Oct. 14, 2024: Columbus the Jew

Hamas and its Iranian paymasters; Men playing "men" for Harris campaign; What about those pristine bullets?

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The Big Story

Happy Columbus Day! To that, we must add the now-mandatory tag—familiar to anyone who peruses social media around significant holidays—“to all who celebrate.” It’s America in 2024, where we are apparently past noncontroversial commemoration of civic festivities, with an increasing number of states and localities either swapping out Columbus Day for “Indigenous Peoples Day,” or where, at best, we asked to share the holiday as an either/or or a both/and. The day informs competing narratives, one of conquest and triumph and the other of genocide and misery. “We did not land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us!” quipped Malcolm X about another famous sea voyage, enacting rhetorically the mirror effect of episodes that split time into before and after.

Columbus Day came into its own around the quadricentennial of the 1492 landing, when it was promoted by Italian American boosters who sought, following the notorious 1891 mass lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans, to redefine themselves to the American people in a positive light and insert themselves into the national story. As such, some anti-Columbus protesters have offered to compromise by decoupling the day from the man, instead making it “Italian American Day.”

Now, to make the day even more fraught, this year it is attended by the news that an examination of Christopher Columbus’ DNA—derived from remains that were disinterred several times over the past five centuries and transported back and forth across the Atlantic to fulfill first his wishes and then those of Spain—confirms not only that he wasn’t Italian, but that he was likely a Spanish Jew by lineage, probably from a family of conversos, or Jews who had converted to Christianity under pain of death or expulsion.

The idea that Columbus was Jewish is nothing new. It has always been known that there were converted Jews on board his ship, including his “translator” Luis de Torres, who was fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic; presumably, whoever the ships met would know at least one of those languages. And the date of the Columbine departure was timed oddly to match the date of expulsion ordered by Ferdinand and Isabella’s Alhambra Decree, which set July 31, 1492—curiously, the same day as Tisha B’Av in the Jewish calendar, a date of repeated catastrophes—as the day when Jews of Spain had to convert or leave.

It’s odd that this year of all years is the one when Jews, always pleased to shep naches over the news that an illustrious figure of world history was, at least nominally, one of “us,” are informed that we must accept the arch colonialist, the settler par excellence, the most notorious early modern genocidaire, the first racist exploiter of brown bodies as a kind of “Gotcha!” The discursive temperature around Jews, Jewry, and Zionism shot up to the boiling point on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, and has hovered around there since. American Jews, mostly a liberal, peace-loving folk, raised on sweet tales of interracial cooperation, immigrant struggle under the protective arm of the Statue of Liberty, and sacrifice in the name of tikkun olam, were suddenly plunged into an acid bath of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-style rhetoric circa 1972. Not only, it emerged, was the state of Israel a vile apartheid state, but also beloved Jewish American institutions like Hillel were suddenly the equivalent of the Hitler Youth in terms of their character and purpose. The Jewishness of prominent and respected public figures now casts a sinister shadow on their credibility.

The European settlement of the New World that began with Columbus created a category, “indigenous people,” that has become fantastically weighty but remains definitionally vague. Technically speaking, everyone is indigenous to somewhere, because we all come from Earth, but indigeneity is a term of art. The native people of Great Britain, it seems, are not indigenous to the islands they have inhabited for millennia because indigenous, according to anthropologist Adam Kuper, is technically a euphemism for what used to be called “primitive” people. It refers to people who are struggling for land, political rights, and a spot within the modern world and typically implies either actual or imminent displacement from ancestral territory.

The matter of indigeneity to the land of Israel/Palestine has become a major issue in the past year, with both sides staking claims to the moral high ground implicit to having been there first. Meanwhile, idiotic elements of the global left have adopted a kind of Nazi Blut und boden approach to the national question and argue tendentiously that “colonizers,” the heirs of Columbus, ought to “go home” and leave the lands they have settled to the original inhabitants. Let’s start with Palestine, they propose, and then we can move on to Australia, New Zealand, and Turtle Island.

So the supposed discovery of Christopher Columbus’ Jewish lineage seems conveniently, or suspiciously, timed to drop at just the moment when the Jews are, once again, being accused of rootlessness, parasitism, stiff-neckedness, and global evil. Slave master and rapist Columbus was in fact a proto-Zionist! How convenient. But we will take him anyway—and without reservations.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Maud Maron on the deceptions of New York’s Equal Rights Amendment

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The Rest

→The New York Times reports, citing “secret documents” captured by the IDF, that Hamas had been planning the Oct. 7 attack for years and agitated for Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to participate in a broader, regional assault to kill tens of thousands of Israelis. (The Times also reported that the late Ismail Haniyeh, then the head of Hamas’ leadership abroad, was briefed on the assault—despite repeated claims from Biden-Harris officials and their media stenographers that the massacre took Haniyeh and Hamas’ political echelon by surprise.) Iran has long disavowed any foreknowledge of the Hamas attack, but a series of October 2023 reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times confirmed that the Islamic Republic not only knew about Al-Aqsa Flood but also helped plan it and provided substantial training and financial assistance in support of it. But it wasn’t just Tehran that denied Iranian responsibility; for months after the Oct. 7 attack, Biden-Harris officials from John Kirby on down insisted that there was a “growing body of evidence,” based on “multiple pieces” of “exquisite intelligence,” that “neither Hezbollah nor Iran helped plan” Oct. 7 and that Iranian leaders were in fact “surprised” by it. All of which was meant to justify sending more money to Iran, its sponsorship of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust notwithstanding.

→With their iron grip on the youth demographic and their general ownership of the culture industry, the Democrats ought to have mastered visual snark and ironic messaging. But their latest video efforts to rock the vote have flopped. An online ad meant to appeal to working-class men showed a series of guys dressed like cowboys or motorcycle repairmen reciting odd, self-consciously silly phrases such as, “I’m a man, man. Man enough to deadlift 500 and then braid the shit out of my daughter’s hair.” None of the men in the commercial “read” as real people, and they were in fact all actors, and not good ones. Then, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan released a weird clip of herself in a camo Harris-Walz hat feeding a Dorito to a kneeling woman with her tongue out, in an obvious pastiche of Catholics receiving Communion. But what was this surrealist tableau supposed to represent? Whitmer’s office absurdly said it was meant to demonstrate the importance of the federal CHIPS Act to Michiganders. Sometimes your staffers may be so deep in the bubble that they don’t even know they are in one, much less be able to communicate out of it.

→Boosting “Area Studies” in American academia has long been a U.S. government priority, in order to give our future diplomats a grounding in the regions they will one day administer. The Department of Education (DOE) routinely gives out Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants to support Middle East and Asian Studies programs and to encourage the study of lesser-known yet important local languages like Pashtun or Kurdish. But a recent review of grant documents by OpenTheBooks.com reveals that FLAS grants may be funding campus protests against Israel. Programs at Columbia University and Indiana University received the most funding for Middle East Studies from DOE FLAS grants, and those institutions have been among the more active in anti-Israel unrest. Columbia’s Joseph Massad was named on a FLAS application that received $2.8 million; Massad called the Oct. 7 attacks a “stunning victory” and “awesome.” Indiana’s Abdulkader Sinno, named on its FLAS application, was suspended for using university resources for pro-Palestinian political events under the guise of academic programming. Sounds like the DOE needs some educating before it hands out taxpayer money to support radical ideologies.

The report will be published later this week at the “Open the Books” Substack, which can be found here:

→The New York Times published a shocking op-ed signed by 65 medical personnel who described the horrors of the war in Gaza, concluding, “The horror must end. The United States must stop arming Israel. And afterward, we Americans need to take a long, hard look at ourselves.” The essay was accompanied by photographs of X-rays showing the slumped heads of ostensibly dead children, with bullets clearly lodged within their skulls or spines. The clear implication that little kids are being targeted by Israeli snipers, with skillfully placed single “kill shots,” was both unmistakable and terrifying. But experts in battlefield forensics have raised serious questions about the images that the Times presented. Matt Tardio, a former Green Beret and sniper, notes that the projectile in question “would easily, without question, pass completely through a child’s skull,” but the X-rays show pristine bullets resting inside heads that indicate no damage, nor entry wounds. In reality, high-powered rifles such as those the IDF uses cause massive damage to the human body, and bullets typically fragment when they penetrate the skull. No one denies the suffering of the people of Gaza. But if the Times is publishing manipulated X-rays, then the readers should know about it.

→The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is tasked with keeping the peace in southern Lebanon. About 10,000 peacekeepers have patrolled the region below the Litani since the late 1970s. But UNIFIL essentially serves the same function in Lebanon as UNRWA does in Gaza, which is to cooperate with the local militant terror organization that allows them to maintain operations and that kills them if they get out of line. Both UNRWA and UNIFIL have gradually been “institutionally captured” by Hamas and Hezbollah, respectively, and co-locate with their local partners to give them cover from Israeli attacks. The recent wounding of several peacekeepers who refused to move their position after IDF warnings has stoked predictable outrage among U.N. personnel, who are calling it another example of Israeli war crimes. Over the weekend, however, the IDF released footage demonstrating the presence of Hezbollah tunnels and weapons caches literally in the shadow of UNIFIL outposts. That ought to embarrass the peacekeepers into acknowledging their real function as human shields for an Iran-backed terror organization, but we won’t hold our breath waiting for an apology.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Dreyfus: A Very Modern Affair, by Tablet Studios

A new podcast miniseries from Tablet Studios about an October 7th story that begins in 1894 with the arrest of a Jewish soldier in France

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What Is New York’s New ‘Abortion’ Amendment Hiding?

The Equal Rights Amendment is actually an effort to undermine our rights as parents and citizens

By Maud Maron

As a young public defender in the 1990s, I learned to appreciate that the Constitution is sacrosanct: To remain a free people, we must fiercely guard against any attempt to diminish our constitutional protections. I have been thinking about the Constitution because I, along with every other New York voter, will have the choice to vote on Proposition 1 next month.

Prop. 1, formally known as the ballot proposal for the Equal Rights Amendment, purports to be about guaranteeing abortion rights, which is odd: The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision that overturned Roe v. Wade had no impact on New York state abortion laws, which are among the most expansive in the nation. So what’s really going on here?

Abortion is good politics in New York. It polls well and can mobilize the base. Which is why Democratic lawmakers, who have a super-majority in the state legislature, used it as a vehicle to include additional categories like ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy in New York state’s Constitution, thereby codifying sectarianism in the Empire State. This sectarian form of government radically subverts equality under the law and erodes our rights as citizens and as parents. New Yorkers should be concerned.

In particular, the “age” category should set off alarm bells with parents. What we’re dealing with here is not age discrimination in the workplace, for which there are already laws on the books. Rather, the target is children. That much has been clear from recent legislation in Democrat-controlled California. After signing into law in 2022 a bill that turned California into a sanctuary state for trans children, in July Gov. Gavin Newsom made his state the first in the country to enact a law that bans requiring school staff to disclose a student’s gender identity or sexual orientation to their parents without the minor’s permission.

A group dedicated to defeating Prop. 1 refers to the ballot measure as the “Parent Replacement Act.” The current New York City guidelines that govern my children’s public schools are explicit about the state’s rights to make potentially irreversible decisions about my children’s mental and physical development without my involvement.

New York state Sen. Liz Krueger, the primary sponsor of Prop. 1, signed a letter in May with 17 other elected federal, state, and city officials condemning a resolution I authored, and my Education Council (NYC’s version of a school board) passed. The resolution merely asked for a review of the NYC public school gender guidelines. The guidelines allow schools to withhold from parents all information about the gender psychosocial transitioning of a minor child in school. Our resolution is just a request for review, of something that’s indisputably controversial, with disturbing new evidence emerging all the time. Yet the elected officials called our mere request for a review “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful.” The passage of Prop. 1 will make it all but impossible for parents to raise these issues and seek regulatory changes in line with newly emerging evidence.

New York lawmakers have also tried to make an end run around parental rights when it comes to vaccines. Krueger has sponsored a bill that would permit any child who is at least 14 years of age to have vaccines administered to them regardless of parental consent. That a 20-year-old veteran with combat duty under his belt can’t buy a Bud Light in New York state, but a 14-year-old should make novel and potentially far-reaching medical decisions without their parents, is a staggering contradiction unanswered by the lawmakers who want to dismantle parental rights. The state is not only inserting itself between children and their parents, cutting out the latter, but also is granting minors an autonomy that allows them, with the state’s guidance, to bypass their parents. In other words, Prop. 1 represents a mass social-engineering project that completely overhauls fundamental norms and values.

Prop. 1 also upends the functioning of the law and enshrines arbitrariness—the hallmark of third-world societies. Although prohibition on discrimination based on gender identity or gender expression was added to the books in New York in 2019, one question that arises from these categories is how can individuals and entities comply when the very definitions are inherently unstable? For instance, several federal District Courts have enjoined the Biden-Harris rewrite of Title IX after they redefined “sex” to include “gender identity,” changing the intent and the functioning of the law and thus paving the road for males to compete in female collegiate sport. A New York state constitutional right banning discrimination based on both “sex” and “gender identity” creates an unresolvable conflict between a young woman who earned a spot on her federally funded school women’s sports team, against the biological male who identifies as a woman and demands her spot.

Another feature of the third world is the grievance-based structure of sectarianism, which Prop. 1 will enshrine in New York’s Constitution. Section B of the amendment states, “nothing in this section shall invalidate or prevent the adoption of any law, regulation, program or practice that is designed to prevent or dismantle discrimination on the basis of a characteristic listed in this section.” In other words, the newly established categories embed discrimination favoring the interests of some over others based on a grievance hierarchy.

This turns simple proscriptions, like “don’t discriminate on the basis of sex,” into a wide-ranging tool of preferential treatment. What does that look like in practice? My eldest son was not allowed to join the only financial literacy club in his high school (sponsored by Morgan Stanley) because it was only open to “girls and non-binary students.” It is hard to challenge such a practice now. With Prop. 1, it will be impossible to challenge under state law.

Perhaps the category that most explicitly codifies the third-world program of Prop. 1, and its nullification of not just our rights, but our status as citizens, is “national origin.” Do we have a big problem with nation of origin discrimination in New York? My husband and I originate in different countries and we’re doing just fine. As are the 36% of the city’s foreign-born population that make up 44% of its resident labor force, many of whom outearn native-born Americans.

We are, however, in the midst of a migrant crisis, and half the country suspects that Democrats—with an unofficial open border policy—want them for their votes. The very concept of citizenship, by definition, discriminates by national origin. New York City Council recently gave close to a million noncitizens the right to vote in local elections. The law was struck down in court under current law. Under Prop. 1, it would become part of our state Constitution.

Prop. 1’s vision of the state as the creator, implementer, protector, and promoter of a hierarchy of citizen categories is a feudal vision updated with sectarian grievance sensibilities.

New Yorkers who are lukewarm about the First Amendment seem increasingly comfortable with the State as the father who regulates their lives but also restricts the speech of those whom they dislike, and punishes them with school and job loss. It is not a coincidence that the key demographic of Democratic Party supporters are unmarried women, who have embraced the role of the state as a substitute parent and husband. The other demographic are illegal immigrants. Prop. 1, therefore, is the tool with which New York’s political ruling class shores up its in-group allies’ support in an election year by granting them favored status. But Prop. 1 is intended to lock this Democratic Party social program in New York’s Constitution.

I prefer a nation of laws, not men. I prefer true equality to grievance hierarchy. I prefer a nation of free citizens to a third-world sectarian nightmare. So I will vote “no” on Prop. 1.