I wish you all a happy and healthy New Year even though, as 2023 draws to a close, it seems that “the whole world is festering in unhappy souls,” to quote Sheldon M. Harnick. I know at times it seems unlikely that 2024 will be better than this one has been, but there are some reasons for optimism. I credit independent journalism, Elon Musk with his fight for free speech on the internet, and the truism that eventually reality bites for my belief that the West may be wising up to the toxic mix of Islamism, traditional anti-Semitism, and Communism. Domestically, I credit the brilliant U.S. Constitution and the good sense of our citizens for my optimism.

Israel

Without much media coverage, there are awful things going on in the world outside of Israel and Gaza. In Sudan, Mauritania, Nigeria, and Libya, Arabs are enslaving, raping, and murdering Africans. In Pakistan, 1.7 million Afghanis, many who have sheltered there for decades, were forced back to their homeland in winter, with few possessions and even fewer prospects for survival. The Ukraine-Russia war is taking an enormous toll on the lives and fortunes of civilians in both countries. This toll of atrocities against civilians is nothing new, as Matti Friedman reports, so it’s worth your time to read in its entirety. The article was written in 2014 but remains relevant today. 

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives -- that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close. 

Despite the oversize coverage of the fighting in Gaza, the psychopath Yahya Sinwar’s days seem numbered. The Hamas infrastructure is in rubble, including most of the many miles of tunnels constructed with billions of dollars of foreign aid that was meant to improve civilian life, but was commandeered to aid death-cult forays into Israel. Along with Sinwar’s demise must come the death of UNWRA, which has been fully exposed as a leading force behind Islamist terrorism in Gaza. The UN and the international press, along with our own major media, have black eyes for their role in the invasion of Israel, the butchery there, the hostage-taking -- all of it. (To take one example of many, it took 83 days after October 7 for the New York Times to finally report on the rapes and mutilations of Israeli women by Hamas.) A number of aid organizations have also exposed themselves as anti-Semites and will in time be as fully discredited. How the western press gets such reporting wrong is detailed in former AP reporter Matti Friedman’s account.

In European countries, the huge wave of Islamists and recent immigrants from Islamic countries have joined the stew of right-wing anti-Semites and communists to demand their countries force a cease-fire on Israel (that is, when they are not demanding those countries scrap their own laws and customs and replace them with Sharia law). Germany has banned such demonstrations and deported numbers of the demonstrators, France has threatened to do so, while the UK seems paralyzed to act as the streets of London are swamped with pro-Hamas and pro-Sharia thugs who beset British patriots and deface treasured national symbols. Still, there are leaders in the West whose popularity rose in defiance of these mobs:  Italy, the Netherlands, and Argentina seem to prefer rational leaders to cowards and appeasers. In any event, the demonstrators' demand for a cease-fire seems futile. The latest offer of one in return for the hostages was rejected by Sinwar.

Domestic Demonstrations

Almost simultaneously with the October 7 attack, demonstrations were orchestrated by outfits like Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, and my favorite, “Queers for Palestine.”  Many, like the three Ivy League presidents skewered by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, showed they were bamboozled by nonsense like “oppressors and oppressed,” “apartheid,” and “colonialism” to think that “From the river to the sea” -- a call for the extermination of 7.2 million Israelis (including 2 million Moslem Israeli citizens) -- was, in “context,” just free speech. This on the very campuses which regularly punished nonsensical “microaggressions,” but not actual aggression. But the president of the University of Pennsylvania was forced to resign, and serial plagiarist and poor scholar Claudine Gay at Harvard is hanging on by a thread. Likely, along with some more sweeping changes, she will not be in the same position by the end of next year. The pressure is building both at universities and corporations to reduce substantially, if not eliminate entirely, the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bureaucracies which, among other things, have fueled anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Semitic sentiments in both public and private institutions. Slowly but certainly, in my view, the demand for meritocracy will prevail, perhaps impelled by a growing number of lawsuits against outfits which endorse it. 

The public rioting and demonstrations -- at least as they attract the leftists among us -- seem to me driven by a hope to repeat in 2024 what worked in 2020. I don’t think they will. No longer confined to wreaking havoc among the urban poor, they have seriously overreached, blocking traffic to airports and bridges, and parading about the World Trade Center (yes, pro-Islamists at the WTC). They may get a frisson in their empty lives thinking they are the advance guard of a large following to redo America. Instead, they are royally enraging us. If, like me, you think the Left took advantage of the COVID restrictions to alter established voting practices and make it easier to cheat in 2020, I doubt that will work a second time. In droves, people are refusing to be ordered about by public-health bureaucracies now that we know how poorly they managed COVID and how hard they worked to keep the truth about the disease, its fatality rate, its spread, and its mitigation from being publicly known. Even Francis Collins, head of NIH at the time,

…acknowledged in the Covid discussion that the [Great Barrington Declaration which advocated against lockdowns, inter alia] could have been a great opportunity for a broad scientific discussion about the pros and cons” of focused protection. But then he blames the declaration’s authors for “short-circuiting” debate by trying to change national policy without first consulting public-health officials. Who really shut down that debate? Soon after the declaration was published online, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci calling for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premise.” Within a few days, myriad public-health associations attacked the declaration. 

Social media were pressured to label such discussions misinformation and posts relating to it were deleted and the posters locked out.  

Perhaps in recognition that the old ways of jiggering a national election may not be of use this time around, Colorado’s Democrat Supreme Court decided to remove Donald Trump from the Republican primary, though it has retreated upon appeal to the Supreme Court, saying he’ll be on the ballot unless the Court decides in its favor. Maine’s crazy-eyed Secretary of State has ordered Trump off the ballot, using an argument no stronger than Colorado’s. Any attempt to justify this as a means of saving “our democracy” sounds like the nonsense during the Vietnam war that we had to destroy a village to save it.

With something like 7 million illegals in the country now, many of whom have not been vetted, and both parties seemingly tied up in any effort to compel President Biden to turn off the spigot, it’s hard to predict how this will affect the election. Urban poor Hispanics and Blacks are protesting, and these are voters the Democrats regularly count on. A terrorist attack by any of these illegals will not help those who opened the door to their admission. And the DNC’s plan to hold its convention in Chicago, where anti-illegal immigration feelings are very strong, seems a mistake. Will the sight of Democrats fighting each other in what was supposed to be a show of unity around Biden really help drag him into the winner’s circle?

Anyway, don’t give up a hope that next year will be better. It very well may be.