Obama’s Involvement in a Bury-worthy Death and Other Commentary on the Media
Conservative: A Death the Media Will Bury
“Paul Kessler went to a demonstration seeking to exercise his God-given, constitutionally protected rights to assemble and speak, and somebody on the other side felt entitled to knock him around and ended up killing him,” writes National Review’s Jim Geraghty of the California man, 69, dead after attending a pro-Israel rally. “This should horrify and outrage us. Kessler was no threat to anyone, and he did nothing wrong. That could have happened to any of us.” And: “If newsrooms wanted to make the name Paul Kessler famous, they could. He could be depicted as a martyr to free speech and the First Amendment.” But it’s “unlikely,” as “the angry young folks denouncing Israel” are “usually young progressives, and the middle-aged liberals who largely populate those news institutions” are “really uncomfortable confronting those on the left.”
Campus beat: The Cash Behind Hate
A new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute offers a “clearer picture of the financial forces” possibly fueling antisemitism on college campuses, reports The Free Press’ Bari Weiss: At least 200 schools illegally withheld information on $13 billion in contributions from foreign regimes, many authoritarian — and the number of “reported antisemitic incidents on a given campus has a meaningful relationship to whether that university has received funding” from “regimes, or entities tied to regimes, in the Middle East.” And this “may explain why university presidents, whose main job is fundraising,” have been “slow to respond” to the Oct. 7 massacre or “released weak statements.” After all, it’s hard to believe these countries “gave nine- and ten-figure gifts” expecting “nothing in return.”
Blame game: Bam’s Dirty Hands
“On the ‘Pod Save America’ podcast,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Eliot Kaufman, ex-President Barack Obama “counsels ‘an admission of complexity’ ” on the Hamas-Israel war, saying “nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” Obama’s aren’t, Kaufman argues, as his efforts to “find a rapprochement with Iran” only empowered Teheran, while his “strategy of pressuring Israel and indulging the Palestinians made no progress toward peace,” as it relied on “the fantasy that U.S. pressure on Israel will obviate the need for them to compromise.” For Obama, Hamas is “only one guilty party among many, and Oct. 7 a mere link in a long causal chain” where “blame shifts to Israel.” Indeed: “If anyone has been complicit in enabling Hamas’s atrocities, Barack Obama has.”
Mideast watch: Rethink Iran Now, Joe
“Everything in the Middle East changed on 10/7, except President Biden’s Iran policy,” scoffs Michael Makovsky at The Hill. Time for the prez to “confront the new stakes.” His policies saw an “extra $30 billion since 2021” for Tehran, with “no penalty for Iranian aggression” — “no U.S. retaliation against various Iranian plots to abduct and kill Americans on American soil.” Now he should be “applying pressure on all fronts to heighten the regime’s internal stress” and to “communicate to Tehran that America will not tolerate Hezbollah unleashing on Israel its arsenal of 150,000 rockets and several hundred precision-guided missiles.” In other words, “recognize the new global stakes and restore U.S. deterrence to confront Iran.”
From the right: Bay State’s Border-Crisis Taste
“A killer who got into the country because the Biden administration failed to stop him, despite the man entering the country illegally, made it to New England, where he threatened public safety,” reports Tom Joyce at the Washington Examiner. On Oct. 27, “the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts had an illegal immigrant arrested and removed from state-provided immigrant housing.” ICE also removed one illegal immigrant and arrested another, both convicted of homicide, from Quincy, Mass., this year, and “from Dec. 29, 2022, to March 1, 2023, Boston ICE arrested or removed five people wanted for murder in other countries.” “How many times do incidents like these have to happen in states throughout the country, including those nowhere near the southern border, before the Biden administration takes border security seriously?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
