March 27, 2024: Don’t Worry, We Want to Fund the Moderate Terrorists
Former PA PM calls to include Hamas, PIJ in PLO; Bibi uncancels meeting?; Marjorie Perloff, 1931-2024
The Big Story
Yesterday’s briefing from U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller was a display of official bullshit so virtuosic as to elevate bureaucratese into a literary language alongside Elizabethan English or classical Greek. The following exchange with a reporter, for instance, on the “non-binding” character of Monday’s U.N. Security Council resolution, isn’t directly relevant to our point today, but we’re sharing it just for fun. See if you can follow along:
Q: Since when is a U.N. resolution, a Security Council U.N. resolution, non-binding? Because that’s a significant shift. That’s not the understanding of most countries, and it’s not the understanding of the U.N. either …
MR MILLER: So let me explain what we meant by that. … When we say the resolution is non-binding, what we mean is that it does not impose any new obligations on the parties. … That said, we do believe that … it does carry weight and it is something that should be implemented.
Q: I mean, either it’s binding or it’s non-binding. If it’s non-binding, like you said, because it lacks provisions, why would anybody comply with it?
MR MILLER: It’s non-binding in that it does not impose any new obligations on the parties, but we do believe it should be respected, that it carries weight, and that it should be implemented, as has always been the—as has always been our belief when it comes to U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Later, the journalist asked why the United States had bothered to veto the three previous resolutions if all of them were “non-binding.” Miller answered that “they carry weight and should be implemented,” so they should “reflect the policy positions of the United States.”
Have we mentioned this week that U.S. officials keep saying the “non-binding resolution” doesn’t reflect a change in U.S. policy? Anyway, forget it. The point is to confuse you.
What we wanted to highlight was a tiny speck of actual information that managed to creep its way into the briefing, part of Miller’s response to a question asking why Hamas couldn’t simply “create new battalions” if Israel were allowed to destroy the existing battalions in Rafah. Miller answered, accurately, that while you can replace fighters, “leaders are harder to replace.” However, Miller agreed that “your underlying question is exactly right” and that Israel needs a “political solution” to “keep those Hamas battalions from reforming.” What does that look like? It’s Miller time:
So, for example, one of the possibilities is for the Palestinian Authority to offer policing and security on the ground with a trained-up force. Well, you have to have a—the PA operating in Gaza to be able to do that. And so you have to have some of the—a political path forward to achieve that.
So, there you have it: The U.S. goal is to prevent Israel from eradicating Hamas in Rafah, then stand up a “reformed and revitalized PA” (which current and former PA officials keep saying must include a “deradicalized” and “nonviolent” Hamas) while replacing Israeli security control with a PA security force. We presume that force would be trained and funded by the United States, following the blueprint laid down last year by Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel for precisely such an arrangement in the West Bank. At the time, Tablet News Editor Tony Badran pointed out some of the obvious problems with such a plan:
How such training will be used by the ostensibly “pro-Western” Fatah faction in the event of Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis, let alone any wider conflict, should not be a mystery. First, the idea of a Palestinian force actually “countering” Palestinian terror is without precedent during the 30-plus years of the Oslo process, meaning it has never happened. Second, there are the words of the Fatah leadership itself. As Tawfiq Tirawi, Yasser Arafat’s former intelligence chief and perhaps the single most capable and best-informed member of Fatah’s senior leadership, put it in a speech posted to his personal Facebook page in 2020, the terrorists themselves are part of the Palestinian Authority’s security establishment and should therefore be left alone by PA security officers. “These fighters are your brothers, so be on their side,” Tirawi urged.
The concern isn’t merely theoretical. The Washington Free Beacon noted in February that PA security forces have been involved in at least 55 terror attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians since 2020, citing research from the Jerusalem-based NGO Palestinian Media Watch. A shooting last week in the West Bank settlement of Dolev, for instance, in which one IDF soldier died and seven Israelis were wounded, was carried out by a former member of the Palestinian Presidential Guard, a branch of the security services directly controlled by Mahmoud Abbas.
And while Fatah (which controls the PA) has chided Hamas for being an Iranian puppet, PA control over territory is no guarantee against Iranian influence. Earlier this week, the IDF announced it had seized a large shipment of Iranian-made shrapnel charges, antitank mines, and several dozen rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-fired antitank missiles (among other military-grade weapons) bound for the West Bank. The agent behind the shipment was identified as Munir Makdah, a Palestinian resident of Lebanon and agent of Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Oh, and according to a Monday report in The Times of Israel, Makdah also happens to be a senior official in Fatah.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Walter Russell Mead on the death of the American wonks
The Rest
→Salam Fayyad, who served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority from 2007 to 2013, said at a Harvard Kennedy School event on Tuesday that the Palestine Liberation Organization should “include those excluded from it so far, like Hamas, like Islamic Jihadists [Palestine Islamic Jihad].” According to a report in The Harvard Crimson, Fayyad added that Hamas “cannot be destroyed” and thus should be included in a “more inclusive PLO,” which would form a “technocratic government” to rule until elections could be held. Asked by a moderator whether this would simply re-create the current situation, with Hamas decisively winning any future election, Fayyad said, “That’s better than what we have right now.”
While we commend Mr. Fayyad’s commitment to the democratic process, we feel obliged to note, per the Office of the Director of National Intelligence newsletter we covered yesterday, that Islamic Jihadists is a “problematic phrase” that is “hurtful to Muslim Americans.” We suggest that he refer to PIJ by a more accurate term, such as Palestine Khawarij.
→It may be Bibi’s turn for zero-dimensional chess: The Times of Israel reported Wednesday that Netanyahu is seeking to reschedule the meeting between his top aides and their U.S. counterparts, which he canceled on Monday following Washington’s failure to veto a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. The leak comes from a single U.S. official, so take it with a grain of salt, although an Israeli official also confirmed to The Times of Israel that the report is “not wrong.” As Lee Smith pointed out in the Monday edition of The Scroll, it may have been a mistake for Netanyahu to cancel the delegation in the first place, when it would have been just easy—and probably more productive—to send his aides to politely listen to the Americans and then ignore their advice.
→Meta (formerly Facebook) has reduced the amplification of political content on Instagram, quietly enrolling users in an optional setting that prevents Instagram from “proactively” surfacing political content from accounts users don’t already follow. The change was announced in February but did not begin drawing widespread attention until the past week, drawing fire from left-wing attorney Scott Hechinger and Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, among others. A Tuesday article in Time magazine on the change notes that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a January earnings call that the company was receiving persistent feedback from users that they “don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” but also notes that the move is part of a wider effort by the company to demote political content in response to pressure from Democrats and left-leaning critics since the Jan. 6 riot. Separately, on Tuesday, the Meta Oversight Board recommended that the company allow users to refer to “designated dangerous individuals,” such as terrorists, as shaheed, the Arabic word for “martyr.” Under the current policy, which prohibits the glorification of terrorists, “it is likely that ‘shaheed’ accounts for more content removals … than any other single word or phrase on its platform.”
→The State Department has denied Israeli media reports that a top U.S. official accused the IDF of systematically sexually abusing Palestinian women, but it confirmed that it had pushed Israel to investigate “credible allegations of wrongdoing,” including those contained in a recent U.N. report accusing Israel of sexually abusing Palestinian prisoners in detention. The Washington Free Beacon, which broke the story, confirmed that the U.S. State Department official who allegedly made the accusation of systematic sexual abuse was Jill Hutchings, director of the State Department’s Office of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs.
→In yesterday’s edition, we highlighted an Atlantic essay that quoted, by name, a Moroccan American graduate student at Stanford University named Hamza El Boudali calling for Joe Biden to be executed. Boudali is, to put it mildly, a real piece of work: a Students for Justice in Palestine activist and apparent Islamic radical whose banner photo on X is a screenshot of his own post in which he calls for “Zionists” to be “deported” for being “more loyal to Israel than to America.” While it might strike you as newsworthy that such a person is entrusted to teach undergraduates at the No. 3 ranked university in the United States, the anecdote prompted a wave of posts from media progressives who were concerned that it was a violation of journalistic ethics to report on Mr. Boudali’s activism. Here’s Briahna Joy Gray, co-host of The Hill’s Rising, responding to a post from an editor at Bloomberg (formerly of New York magazine and The New York Times):
(“The Huberman piece” is a reference to a recent New York profile of Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist and fitness guru with an apparently strange, and complicated, sex life.)
As UnHerd columnist Kat Rosenfield pointed out on X, however, this “privacy” standard appears somewhat inconsistently applied. In 2020, for instance, The New York Times ran an investigation into a white cheerleader, Mimi Groves (named in the article), who had said “I can drive, n***a!” in a private Snapchat video sent to a friend when she was a 15-year-old freshman in high school. The video was released years later by a classmate, prompting the University of Tennessee, where Groves was then a student, to kick Groves off the cheerleading team and then force her to withdraw from the university altogether. The story, the Times said, underscored “the power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable” and revealed a “complex portrait of behavior that for generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.”
→Vanderbilt University, meanwhile, showed a surprising amount of spine on Wednesday, arresting three students for assaulting a campus police officer and suspending several others for a pro-Palestine sit-in at a university building. The students were protesting to demand a vote on a proposed amendment to the Vanderbilt Student Government constitution, which would have prohibited VSG funds from going to organizations blacklisted by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. According to a report from ABC’s Nashville affiliate, the students, who were warned by administrators that their protest violated campus rules, received “interim” suspensions, requiring them to leave campus until further notice. We’ll see if the administration is willing to stick to its guns in the face of the inevitable howls of outrage to come from the Islamo-gauchiste messaging machine.
→The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case challenging 2016 and 2021 rulings by the Food and Drug Administration that expanded access to mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill. The plaintiffs, a group of doctors opposed to abortion on religious and moral grounds, have claimed that they suffer moral harm from the FDA regulations since patients who take the pill may later seek treatment at hospitals. But the majority of Supreme Court justices—including conservative Catholic justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—appeared skeptical that the plaintiffs had standing to sue, and suggested that existing conscience protections, which allow doctors who morally object to abortions to refuse to perform them, were already an adequate protection.
→In related news, Marilyn Lands, a Democrat who ran a heavily pro-choice and pro-IVF campaign, won a decisive victory on Tuesday in a special election for an Alabama state House seat in what was formerly a solidly red district. Lands defeated her Republican challenger in the race for Alabama House District 10, which covers portions of Huntsville, by nearly 25% of the vote, only two years after losing a race for the same seat by seven points. We doubt that ending the war in Gaza will help Biden’s poll numbers much, but Republicans scaring normal people about IVF access might.
→Marjorie Perloff, a longtime professor at Stanford University, poetry critic, and forceful public advocate for the avant-garde, died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles, aged 92. Born in 1931 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Perloff emigrated to the United States following the Nazi Anschluss in 1938 and completed her doctorate, on Irish poet William Butler Yeats, at the Catholic University of America in 1965. Her public career began in earnest with her 1977 book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, which, according to The New York Times’ obituary, was the first “full-length assessment” of a writer who, thanks to Perloff, has “since come to be regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the past century.” In addition to her academic work, Perloff contributed to several popular magazines, including Tablet. She is survived by two daughters and three grandchildren.
See Dr. Perloff’s Tablet author page here: https://www.tabletmag.com/contributors/marjorie-perloff
And read the poet Jeremy Sigler’s 2022 Tablet interview with Perloff here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/marjorie-perloff-duchamp-wittgenstein
TODAY IN TABLET:
Q&A: The Marriage Vows of the American Elite, by David Samuels
A conversation with Benjamin Ginsberg
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.
Today’s Back Pages is an excerpt. The full essay can be found here.
Twilight of the Wonks
The 100-year reign of impeccably credentialed but utterly mediocre meme processors is coming to an end
By Walter Russell Mead
Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the "go along to get along" principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.
The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.
The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years.
American universities remain places where magnificent things are happening. Medical breakthroughs, foundational scientific discoveries, and tech innovations that roar out of the laboratories to transform the world continue to pour from the groves of academe, yet simultaneously many campuses seem overrun not only with the usual petty hatreds and dreary fads, but also at least in some quarters with a horrifying collapse in respect for the necessary foundations of American democracy and civic peace.
Sitting atop these troubled institutions, we have too many “leaders” of extraordinary mediocrity and conventional thinking, like the three hapless presidents blinking and stammering in the glare of the television lights. Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires. Leaders recruited from these ranks will rarely shine when crisis strikes.
The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust.
It would be easier to simply dismiss or take pleasure in the public humiliation of some of America’s most elite institutions—but we can’t. Universities still matter, and as Americans struggle to reform our institutions in a turbulent era, getting universities right is a national priority. The question is not whether our higher educational system (and indeed our education system as a whole) needs reform. From the colonial era to the present, America’s system of higher ed has been in a constant state of change and reform, and the mix of opportunities and challenges presented by the Information Revolution can only be met by accelerating the pace and deepening the reach of that continuing historical process.
***
Universities are not and never have been castles of philosophic introspection floating high in the clouds. They are functional institutions serving clear and vital purposes in national life. That is why taxpayers and private donors pay for them to exist, students attend them, and society cares what happens on campus. As society changes, the roles that universities are called on to play change, and universities modify their purpose, structure, and culture to adapt to the new demands and opportunities around them. At a time of accelerating social change that centers on the revolutionary impact of the Information Revolution on the knowledge professions, it is not surprising that universities—the places where knowledge professionals like doctors, lawyers, business managers, civil servants, and teachers receive their formal education—face a set of challenges that are urgent and profound.
America’s education system developed in response to the transformation of human civilization over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution resulted in a society of unprecedented scale and complexity, and this society required a large class of highly trained specialists and administrators. Architects had to master the techniques to build hundred-story skyscrapers. Engineers had to build bridges and highways that could carry unprecedented masses of traffic. Doctors had to master immense amounts of knowledge as the field of medicine changed beyond recognition. Bureaucrats had to coordinate the efforts of government agencies taking on tasks and managing resources beyond anything past generations had considered possible. Corporate managers had to integrate sourcing of raw materials, design, and upkeep of factories based on cutting-edge technology and management of a labor force as large as some armies in past centuries with financing and marketing operations on an ever-expanding scale. Financiers had to calculate risks and extend long-term credit for corporations and governments whose need for capital eclipsed anything ever previously seen. Military leaders had to coordinate the largest armed forces in the history of the world, operating at unprecedented levels of technology from the tundra to the jungle, and from outer space to deep under sea.
At the same time, scientific research—which for past generations had been something of a hobby for intelligent gentry amateurs—became a vital engine of economic growth and a key aspect of national security. From the gentleman amateurs of the Royal Society showing their intriguing results to Charles II to the scientists of the Manhattan Project building superweapons for Franklin Roosevelt, there is a long and laborious journey. As the natural sciences became more complex, as experiments required ever more expensive and technologically sophisticated equipment, and as their importance to industry and government grew, the sciences required an ever-growing cadre of trained and skilled researchers. And with the increased economic and military importance of science, business, civilian government, and the national security sector required more professionals who could follow the increasingly arcane yet massively consequential developments in the scientific world.
Before the advent of modern computing, much less AI, all this work had to be carried out by the unaided human mind. Modern industrial societies had to stuff vast quantities of highly specialized and intellectually complex knowledge into the heads of a large sector of their population. They had to develop methods of managing and governing this large, technical intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom would be cogs in the machine rather than exercising leadership. And they had to develop and maintain the institutions that could carry out these unprecedented responsibilities.
The consequences for universities were revolutionary. Higher education had to serve a much higher number of students and prepare them with a much higher standard of technical knowledge—and provide technical and specialist education in a much larger number of subjects—than ever before.
From the post-Civil War generation through the present day, the immense task of shaping the disciplines and filling the ranks of the learned professions and civil service shaped the evolution of the modern educational system. What we call colleges and universities today have, functionally speaking, little in common with the institutions that bore those names in pre-modern times. The University of California resembles the medieval University of Paris less closely than my hometown of Florence, South Carolina, resembles the Florence of Tuscany.
The pre-modern university was a small, loosely managed association, and its officials needed to pay the bills, discipline the students, arbitrate the petty jealousies of the faculty, and keep the university as a whole on the right side of the political and ecclesiastical powers of the day. A modern university, even of the second or third tier, will often be large enough to play a significant role as a local or even regional engine of economic development. It may well be the largest employer in the city or town in which it is sited. It will often manage operations ranging from top-of-the-line hospitals to world-class athletic facilities to academic printing presses and day care centers. Larger universities operate dining halls that feed thousands or even tens of thousands of people every day and carry out projects as diverse as cattle breeding and subatomic research.
American universities succeeded in these tasks better than their peers anywhere in the world, and America’s success in the 20th century was not unrelated to the speed and efficiency with which its higher education system adapted to the new realities. But precisely because they succeeded so brilliantly in the past and adapted so effectively to the conditions of late-stage industrial democracy after World War II, American universities face severe difficulties as the Information Revolution upends many of the institutions, practices, and ways of life that characterized the earlier era.
As universities and their student bodies became larger, with the percentage of college graduates in the American population growing from an estimated 1% in 1900 to 6% in 1950 to roughly 25% in 2000, the role of the university-educated in American life also changed. Access to higher education was significantly widened, but the gulf between those with bachelor’s and post-baccalaureate degrees and the rest of the population also widened. There was a day when most American lawyers had never studied in law school, and when many, like Abraham Lincoln, lacked even a high school degree. Today, entrance to the profession is much more highly controlled and those without the requisite degrees face nearly insuperable barriers.
At the same time, the relationship between higher education and social leadership has largely broken down. In pre-modern times, university graduates were almost entirely recruited from the upper classes, and their university study was consciously intended to equip them for the exercise of real power and leadership. The pre-modern university was dedicated to the artisanal production of new generations of elite leaders in a handful of roles closely related to the survival of the state. The modern university produces scientists, bureaucrats, managers, and assorted functionaries on an industrial scale to provide governments and the private sector with a range of skilled professionals and knowledge workers, most of whom will spend their lives following orders rather than giving them.
One measure of the change is to contrast the credentials of past generations with what is routinely expected of professionals today. Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10 years old. There were no economics departments or doctorates anywhere in the world when Alexander Hamilton, who was unable to complete his undergraduate studies at the then-Kings College of New York (now Columbia), designed the first central bank of the United States. None of the Founding Fathers were as well credentialed or thoroughly vetted as utterly mediocre, run-of-the-mill lawyers and political scientists are today. Armed only with his genius and his scanty formal educational credentials, a young John Marshall could not land an interview, much less a job, with a major American law firm today. Neither Ulysses Grant nor Robert Lee held a doctorate or had any formal professional training after graduating from West Point. Their lack of credentials would ensure that neither, today, would be considered for senior command in any branch of the armed forces. Through most of the 19th century, American colleges and even elite universities did not require doctoral degrees of their faculty. Today, however, a person with George Washington’s educational credentials could not get a job teaching the third grade in any public school in the United States.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/twilight-wonks-walter-russell-mead
Re article: “ Q&A: The Marriage Vows of the American Elite”
Most fascinating interview especially when you realize that it took place in 2020, and then see where we all are now, Jews and Israel in particular, many still clinging to the side of those who vehemently want to destroy them.
But even Republicans (at least the DC political class), don’t offer much respite, as they’ve only shown themselves to be cowards and subservient to the elites running the game, having even obstructed and fought Trump, their own party’s president, at every turn from governing fully the way the country so desperately needed.
Bridges collapse jets fall apart terrorist acts are denied and illiterates masquerade as learned professionals This is the reality of the woke world view