Nov. 5: Election Day Begins

A list of rabbis for Harris; Targeting the Brooklyn Museum; Quincy Jones, producer of Jews

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The Big Story

Today is the big day! If Washington, D.C., is “Hollywood for ugly people,” Election Day is the Super Bowl for nerds … or something. The quadrennial day when all the inflamed passions of the polity extrude to the surface and erupt in the exercise of self-government we call democracy. According to the experts, this year’s expression of the people’s will is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty. Professional prognosticator Nate Silver—who, like the biblical Daniel, has fallen in and out of favor with the elite—criticized the polling for being illogically unified around the 50-50 line, as if a coin flipped a hundred times always landed on its edge. But this morning, Silver revealed his final prediction based on 80,000 iterations of his model, which were won by Kamala Harris 40,012 times. Hm.

The slim margins in the past two elections—when a comparative handful of votes across a few swing states determined the winner—appear to have become the new normal. All scenarios or paths to electoral victory seem to converge, again, on the question of women’s and Black voters’ turnout in and around Philadelphia and Milwaukee. 

The national 50-50 electoral divide seems to have been designed by the two parties as a means of maintaining their own relevance, by building in a stalemate. The microtargeting of tiny constituencies is carried out with the same relentless focus and individuation as online marketing campaigns. Any advance by one side in penetrating the voter base of the other side is countered by fine-tuning the message in return. It’s not that the two parties aren’t different—they are—but they have access to the same persuasive tools and have each drilled so deep into the mass consciousness that they have essentially reached a draw. So, the election comes down to whether Bucks County, Pennsylvania, “safety moms” have been better compelled by memes of illegal alien criminals running amok or images of woman-hating evangelicals arresting their teenage daughters for using birth control.

Meanwhile, mysterious forces appear to be preparing the ground for a lengthy, indeterminate vote count. Why, as time goes on, does tabulating votes become increasingly an exercise in quantum mechanics? It used to be simple, but then again, it used to take place on one day, and the process was well-defined. Yesterday evening, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a joint statement advising us that:

IC has been observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans. The IC expects these activities will intensify through election day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states. 

The “IC”—the “intelligence community,” a recent Beltway loanword that everyone is supposed to pretend to have always known—warns that “Russia” is stoking divisions among Americans that will intensify “in the coming weeks.” It used to be that the weeks following an election were spent defrosting turkeys and observing the early arrival of Santa-themed displays at the drugstore. But now deep-state actors tell us to take it for granted that presidential elections will necessarily involve weeks of confusion and contention. If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that when the IC starts talking about Russia, you ignore them at your peril.  

IN THE BACK PAGES: A Lee Smith classic on the legacy of Obama’s Iran Deal

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The Rest

→In a surprise move, Bibi Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and installed former Foreign Minister Israel Katz in his place. Gideon Sa’ar will take over as foreign minister. Netanyahu said that trust between him and Gallant had “cracked” in the past few months. In particular, the two had clashed over Gallant’s determination to draft 7,000 Haredi men into the army, and over his opposition to legislation that would continue the controversial exemption of the ultra-Orthodox from military service. Following the exit of Benny Gantz from the cabinet earlier this year, Gallant emerged as the primary channel of U.S. influence on the Israeli government. That his dismissal comes so close to the American election shouldn’t be ignored, as Netanyahu is likely hoping to bury the news while the American public’s attention is elsewhere.

→Trying to keep up with the lists of “23 Nobel Prize-winning economists” and “more than 500 historians” and “over 100 ex-GOP officials” who have signed on to support Kamala Harris, a group of 33 soi-disant Orthodox rabbis released a letter called “A Rabbi Rebellion: Orthodox Leaders Stand Firm for Harris Against Trump.” This mini-Sanhedrin explains that “the risks posed by former President Trump’s character make clear to us as Torah-abiding Jews that we should support Vice President Kamala Harris.” But some critics have noted that this group’s identification as Orthodox is problematic, to say the least. Nine of them are women, and generally speaking, women are not ordained as Orthodox rabbis per se, though there are exceptions on the margins. Several are rabbis at Conservative synagogues, and others are teachers or leftist activists. As we saw in the “Rabbis Against the Occupation” protests after Oct. 7, a lot of people who aren’t congregational leaders or Talmudic scholars can call themselves “rabbi.”  

→Three New Yorkers—at least two of whom appear to be Jewish—were indicted by Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez for hate-crime and vandalism charges related to the defacing of the homes of Brooklyn Museum trustees in June. Protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, the trio painted inverted red triangles—a symbol associated with Hamas—splashed red paint around, and hung banners accusing Jewish members of the Brooklyn Museum board of being “white supremacist Zionists.” The Brooklyn Museum is, somewhat unaccountably, a constant focus of anti-Israel protest. Radical pro-Hamas group Within Our Lifetime is especially obsessed with the role of the Brooklyn Museum in carrying out the alleged genocide in Gaza, “despite its claim to be a ‘progressive’ cultural institution,” the group wrote in a May 31 communiqué:

We know that through its leadership, trustees, corporate sponsors and donors, this museum is deeply invested in and complicit in the ongoing colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people. The de-occupation had three central demands for the Brooklyn Museum, uplifting a sustained call from its workers which has thus far gone unrecognized by the institution:

1.    To recognize the genocide in Palestine and make a declaration to this effect

2.    To disclose its investments and divest from Israel’s genocidal apparatus

3.    To pay reparations for its contributions to colonial looting and gentrification 

One would be hard-pressed to identify a major cultural institution in New York City that is more generally sympathetic to leftist causes, including Palestinian rights, than the Brooklyn Museum. In 2020, during the George Floyd riots and the COVID-19 lockdown, the Brooklyn Museum became a focal point of protests, and the administration of the museum volunteered to open its lobby for four hours a day “as a safe haven for protesters.” A majority of the museum’s special exhibitions highlight nonwhite artists and virtually always center on social justice issues. Mona Chalabi, an Iraqi British artist who is especially active in anti-Israel causes, had a solo exhibition in 2022. It’s almost as though the Brooklyn Museum, in signaling its allegiance to leftist activism, has made itself a ready target in the cases in which it doesn’t align itself quickly enough with the latest cause.

→Famed musician and producer Quincy Jones, a legend in jazz and pop who worked with Lionel Hampton, backed Elvis Presley on trumpet, arranged Frank Sinatra’s collaboration with Count Basie, and left a lasting mark on American music for decades, has died. He is reported to have enjoyed making the following joke to Jews he met. “I have produced Jews,” he would say. “Oh, like Herb Alpert?” his interlocutor might ask. “No, not musicians,” Jones would riposte. “Children.” Indeed, Quincy Jones had two Jewish daughters, actresses Rashida and Kidada Jones, with his third wife, Jewish TV star and model Peggy Lipton.

→The anti-Israel protests at Columbia University have generated controversy and accusations of prejudice and brutality on both sides. In one significant episode, members of the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine alleged that they had been attacked by chemical weapons. “Two Columbia University students, both IOF [sic] soldiers, sprayed a chemical weapon on peaceful protesters. Skunk spray is used on Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli occupation. It is known to cause nausea, abdominal pain, and vomiting,” the group posted. “Dozens of students have given us testimonies of their clothes & hair having the foul smell left even after the initial burst of smells at the protest. The smell only worsens & spreads after being washed. Some students are experiencing nausea & burning eyes, even hours later.” Reports that Israeli soldiers were poisoning peaceful protesters spread widely and were accompanied by demands for federal investigation. Columbia suspended the students in question for 18 months but have now settled a lawsuit and paid one of them $400,000. The substance in question was not, it turns out, a dangerous chemical agent. It was a “fart spray” used in pranks. Columbia evidently knew this when it levied the harsh punishment.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Day After

Register at the link above for Tablet’s rundown of election results at 12:00pm Eastern Time tomorrow.

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Why the Iran Deal Matters

It was the first in a series of hugely consequential lies that will shape our country as much as the Middle East

by Lee Smith

How did we get here?

The current state of affairs began when Joe Biden’s former boss Barack Obama legalized a terror state’s nuclear weapons program.

Despite what its publicists claimed, the purpose of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was never to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Rather, the tens of billions of dollars that Obama paid the clerical regime, which included planeloads of cash, was to facilitate construction of the nuclear weapons program under the protective umbrella of an international agreement backed by the United States. Even a cursory glance at the agreement’s clauses restricting Iranian nuclear and other activities reveals the truth—they are called “sunset clauses” because they were designed to expire. And once they expired, Iran’s industrial-size nuclear weapons program would be entirely legal under the continuing protection of the United States.

No, no, say JCPOA advocates and defenders—the Iran deal was constructed to prevent Iran from ever getting a bomb. And at the time that Obama proposed his plan, it seemed inconceivable that the president would mislead Americans about something as serious as legalizing the nuclear weapons program of a terror state that has been killing Americans since its inception in 1979. Surely, Obama had some more conventional idea of arms control in mind. His critics must be conspiracy theorists, projecting their own pyromania onto the righteous president, probably because they were racists, or Zionists, or both. The Iranian emigres and Saudi analysts who expressed their shock at the idea of giving Iran the bomb must have their own local axes to grind.

Nearly a decade after the selling of the Iran deal, it’s much easier now for Americans to see that it was the origin point in a series of hugely consequential lies that have shaped our country at home as surely as they have shaped the lives of people in the Middle East. They lied about Obama’s successor being a Russian spy to delegitimize the government and divide the country, in the hope of removing an elected president from office. They lied about an “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, to justify designating one half of the country as domestic terrorists, in order to put their political opponents in jail. They’ve lied about so many things because they’re certain that their communications infrastructure—where intelligence officers direct big tech and censor what was once America’s independent press—will shape the “information space” on their behalf, effectively controlling what we see, hear, and read. They first built their echo chamber to sell the idea that the Iran deal would stop Iran from getting a bomb; now the echo chamber is everywhere—a high-tech version of how the press is run in countries like Egypt, or Iran.

Obama wanted to give Iran the bomb in the context of a larger realignment of U.S. interests with those of the Islamic Republic. If you’ve seen any of the videos on social media of Hamas operatives dragging Jews out of their homes and shooting them, you can see what that means. Obama admired Hamas’ Iranian patron Qassem Soleimani, who ran Iran’s expeditionary unit, the Quds Force, until the Trump administration killed him. Obama told Gulf Arab U.S. allies they should get their own Quds Force, but they didn’t, which is partly why Obama downgraded relations with America’s traditional Arab allies and moved Iran into the top slot. He wanted Iran’s hard men and their terror assets to manage U.S. regional interests, so that the United States could leave the Middle East and “pivot” to Asia—though as it turned out, China and its friends in Washington had their own ideas about American dominance there.

But there was also an important domestic reason to get Iran the bomb, which was to normalize pathology. If you treat a nation-state that embodies Jew-hatred as an ally and arm it with a bomb, you are legitimizing Jew-hatred, which is perhaps the dominant form that psychopathy takes in modern global politics. To believe that Jews secretly rule the world, that the invisible hand of the "elders of Zion" tilts the world like gravity in favor of the Jews, and that mankind’s dignity can only be restored if the Jews are disempowered, or eliminated, is a pathological belief—one that is shared by billions of people around the globe, as well as by a stunning assortment of psychopaths with designs on power.

Obama rejected that characterization, acknowledging that the regime was antisemitic. But antisemitism, as he told a journalist, “doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power.”

That’s just your average high-stakes undergraduate bull session answer, in which the winning move is to rationalize Jew hatred through the backdoor: You can be an antisemite and still be rational. But then Obama went a step further, and suggested that maybe antisemitism could itself be rational. He talked about the Iranians using “antisemitic rhetoric as an organizing tool.”

The latter part of Obama’s answer was incredibly revealing. Of course, antisemites don’t see antisemitism as an “organizing tool”—meaning, as a rational device to achieve a rational end. Antisemitism is many things—a conspiracy theory, a passion—but rationality is not one of its characteristics.

The antisemites you come across on social media aren’t trying to win followers or “organize people”; they just hate Jews. They are proud of their beliefs, and eager to tell the whole world. No, the kind of person who sees antisemitism as an “organizing tool” is someone who would use it that way. In other words, Obama’s comment was revealing because he wasn’t speaking about the Iranian regime. He was talking about himself.

It’s hard to look into another’s heart to discern their true feelings about others. But we know that Obama believes antisemitism to be a useful organizing tool, because he said so himself.

The Iran deal was more than a foreign policy blunder, or a bad deal. It was the device that Obama consciously used to transform America. It unleashed the Iranians and their terror assets abroad; at home it sidelined the Jews, pushing them out of the places they had carved out for themselves in American life and relegating them to second-class status in the Democratic Party—where, in order to belong, they would now have to pledge allegiance to the idea of gifting nuclear weapons to a country that pledged to exterminate them.

In turn, the reason that Obama had to push out the Jews is because they are one of the touchstones of American exceptionalism. Like Israel, like the Jews, America is a nation built since its founding on the idea of a covenant with God. Just as Christians have no evidence that Jesus is real or that God acts in history without the historical reality of the Jews, America grounds its unique self-conception in history through Israel. Like the Jews, we are one of a kind, with a unique, God-given destiny.

Obama’s transformation of America was to remake it in his own image, by junking the idea that America is exceptional and dissolving the country’s borders with the rest of the world. America is not unique. It is as sinful as any other nation, he was effectively arguing, and possibly worse. What better way to make that point than by throwing Israel overboard, and replacing it with Iran—a country that preaches God’s retribution against America.

Now that the Israel part of Obama’s dream has been achieved, we should all be prepared for the other shoe to drop. The violence he unleashed in Israel will be coming to these shores now.