Sep. 17, 2024: Israel Pages Hezbollah

U.S. authorities were warned of would-be assassin Routh; Routh's troubled past; One million casualties in Ukraine war

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The Big Story

Thousands of Hezbollah members and the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, were injured in Lebanon on Tuesday when their handheld pagers explode in what appears to have been an Israeli attack. The Lebanese Health Ministry has estimated the casualties at nine killed and 2,750 wounded, the vast majority of them in the Hezbollah strongholds of Beirut and southern Lebanon. Higher numbers have been reported but not confirmed.

We don’t know exactly how the attack was pulled off, though it certainly represents an impressive tactical coup on the part of the Israelis. The Wall Street Journal reported that the exploded pagers were from “a new shipment the group received in the past few days,” raising the possibility that the Israelis interdicted the shipment and modified the devices or directly infected them with malware. Others have suggested that Israel was able to either hack into the pagers and force their lithium batteries to overheat or somehow activate self-destruct mechanisms that Hezbollah had built into the devices. What the Israelis did not do is tell the United States of the plan, per U.S. officials quoted in Axios—probably a good idea, given that the highest-ranking White House intelligence official, Maher Bitar, used to sit on the executive board of Georgetown’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. 

The attack was a brilliant technical display, of course, but did it mean anything strategically? On Tuesday morning, Israel declared the return of civilians to the north as an official war goal, and Israel Hayom reported, citing a “high-ranking security official,” that Israel was “on the precipice of conflict with Hezbollah.” The same official said that Netanyahu had been working to overcome “resistance [to a Lebanon operation] from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and [the] military leadership,” who were resistant to defying American requests to delay any invasion until after the Nov. 5 U.S. election. So, was this attack a prelude to an invasion?

For help understanding that one, we emailed Tablet News Editor Tony Badran. Here is what he had to say: 

The question is what was the purpose of this operation? Why now? What now? 

Timing wise, it’s difficult to overlook the fact [that] it coincided with Amos Hochstein’s visit to Israel and him telling the Israelis that the U.S. continues to oppose an invasion of Lebanon. Hochstein’s visit itself comes as reports emerged in Israel that Netanyahu was considering firing Gallant, who agrees with the U.S. position against invading Lebanon and who appears to be at odds with the view of the head of the northern command, who is reportedly advocating an incursion. 

Against this backdrop, Ron Ben Yishai reports that “Israel’s leaders agree that U.S. demands should be met, delaying the war.”  

This brings us to a point made by Tablet’s geopolitical analyst: 

They set off the pagers because they decided not to invade, which was the original purpose of these capabilities.

In a separate email to The Scroll, Tablet’s geopolitical analyst expanded:

I highly doubt this was intended as a one-off. Logic says this was supposed to disrupt the enemy’s comms as part of a larger invasion plan. The word is that the invasion was called off “until after the election.” So then you’re left with a degrading asset that was either already discovered or would likely be discovered the moment one of these guys brought their pager for repairs. So either you use them or you lose them.

The point being that the news on a strategic level is that Israel has decided not to invade Lebanon under heavy U.S. pressure.

In other words, as with everything we’ve seen so far from Israel, its actions are still within the U.S.-imposed parameters pertaining to the special province of Lebanon and the U.S. protective umbrella it extends to Hezbollah.

IN THE BACK PAGES: What happens when between one-quarter and one-half of elite American university students are foreign? The answer isn’t good for America, or Israel, argues Jay P. Greene

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The Rest

→U.S. authorities were warned on multiple occasions about would-be Trump assassin Ryan Wesley Routh, according to a Tuesday report in The Wall Street Journal. In 2019, a tipster told the FBI that Routh owned a firearm despite being a convicted felon, though neither the bureau nor local authorities in Honolulu, where Routh was living, appear to have followed up on the tip. The most troubling reports, however, stemmed from Routh’s time in Ukraine as a self-styled crusader for democracy. According to former CIA officer Sarah Adams, who helped coordinate aid efforts, Routh was well-known in Ukraine as a “fraudster” and “kind of a whack job,” who was reported to the State Department on suspicion of engaging in “human trafficking or immigration fraud” related to his efforts to recruit Afghan volunteers for the Ukrainian Army. And a nurse who met Routh in Kyiv in 2022, Chelsea Walsh, was so concerned about his violent rhetoric that she warned U.S. Customs and Border Patrol about him during an hour-long interview upon her return to the United States. The following year, Walsh filed an online report with the FBI and Interpol outlining her concerns about Routh and others. Neither CBP nor the FBI ever followed up. 

→Routh, once praised as a local hero for helping apprehend a rapist in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1991, was a troubled individual who spent his life looking for a “monumental” cause, Ryan Mills reports for National Review. Routh’s former business partner, Samuel Plata, who co-ran a roofing company with Routh from the early 1990s until 2003, told Mills that he was “not surprised” to hear of Routh’s involvement in the assassination attempt, describing him as a “nice guy” whose mental health gradually deteriorated under the pressures of running a business. Routh accumulated several traffic offenses during the ’90s, which escalated into more serious offenses by the early 2000s: passing bad checks, possessing stolen goods and cars and, in 2002, fleeing a traffic stop and then barricading himself in his apartment with a machine gun. Plata parted ways with him after Routh threatened to “shoot” one of the “Mexican guys he owed money to,” apparently an unpaid worker. On his LinkedIn, Routh wrote that he “would tremendously enjoy the invitation to join any monumental worthy cause to bring about real change in our world” and that he was “free to relocate to any remote location on the planet that might render the most positive impact.” He seemingly found that cause with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

→The Journal also reports that Routh’s gun, an SKS assault rifle, had a scratched-off serial number, and that his car had a stolen license plate. The FBI on Monday charged Routh with two federal crimes: “possession of a firearm by a prohibited person—convicted felon” and “possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.” As we reported yesterday, Routh was able to stake out the golf course for about 12 hours on Sunday, and Secret Service agents apparently did not perform a sweep of the course’s perimeter when they learned that Trump would be golfing there that day. Acting Secret Service Director Ryan Rowe Jr. on Monday praised the former president’s protective detail for spotting the gunman, but other Secret Service veterans quoted in The New York Times raised alarms about the publicly reported details of the incident. “The Secret Service has protocols where if enacted, this suspect could have been discovered before the incident,” said retired agent Beth Celestini. 

→Quote of the Day:

I think it's important to indict the Russians, just as Muller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.

That’s former U.S. secretary of state, New York senator, First Lady, and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in a Monday interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, on the need to prosecute Americans for repeating Russian “propaganda.” What counts as “propaganda” in Clinton’s mind is unclear, although she also accused congressional Republicans of “parrot[ing] Russian talking points” on the “floor of Congress.” Clinton’s campaign, of course, was responsible for disseminating the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was a Russian agent following her loss in the 2016 election. As The Scroll has reported, and as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines partially confirmed in July, the anti-Israel protest movement, which both was cultivated by and influenced the posture of the Biden-Harris administration, has regularly spread propaganda from China, Iran, and foreign terrorist organizations. 

→Stat of the Day: 1,080,000

That’s a rough estimate of how many people have been killed or wounded in the war between Russia and Ukraine, according to a Tuesday story in The Wall Street Journal. The estimate comprises, on the Ukrainian side, about 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded (per a confidential Ukrainian government estimate) and, on the Russian side, about 200,000 dead and 400,000 wounded (per Western intelligence estimates). Whether it’s plausible that the Russian wounded-to-killed ratio is 2:1, while the Ukrainian ratio is only 5:1, is a question for the military experts out there. But the total casualty counts capture only part of the demographic catastrophe that the war has brought to both countries. In Russia, an additional 600,000 young people have fled the country to avoid military service since the start of the war, while more than 6 million have fled Ukraine. In the first half of 2024, according to Ukrainian government data, 250,000 deaths were recorded vs. 87,000 live births, compared to more than 130,000 births in 2021, the last year before the Russian invasion.

→Two updates on the “Haitians eating pets” storyline from last week:

• As of Tuesday, no credible reports have emerged of household pets or ducks being abducted or eaten in Springfield, Ohio, despite the claims of locals and despite Christopher Rufo offering a $5,000 bounty to anyone who could provide him with evidence of such behavior by Sunday.

• Late last week and over the weekend, the mainstream press reported on a series of “bomb threats” targeting Springfield, with CNN’s Dana Bash telling Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance in a Sunday interview that the Trump campaign’s rhetoric was “actually causing” the bomb threats with its rhetoric. In a Monday evening press conference, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that “each one” of the 33 bomb threats was a “hoax” that originated “overseas.”

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Man Riding a Lion, by David Sclar

A new narrative for the coronation of Sabbatai Zevi

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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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Educate Americans First

Skyrocketing foreign student enrollment at American universities is giving foreign governments power over what our universities teach while acculturating American students in third-world hatreds

By Jay P. Greene

As the number of foreign students at our selective universities exceeds a third of total enrollment, it is important to remember the maxim of the 16th-century physician Paracelsus: “Sola dosis facit venenum.” The dose makes the poison.

From the end of World War II to 1977, the percentage of U.S. university enrollment from abroad never exceeded 2%. With this modest level of foreign enrollment, international students offered significant benefits. They strengthened the education of American students by contributing talent, experiences, and ideas from around the world to the learning environment.

Foreign students also added financial resources to U.S. universities because they tended to pay full tuition and sometimes brought with them large donations from wealthy foreign governments or families. In the context of the Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the West, foreign students who learned about the American political system and its values could bring ideas about individual liberty and representative democracy back to their home countries.

After 1977, foreign enrollment at U.S. universities crept higher, slowly at first, before it dramatically skyrocketed over the last two decades. Nationwide, the percentage of international students on college campuses has now nearly tripled since 1977. At our leading universities, the percentage of students from abroad has reached critical mass, averaging about a third but sometimes approaching half of total enrollments.

Among Ivy League institutions, the foreign student population averages 27% or 39%, depending on whether students participating in Optional Practical Training (OPT) program are included. OPT allows foreigners on student visas to remain in the U.S. for as many as three years, if their university recommends that they receive additional applied training by working in their field of study, often as research assistants or instructors at the university. If OPT students are counted, Columbia University now has almost two-thirds of its total enrollment from abroad—a remarkable figure that makes it hard to imagine why U.S. taxpayers are massively supporting the educations of students who aren’t Americans. If OPT students are excluded, international students at Columbia still constitute 40% of its student body.

The University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Cornell each number 25% of their enrollment from abroad, not counting OPT students, and between 33% and 37% if OPT students are included. Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown all have more than a fifth of their enrollment from abroad, excluding OPT, and between 23% and 31% if OPT is counted.

What was healthy at a low dose is turning poisonous at much higher levels. As foreign enrollments reach critical mass, the direction of the cultural exchanges taking place on campus has reversed. U.S. students are starting to take political opinions from countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and others whose governments and people are hardly known for their adherence to liberal values like democracy, free speech, legal equality of the sexes, opposition to racism and antisemitism, and other basic rules of the road in Western societies. At a certain level of foreign enrollment, our leading universities stop seeing themselves as the incubators of the American elite and start seeing themselves as incubators of a global elite, which sometimes involves teaching hatred of America and its values.

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In addition to direct donations from foreign countries like Qatar, which have proved to be enormous, foreign actors gain leverage over American universities by massive tuition payments that can equal half or more of a given university’s tuition revenue—while helping to make universities unaffordable for all but the wealthiest American families. Foreign actors, whether governments or quasi-official foundations, can advance their agendas both by creating and amplifying entities within universities that promote perspectives preferred by their foreign patrons and by silencing potential critics of foreign misbehavior. Foreign students have played a leading role in campus protests against U.S. backing for Israel in the Gaza war, thereby advancing the foreign policies of their home governments while driving Jewish students off campus.

Neetu Arnold at the National Association of Scholars issued a report documenting how Middle East studies centers at American universities have been “hijacked” by foreign donors. “It is no surprise that foreign governments and individuals fund these centers,” Arnold wrote. “But foreign sponsors rarely need to exercise active influence, for the faculty and staff willingly do their bidding unasked. Donors can thus take a hands-off approach, leaving almost no paper trail other than a dollar amount and a few signatures. The funding still serves their interests: continued production of biased material that promotes the political interests of the donors.”

The Chinese government helped create and fund a network of centers at American universities known as “Confucius institutes,” as a “soft power” tool to advance their interests. Those institutes were so egregious in their propaganda activities, including efforts to silence critics and facilitate espionage, that Congress took action that resulted in the closure of almost all of them.

A more general critique of the influence of foreign money on American campuses is that it has tempted administrators and faculty alike to stray from basic academic norms such as the protection of free speech and the unhindered pursuit of knowledge, free access to university facilities by all faculty and students, the need to prove one’s arguments through objective fact-based research and argument, and prohibitions on violence and intimidation as acceptable methods of argument. According to a study of over 200 universities, “Campuses receiving foreign funds exhibited approximately twice as many campaigns to silence academics as those that did not.” Students at universities receiving more foreign money also reported a greater amount of antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric and activity. The leverage of foreign money has enabled foreign actors to influence the culture and research activity at American universities in significant and harmful ways.

The largest number of international students come from China, which constitutes 27% of those from abroad. Students from India—a country that can at least boast a functioning democracy and which adheres to many, if not all, values of a liberal democratic society—make up 25% of foreign students. A little more than half of these students from China and India are studying math, science, or engineering, but the remainder are spread across a diversity of fields, including those in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts.

As relations between China and the U.S. have become more hostile, there has been a sharp rise in instances where Chinese students have been engaging in espionage against the U.S. and spying on fellow Chinese students to monitor any activity that might be threatening to the communist regime. While these activities of Chinese students in the U.S. pose serious threats to American interests, they do not cause much disruption in the normal operations of universities, which therefore appear happy to let them continue, without disrupting their accustomed cash flow.

Foreign students from countries hostile to Israel, however, have contributed to massive disruptions at U.S. universities after Oct. 7. These protests have not only interfered with regular instruction and research at universities, but they have also forcefully agitated against America and capitalism almost as much as against Israel. In some cases, they have led to the closure of campus facilities and spaces to American Jewish students, and to the cancellation of in-person instruction and graduation ceremonies for all students.

There are 28 countries in the U.N. that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. Students from those 28 countries represent about 8% of international enrollment. If we add the 11 countries that have recalled their ambassadors or severed relations subsequent to Oct. 7, there are 129,710 students from countries with explicitly hostile relations with Israel, amounting to more than 12% of international enrollment. Other than China and India, both of which have maintained relations with Israel, students from these anti-Israel countries represent the largest block of international students on American campuses.

Universities with a critical mass of international students have hosted many more anti-Israel protests than universities where foreign enrollment is more moderate. A group of researchers at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium tracks protests all over the country. If we focus on the few weeks following Oct. 7 and the last few weeks of the spring 2024 semester, the two periods with the most protest activity, and consider universities with at least 1,000 foreign students, we see a strong connection between the frequency of those protests and schools with high percentages of international students.

We can divide universities into quintiles—five groups, each with the same number of schools. In the three quintiles with fewer than 13% of enrollments from abroad, we see no trend between foreign enrollments and the number of protests. But when the dose is increased so that international students constitute more than 13% of enrollments, the number of protests more than doubles.

Calculations by Jay Greene and Tommy Huska based on data from IPEDS Data Center and OpenDoors and Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium

Of course, we cannot prove that high concentrations of international students caused the higher number of anti-Israel protests. Universities with more international students also tend to be institutions with wealthier and more liberal students, factors that other researchers have linked to anti-Israel activity. It is also important to note that the vast majority of international students, like all university students, have nothing to do with protests and just want to focus on their studies. But at higher doses, even a small percentage of international students seeking political agitation can constitute a critical mass to foment significant disruption.

We cannot demonstrate that international students are a large portion of those directly engaged in protests, in part because protesters have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal their identities, and most reporters and universities have acquiesced to their desire for anonymity. International students have good reason to fear being identified in protests. If those protests violate laws or campus policies, resulting in suspensions, international students risk revocation of their visas and deportation.

Yet it is telling that universities have been visibly complicit in assisting international students in seeking to avoid consequences. For example, MIT publicly announced its reluctance to discipline rule-breaking foreign student protesters for fear that their suspension might cause them to be deported. Most other universities have been very reluctant to call in the police to shut down rule-breaking protests in part out of fear that arrests of foreign students could result in deportations.

Because of these efforts to conceal the role of foreign students in campus protests, we cannot quantify their participation, but we have plenty of anecdotes of their pivotal involvement. For example, Al Jazeera profiled Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian raised in Syria who is enrolled at Columbia University. According to that report, Khalil avoided joining the encampment for fear of suspension and deportation and instead took a role behind the scenes as “lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest.” Despite his effort to assist the protests without directly participating in them, Khalil was suspended, but that suspension was quickly rescinded. According to Al Jazeera, Khalil “even received a call from the Columbia University president’s office, apologizing for the mistake.” Like MIT, Columbia officials were eager to avoid punishments for international students that might result in deportations.

The USC Annenberg Media similarly profiled Yousef Khafaja, a Palestinian raised in Germany, who was active in the UCLA encampment. According to that report, “the fear of the consequences he could potentially face as an international student participating in protests has never stopped him from doing so,” then it quoted Khafaja as saying, “Whatever happens to me is not going to be as important as the cause.” But the story acknowledges this sentiment as exceptional, noting “the general fear among pro-Palestinian protesters, who are covering their faces to hide their identity” with concerns about their visa status.

The Washington Post described the experience of two Cornell University international students, Momodou Taal and Bianca Waked, who both served as negotiators for protesters. Despite their efforts to avoid breaking rules by directly participating in protest actions, both nevertheless received suspensions. As they told the Post, they were “only in the encampment area the night before receiving the suspension letter to negotiate with the administration.” Like the claim that there is a distinction between the political and military wings of Hamas, university officials may not believe that negotiators are different from protesters.

Even if the involvement of international students in the protests cannot be fully documented, it is still clear that many foreign students were key contributors to those protests. As the Post put it, “The Post could not verify how many international students participated in the ongoing campus protests. Students at various universities, however, told The Post international students had been playing significant roles as speakers, teachers and general supporters, while avoiding encampments and other areas where the risk of arrest or suspension was high.”

International students have also played a longer-term indirect role in contributing to the wave of anti-Israel protests because many foreign students holding bigoted views imported from their home cultures eventually become professors at American universities where they further normalize hateful doctrines foreign to American culture. For example, Joseph Massad, a Columbia professor who was lambasted during congressional hearings as contributing to the antisemitic culture at the university, had previously been an international doctoral student at Columbia. A critical mass of anti-Israel international students eventually leads to a critical mass of anti-Israel faculty, who in turn recruit U.S. students to their cause. According to a 2019 report by George Mason University’s Institute for Immigration Research, 22% of university faculty are foreign-born, of whom over half remain foreign citizens.

Universities have shown little sensitivity to the potential problem of excess foreign influence. The amount of money they receive directly from foreign students and indirectly from foreign gifts, grants, and satellite campuses is too attractive for them to restrain themselves. And as they become globalized institutions, they feel even less obligation to attend to whether the education they offer serves American rather than foreign interests.

Yet despite all the money America universities receive from abroad, they receive even more from American taxpayers. If U.S. universities prove unable to distinguish between healthy and poisonous doses of foreign influence, policymakers may have to. Certainly, if universities wish to continue receiving large public subsidies, they will eventually be forced to ensure that they are serving American purposes by educating American students in American values and limiting foreign influence over the nature and content of the educations they are providing to foreign- and native-born students alike.