What Happened Today: January 3, 2024

The military’s fake extremism problem; The Gay Affair; Terror in Iran

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The Big Story

On Dec. 26, the morning after Christmas, the Pentagon finally released its report on “domestic extremism” in the U.S. military, commissioned to great fanfare in April 2021 amid the media panic surrounding the Jan. 6 riot. The conclusion? The report, undertaken by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole.” Indeed, the report examined 10 years of court martial records and found that only 0.3% involved “prohibited extremist or gang activity.” Strip out the “gang activity” part, and you have about one case of prohibited extremism per year, with “no clear increase or decrease in the number of cases over time.” 

In a sense, we already knew that. Several previous reports have failed to find any significant extremism problem in the U.S. military. A 2023 RAND survey found that support for extremism among service members is “similar to or less than levels seen among the U.S. public,” and The Scroll reported in June 2021 on a study that found that active-duty troops are “less prone than the American public as a whole to seek out information about violent extremism.” You’d think the Pentagon would be happy to trumpet the IDA’s good news rather than burying it on the day after Christmas, when almost no one would notice it. Apparently not.

In fact, it’s been the Pentagon that has been pushing the false story of an extremist threat inside the military over the past three years. Throughout the summer of 2020 and especially after Jan. 6, the narrative was that there was an “alarming rise” of far-right radicals, white supremacists, insurrectionists, and other Republican-coded deplorables within the ranks of the U.S. military. This grave problem in turn required sweeping crackdowns on service members for speech that didn’t align with “our values,” in the words of a defense official quoted in a May 2021 story in The Washington Post. In December 2021, for instance, the Pentagon, citing rising extremism in the ranks, announced a policy banning service members from “liking” or sharing “extremist views” on social media, as The Scroll reported at the time.

The media duly ran with its government-issued talking points. Here are some sample headlines, mostly sourced to “Pentagon reports,” anonymous defense officials, and other “experts”:

• “Have You Witnessed Far-Right Extremism Inside the Military?” The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 20, 2021

• “Pentagon report warns of threat from white supremacists inside the military,” NBC News, Feb. 25, 2021

• “Pentagon report: Domestic extremists pose serious threat to the military.” Axios, March 2, 2021

• “American Terror: The Military’s Problem With Extremism in the Ranks.” VICE News, Oct. 20, 2022

• “‘The single biggest threat to the security of the country’: Extremism in the military is alarming experts.” The Boston Globe, July 15, 2023.

The IDA report not only undermined this message but also concluded that the hunt for nonexistent extremists was doing more harm than good. According to the report, “some members of the military believe they are being targeted for their ideological views” and that “the risk to the military from widespread polarization and division in the ranks may be a greater risk than the radicalization of a few service members.”

Credit to the IDA for its honesty, but we suspect that the alienation of some members of the military may have been a feature rather than a bug. Consider that the anti-extremism push moved in parallel to the purge of service members who were insufficiently enthusiastic about the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates. By disproportionately blocking the advance of conservative junior officers, as well as those who favored unit cohesion and the interests of the rank and file over politicized diktats from Washington, those mandates functioned as “a disciplinary tool to enforce political conformity and punish independent thought and ideological dissent,” as Clayton Fox wrote in Tablet last year. And both efforts went alongside the Biden administration’s promotion of DEI within the military and federal bureaucracy—yet another step to ensure that the military conformed to the brand of elite progressivism embodied by the Democratic Party.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Emily Benedek interviews Ilya Bratman, the Moscow-born linguist and head of eight CUNY and SUNY Hillels, on the campus fusion of victim culture and antisemitism

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The Rest

→Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday was an unambiguous victory for her leading critics, including donor Bill Ackman, conservative journalist and activist Chris Rufo, and journalists Chris Brunet and Aaron Sibarium, who helped publicize the plagiarism charges against her. Of course, it helped that they were demonstrably right and she and her defenders were wrong, but that hasn’t prevented public grousing from progressives upset to see one of their own taken down by what Angelo Codevilla once referred to as “lesser beings of superior intelligence.” For Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, the plagiarism and antisemitism charges were all a smoke screen for the hatred Gay’s critics for her because she’s Black:

Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) agreed, adding that Ackman et al. are “fascists”:

Meanwhile, Emory University professor Jo Guldi wrote, in a since-deleted X post, that it was unfair to single out Gay, when plenty of academics could be strung up on the same charges: 

Claudine Gay has resigned on the basis of a plagiarism charge that could have been leveled at anyone we know via the power of text mining applied without sound standards of how to assess the results. What this means is that certain political factions know that it’s open season on the liberal university and its stewards.

A different perspective was provided by Ronald Sullivan Jr. A Black Harvard Law professor and criminal defense attorney, Sullivan was ousted by Gay from his position as faculty dean following student outrage over Sullivan’s decision to accept Harvey Weinstein as a client during the height of #MeToo. In a since-deleted Facebook post, Sullivan had only one word on Gay’s resignation: “Karma.”

→So is Harvard capitulating to a racist mob? For some analysis on the dynamics at play, let’s turn to Timur Kuran, the eminent Duke University political scientist who coined the term preference falsification to describe how people hide their own views due to social pressure. Kuran wrote the following in a Wednesday X post, presented here as a quote for readability:

Preference falsification has been central to the trajectory of DEI. People who abhor DEI principles and methods came to favor these publicly through a preference cascade. Every instance of preference falsification induced others to pretend they consider DEI just, efficient, beneficial to marginalized groups, etc. In time, a false consensus effectively displaced the search for truth as the university’s core mission, replacing it with DEI. Most professors watched in concealed horror the transfer of enormous powers from themselves to rapidly growing DEI bureaucracies. In countless contexts, they endorsed policies they considered harmful, participated in the defamation of scholars they admired, and sheepishly submitted to DEI training—all to be left alone, to avoid being called racist, to advance their careers. But the resulting equilibrium was self-undermining. In emboldening DEI officials, it increased privately felt anger and resentment. The stage was set for a preference cascade in reverse. The shock that unleashed the ongoing cascade in reverse was the Hamas massacres of October 7. The chain of events that they triggered in the U.S.—anti-Jewish demonstrations, the Congressional hearings, the plagiarism revelations—brought to the surface outrage that had been building up quietly for years. As public criticism of DEI grew, and as it became clear that broad segments of the left share the outrage, the DEI-favoring false consensus disintegrated. The process is by no means over. As preference falsification on DEI continues to diminish, more scholars and administrators will find in themselves the courage to stand up for values that they truly believe in. Though the DEI complex will fight back, it won’t be easy to quash the honest discourse finally under way. Public critics of DEI know they aren’t alone.

→For more on the reaction to “L’affaire Gay,” which doubles as an inquiry into the historical origins of scalping, consider our Quotes of the Day:

Part I: 

Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort, celebrated [Claudine Gay’s] departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote “SCALPED,” as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.

That’s from an AP write-up of the Tuesday resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, headlined “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” After widespread mockery on social media, AP added “and also used by some tribes against their enemies” to the final sentence.

Part II

As to war, these are their customs. A Scythian drinks of the blood of the first man whom he has overthrown. He carries to his king the heads of all whom he has slain in the battle; for he receives a share of the booty if he brings a head, but not otherwise. He scalps the head by making a cut round it by the ears, then grasping the scalp and shaking the head out. Then he scrapes out the flesh with the rib of an ox, and kneads the skin with his hands, and having made it supple he keeps it for a napkin, fastening it to the bridle of the horse which he himself rides, and taking pride in it; for he is judged the best man who has most scalps for napkins.

That’s from Book IV, Chapter 64 of Herodotus’ The Histories, composed around 430 B.C., concerning the scalping practices of the Scythians, a nomadic people who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian Steppe between the seventh and third centuries B.C. 

Part III:

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.

That’s from a July 13, 1982, article in The Yuma Daily Sun, which appears as an epigraph to Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian. The skull in question is the Bodo cranium, a fossil of homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species of archaic human that lived in the Middle Pleistocene period. Subsequent scientific work has estimated the age of the skull at 600,000 years. 

→The New York Times reports, citing U.S. intelligence, that Hamas used Al-Shifa Hospital to “exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold ‘at least a few hostages.’” A senior intelligence official quoted in the paper said that the U.S. spy agencies had evidence that Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which also used the hospital for military purposes, evacuated the hospital complex days before the Israeli operation to capture it in mid-November, and destroyed evidence of their presence before evacuating. The Times report, which reflects “the most current American assessment,” contradicts the conclusions of a recent open-source investigation published by The Washington Post, which claimed that the tunnels discovered by the IDF in the Shifa complex showed “no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas,” and suggested that the IDF’s storming of the complex might have been a war crime. 

→At least 103 people are believed to have been killed in a series of explosions in the Iranian city of Kerman on Wednesday, near the grave of former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader Qassem Soleimani, in what Iranian officials are calling a terrorist attack. Contradictory reports on social media and the Iranian press claimed that the explosions came from suicide bombers, gas canisters placed near a roadside, and an explosive-laden suitcase, but nothing had been confirmed as of The Scroll’s publication time. Neither Iranian authorities nor outside analysts have assigned blame for the attacks, but Israel is not believed to have been involved. 

→Image of the Day:

This visualization of Hamas’ governing structure, courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations and The Wall Street Journal, is from a WSJ article on Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas leader killed yesterday in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut. The deputy chairman of the Politburo and leader of the terror group’s West Bank affairs, Arouri “was the Hamas official closest to Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps” and oversaw its “special weapons portfolio,” according to the paper. 

Read more here: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-leader-killed-in-beirut-was-linchpin-of-relations-with-iran-hezbollah-dd8fd6e8?mod=hp_lead_pos2 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Recipe for Remembrance, by Nomi Kaltmann

A collection of South Africa’s Jewish cookbooks preserves the history of the community—in the kitchen and beyond

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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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White People Are Going to Colonize Mars, and Other Fears From Today’s Campuses

When Ilya Bratman—the Moscow-born linguist and head of eight CUNY and SUNY Hillels—looks out at the students facing him, he sees a familiar threat

By Emily Benedek

It was a belated awakening. For many American Jews, Oct. 7 uncovered the deep rot in the elite institutions they had invested in for decades, psychically and financially. A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish students experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents since the beginning of this academic school year, a 22-fold increase over the year before. Jewish students have been punched, spat upon, assaulted with sticks, shouted at, and corralled by students in kaffiyehs.

But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the DEI regime has fostered the flourishing of campus antisemitism under the Palestinian banner. Having established Jews as members of the “oppressor” class and defined “justice” as the dismantling of this class, the officially sanctioned ideology has given license to the Palestinian vanguard to demand fulfillment of the progressive promise, “by any means necessary,” while turning Jewish students into piñatas.

In New York City public colleges, a kippa-wearing, red-headed leprechaun named Ilya Bratman—former U.S. Army tankist, applied linguist, long-distance runner, and immigrant from the former Soviet Union—has witnessed up close the socialization of young Americans into this toxic worldview. A teacher of English composition at Baruch and John Jay colleges who holds a Ph.D. in education from the Jewish Theological Seminary, he also serves as executive director of Hillel at eight CUNY and SUNY colleges.

On the day we met, Bratman was hosting dinner for 200 Jewish students at a synagogue on 23rd Street near Lexington Avenue. After passing a phalanx of security guards into a social room, they began filling their plates with grilled meat and salads prepared by Bratman’s favorite Georgian caterer.

After the students use cookie cutters to shape chocolate chip cookie dough into Stars of David, Bratman grabbed a microphone and stepped forward. “Last week, everybody was already seated in my 8:00 a.m. class, and a student comes in and she says to me, “Wow, I can't believe you bombed that hospital last night and killed all those people.”

The social room, for the first time, went dead quiet.

The student of course was referring to deaths and injuries at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, whose courtyard was hit on Oct. 17 by a rocket misfired from inside Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but which was widely misreported as having been the result of an Israeli missile.

Bratman’s reaction, as a teacher, was to affirm the importance of sound reasoning and argumentation—and, of course, language. “I told her, ‘Wow, I can't believe you forgot completely everything I taught you about the accusative voice and the proper use of the pronoun ‘you,’ because you just said that ‘I’ did this,” he recounted. “‘I’ bombed the hospital. What hospital? Where? Who?’”

He went on. “Did you hear that Hamas said they did it?” Bratman said he asked the student, referring to a conversation Israel had recorded between two terrorists apparently acknowledging the bombing was an own goal.

The student’s response was emblematic of the sectarian worldview into which young Americans are regimented, whereby the value, even the truthfulness, of an argument or action is assessed based on the identity of its author, rather than on its own merits. “I will never believe that,” she told him, “even if they came to my face and say, ‘Hamas, we did it.’ I will never believe it.”

Bratman told me the students think he’s a fool to read the newspapers and interrogate different sources in search of the truth. They tell him that mainstream media is all fake news, and they get their information from TikTok, which is real people talking about real things. “I've seen it,” they tell him. “On Instagram, on TikTok, I've seen it.”

“They don't read anything. They just read headlines and pictures and memes. And they base their whole worldview on a set of memes.”

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Ilya Bratman was born in Moscow. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 with his parents, graduated from college at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999, then joined the U.S. Army, where he served four years in active duty and four years in the reserves.

Bratman believes strongly in America and the American dream. Teaching American students in New York City has brought him face-to-face with an entirely different worldview—one that appears to be particularly common among students from officially sanctioned “minority” backgrounds. The students don’t appreciate what a gift they’ve been given to live in America. Instead, they are lost in a zero-sum game of calculating relative oppressions. This fixation stops them from learning, Bratman believes, in part because it assures them that they will fail.

In his composition classes, he explained, he tries to get his students to create and support an argument. One week, he asked them to write about space exploration. Should we go to space? Or should we not?

One girl argued in favor of space travel because “white people will move to space, maybe to Mars, or wherever,” creating a gap, or an opening into which the “indigenous brown and black people can move up in the class structure and fill that gap left behind by the white people who will move to Mars.”

“There’s a lot to unpack there, isn’t there?” Bratman responded. “First of all, the belief in this structure where white people are on top, everybody else on the bottom, and the only way to move up is if the white people leave.”

Another girl wrote that no, we should not have space travel because then the white people would colonize the Martian people, as they always do, and ruin the Martians’ lives.

Bratman said he asked, “Does it help you to blame somebody? Do you actually become better? Do you strive further? Do you succeed better because you can blame someone?”

He told me the students have no answer, but they know life “is a victimhood competition. I’m a victim and therefore you owe me, and therefore I don't have to do anything because I cannot succeed.”

The narrative of victimhood has become welded to these young people’s identity, leading to an increased detachment from, and a sense of grievance toward, America—the irony of course being that they and their parents chose to immigrate here. One girl in the class told him: “I am here in this country against my will.” Bratman asked her: “Who’s holding you? Tell me, please. I'm frightened for you,” showcasing his high-energy, high-drama style. “Everybody’s laughing, and I asked her, ‘Where are you from?’ And she says, ‘Haiti.’ OK. ‘And where were you born?’ And she says, ‘Brooklyn.’”

“So you're actually from Brooklyn. Your parents are from Haiti,” he repeated. “Who's holding you back? Do you really want to go to Haiti today? You should actually go and see what life is like in a noncapitalist, depressed country that is in a desperate economic struggle. Or go to Gaza to a totalitarian, autocratic, hateful, homophobic nation. Or go to North Korea, go to Iran, go to all the places as a young woman, and see what life is really like.”

“None of that is understood,” he told me. “The students are pawns of teachers who want them to believe they can never succeed. And these teachers have been spectacularly successful at convincing them it is true.”

Bratman teaches his Jewish students to adopt a different approach to the world—one anchored in tradition, learning, and the study of Jewish texts. At the dinner in the 23rd Street synagogue, he invited the students to let him know if they’d like to join him in studying Pirkei Avot in honor of IDF soldiers called up for duty. He also has a club of about 80 boys who are laying tefillin every day.

Bratman told me that, in spite of the recent stresses, he’s not worried about his Jewish students. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of them are rational people who go out and get jobs, they get married and I go to their weddings and brises.”

But there is something terribly wrong with the others, he believes. “A lot of these students, they're nice, they're wonderful people, right? But they look at me as a Jew, and say, ‘well, you know, because you're supportive of this Israel story and Israel narrative, you kind of stand with the oppressor, you know, and I'm Hispanic or Black and I have to stand with the oppressed. Or I’m gay and I have to stand with the oppressed.”

Bratman’s worry is that these students, by adopting a worldview of grievance, are keeping themselves down with imaginary obstacles and denying their own volition. “What they don’t understand is that [these invented obstacles] are all surmountable. It’s my mission to uplift and empower these young people to actually strive for the opportunities that exist and to dispel the false and limiting idea that it’s all impossible.”

Bratman told me he had a student at John Jay whom he will never forget, a student struggling mightily at school. “I had many conversations with him,” Bratman said. “I’d say, ‘come, come on, keep going, keep going.’ And he said, ‘No, I'm thinking of dropping out.’”

“And I'm like, no, no, get through this class. I got you. I got you. And I carried him through this course. And on the last day he came to see me, and he said, ‘I dropped out of all the classes except for yours. Everybody in my family, including my mother and my grandparents—I don't know my father—my uncles and everybody said, ‘What are you doing? Why are you going to college? You can get a job now for $20 an hour, and when you graduate, you’re gonna get a job for $20 an hour. What's the purpose?’”

Bratman seemed genuinely sad—not angry or offended, just sad—about what he heard next. “No one ever believed in me,” the student said. “I can't believe that the first and only person who’s ever believed in me is a white Jew.”