidence of Israel's “occupation” while Israel integrated the over 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands and granted participatory citizenship to over 2 million Arabs who chose to remain in its boundaries.

Taking this tactic of martyring their fellow Arabs to a new level, Hamas turned Gaza into suicide central. Above ground, residents were allowed to conduct a quasi-normal life, knowing that, below ground, every school, every hospital, and many private homes were booby-trapped for the Israelis whom their leaders would lure into their cities. The IDF continues to uncover a tremendous amount of infrastructure built over years, confirming Hamas’ intention of invading and killing Israelis en masse. In the words of one of its soldiers “[It] is clear they expected us to arrive and laid plans to exact a cost in the form of IDF casualties.” The attack of Oct. 7 had to be monstrous enough to provoke Israel into full-scale war in the hope of rescuing the hostages and destroying the terrorists—a plan that would also ensure the collateral death of as many Gazans as possible to attract Western sympathy.

The Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy that rewards terrorists for the murders they commit will support every Hamas rapist and killer and their families. Making a travesty of international law that calls for the protection of citizens and prevents the use of human shields, breaking treaty arrangements and forbidding Red Cross access to prisoners, Hamas ridicules any hopes Israelis may invest in the West’s civilizing structures, which were designed for the protection of minorities and to which modern Jews did indeed look for fair treatment. In this sense, like Kafka’s Joseph K., they have been betrayed by the very institutions where they hoped to find justice.

Now the government of South Africa has weighed in with its support for Hamas and its accusations of Israeli genocide, and now the U.N.’s International Court of Justice prosecutes this charge, blatantly sabotaging the cause of justice it was created to serve. A century after Kafka’s death, there is nothing Kafkaesque about this trial, the falsity of which is plain to all. Israel stands in its own eyes and must stand before the world not as defendant but as righteous plaintiff against “those who demonstrate total disdain for life and for the law.” Unless Israel prevails, the political calculations that have allowed this travesty can only embolden the murderers and their supporters, condemning the world to ever greater evils—and not against Israel alone.