Saturday Miscellany

First, over at the City Journal Heather Mac Donald makes a salient point about the anti-Israel pro-Hamas protests. Their leaders and their followers are largely of the female persuasion.

It’s girl power in action. Aren’t you happy that you have supported feminism all these years?

Mac Donald offers some explanations:

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Fair points, all of them. I would underscore the simple fact that victim ideology, dividing the world into oppressors and the oppressed ends up defining femininity as a masculinist plot to oppress women. So, signing up with a group that supports honor killings now counts as the new womanhood. Go figure.

Second, another possible explanation is even easier. Contemporary feminist theory was first articulated by one Friedrich Engels, the No. 2 communist roader. Of course, Engels did not care about women. He considered them to be gullible dupes who could be enlisted in the revolutionary cause. 

Apparently, he was on to something. Consider the simple question of whether Hamas, to take an organization at random, is a champion of women’s rights. To raise the question is to provoke derisive laughter.

I have occasionally remarked that contemporary feminism is stealth misogyny. Nowadays, it is not so stealth any more.

Victor Davis Hanson sheds some light on the Hamas attitude toward women:

Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.

The same applies to the absurd notion that gay rights advocates will advance their cause by militating for people who believe that homosexuality is a capital crime, worthy of execution, if not interminable incarceration.

Now, considering that the notable nitwit, Judith Butler, has been the subject of a long article in The New Yorker, it might be time for us all to chip in and offer her, a gender-bent gay activist and staunch supporter of Islamist terrorism organizations, a one-way ticket to Gaza. 

Third, three down, a few more to go. The president of Cornell University, one Martha Pollack, has resigned. She would have disciplined you for using the wrong pronouns or even for deadnaming a transgenderist, but when it came to anti-Semitism, she let it fester.

Good riddance.

Add her name to the list of incompetent ivy league presidents, from Harvard University and U. Penn, both of whom have resigned their positions. We await the resignation of the supremely incompetent president of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, the weak kneed president of Brown University, Christina Paxson and the equally incompetent president of Dartmouth, Sian Leah Beilock.

So, the great social experiment of putting underqualified women in charge of major academic institutions is crashing and burning.

We note, for the record, that the heads of Princeton and Yale are male.

Fourth, in the meantime the Swedes are being punished for allowing too many migrants of a certain ethnic persuasion into their previously tranquil country.

From the Financial Times, via Powerline:

Sweden has suffered an extraordinary spate of violence in recent months, particularly in Uppsala and its neighbour to the south, capital Stockholm. At its worst in September and October, barely a day went by without a shooting, bombing or hand grenade attack — sometimes several.

The Nordic country has gone from having one of the lowest levels of fatal shootings in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade. …

In a televised addressed at the end of September, Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, offered his diagnosis for the unprecedented violence, directly blaming “irresponsible immigration policy and failed integration”.

“I cannot over-emphasise the seriousness of the situation,” added the leader of the centre-right Moderate party. “Sweden has never seen anything like it before. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like it.”

The issue has shaken the full strata of society in the Nordic country. “This is a social earthquake in Sweden,” says Jesper Brodin, chief executive of furniture giant Ikea’s retail arm and one of the country’s most high-profile business leaders.

“If this continues for the next two decades, Sweden is lost. It’s tearing us apart,” says Richard Jomshof, head of the Swedish parliament’s justice committee and an MP from far-right Sweden Democrats.

Fifth, authorities in Germany have revealed that a mere 60% of violent crime in that country is produced by Muslim migrants.

Sixth, fear not, the Biden administration has Islam’s back. It might have sold out Israel, but it issued waivers for weapons shipments to countries that are supporting or harboring terrorists.

The Washington Free Beacon has the story:

Less than a day before the Biden administration announced its intent to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel, it issued a sanctions waiver to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to a host of Arab nations that boycott the Jewish state, including Hamas ally Qatar and Iran-controlled Lebanon, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Seventh, while Republicans in Congress step up to denounce Joe Biden for stopping arms shipments to Israel, many Congressional Democrats have been notably silent.

Now, however, they have permission to oppose the Biden policy. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens laid out the case against Biden:

The tragedy in Gaza is fundamentally the result of Hamas’s decisions: to start the war in the most brutal way possible; to fight it behind and beneath civilians; to attack the border crossings through which humanitarian aid is delivered; and to hold on cruelly to Israel’s 132 remaining hostages, living or dead. Whatever else the arms cutoff might accomplish when it comes to Israel, it is both a propaganda coup and a tactical victory for Hamas that validates its decision to treat its own people as human shields. And it emboldens Hamas to continue playing for time — especially in the hostage negotiations — with the idea that the longer it holds out, the likelier it is to survive.

Eighth, on a more encouraging note, some schools in Norway have banned smart phones. The results were about what you might have expected. This comes from the Epoch Times:

Banning cellphones in schools improved academics, reduced bullying, and reduced students’ need for counseling, a 73-page Norwegian paper found.

“Banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls,” Sara Sofie Abrahamsson, a postdoctoral researcher and the paper’s sole author, wrote in the abstract. Post-ban bullying among both genders decreases.”

It especially helps girls:

The number of psychological consultations was reduced by 60 percent in female students.

The incidence of bullying for both girls and boys lowered.

Girls made gains in GPA and externally graded mathematics tests.

Girls were more likely to attend an academic high school track.

And you thought that girls were suffering for being exposed to the toxic masculinity of male students.

Ninth, a footnote to the current trial of Donald Trump in downtown Manhattan. Commenting on the testimony of porn star Stormy Daniels, Ann Coulter wrote this on Twitter:

If you can't "slut shame" a porn actress, who can you slut shame?

Tenth, some American dupes have bought Hamas propaganda. Victor Davis Hanson sheds some light on the notion of occupation, an article of anti-Semitic faith:

Gaza was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.

So on October 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization.

After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas canceled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians. Israel hosts two million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.

That should help you to clear your mind.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.