A disturbing and particular act of vandalism has gone viral in recent days. You’ve probably seen the videos online: people in cities across the West ripping down posters with the photographs and names of the hostages being held in Gaza. My colleague Candace Mittel Kahn was scrolling Instagram this week when she saw one such clip.
“I almost skipped past it when I noticed something,” she writes in a piece for The Free Press. “After the woman finishes scraping the remainders of the poster from the street post, while muttering the word calba, the Arabic word for dog, she turns to the camera—presumably to the person filming her vandalism—and says, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. And burn in hell.’ And that’s when my heart dropped: I know her.”
In her brilliant piece, Candace tries to make sense of how a college friend ended up “standing on a street corner, tearing apart pictures of kidnapped Israelis and flinging them to the ground like a dirty tissue.”
My daughter is scared of the dark. We got her a nightlight—it glows purple—which helps. Still, she likes my husband or me to lie in bed with her until she falls asleep. She’ll wrap her arm around my neck as she drifts off, and whisper things like “I love you, Mommy” and “What are we doing tomorrow?” She is four and a half.
My son likes for me to read him a book before bed. Right after I give him a bottle of milk, he looks up at me with his stunning green eyes and begs, “Book! Book!” though the k is silent—a syllable he has not yet mastered—so it sounds more like “Buh! Buh!” I read The Going to Bed Book, by Sandra Boynton, to him. He is one and a half. He giggles as I place him in his crib and turn off the lights.
More than thirty Israeli children, some as young as 9 months old, are currently being held captive by Hamas terrorists inside Gaza. If they are still alive, they have now spent seventeen nights away from their beds. Some of them are alone. Some of them are with their siblings. Some of them watched their parents die in front of their eyes.
None of them are getting bedtime stories or purple nightlights.
A lot of very smart people have been fired from teaching jobs at U.S. colleges for a lot of very dumb reasons in recent years. In many cases, professors have lost their jobs for wrongthink, an ill-considered tweet, or something else that has nothing to do with their jobs.
In the case of Kendrick Morales, he was let go by Spelman College for doing the very thing I was naive enough to think professors were supposed to do: uphold academic standards.
He tells this maddening tale in The Free Press today:
When I accepted a tenure-track position in the economics department of Spelman College in the spring of 2021, handing out bogus grades was the last thing on my mind. Spelman, after all, has a great reputation. Based in Atlanta, it’s a women-only historically black college, one of the oldest in the country; for the past 15 years, it’s been rated the number one HBCU by U.S. News & World Report.
I arrived on campus in mid-August, a week before classes began, to attend an orientation session for new faculty. Sitting on the stage of a modestly sized auditorium, a panel of Spelman teachers and administrators pressed upon us the importance of maintaining high standards. I recall the head of the sociology department saying, “Absolutely don’t run a deficiency model!”—meaning we should never act as though our students were intellectually or educationally deficient. Another member of the panel said professors should work to instill the idea in students that they represent “black excellence.” As someone who has always lived in the white world (though I’m half Filipino), I found this deeply inspiring. I thought, this is the kind of place where I want to teach.
What I discovered, however, was that Spelman’s high-minded rhetoric didn’t match its reality. This was especially true when it came to awarding students grades they hadn’t earned. Grade inflation is a well-documented problem at universities across the country, of course. But what I found at Spelman was even more troubling: even after receiving the “normal” grade inflation, students demanded yet higher grades—and revolted when I wouldn’t go along. To my astonishment, the students went above me to Spelman’s administration, which capitulated without ever telling me. And because I refused to look the other way, I lost my job.
Also in The Free Press today:
Max Raskin interviews Sofie Berzon MacKie, a survivor of the attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, who hid in a safe room with her family for twenty hours.
Here’s an excerpt from their conversation:
MR: As a woman, were you afraid?
SBM: I wasn’t thinking like they’re going to rape me or anything. I was just, as a mother, I think. . . seeing the terror on my children’s faces once they’re in the safe room—that was a thought that absolutely broke my heart. So when they were really on our house trying to get in, I just sat. I held them and covered their eyes, because I just didn’t want to see the look on their faces when they see the people that are going to murder them. I prayed. I don’t believe in God. Not that I don’t believe that the world is a spiritual place, but I don’t believe in Him in the way any religion explains this force that moves through the universe that creates all things. But I was, in my heart, just begging for some force to let me out of that room. We sat there for so many hours, my heart was pounding in my chest the whole time. At some point, I started really shaking uncontrollably because of the adrenaline rush. Complete terror.
MR: Physically—other than your heart beating—what does that physically feel like to be in that kind of situation?
SBM: I can’t even describe it.
MR: Do you want to throw up? Do you want to go to the bathroom?
SBM: You want to throw up. You want to run away. You have this urge, crazy urge, that you have to oppress, to open the door and run, just run. And you have to really stop yourself from leaving your home because you just want to run. To have to sit there and wait, all your muscles become stiff. Your body becomes stiff. Your heart is beating. I got extremely thirsty at some point. My mouth was so, so dry. My daughter had terrible cramps in her stomach. She had an awful tummy ache, and her head was throbbing. Your body is screaming that this situation is unbearable. But here we are.
MR: I don’t know if this is a silly question, but are there any moments of levity in that whole thing?
SBM: No. At one point, when I understood that I am going to die, I couldn’t stand the fear that took hold of me. It was beyond anything I ever felt in my whole life, the most extreme feeling of panic, and terror, utter terror. So, I kind of took a look at my life, and I became very grateful for what I have, what I had—for my life’s trajectory and the people I met and the people I loved and who loved me back. And that was a really deep moment for me. It was, I don’t know, spiritual in a way, that I understood my life is going to end. It’s a fact.
Read the whole thing here.
And we reprint a prescient 2014 speech by Alan Johnson in which he busts six myths about Hamas.
Alan Johnson gave this speech in 2014, after the 50-day military conflict between Israel and Hamas. We’re publishing it today, lightly edited for clarity, because we believe the myths are still with us and are still poisonous, radically misshaping the Western understanding of Hamas, Israel, and the history of the conflict, especially on the liberal left.
The horror of the 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas is known to everyone here. You didn’t just watch it on TV. You had anguished conversations with your family and friends at home and in Israel.
You knew it was a legitimate act of self-defense by Israel against the rockets and the tunnels and the antisemitic hate of Hamas.
You knew Israel had offered Hamas “quiet for quiet” day after day in early July, holding back as the Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.
You knew that no one in Israel wanted this war. You knew Israel accepted an Egyptian cease-fire proposal seven days into the conflict while Hamas rejected it, fired more rockets, and used the terror tunnels to try and murder Israelis.
But on TV, we were presented with something quite different: a motiveless assault by a cruel IDF on Palestinian children. For a week or so, Israel’s right to self-defense was acknowledged. But then, as the number of casualties rose, Israel’s actions were called “disproportionate,” then “unjustifiable.” Then Israel was accused of “deliberately targeting civilians,” and a “slaughter of the innocents.” Before the conflict was over, the terms child killers and war criminals could be heard.
On Monday, we wrote that we sensed a lot of people have been changing their minds on big political questions since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. And judging by the huge response to Konstantin Kisin’s superb piece on “The Day the Delusions Died,” we were onto something.
One commenter on Konstantin’s piece wrote: “I am exactly where your friend is. Went to bed a liberal on October 7, woke up a conservative on October 8. And if all the Republicans can muster as a candidate is Trump, and Biden for the Democrats, I am—gulp—voting for Trump.”
Another said: “Brilliant article! I am also one of those people who has become politically conservative overnight after this issue. Never thought I would vote conservative until now. Even when I saw illogical and harmful demands made about inclusion of trans women in sports, prisons, too much focus on skin color, I still thought at its core these people mean well and want to create a more equal society. They are misguided, brainwashed, and maybe misinformed due to hyperpolarization driven by social media. But there is no way anyone can brainwash a moral person to think that killing babies is a form of ‘resistance.’ ”
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Technical question: there are 3 full size stories under this Substack entry in my feed. Why don’t they also show up individually? Makes it hard to go back and find stuff.
There is an entire generation of people, 30ish, who were brainwashed by the far left. This happened after public education was hijacked by communists which, not surprisingly, was actually their stated goal. You people, former liberal lefties that recently woke up as conservatives, are just learning what has been true all along of far left and far right wing politics - namely that it is evil to the core. Spread the message far and wide that political centrism and democratic capitalism are the only things that raise us from poverty and maintain liberty. Shun Marxists, and despots of all flavours and vote for political centrism.