Free Republic

Vice President Kamala Harris’ stepdaughter — Ella Emhoff, a 24-year old woman of Jewish ancestry — has racked up over $8 million in aid for the Palestinians of Gaza. Experts caution that the aid is likely to end up in the hands of the terrorist group and governing party of the territory – Hamas. The New York Post reported on the VP family’s efforts to send aid to the people of Gaza in the aftermath of a war launched on October 7, when Hamas mercilessly killed Jewish civilians at a music festival.

“For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now we’ve fallen from it.” So proclaimed author Hillel Halkin in a hysterical requiem for Israel published last week in TheJewish Review of Books. Halkin’s metaphorical cliff is the right-religious bloc’s electoral victory on Nov. 1, 2022 and the formation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth government two weeks ago. Halkin explained to his concerned readers that it isn’t that Israel stopped being a democracy on Nov. 1. Far worse. On that day, Israel lost its soul. And Halkin identifies the culprit: Judaism. In language...

We went mad because we easily could. And we could, not because we were poor and oppressed, but because we were rich and bored. Travel abroad and or talk to pro-American foreigners here, and you will be surprised at what they say. It is not boilerplate anti-Americanism of the usual cheap Euro style. And their keen criticism is not just that we are $30 trillion in debt, dependent on China, with a corrupt elite, or have gone insane inventing the most lurid crimes to put away the supposedly predetermined guilty Donald Trump. Instead, they express disbelief, worry, lamentation even, that...

But I cannot emphasize this enough: The existence of wealthy non-white people is not a counterpoint to the fact that the climate crisis was strongly perpetuated by white, Western European ideas about dominance. (Nor is the existence of poor, white people who suffer because of our climate-destroying economic system.) Across social classes, the Western European ideal of “success” is based very much on extractive economies, materialism, and individualism — each a pillar of the climate crisis. When you consider this foundation, it is not a coincidence that almost all of those mega-billionaires are white. … There is no shortage of...

<p>With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.</p><p>It is not just that they fear that “The Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. They are also terrified that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon, the Democratic Party will end up as disdained as the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.</p>

Benchmark Education has created Social Justice resources for three of its ten units. Units 1, 4, and 6 now have a layer of questions that promote collaborative conversations and productive struggle in which student engage critically with the texts already in the unit. Benchmark designed this layer of questions and additional reading suggestions to encourage students to discuss and share experiences using students' personal stories and cultural histories as lenses for analyzing texts. This will help deepen cultural understandings and expand students' world views. The materials will be a resource for sustaining a literacy classroom that allows for various ways...

On Having Whiteness Add to Calendar 02/07/2020 7:30pm FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2020 | 7:30 – 9:30 PM 2 CE credits for Licensed Psychoanalysts and Social Workers Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to...

Yes, yes, I know. The climate is breaking down. It’s urgent. An emergency. We’ve only got a few years left to ‘fix’ it. Indeed, we won’t fix it. Weather patterns will become increasingly unstable and unpredictable, and the effects it will soon have on how humans around the world grow food will be devastating, likely causing harvests to fail across entire continents and food prices to sky-rocket. Millions have already suffered due to the amplified instability. We’re facing imminent societal collapse (whatever that means), both around the world and in the UK. All of our lives are soon going to...

We’re about to see a Presidential Cabinet where every single member will be a racist, sexist, climate-change denying, adulterous, felonious, lying old white man. Every decision they make will be based on a deadly combination of fear, ignorance, and arrogance. We will be one rash decision away from a nuclear holocaust. All of the platitudes about “giving him a chance” and “working together” ignore the hostile reception that met our last President and the past eight years of obstructionism. All of the advice about organizing for the next election ignores the people who will have their marriages invalidated, who will...

On Thanksgiving, Washington Post readers turned to the front page of the Style section for the annual “Native American” lecture on “Hatesgiving.” It was a food article by Maura Judkis. The online headline was “Native American chefs lament 'Columbusing'of indigenous foods.” Judkis began: Earlier this fall, Karlos Baca, an indigenous food activist known for cooking beautiful foraged meals using traditional Native American ingredients and cooking methods, was approached by a regional food magazine: Would he like to provide a recipe for their Thanksgiving issue? "Instead of getting a recipe from me, they got three pages of activism," he says. Baca,...

Barbra Streisand usually talks to her audience, but Saturday night she had a special message for two guests: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Streisand gave former president and former Democratic presidential candidate much more than a shout out at her concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, her hometown. She noted that she performed at President Clinton's inauguration and then went on to list his accomplishments, including lowering taxes for some and raising taxes on the rich. "And speaking of taxes, he showed us his tax returns," she said, a dig at Republican President Donald Trump, who has refused...

Blunders on Israel abound in the Bernie Sanders camp. On April 14, Sanders suspended his new national Jewish outreach communicator, Ms. Simone Zimmerman, after just two days on the job. Her sacking followed discovery of her calling Benjamin Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a[**]hole,” accusing him of “sanctioning the murder of over 2,000 people,” and presiding over a “brutal military occupation” of the West Bank (a canard I debunk here). In an April 1 interview with the NY Daily News, Mr. Sanders stated that Israel killed over 10,000 Gazans in the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. He later...

Bernie Sanders has dodged his Jewish ethnic roots throughout the campaign. He avoided campaigning in Jewish areas in Florida. He has a history of hostility to Israel. So it's not surprising that he decided to blow off the AIPAC conference. AIPAC conferences are lightly pro-Israel consensus events. AIPAC is willing to provide cover for just about any politician willing to show up. Actual pro-Israel views are not required. Hillary Clinton and Trump will be there. Obama has been there. Showing up at an AIPAC conference is basically a politician saying that he or she is willing to extend an olive...

In a still developing situation, the city of Paris, France, is under attack by terrorists armed with guns and explosives. Many dozens of people have been killed. A still undetermined number of people have been wounded. The terrorists took dozens of hostages in a concert hall. French police and military forces have been deployed. There is mayhem and blood in the streets of Paris.President Obama has correctly described this day’s horrific events as “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”Terrorism is politically motivated violence against a vulnerable population that is designed to intimidate, sow fear,...

This post was produced in partnership with Beacon Reader as part of a crowd-funded reporting project, “After Ebola Comes Hunger.” Read more about our support for this project, and pledge your support here.Two months ago, it felt like America had a serious identity conflation problem. Amid the Ebola hysteria, people confused Ebola-afflicted Africans with any other African. A Nigerian girl was barred from school out of fear of Ebola contagion; a stadium crowd taunted a juvenile soccer player from Africa by braying “Ebola, Ebola!” at him. Meanwhile, the country faced its own dark scourge—and here, the conflation of identity was...

WARNING: Graphic language… Joe Newby at The Washington Examiner has found a real doozy of a “comedian.” Her name is Laura Levites – with obviously no connection to the priests of the Old Testament. (She’s an atheist with a fondness for Ricky Gervais.) “I would personally like to castrate every Male Conservative Christian so that they have NO reproductive rights,” she wrote on Twitter, using the hashtag “#HobbyLobby.” She certainly knows how to draw attention to herself. Newby said that’s not all. She also expressed her hatred of Christians in a tweet calling conservative Christians “scumbags,” claiming they are “really...

It happens every year. Someone on the left goes so overboard in their hatred for America that they can’t even let Thanksgiving pass without their wacky comments. This year, Huffington Post author Nicole Breedlove didn’t disappoint. Her piece bashed America under the headline: “Happy National Genocide (Thanksgiving) Day!” Breedlove doesn't miss a beat—slamming everyone from Columbus and to the Pilgrims while invoking images of the Holocaust and 9/11. She began her piece talking about how her family “always gave thanks that all the Native Americans weren’t wiped out when Columbus ‘discovered’ America.” Because, of course, liberals assume Columbus personally killed...

Viewers must have gasped at the sheer depravity when racial violence victim Phoebe Connolly, who was assaulted by “teens” playing the Knockout Game in DC, came on Greta Van Susteren’s show last Wednesday night to defend her attackers. But her bizarre reaction was no isolated incident.Here is what Ms. Connolly had to say after her brush with savagery — an incident she was lucky to survive: “I’ve moved past it and I really have no hard feelings about what has happened. And I just see it as another reason why we need to better support our youth with activities and...

A high-profile case of a Belgian transsexual who chose to be killed by medical euthanasia after a sex-change operation turned him into a "monster" has highlighted the soaring number of people in the region electing to die this way – and has raised fresh questions over the controversial practice. Nathan Verhelst, born Nancy, gave an interview to a local newspaper hours before his death this week citing his "unbearable psychological suffering" – rather than a terminal or degenerative physical illness – as his reason for dying voluntarily. "When I looked in the mirror, I was disgusted with myself. My new...

MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) of the Israeli Knesset has criticized the U.S. lobbying group J Street for recent comments it made on the violence between Israel and Gaza. The J Street statement criticized “rockets fired on Israeli cities and towns and airstrikes on Gaza that have killed over a dozen Palestinian civilians.”“At a time when a million Israeli citizens have been living in bomb shelters for four days and four nights, have not gone to school or work and anxiously await the next siren, the terrorists firing on them are getting encouragement and support, not just from Iran and Hezbollah,...