Pun Salad

We noted the craven takedown of Michael Ramirez's anti-Hamas cartoon at the WaPo the other day. (You can also see the cartoon itself there.)

Ramirez gave an interview to the Washington Free Beacon, relating the process by which (a) WaPo's editorial page editor, David Shipley, personally selected the cartoon to publish, only to (b) succumb to internal pressure to take it down. And Ramirez's cartoon above reflects his thoughts on the matter:

The WFB article provides confirmation that baseless accusations of "racism" are today's last refuge for scoundrels.

Also of note:

• Because of course she did. Damien Fisher takes a look at the latest twitterings of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: UNH Professor Compares Hamas to Jewish Victims of Nazi Germany. And the current state of play at the University Near Here:

  Jewish students at the University of New Hampshire say they are feeling fearful as the anti-Israel slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is heard across the campus and swastikas appear on the walls. The chant was also heard at an anti-Israel rally in Manchester on Saturday, along with attacks on Israel as an “apartheid state.”

  Thus far, New Hampshire’s elected officials are largely standing with Israel. All four members of the state’s federal delegation have condemned the use of the “from the river to the sea” language, and Gov. Chris Sununu has declared the phrase “nothing short of requesting another Holocaust.”

  But New Hampshire’s far-left activists denouncing Israel are getting support from some members of the UNH faculty, including a nationally-known progressive academic who is using her large social media following to attack Israel as an “apartheid state” and to compare Hamas terrorists to the Polish Jews who fought Nazi SS troops during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

  Assistant Physics Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is paid close to $100,000 a year to teach physics and gender studies at UNH. In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that claimed the lives of 1,400 people and injured another 3,400, Prescod-Weinstein has kept up a flurry of anti-Israel posts on the X social media site. Her feed, which has more than 115,000 followers, includes denunciations of what she calls Israel’s “setter colonialism” and defenses of antisemitic Rep. Rashid Tlaib (D-Mich.)

  Frankly, I don't think Jewish students have a lot to worry about at the University Near Here. (Unless they are unfortunate enough to be enrolled in one of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's courses.) It's not as if UNH is MIT, after all. But (these days) claiming that you're "feeling fearful" is probably the most effective method to get administrators to sit up and take notice of you. Otherwise…

  Fisher shares one of CPW's more bonkers tweets:

  The people in charge are those who would have condemned the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 🤦🏽‍♀️

  — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (@IBJIYONGI) November 9, 2023

  You are invited to read the Wikipedia page about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and try to find any similarities between that and Hamas atrocities.

• Some praise is due. Robert F. Graboyes provides Profiles in Courage from Left of Center.

  After the Hamas barbarities in Israel on October 7, the verdict is in: in America, antisemitism, tolerance of antisemitism, and cowering before antisemitism are primarily phenomena of the political Left, not of the Right. The evidence is stark, self-evident, and overwhelming, with few if any plausible arguments to the contrary. My recent column, Intellectual Tyrants Beget True Believers, explored the depraved enthusiasm of leftist academicians, students, and activists for last month’s live-streamed orgy of murder, torture, rape, kidnapping, and beheading of innocents. I honestly do not envy the honorable Left’s urgent, painful task of liberating themselves from the large, perverse fifth column in their midst.

  An upcoming Bastiat’s Window essay will elaborate on why I say all of this, but today’s column celebrates those on the American Left who have already shown backbone and moral clarity and deserve loud and sincere thanks. There are too many to name, but I will highlight Representatives Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Ritchie Torres; 22 Democratic members of the House of Representatives (including Wasserman-Schultz and Torres); Senator John Fetterman; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I especially recommend watching Clinton’s 8-minute tour de force discussion on TV’s The View.

  My own CongressCritter, Chris Pappas, was one of those 22 Democrats mentioned. Good for him. New Hampshire's other representative, Annie Kuster, meekly avoided the issue.

• We need an Endangered Liberty Act. A very good Reason article, out from behind the paywall, and try not to fall asleep reading the title: The Endangered Species Act at 50. The author, Tate Watkins, shows how "unintended consequences" of a few stray lines in the legislation have actually worked against taking species out of danger.

  Fun (and interesting) fact:

  In the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark fascinated Americans with tales of a "verry large and a turrible looking animal, which we found verry hard to kill." The grizzly bear became easier to kill over subsequent decades, and state and federal bounties helped fuel efforts to get rid of it. The grizzly population in the Yellowstone region bottomed out at 136 bears in 1975, the same year that all lower 48 populations of the species were listed as threatened.

  Since then, it has largely rebounded. The Yellowstone grizzly now numbers an estimated 1,063, more than double its recovery target of 500. Yet efforts to delist the population in 2007 and then 2017 both failed due to litigation from environmental groups.

  "It's recovered under any metric we look at," Tom France of the National Wildlife Federation said after the last attempt to de-list the population. "We should consider it a great success." But WildEarth Guardians sued to challenge the delisting. Now, even as Yellowstone National Park touts that grizzlies "have made a remarkable recovery," the bears there remain listed and, technically, unrecovered.

  For the statist, "success" is maintaining and increasing government regulatory power.