Latest news with #Commentary
New York Post
2 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
Behind Trump's Israel backing, leftist rot ruins universities and other commentary
Foreign desk: Behind Trump's Israel Backing 'There are several plain reasons why President Trump has been vocally supportive of Israel's mission in Iran so far,' explains Commentary's Seth Mandel. The prez 'loves a winner' and 'so far, Trump likes what he sees and doesn't want to stop seeing it.' He 'said he would stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon' and 'the IDF has gotten results.' 'If all he has to do is sit back and watch it happen, why wouldn't he?' Advertisement He also likes prefers flexibility, and: 'At this point, Trump hasn't overcommitted to anything and hasn't ceded control of his own ability to adjust as he sees fit.' Backing Operation Rising Lion lets him be a winner and fulfill a key campaign promise. Campus watch: Leftist Rot Ruins Universities 'The radical-left [campus] monopoly is a threat to America's democracy, institutions and national well-being,' warns John Ellis in The Wall Street Journal. Advertisement Treating 'criminals as victims' along with 'pronoun madness, defunding the police and so on' all began and metastasized at universities, 'the national headquarters of the radical left.' Team Trump is spot-on in aiming to 'end wokeness by targeting DEI and critical race theory in universities and the federal government.' But more's needed: 'Ending woke foolishness and returning universities to their former brilliance is possible only if the political monopoly is broken up.' With that, the country 'would take care of DEI, critical race theory and even antisemitism, because these are all created by the monopoly.' Advertisement Republican: Radicals Betray Mexican-Americans 'As someone proud of my Mexican heritage and deeply patriotic about my American identity, I find it offensive' that 'American citizens, many of Mexican descent' are 'setting fire to vehicles' and 'waving foreign flags' to protest Trump policies, fumes Rep. Myra Flores at The Hill. 'President Trump is doing what any responsible leader would: enforcing the laws already on the books,' yet Democrats 'deliberately blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants so they can demean Republicans as 'anti-immigrant' or 'xenophobic.' ' 'They want to lump us all together so that criminals and patriots alike share the same label.' So 'the actions of a few radicals now tarnish entire communities.' Advertisement No! 'We are a nation of immigrants, yes — but more importantly, we are a nation of laws.' Conservative: Randi's Power & Dem Corruption Teacher-union boss Randi Weingarten's long tenure as a member of the Democratic National Committee 'is proof of the open corruption of the Democratic Party,' thunders the Washington Examiner's Zachary Faria. While her union 'was funneling money to Democrats,' she 'was directing CDC guidance.' Hypocritical Democrats rant 'about Republican 'dark money' and the undue influence of groups such as the National Rifle Association,' yet 'the DNC was happy with this corrupt relationship with Weingarten and her union.' The liberal media are just as corrupt as they 'made next-to-no mention of her DNC role and offered almost no pushback against her as she used her union and DNC influence to write CDC policy and keep schools closed.' Legal beat: Colorado's Pro-Trans Oppression 'You'd think that after two significant losses at the U.S. Supreme Court, Colorado would tread more carefully with its anti-discrimination laws,' snarks USA Today's Ingrid Jacques. But a new law making 'deadnaming and misgendering transgender individuals a punishable offense' has 'already attracted lawsuits on the grounds that the law violates the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment.' Advertisement One federal suit outs the measure's aim as 'suppressing traditional views on sex and gender and punishing those who refuse to address transgender-identifying individuals using so-called chosen names and preferred pronouns.' A second defends the rights of businesses like XX-XY Athletics to use language 'vital to the company's branding and advertising.' Any law 'requiring citizens to use language that's simply not true or accurate will never pass muster when squared with the First Amendment.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
News.com.au
18-05-2025
- Sport
- News.com.au
'Oh Umpire!'
AFL: Commentary was left stunned after two controversial calls in the late stages of the first half, in the Tigers home game against the Roos.
Daily Mirror
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mirror
Pulitzer Prize winner says 'I don't want to compare suffering' in poignant chat
Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and essayist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his writing on Palestinian suffering during the Israeli conflict. In an awkward interview with MSNBC this is side-lined Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha refused to compare suffering as he was awkwardly questioned in an interview with MSNBC 's Weekend Primetime. Abu Toha appeared on the chat-show to talk with Ayman Mohyeldin, Antonia Hylton and Catherine Rampell about winning the highest accolade within journalism. However, Rampell's line of questioning has caused reaction across social media, not least from Abu Toha himself. Rampell congratulated Mosab on his award, but in her words, it had come "not without controversy." The anchor continues to ask about the case of British-Israeli hostage, Emily Damari. As reported by the BBC , Damari was kidnapped from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. Damari lost two fingers, and was then released in January 2025. The MSNBC anchor queries Abu Toha about a possible comment about whether Damari was a hostage at all. In response, he refutes this. He said: "First of all, I did not question her status as a hostage." Instead, he explains that the language used to describe those incarcerated differs depending on whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. He continues: "I have people in my family who were kidnapped from checkpoints, from schools, from shelters, and they are named prisoners. So my question is, why should Emily and other hostages be named hostages while my loved ones should be named prisoners?" He says: "I have never denied anyone's suffering. Everyone is suffering, Israelis and Palestinians. But why are our sufferings not acknowledged? Why are we called terrorists?" Abu Toha has written extensively about Palestinian suffering. On his personal pain, he said: "I was kept hostage for 53 hours. I was blind-folded, and hand-cuffed, and was beaten in my face. I asked Israeli soldiers to see a doctor, and they denied me any medical treatment. Am I less human than anyone else? So that was the question." He tells the three MSNBC anchors that 31 members of his family were killed in one airstrike. In response to Damari being held hostage for 15 months, he says "I don't want to compare suffering." But he continues on to highlight the continued plight of Palestinians, by saying: "A cousin of mine was killed in October 2023, and her body remained under the rubble for 558 days. And still, her husband and her child are still under the rubble to this day." When he is asked about his Pulitzer win, he explains that being awarded the prize is bigger than his own story. He says: "My win is not my win as Mosab, it is for the stories I shared with the whole world. And I promise you there are so many stories that I have that I haven't written." Mosab Abu Toha won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, for his series of essays in the New Yorker on the war in Palestine. The Pulitzer Prize committee in awarding Abu Toha the prestigious prize said that his work as contributor to the New Yorker consisted of "essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience." He won the prize for four articles, which include, ' My Family's Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza ' and The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian,' both of which highlight the suffering caused to the Palestinian people during the Israeli conflict.
New York Post
11-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Democrats' road not taken, Columbia's ‘academic freedom' hypocrites and other commentary
Liberal: Democrats' Road Not Taken 'Democrats currently are at a fork in the road to their political future and how that future turns out depends on which path they choose,' muses The Liberal Patriot's Ruy Teixeira. They can take either 'the party of restoration' path or the less traveled 'party of change' one. Polling shows 'voters want change — big change'; the 'party's brand is in wretched shape and views of Democratic governance are negative.' Advertisement Dems 'will have to work really hard to convince voters, especially working-class voters, that they embody change.' Democrats 'don't realize that they are at a fork in the road,' yet if they keep on the nothing-but-anti-Trump path it 'will make them the party of restoration in a change era — and ensure that the political breakthrough they are seeking will continue to elude them.' Campus watch: Columbia's 'Academic Freedom' Hypocrites Critics of President Trump's 'enforcement of civil-rights laws' at universities gripe that a crackdown on pro-Hamas protesters will destroy academic freedom, notes Commentary's Seth Mandel. Advertisement Yet it's the 'anti-Zionists' who've been 'erasing academic freedom,' and punishing them 'will help restore it.' The 'tentifada mobs' made that point clearly 'when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying' for finals. Even groups that usually defend the goons said protesters went too far. Yet if academic-freedom groups had led the fight 'to restore the academic freedom of the Jewish students under siege' from 'campus Hamasniks,' then perhaps now 'they wouldn't be fighting to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Harvard and Columbia and the rest.' Advertisement From the left: How US Higher-Ed Turned Useless As professors gripe about the 'climate of fear' stemming from Gov. Ron DeSantis' and President Trump's DEI crackdowns, Racket News' Matt Taibbi observes it's just 'the latest in a long chain of official actions and reactions, during which American higher education became increasingly a) expensive and b) useless.' Remember: Obama-era 'federal pressures' on campus sexual-harassment led to a 2022 poll showing that 'huge pluralities of Americans held their tongues for fear of 'retaliation and harsh criticism.'' DeSantis' anti-DEI rules 'go too far,' trading 'one brand of groupthink for another': Yes, 'universities have become madhouses and ignorance-factories whose purpose is not to teach but produce sinecures for ed-sector dingbats,' but 'I don't want federal thought police of any stripe sitting atop them.' From the right: Bernie's Private-Jet Hypocrisy Advertisement Sen. Bernie Sanders won ridicule with news 'that he spent $221,723 in campaign money on private jets for his 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour,' scoffs the Washington Examiner's Byron York. Bernie's excuse? 'You run a campaign and you do three or four or five rallies in a week . . . That's the only way you can get around.' Yet, notes York, 'Sanders has long had a taste for private jets'; indeed, his 'requests for private jets were so frequent that they at first irritated and then angered Clinton staffers' during the 2016 campaign. Bernie's 'message is basically that billionaires are destroying American democracy,' but he has something in common with them: They also 'defend their use of private planes by saying they are just so busy' they can't fly commercial like the little people. Law prof: Partisan Persecution of Lawyers Isn't New 'I opposed the executive orders of President Trump targeting law firms,' writes Jonathan Turley at The Hill, but 'many of those objecting today to the targeting of Democratic firms and lawyers were the very same people who targeted conservative lawyers for years.' Indeed, 'I personally know lawyers who were told to drop Republican cases or else find new employment — including partners who had to leave their longstanding firms.' Many 'deans and law professors protesting Trump's orders' had 'previously purged their schools of Republicans and conservatives.' Advertisement At least 'there could be a modicum of recognition of the years of systematically purging conservative lawyers and law professors by some of these very critics.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Aid groups want to prolong war, dodging the tariff apocalypse and other commentary
Gaza watch: Aid Groups Want To Prolong War Humanitarian groups are refusing to 'have anything to do' with Israel's new 'plan to renew food aid to Gazans,' fumes Commentary's Seth Mandel. The United Nations whines that the plan 'is 'designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic.' ' Translation: It lets Israel 'feed the Palestinian population without sustaining Hamas' — which executes non-Hamas Palestinians who try to access aid storage facilities. Fact is, funding from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which goes to schools that 'serve as Hamas battle stations' and promote a 'medieval antisemitism' curriculum, is meant to prolong the conflict 'until Israel is destroyed and the Jews can be wiped out.' Aid groups' 'refusal to feed Gazans' unless 'they and Israel acquiesce' to Hamas rule 'serves the same purpose.' Conservative: Dodging the Tariff Apocalypse Advertisement 'The doom that was supposed to follow President Trump's tariff revolution,' notes The Wall Street Journal's Gerard Baker, 'has so far stubbornly failed to materialize,' Yes, it's ' much too soon to celebrate,' since 'actual tariffs imposed so far' are 'still relatively modest.' And 'anecdotal, real-time and small-set data from ports, transportation companies and retailers are unsettling — they speak of the hit to come from tariffs if they aren't negotiated down or away, especially the 145% duty on imports from China.' 'But there are opportunities too: more-secure supply chains' and 'a chance to nurture high-end domestic manufacturing and reduce our financial dependency on the rest of the world.' Trump's tariff plan is 'yielding not the apocalypse that was forecast, but a set of thorny economic challenges all the same.' Culture critic: Everyone's Cheating in College 'In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments,' reports New York magazine's James D. Walsh. Collegians everywhere now 'are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education,' as they can't 'resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences.' Professors fear AI's 'short-circuiting' the learning process, yet 'the ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT.' Heck, the 'speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core.' Advertisement From the right: Biden's Decline Was No Secret 'There is an inside story' and 'an outside story of Biden's decline,' argues the Washington Examiner's Byron York after new insider revelations about efforts to cover up the then- president's 'senescence.' Both the White House and its media allies denied 'that the president had a serious problem' though it was evident to the public. 'Another way to put it would be to say that the inside story was the effort to deny the outside story existed.' Clearly, White House aides 'went beyond simple denial' while supporters in the media 'attacked those who said Biden had a problem.' Only now are Americans 'learning more about the lengths to which the Biden team and its many allies in politics and media went to conceal the truth.' Ed desk: Crimson vs. Orange Advertisement 'The battle is on between Harvard, which did not want battle, and the Trump Administration that sought it,' warns Harvey C. Mansfield at The Harvard Crimson. 'A major concern among the Trump Administration is Harvard's lack of viewpoint diversity'; 'Harvard's one-sided fondness for the left' provoked the fight. 'Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society; it's worth the money!' Yet 'to depend on the courts to defend its independence is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege.' And 'this gratuitous partisan attitude' will not 'preserve Harvard's independence' but endanger it. 'There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to share our company.' 'A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have' served the school far better.' — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
