A “world spinning out of control.” Those were the words Wall Street Journal Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead used to describe the latest geopolitical developments when Bari interviewed him on the latest episode of Honestly this week. And it’s not hard to see why.
In the past 48 hours alone:
Houthi fighters fired at Israel from Yemen.
An Israeli air strike hit Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing a senior Hamas commander as well as Palestinian civilians.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray warned senators that the Israel-Hamas war has increased the chances of a terrorist attack against Americans in the United States to “a whole other level.”
Israel vanished overnight from maps on the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Egyptian prime minister Mostafa Madbouly said Egypt was “prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory,” dismissing requests for the settlement of Palestinian refugees in Egypt.
On the podcast, Walter explains why the “pre-war era” we’ve been in for a while is “moving quickly and at an unpredictable pace” toward “something big and something bad.”
Let Walter give you the lay of the land. I can’t promise that it will be reassuring. But it will be clarifying.
Read an excerpt of Bari’s conversation with Walter here or click below to listen to the entire podcast:
SBF’s Day in Court
Defense Attorney 101 states that you should be very careful about letting your client take the stand. The risks of cross-examination going horribly wrong usually outweigh any possible benefits.
So why did Sam Bankman-Fried take the stand? Perhaps his lawyers decided that the mountain of evidence against the disgraced crypto whiz meant they needed the legal equivalent of a Hail Mary.
Whatever the strategy, the decision delivered a fraud-trial spectacle for the ages. And we sent Joe Nocera to take it all in.
Read his account of SBF’s courtroom debacle:
The first audience members started arriving around 10 p.m. on Sunday night, even though the event wouldn’t begin for another eleven and a half hours.
The people in line weren’t waiting for Taylor Swift tickets, or some new Apple device, but for a coveted seat in U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s courtroom in lower Manhattan, where alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was on trial. Only 21 seats were reserved for the press and the public, and it was first come, first served. If you wanted to be in that courtroom—to be able to see the reactions of SBF’s parents, say, or Kaplan’s expression as he chastised the defendant (which he did regularly)—there was no such thing as getting to the courthouse too early. By midnight, all the seats had been accounted for.
The rest of us had to make do with the overflow courtroom. Or rather, two overflow rooms, since one wasn’t enough to accommodate the 80 or so reporters covering the trial.
Friday, my first day at the trial, had been devoted to gentle questioning from SBF’s lawyer, Mark Cohen, as he tried to present his client as someone who had been done in by his subordinates—three of whom had offered devastating testimony against Bankman-Fried earlier in the trial. By the time Friday’s session ended, Cohen’s direct examination was nearly completed, after which, we all knew, would come the main event: prosecutor Danielle Sassoon’s cross-examination on Monday, which was bound to be brutal for SBF, and highly entertaining for the rest of us.
In the overflow rooms, the televisions offered a split screen, with one camera focused on SBF in the witness box and another pointed down at the three long tables where the lawyers were seated. The only time we caught a glimpse of the jurors was when they walked past Bankman-Fried on their way in and out of the courtroom. It was painful to see how studiously they averted their gaze from him, while he did just the opposite, staring balefully at each of them as they walked by. I couldn’t help wondering if any of them found him persuasive, or even sympathetic.
I had my doubts.
The Wretched Fanon
Why are PhD candidates glorifying terrorism? Why does a college professor say it was “exhilarating” to witness the atrocities of October 7? Why are many, especially on college campuses, so willing to apologize for—or even celebrate— barbarity?
The answer to these questions, according to Eli Lake, is Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth is required reading for undergraduates in many courses. (One colleague told me she was assigned Fanon in three separate college classes.) “For the pro-Hamas left,” Eli writes, “Fanon is not so much an intellectual as an oracle.”
Eight days after the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, Russell Rickford gave a speech to a pro-Palestinian protest, in which he acknowledged that he was a person who abhorred violence and the targeting of civilians. And yet, he said the Hamas atrocities meant that Palestinians “were able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human.” He added, “I was exhilarated.”
Rickford (who later recanted part of his remarks) is not a fringe activist wearing a sandwich board and sputtering about the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergs. He is an associate professor of history at Cornell University with a PhD from Columbia. His book We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination won the Hooks Institute National Book Award, named for the famed civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin Hooks. Russell Rickford is a member in good standing of the American republic of letters.
He is not alone. Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, took to X, (formerly Twitter), to give her thoughts on the Hamas massacre: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.” And in response to a post decrying Hamas’s targeting of civilians, she wrote: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The professor, who teaches migration studies, and whose work has been supported by Fulbright and the Luce Foundation, apparently does not know that the Jews attacked in their homes in southern Israel live in the pre-1967 borders of the state. They were not settlers.
On our radar. . .
→ Our man in Jerusalem: It’s a good thing that America has had an experienced and long-standing Senate-approved ambassador in place in Israel for the duration of the grave crisis. Just kidding! There has been no Senate-confirmed ambassador in Israel since July, when Thomas Nides stepped down. But that changed yesterday when the Senate voted 53–47 to confirm Jack Lew as the U.S.’s top envoy to Israel.
→ The coming Ukraine-Israel spending fight: A fight on Capitol Hill over military spending for Israel and Ukraine has been brewing for weeks. The president and a large majority in the Senate support a large package of aid that covers both countries. Meanwhile, newly installed House speaker Mike Johnson prefers an Israel-only package and has proposed a measure that takes money that was due to fund the IRS and gives it to Israel, leaving aid for Ukraine to be dealt with separately. If Johnson had hoped to win Mitch McConnell around to the idea, he hasn’t been successful yet. Yesterday, the Republican leader in the Senate reiterated that he prefers a package that handles Ukraine, Israel, border security, and Taiwan all in one.
→ Watch Voices from Gaza: As we’ve mentioned before, we’re thrilled to partner with the Center for Peace Communications on our Voices from Gaza series, which aims to bring authentic Palestinian voices to a wider audience. Watch the CPC’s Joseph Braude talk about the initiative on MSNBC here. And watch the latest installment here.
→ Pumpkin spice colonialism: Think you can enjoy a pumpkin spice latte guilt-free? Think again. The Washington Post is here to tell you the spices that go into that most basic of fall beverages are, in the words of food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson, “fraught with colonizer histories.” And the worst thing about it is that coffee chains don’t educate their customers about the evils of colonialism. “You’re getting stuff all over the world and repackaging it for wealthy consumers without acknowledging the history of the ingredients,” says Johnson. Time to do the work, Starbucks.
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A dear friend, a Jew who immigrated here during Glastnost, accurately predicted events following 7 Oct. right down to yesterday’s statement by Biden calling for a ceasefire.
Basically, he’s convinced that communist ideas and practices are overcoming American core values.
I asked him why people hate Jews.
This is what he sent.
The subject is worthy of a TFP article.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=u5f4y18FHxbxNyVt&v=sEdMpki-YeE&feature=youtu.be
Levi tripped and fell!! I swear!! I feared for my life!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/17lguvu/to_protest_in_jerusalem_as_an_anti_zionist_jew/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3