POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Why do they pull down posters of kidnapped Israelis?

Evidence of Palestinan barbarity upsets their belief in Jewish guilt and Palestinian innocence

Immediately, people began pulling down the pictures of hostages from walls, subways, bus stops, telephone poles, angrily, purposefully, often tearing the paper posters right across the faces of kidnapped children. They carried them away in self-righteous handfuls or stuffed them in trashcans. In addition to helping raise awareness of the fate of the hostages, Bandaid and Nitzan’s poster campaign was now also highlighting the startling prevalence of raw antisemitism within the flagships of Western enlightenment—in large cities and on university campuses.

“The first torn-down posters we saw I think was a video coming from London,” Bandaid recalls, “two Muslim women tearing down posters.” When observers criticized the women, they responded, “We are doing this for Palestine.”

It was not immediately clear, to most normal observers, why concern for the fate of hundreds of innocent people grabbed from their homes and held as hostages in inhumane circumstances in blatant violation of international law should elicit any reaction but grief. Yet the teardowns increased, and soon became the story. Some of the vandals filmed themselves tearing down posters and uploaded footage of their actions to social media, as proofs of their virtue and in the hopes of inspiring others. Others yelled at strangers filming them. The destruction went on in Boston, London, Miami, New York, Melbourne, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, and Paris. Hitler mustaches were drawn on the faces of two 3-year-old twin girls. Vandals scrawled “Actors” and “Lies” on others.

“There is no possible justification for such heartlessness,” wrote Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. “The whole purpose of the fliers is to heighten awareness of the Israeli (and other) civilians kidnapped by the Hamas terror squads—to put names and faces to the hostages, all with one goal: to bring them back home. How can a project so heartfelt and humane trigger such a poisonous response?”

The vandals had their own ideas. These ideas were often confused, illogical, sometimes wrong on the facts, but were all expressed with intense, shaking emotion. They seemed rooted in a deep identification with the hapless, helpless, and voiceless, which in their minds justified not just tearing down posters of real human beings in terrible circumstances but also the kidnappings themselves.

The hundreds of videos of people tearing down posters have become as widespread as the posters themselves. Some of the perpetrators are enraged and inarticulate; some are furtive and defensive; some are proud of their actions; some are creepily smug. All of them seem to be operating on a similar odd frequency, in which their actions signal their belonging to a group with impenetrable beliefs that are not open to discussion or questioning, like a cult. In the U.S., at least, nearly all were current or aspiring members of the professional classes.

A worker at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School, videotaped while tearing down posters on campus, was asked why he was destroying posters of innocent victims. He shouted, “Get the fuck out of my face,” and when informed the photos were of innocent victims, said “There were people killed in the hospital bombing,” referencing the deaths at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza that was later attributed to an Islamic Jihad rocket gone astray. When asked why she was tearing down the posters, a woman in New York said, “Because they are fake.” Francesca Martinez-Greenberg, who according to her LinkedIn profile is a graphic designer at the Center for National Security at Fordham Law School, said, “This is part of a concentrated propaganda effort to rile up support for the genocide of Palestinian people.” A man identified as Joe Friedman tore down posters at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, explaining, “what about the Palestinian children?” and then made fun of an observer’s Israeli accent, calling it “fake.” Friedman, who comes from tony Silver Spring, Maryland, was previously arrested while disrupting a pro-life event on campus at VCU.

The barbarity of the Hamas attack on innocents was thus impossible for those who hate Jews to process, so they didn’t. Rather, they attempted to deny the evidence by throwing away photos of the real-life Jewish victims, in a vain yet chilling attempt to resolve their own logical impasse.

The teardown artists elicited their own social media-driven response, which in some cases included real-world consequences. Observers hunted down the rippers on social media and outed them. NYU law student Ryna Workman, who was filmed destroying posters with a companion, who coyly said she was “very proud” of their actions, saw her job offer from a top law firm rescinded after video of her acts was posted online. Laurel Squadron, who works part time as a babysitter for ArtistBabysitting, a boutique child care agency serving families in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, was filmed tearing down posters of children and screaming, “you support genocide you asshole,” at observers. The agency later denounced her actions and pulled her profile off the job site. An endodontist tearing down posters in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, was outed by StopAntisemitism and fired from her job. New York County public defender Victoria Ruiz was filmed tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, and she later resigned from her position.

In a viral incident reported by the New York Post, construction workers jumped out of their truck to stop a man in Queens from tearing down the posters. “This is a free country,” said one of the men, named Paulie. “You can wave your Palestine flag and say death to the Jews and America whenever you want, but we can put up f–king signs.” He pointed out the man was breaking the law by littering.

Although Bandaid had anticipated some trouble, he admitted the poster destruction “was not so nice to see.” He was also surprised to observe the vandalism on the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan. “You would think there are so many Jews there, that maybe it will be more protected, but you can feel the hate.”

And hate it was—sometimes calm, cool, self-confident, and entitled, and sometimes hysterical. A 24-year-old Israeli student enrolled in general studies at Columbia University in New York City was putting up posters on campus when he was assaulted by a masked female Jewish student named Maxwell Friedman, who was later arrested and charged with assault after breaking her victim’s finger with a stick. A vandal tearing down posters while walking her dog in Miami admitted Hamas was a “terrorist organization” but, shaking with emotion, she said she was ripping down the pictures of hostages to “protect Palestinian civilians” who “over decades have been oppressed; they’re in apartheid because of what Israel is doing.”

One observer on Instagram understood right away what was happening. A young Israeli woman from South Africa explained the rippers were compelled to tear down the photos of innocents kidnapped because “it doesn’t fit the propaganda they’ve been feeding the world,” which denies the humanity of Jews and Israelis while painting them as monsters who oppress innocent Palestinians. “Every video we post, every death and missing person we announce, it’s all ‘fake’ and we’re ‘making it up,’ never mind the fact that the most graphic videos we have of the crimes committed on our innocent Israeli angels are taken by their own leaders.”

The barbarity of the Hamas attack on innocents was thus impossible for those who hate Jews to process, so they didn’t. Rather, they attempted to deny the evidence by throwing away photos of the real-life Jewish victims, in a vain yet chilling attempt to resolve their own logical impasse. “Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific,” Jeff Jacoby wrote, “it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy.”

Mintz and Bandaid are hurt by the blood-curdling reactions, but they remain undeterred. “You know, we are only going to put the posters up again, and all the thousands of people who are with us, they just print more and put them back up,” says Bandaid. “We put innocent civilians on these posters because we know they can’t speak for themselves right now. We have to keep their names up there and keep spreading awareness until they gain their freedom.”

Bandaid and Nitzan’s posters continue to be downloaded. (There are fewer reported teardowns in the Far East.) Posters have been displayed on 240 chairs surrounding an empty Shabbat table that has been constructed and displayed around the world: in New York, Geneva, Boston, Berlin, Rome, Frankfurt, Washington, D.C., Johannesburg, London, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Tbilisi, Chicago, Vienna, LA, and Lisbon, to name a few.

In the fourth week of the war, analytics show that kidnappedfromIsrael.com has been visited an average of 30,000 times per day.

Nevertheless, Bandaid has to admit the rage is terrifying. “They tear down photos of babies and elderly people!” the artist told me. “It’s just pure evil. It’s not human. It’s really crazy. It’s really upsetting. We see antisemitism rising everywhere. It’s not a nice feeling to have when you’re abroad, and we feel less and less safe. It’s scary and it’s depressing to see the world act like that. But we will just go out and put up more.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-art-of-the-teardown

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UK: Sacked Suella Braverman accuses Rishi Sunak of needing ‘comfort blanket’ in an explosive missive

Sacked Home Secretary Suella Braverman has delivered a withering take-down of Rishi Sunak, accusing the British Prime Minister of being so weak that he uses wishful thinking as a “comfort blanket” to avoid making hard choices.

Ms Braverman has accused Mr Sunak of betraying the British public and failing to uphold four key of promises he made to her when she backed him – and brought along a swath of supporters – so that he could be Prime Minister in a leadership ballot last year.

She said she had worked up legal advice, policy detail and action to take on those issues – the significant one being to stop the flood of small boats crossing the Channel with illegal migrants – but was “often met with equivocation, disregard and a lack of interest” by Mr Sunak’s team.

Suella Braverman has accused Rishi Sunak of “betrayal” over a… promise to stop small boat crossings in an incendiary letter after being sacked as home secretary. In a broadside aimed at the Prime Minister, she accused him of having “manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver” on key policies, More
She added: “You have manifestly and repeatedly failed to deliver on every single one of these key policies. Either your distinctive style of government means you are incapable of doing so. Or, as I must surely conclude now, you never had any intention of keeping your promises.”

Ms Braverman was sacked from her high profile and senior position after claiming the Metropolitan Police had applied double standards to pro-Palestinian protesters in allowing “hate marches” across Britain.

In her statement she said Sunak had failed “to rise to the challenge posed by the increasingly vicious antisemitism and extremism displayed on our streets”.

“I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate marches and help stem the rising tide of racism, intimidation and terrorist glorification threatening community cohesion,” she wrote, accusing Mr Sunak of instead trying to minimise his political risk.

“Britain is at a turning point in our history and faces a threat of radicalisation and extremism in a way not seen for 20 years. I regret to say that your response has been uncertain, weak, and lacking in the qualities of leadership that this country needs.”

The four key points in her deal with the Prime Minister related to some of the most explosive and voter-sensitive issues facing Britain.

She said the deal with Mr Sunak, worked out over a dinner, was to reduce overall legal migration as set out in the 2019 manifesto as well as dealing with illegal migration by including specific ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into new legislation to stop the boats. This would entail excluding the operation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Human Rights Act and other international law which was obstructing progress.

She was to also deliver the Northern Ireland Protocol and Retained EU Law Bills in their then existing form and timetable.

The fourth point was in relation to transgender issues and she was to issue unequivocal statutory guidance to schools that protects biological sex, safeguards single sex spaces, and empowers parents to know what is being taught to their children.

She said in her statement to Mr Sunak that his decisions about the boats were “magical thinking”, adding, “You opted instead for wishful thinking as a comfort blanket to avoid having to make hard choices. This irresponsibility has wasted time and left the country in an impossible position.”

The missive was no surprise given Ms Braverman’s direct and blunt approach, but will unsettle the rejigged Cabinet which now includes ex-prime minister David Cameron as foreign secretary.

”Ms Braverman wrote: “Someone needs to be honest: your plan is not working, we have endured record election defeats, your resets have failed and we are running out of time. You need to change course urgently.”

She believed Mr Sunak has no real intention of fulfilling his pledge to the British people to stop the small boat crossings because he has wasted a year on the Illegal Migration Act and he has failed to prepare any credible Plan B in the event of legal defeat. She said she had received no reply to the back up migration plan she had prepared.

In her statement she said: ”I can only surmise that this is because you have no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people’’.

She said that she had striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported the Tory party in 2019.

“These are not just pet interests of mine. They are what we promised the British people in our 2019 manifesto which led to a landslide victory. They are what people voted for in the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Our deal was no mere promise over dinner, to be discarded when convenient and denied when challenged.”

And her parting shot?

“In October of last year you were given an opportunity to lead our country. It is a privilege to serve and one we should not take for granted. Service requires bravery and thinking of the common good. It is not about occupying the office as an end in itself.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/sacked-suella-braverman-accuses-rishi-sunak-of-needing-comfort-blanket-in-an-explosive-missive/news-story/e91a942683c7569717b09ded383efcdc

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When identity trumps merit we all lose in the end

Possibly the most important contribution Western liberalism has made to the development of civilised society is the notion that we should judge people on their individual characteristics, not on what tribe or collective they belong to.

Tragically, this foundational principle is being challenged everywhere – sometimes overtly, sometimes by subterfuge. If one went in search of a sure-fire way to dumb down our society, this is it.

Cue the Queensland government and Queensland University of Technology. Both are abolishing merit-based hiring for public servants and academics, allegedly to stamp out “unconscious bias”.

The government and QUT are dumping the word merit from their selection policies and will instead hire staff based on “suitability”. Apparently, bad references or a history of disciplinary action – such as being fired from a previous job – will be handled differently for Indigenous applicants on cultural grounds. In other words, applicants will be judged at least partially on the colour of their skin.

A courageous woman, Rochelle Hicks, has blown the lid on the real-life impact of this sort of discrimination. Earlier this year, Transport for NSW failed to take steps to remove Aboriginal man Ian Brown from being involved in a major infrastructure project she oversaw even after he made a death threat against her. Hicks wanted to deal with the situation herself. If a white employee or a contractor had made a death threat against a woman, they would have been removed swiftly. End of story.

Not here. Imagine the diversity tangle for Transport for NSW. Senior honchos want to attract more women into its traditionally male-oriented construction and infrastructure areas. Then an Indigenous man on its payroll makes a death threat in front of a witness against one of their most respected executives.

A workplace safety report finds the threat credible. Does Transport for NSW support Hicks? Or does Transport for NSW apply a different standard to Brown? In short, in the hierarchy of diversity claims, does race and cultural sensitivity trump gender and safety at work? Transport for NSW effectively choose the former, leaving Hicks feeling unsafe and unsupported by her employer.

This debacle comes from not judging a person on their merits. And there are a million different ways to sideline merit.

A more subtle method is to redefine merit or demand it be assessed in a more holistic way. Just change the criteria applied to judge merit so that it fits whatever hiring result you want to reach.

Earlier this year I suggested, tongue in cheek, that it wouldn’t be long before diversity divas in corporate Australia demanded that the criteria for picking company chief executives be broadened to allow for more heads of human resources and in-house general counsel in the top job. I said if you thought it was bad enough that HR departments controlled chief executives, wait until HR people actually ran the joint.

It was a joke. Except, right on cue, and as if to prove there is no claim so outrageous that Chief Executive Women can’t make it with a straight face, the organisation’s new president, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, was quoted as saying that boards should broaden the talent pool from which chief executives were selected to include people from HR.

Lloyd-Hurwitz referred to her own experience as chief executive of Mirvac, claiming “90 per cent of what I did was around people, so why would coming through a human capital and culture function not equip you very well for that?”.

This is surprising coming from a woman who once said she needed to do an MBA because “having done urban geography as an undergrad, I was woefully underprepared for the world of finance and commerce”, and then proceeded to follow an extremely high-powered career in funds management and real estate.

Isn’t there something ever so slightly revisionist about a woman who now thinks you can be a chief executive while still having your training wheels on when it comes to reading a balance sheet?

Given the gullibility with which every breathless new CEW claim is greeted by latter-day equivalents of the late, unlamented Male Champions of Change, a little hard-nosed cross examination of these claims might help avoid wholesale adoption by scared boards of this latest lunatic piece of gender activism before it dooms our public companies to financial and commercial illiteracy.

The problem is this. Women now significantly outnumber men at universities and institutions of higher learning. But, damn it, not only do they choose the wrong courses (at least if you want to be a chief executive) but they keep compounding the error by subsequent career choices.

As the Workplace Gender Equality Agency coyly puts it, “Women and men continue to follow different educational paths and the pattern of female and male segregation into different industries remains.”

For example, recent figures show that around 60 per cent of women tend to study education, health, society and culture, and creative arts while information technology and engineering are male-dominated.

CEW would no doubt blame the dreaded patriarchy for dragooning young women into filling out their tertiary application forms in traditionally sexist ways, and by logical extension doing the same to young men. This is rubbish.

Judging from the assertive young women I know, treating them as automatons choosing university courses and subsequent careers at the whim of some great unseen sexist god is offensive in the extreme.

At this point in their lives – the time of university entrance – there is a strong argument women appear to have achieved equality of opportunity with men. Their apparently superior school results give them first crack at whatever university choices and careers they wish. It is the voluntary choices that young women make then, and later, that lead to different career outcomes.

One of the biggest failures of CEW and other like organisations is the determined refusal to recognise, indeed celebrate, freedom of choice and individual responsibility. This brings us back to why merit is being defined down.

As the 2022 CEW survey revealed, while numbers of women in executive leadership teams continue to grow, they largely choose so-called functional roles (HR, legal, marketing, communications and so on) in greater numbers than the operational or line roles that lead naturally to CEO succession.

This infuriates the CEW ideologues for whom equality of opportunity is never enough. Only equality of outcome will do.

You would think CEW would recognise the lessons of centuries of business practice, the learnings of companies through business cycles, the acres of academic texts and simple common sense, all to the effect that, as a general rule, executives with line and operational experience make the best chief executives.

Not CEW. If the facts don’t fit CEW’s preferred hypothesis, it seeks to change the facts. If the assessment of individual merit doesn’t get you the right outcomes, change the definition of merit.

CEW seems to accept it can’t force more women to choose the career paths that lead to the chief executive’s office, so its solution is to try to redefine the CEO’s role and qualifications so it fits women’s preferred career paths. CEW wants to welcome you to the world of chief executives who may be financially illiterate, commercially obtuse and strategically sterile but who have empathy, are terrific at compliance and know HR backwards. No thanks.

My advice to you is that if any company you have invested in appoints an HR executive or the general counsel as CEO, do what I think a young Lloyd-Hurwitz would have done when she was a fund manager: short the stock.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/when-identity-trumps-merit-we-all-lose-in-the-end/news-story/1c02928a8d5102907d14805d53444932

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The poisonous results of a refusal to compromise

Their enmity to Israel hurts Palestinians most of all

One month into the latest round of the Gaza war, Saturday has become Protest for Palestine Day among TikTok generation students and Islamists.

It follows the same pattern as the Friday Strikes for Climate championed by Greta Thunberg, her high school acolytes, and the Socialist Workers’ party members of the teachers union.

With the inevitable clash this Saturday of youthful, useful idiots and their parents’ generation who will be commemorating Remembrance Day, here are some Post-it notes to point out to the protesters that they won’t see in their social media feeds.

November 11 is Armistice Day but not all armistices are equal. In the West, an armistice signals the end of hostilities. Not in Islam. Ever since Hamas invaded Israel on 7 October it has repeatedly called for a ceasefire yet it is Hamas that shatters each ceasefire to which it agrees. It’s not an accident. What Hamas calls for, a ‘hudna’, is a fake ceasefire in today’s parlance. It’s a term that Mohammed used in his battle with his own tribe, the Quraysh. It allows each side to regroup and in the case of the Prophet to craftily defeat his enemy.

The war between Hamas and Israel has nothing to do with Palestinians who were assaulted in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in September 2023, mistreatment by Israeli security forces, settlements in the West Bank, or returning to the 1967 borders; indeed there is nothing Israel can do to broker lasting peace because Hamas doesn’t accept the right of Israel to exist at all. As Mahmoud al-Ramahi the secretary-general of the Palestinian parliament put it, ‘We accept that Israel as a state exists, but we will never recognise the right of Israel to exist in our land.’

For the same reason, Hamas will never agree to a two-state solution. The only solution it will accept is a Palestinian caliphate in the entire area once referred to under the British as Mandate Palestine and even then this is just a stepping-stone to a global caliphate. Protesters should note that they will not be able to choose their gender or pronouns in a caliphate. As Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Zahar put it in a video published in December 2022, ‘Israel is only the first target.’ The plan is that, ‘The entire planet will be under our law.’ This is the goal of all Islamists. At the Mufti Mehmood conference in Pakistan on 14 October, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, emir of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl told the crowd that ‘we are ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the mujahideen… to destroy Israel, and throw its corpse into the Dead Sea’ and as Hamas leader Khaled Mash’al said at the same conference, Hamas is working for the implementation of sharia law not just in Palestine but all over the world.

The disruption of Remembrance Day commemorations should serve as a reminder that Islamists did not side with the West in the second world war; they fought with Hitler. The Islamist ideology of Hamas and its spiritual forerunner the Muslim Brotherhood stems directly from a strand of Islamist antisemitism that fused with Nazism before and during the second world war. Unfortunately, despite the well-documented collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Hitler and his enthusiastic endorsement of the Final Solution he was never indicted for war crimes and after the war became a hero to Islamists continuing to propagate lies that fuelled religious intolerance, antisemitism, rejection of liberalism and of the state of Israel. His nefarious influence continues to this day. That’s why a former Guantanamo prisoner associated with Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban posted a speech by Hitler on Telegram (translated by the Middle East Media and Research Institute MEMRI) inciting Muslims to kill Jews.

Islamist support for Nazism leads to genocidal gymnastics in which Islamists celebrate the Holocaust, deny the Holocaust occurred, and claim Israel is a Nazi state. Examples of each abound. Dutch Islamist soccer fans chant ‘Hamas, Hamas, All Jews to the Gas’, an Australian Islamist ‘scholar’ Nassim Abdi referred to in a Facebook post on 10 October ,‘the so-called oppression of the Jewish people, and the so-called Holocaust’ (translated by MEMRI) while UK Labour councillor Hajran Bashir last week compared Israel to Nazi Germany.

Hamas is not interested in protecting Gaza civilians. Instead, it counts on the Western media to attribute every death in Gaza to Israel and to put pressure on it to let Hamas get away with its perpetual attacks and rearmament. In the messianic mission of Hamas to build an earthly caliphate, the suffering of Gazans serves a useful purpose. As Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, put it in a speech on 26 October, ‘The blood of the women, children and elderly… we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens within us resolve.’

When Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of the Hamas politburo was asked on 27 October why Hamas, which has built 500 kilometres of tunnels, hasn’t built a single civilian bomb shelter he said that the tunnels in Gaza were built to protect Hamas fighters from airstrikes, not civilians, and the protection of the people of Gaza was the responsibility of the United Nations and the ‘occupation’ ie. Israel, even though Hamas has had full control of Gaza since its bloody coup in 2007.

Given the ruthlessly cynical way in which Hamas inflicts and exploits the suffering of Gazans, it’s hardly surprising that Hamas isn’t popular in Gaza. In 2023, polling indicated that a majority of Gazans were opposed to breaking the ceasefire with Israel and almost three-quarters think Hamas is corrupt. Unlike Hamas, most Gazans are prepared to support peace plans and Hamas is far from popular throughout the Middle East. Egyptian TV host Ibrahim Eissa slammed Marzouk and the Hamas leadership calling them ‘disgraceful cowards’ who were ‘peddling’ the lives of Palestinians instead of protectng them.

Yet thanks to TikTok, young people get a constant flood of pro-Palestinian propaganda which has persuaded young Australians to sympathise with Palestinians as the victims. But if they are victims of anyone, they are victims of Hamas.

Unfortunately, thanks to migration, Australia has also imported its share of Islamist ideologues. Islamic ‘scholar’, Brother Ismail, used a Friday sermon in Sydney on 27 October to call on Muslims to wage jihad, raise the flags of Isis and Al-Qaeda, and condemn the ‘betrayal sheiks’ that ‘suppress the rage of Muslims who cannot wait to wage Jihad and die as martyrs’. He told Australian Muslims that, ‘By Allah, (Australians) don’t love us and they would like to kill all of us.’ ‘But,’ he said, ‘whether the Australian government or the Australia Security Intelligence Organization likes it or not, or wants to deport me, jihad is the solution… there is no other way to defend the Muslims and erase this humiliation from the Islamic nation, but to fight for the sake of Allah. Jihad is … one of the highest pillars of our religion. Hamas freedom fighters … are the most honourable men, and more honourable than you, who are labelling (them) terrorists.’

With sermons like these and with TikTok propaganda brainwashing young people, Australia can expect Remembrance Day disruptions for many years to come.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/tiktok-time-bomb