Free Republic

It should properly be called “Affirmative Action Looting.” Having lectured the world for decades that American blacks should not be expected to obey the law or conform to the standards of behavior applicable to others, that black crime is a protest against social injustices, that blacks cannot succeed because of white skin privilege and never mind that there is a black president, the liberal establishment might as well be torching they buildings and cars in Missouri all by itself. The liberals have “Tawana Brawleyed” themselves into oblivion. They seriously believed that a grand jury could be bullied into indicting an...

Many of us are scratching our heads, and in some cases other parts of our anatomy, trying to make sense of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and its sundry clones around the US and now around the world. Just what do these urchins really want? What do they think and believe? Well, we thought we would recruit Jeff Foxworthy to try to assist us. Most of you probably are familiar with the great American comedian from the Deep South. He is best known for his comedy shticks based on the refrain, "Then you just might be a redneck." For example,...

Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is a sort of pagan religious cult. It is a theology. It is a form of superstition. Marxists claim that Karl Marx understood capitalism and economics. He did not. They also claim that the entire validity of Marx's set of theories on all subjects rests ultimately on how valid Marxist economic thought is. Marxist economic thought was completely wrong. Marx claimed that all products contain value that is directly proportional to the amount of labor embodied within them. He was wrong. All the rest of Marxism is based entirely...

Judaism And Warfare , Steven Plaut Dear Dr. H: You write about how Judaism is devoted to the pursuit of peace. You bring assorted citations from the Bible and Psalms about how nice peace can be. You emphasize that Judaism grants peace priority over competing goals. You find biblical quote after biblical quote about how good peace is. You then conclude that Israel is behaving in a manner that contradicts Jewish tradition when it wars against Hamas barbarism and Gaza terror. Israel must pursue "negotiations" with Hamas, you insist, citing the biblical desire for peace as the over-riding consideration. That...

Whenever the media takes note of the antics of Norman Finkelstein, the former DePaul University professor and anti-Israel activist, a flood of disinformation seems bound to follow. Finkelstein’s arrest in Israel last week was no exception. The facts of the case are clear. Finkelstein had attempted to enter Israel last Thursday to travel into the West Bank. There he would likely have lent support to Palestinian extremists. Unquestionably, he would have caused trouble. And while Israel generally does not prevent foreign trouble makers from entering the country (a highly naive and short-sighted policy), it made an exception this time: Finkelstein...

Israel's Left has always hated "talkbacks". Those are the little responses that people can write to articles on the web versions of newspapers. In Israel, where the newspapers are largely under the hegemony of the Left, and especially at Haaretz, whose concept of political pluralism resembles that of Pravda back in the happy days of Brezhnev, "talkbacks" are the main or only venue in which non-leftists get to have a say. But in Israel talkbacks - a bit like radio phone-in shows in the US (and in Israel) are dominated by the non-Left. Even at Haaretz, which almost never allows...

On May 4, 2007, Professor Dershowitz took his campaign against Norman Finkelstein to the Wall Street Journal, publishing an Op-Ed there entitled "Finkelstein's Bigotry". In it Dershowitz again explains why no self-respecting university should employ a fraud and pseudo-scholar like Finkelstein, especially one with widespread ties to Islamic terrorists and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis. Dershowitz notes that Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By that he means academic journals. Yes, Finkelstein has yet to publish a scholarly article in a refereed academic journal, the sine qua non for tenure at any serious university....

It was a war Israel was more afraid of winning than of losing. It was a war whose battlefield strategy was based on posturing – on acting as if Israel were conducting an actual all-out war. It was a war in which Israel attempted to defeat the enemy by not defeating him. It was a war of the make-pretend. Let us be clear. Every war has its share of mishaps, glitches, and human errors, and this one was no exception. But this war was fought after many years of massive budget cuts for the military. Convinced that the era of...

So many people are asking "When will it all end?" But the answer is so simple. It will not end until Ramat Aviv is attacked massively by rockets and missiles. How do we know Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz are still playing games? When the newspaper headlines read: "In heavy fighting today 6 terrorists were killed." When it says, "In heavy fighting today, 10,000 of the enemy were killed," then we will know that Israel has stopped playing. In the meantime, however, even the Israel of today is not the same country as the Israel of a month ago. The...

Haifa, Israel — I am writing this in between ducking in and out of a bomb shelter as Haifa is bathed by the Katyusha rockets and other missiles that Ehud Barak has allowed to be fired at the city. Why Ehud Barak? Because, as Israeli prime minister in 2000, he ordered the cowardly unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from the security zone in southern Lebanon, which led to the positioning of thousands of Hezbollah rockets on Israel’s northern border. It occurs to me that now would be as good a time as any to sum up everything that has been...

Forwarded from Ms. Gabrielle Goldwater Prof. Steven E. Plaut Graduate School of Business University of Haifa Haifa 31905 Israel Fax: 04-824-9194 Email: Splaut@econ.haifa.ac.ilJune 7, 2006 Dear Friend of Israeli Democracy: I am writing to you to ask for your help in defending free speech in Israel from the malicious assault upon it by Israel's far-Leftist extremists in league with Arab anti-Israel radicals. Free speech in Israel is inadequately protected in law, and it is defended with increasing political selectiveness. Under selective free speech, the most seditious behavior and activities of Far Leftists and Arab militants is always protected speech, but...

Americans are familiar with campus characters, such as Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky, who misuse their positions in academia to disseminate anti-American hate and propaganda from the university podium, often in the guise of "scholarship". But in many ways Israeli universities are considerably worse. Israeli universities are crawling with extremist faculty members, many of whom hate their own country, endorse the enemies of their country, and collaborate with Bash-Israel organizations around the world, sometimes even with open anti-Semites. Over the past year, the "Israel Academia Monitor," a watchdog group that monitors anti-Israel extremists and "Post-Zionists" in Israeli universities, has begun...

Baylor University is the Baptist-affiliated school in Waco, Texas, best known perhaps for its football team. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas and, with some 14,000 students, the largest Baptist university in the world. Of late, however, the school has distinguished itself mainly by its evident disdain for the academic freedom of an eminent scholar and its concomitant promotion of a radical polemicist. Baylor recently decided to deny tenure to Francis Beckwith, a leading bio-ethicist and one of the most accomplished scholars at Baylor. Beckwith had been associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State...

Tel Aviv University is crawling with anti-Israel "Post-Zionist" professors and with openly communist faculty members. It would be hard to pinpoint the very worst and most outrageous of these, but Yehouda Shenhav is surely a serious contender. Shenhav is Associate Professor and past department chairman of sociology at Tel Aviv University He was born Yehouda Shaharabani to Iraqi parents who had immigrated as refugees to Israel, and later changed his name to a less obviously Oriental one. He teaches Marxism and anti-Zionism to Tel Aviv University students and he edits the hardcore Marxist pseudo-academic Israeli journal calling itself "Theory and...

The Continuing Idiocy of Rachel Corrie's Parents By Steven PlautFrontPageMagazine.com | January 10, 2006Just recently, Palestinian terrorists failed to kidnap the parents of Rachel Corrie in the Gaza Strip.  They tried, but backed off when they learned the identity of their would-be victims.The Corrie parents were in the Gaza Strip as part of their global campaign to get the world to commemorate their daughter's death by destroying Israel.  They are also trying to get terror lovers from around the world to boycott the Caterpiller company for the crime of selling bulldozers to Israel, some of which are used to fight terror.  You...

William A. Cook is a far-leftist professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He is a regular correspondent for Counterpunch, and most of the drivel that he writes there is anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, although some is also anti-Christian. A professor of English literature with a highly-dubious academic record (in fact with none at all that we could uncover) at a third-rate college, he sees himself as having the credentials and expertise to make pontifical pronouncements on everything from the workings of capitalism to the history of the Middle East. La Verne "University" is a small...

The Left has long painted the CIA as a far-Right neofascist bogeyman, dominated by reactionary Dr. Strangeloves, and paranoid “neoncons.” The reality, of course, has long been very different. In fact, the CIA has long been dominated by liberal ideology and the left-leaning, blame-America mindset. Those who are skeptical of this last assertion should read one of the most important books ever written about intelligence services: Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century by Angelo Codevilla. In this book, to which I cannot do full justice here, he shows how the many failures of the CIA trace back to its...

Well, the media last weekend reported the latest instance of Oliver Stone being arrested for drug and alcohol charges in Beverly Hills. They found illegal drugs in Ollie’s car and arrested him for DUI. Oliver Stone had earlier been arrested in 1999 on alcohol and drug charges and, as part of a plea bargain, had at that time agreed to enter a rehabilitation program. He had been arrested for drugs before, the first time being when he was only 21. Now we know what you are all thinking, and that is that the media accounts of this could not possibly...

So let us see if we have this straight.  The anti-Zionists claim that the Jews have no right to the land of Israel because before Israel was re-created in 1948, it had been almost 1900 years since the last time that the Jews exercised sovereignty over the Land of Israel.  And the anti-Zionists claim that it is absurd to argue that anyone still has rights to land that was last governed with sovereignty 1900 years ago. And on what basis do they argue that the Arabs have some legitimate claim to these same lands? On the basis of the...

Colin Powell, in a sudden leap onto the PLO "refugee suffering" bandwagon, has come out for some kind of solution for the Palestinian refugees. The only problem? He thinks this is somehow the responsibility of Israel. He might be better off looking at the U.S. model of solving refugee problems. Consider the following: When the War of Independence began, it quickly assumed the nature of a civil war. Those opposing the declaration of statehood fought alongside the organized armies of their kinsmen, which invaded the territory of the infant state from all directions. The fighting was bloody, and the opponents...