Well, Roger Cohen of the New York Times thinks so, pointing out in a new op-ed the increased blurring of lines between dislike of Israel and dislike of Jews, as well as the increasing acceptability of slurs against Jews in both British and American academia. And Cohen, like me, always has to include in his articles a caveat about the bad things that, we agree, are done by the Israeli government, including the support of illegal settlements. But the malfeasance of the Israeli government does not justify demonizing Jews, just as the perfidies of ISIS or Saudi Arabia doesn’t warrant the demonization of Muslims. Yet Jews are regularly murdered by terrorists simply for being Jewish, regardlessof their views on Israel.

One can argue about Israel’s right to exist, or whether we should have a refuge state based on Judaism. (Of course, much of the Middle East comprises states not only undergirded by…

The line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is nearly invisible—if it exists at all—but was surely crossed by the behavior of students at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), where Harvard emeritus law professor Alan Dershowitz, a liberal Democrat, recently spoke on Israel. His October 11 talk was called “The liberal case for Israel,” and was sponsored on campus by Berkeley Law, Bears for Israel, and the Chabad Jewish Center.

As Dershowitz reported yesterday at the Gatestone Institute, his talk was not a one-sided pro-Israel talk, but called for an end to occupation as well as a two state solution:

I was recently invited to present the liberal case for Israel at Berkeley. In my remarks I advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state and a negotiated end of the conflict. I encouraged hostile questions from protestors and answered all of them. The audience responded positively to the dialogue…

On 12 June 2003 a minor constitutional revolution began with the resignation of Lord Irvine as Lord Chancellor and the announcement of a package of reforms including the abolition of his office and the creation of a Supreme Court, later to become the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 (CRA). To commemorate the tenth anniversary of these events, the Judicial Independence Project held a private seminar on 12 June 2013 at which some of those directly involved in the changes spoke about the experience and the effects it has had on constitutional change. A note of the seminar is available here. In part the seminar brought out the drama and the comedy of the day itself. An old friendship ended in acrimony: Irvine had been the Prime Minister’s pupil master and had introduced him to his wife. At the same time the senior judiciary, at an away day with civil servants…

Scottish offshore wind project [image credit : urbanrealm.com]
Electricity bill payers are in effect subsidising work that’s being exported round the world while promises of so-called green jobs for Scottish workers, and the government’s own ’emissions’ policies, are forgotten or ignored. The irony being that the high cost of UK electricity – and rising due to renewables – is part of the problem.
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A trade union has called for a halt to new offshore wind farms until a local supply chain is established, says The National (via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

GMB London echoed the growing anger from GMB Scotland after it was announced last week that contracts to supply turbine jackets for SSE’s offshore wind farm, Seagreen, in Angus, were awarded to firms in China and UAE.

The decision meant Scottish firm Burntisland Fabrications (BiFab) was left overlooked in favour of companies based…

German energy policy is a fiasco; the so-called energy transition is a debacle. Germans suffer the highest power prices in Europe, all thanks to an obsession with intermittent wind and solar.

When the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, Germany is forced to import huge volumes of power from its neighbours, particularly nuclear-powered France and coal-fired Poland.

Then, when the sun’s up and breezes return, awash with power it cannot possibly consume, Germany slashes its prices and dumps the stuff on its neighbours.

The result is power market chaos, as No Tricks Zone reports.

German Electricity Imports Hit New Record, Rise 43.3 Percent in First Half Of 2020!
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
16 September 2020

You would think that with all the added wind and solar energy in Germany, along with all the conventional power plants on standby, all totaling up to huge unneeded capacity, there would be…

Reading the latest edition of The Chicago Maroon, our student newspaper, I saw an op-ed about self care by Ada Palmer, an associate professor of History. I’m not going to write about that; her piece is pretty straightforward and empathic towards our students, who will be having a rather stressful semester. Rather, when I looked Palmer up, I saw that she’d written a review two years ago in Harvard Magazine of Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Always interested in how my colleagues regard Pinker, in arguments for empiricism and rationality, and intrigued by the title of her piece, I read her piece. You can, too, by clicking on the screenshot below.

It turns out that Dr. Palmer likes Steve’s book, but has two reservations. The first is that Steve argues that humanism, which is a handmaiden of atheism, is the…

Dr Martin Spychal, research fellow on the Commons 1832-1868, reviews Robert Poole’s Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford, 2019)

What drove 400 volunteer soldiers and special constables to murder 18 and maim nearly 700 of their fellow Lancastrians? This is the key question that Robert Poole’s definitive and illuminating Peterloo sets out to answer. As Poole states in his prologue, ‘two hundred years on, it is still possible to be angry about Peterloo’. Thanks to this revealing, tragic and at times harrowing thick description of one of the pivotal moments in the development of Britain’s democracy, Peterloo will continue to make future generations of students, teachers and general readers angry about the events at St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819.

Those massacred at Peterloo formed part of an unarmed, peaceful crowd of around 40,000 children, women and men assembled to hear…

It was predictable. Inevitable, even.

It was all but certain that news accounts and reviews of Rage, Bob Woodward‘s latest book about Donald Trump and his presidency, would credulously recite the hardy media myth that Woodward’s Watergate reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Not he: didn’t bring down Nixon

Sure enough, news outlets in the United States and abroad summoned the mythical trope — a trope that even Woodward has tried, occasionally, to dampen as absurd.

An editorial in the Detroit Free Press, for example, described Woodward as “famed for having brought down former President Richard Nixon.”

The New York Post, in reporting last week that Trump found Rage “very boring,” referred to Woodward and his Watergate reporting partner at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, and declared they had “brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.”

The Toronto Sun likewise asserted that the

Yesterday I criticized the University of Chicago’s English Department for repeatedly changing their “Faculty Statement of 2020” without ever telling readers that they’d done so. That’s not a huge misstep, though it’s unethical and should not have been done by—of all organizations—a Department of English.

But the New York Times has been far more unethical in a simiular way: changing what it said about the 1619 Project’s aims without letting the readers know.  It also does other dubious things, like employing fact-checkers whose fact-checks are ignored, as well as ignoring correct criticisms from historians on all sides of the political spectrum. And its dug in its heels when historians offer corrections that should have been made.

An example of historical sleaziness is the Project’s assertion that the Revolutionary War in America was fought because the colonists wanted to ensure the continuation of slavery in their new country. The evidence for…

A Plethora of D-Day Books

I have an obsession with D-Day.

Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t begin to give you a rational answer.

As a first-generation American citizen born to two immigrants from Colombia, I don’t have any personal connection to the Second World War. Yes, Colombia joined the Allies (then called the United Nations) in 1943, and it made its own contribution to the war effort against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan. However, unlike Brazil or Mexico, my parents’ homeland did not send an expeditionary force to either the European theater or the Pacific, and my dad, who in 1944 was a 25-year-old pilot learning…

There is no area of human endeavor, be it scholarship, art, science, or technology, that is immune from modern accusations of systemic racism. It’s almost funny how far the woke can cook up accusations, often without evidence, that an area is afflicted with bigotry and exclusion.

The latest victim appears to be Beethoven—not just the man and his work, but specifically the Fifth Symphony, which the authors below, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, indict for exclusionism and, curiously, for “regularizing” classical music concerts so that concergoers have to be polite, well dressed, and adhere to the rule not to make noise. Their article is in Vox, which gets considerable circulation, so you can’t claim that this is just a pair of cranks sounding off.

Well, that may well be accurate, but these cranks have cred. Sloan is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California, while

The pre-election event I most feared has happened. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died.

Her now-empty seat on the Supreme Court has the potential to polarize our deeply divided nation even further. The last Supreme Court confirmation hearings were so poisonous I nearly quit Facebook. I saw Christine Blasey-Ford called a “lying skank,” and Brett Kavanaugh called a rapist and a “rich white man throwing a fit because for the first time in his life, he might not get what he wants,” by people who’d never met them and knew absolutely nothing about them except which political team they were batting for. I watched Senators whose job was to discover the truth instead using their time to showboat and create soundbites for their bases.

How did something as fundamental to our system of government as seating Supreme Court justices become so contentious? Why are Republicans like Lindsey Graham willing to…