Mideast desk: Bidenites’ Disastrous Delusions
“Until last week, the Biden administration considered its approach to the region a success,” notes Eli Lake at The Free Press. “After this weekend, the administration’s Middle East strategy is in tatters.” Blame “the self-delusion among our foreign policy establishment.” Recall that in 2021, Biden’s State Department “sought to release more than $360 million to Palestine despite concerns that at least some of it would go to Hamas.” And now the administration “has done a deal with Hamas’s most powerful and important patron,” Iran. The real delusion? “The one that has led so many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment to think that with enough patience, engagement, and money, fanatical regimes like those in Tehran and Gaza can be enticed to join the civilized world.”
Urban beat: Behind the Shoplifting ‘Epidemic’
“Shoplifting has become an epidemic,” frets The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. Thieves “no longer need to hide their behavior.” “Shops themselves forbid staff” to stop them. “Organized criminal enterprises recruit drug addicts” to steal, and “smash-and-grab mobs overwhelm store employees.” “It’s all a product of a growing social dysfunction born of the abandonment of broken-windows policing.” Indeed, today, “quality-of-life offenses,” like “treating a sidewalk like a toilet,” are no longer enforced; “lawlessness has become routine.” “The law-abiding and lawbreaking alike know that the cops aren’t coming to the rescue.” Worst of all, shoplifting is “only one part of today’s urban dysfunction.”
Eye on Albany: NY Needs Regulatory Reform
Gov. Hochul “made a nice end-run around one of the state’s messiest bureaucracies” when she OK’d letting bars serve Buffalo Bills fans last Sunday morning as the team played in London, but Albany “still needs to get serious” about New York’s archaic liquor rules, grumbles the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. The State Liquor Authority “regulates virtually every facet of alcohol sales and consumption”; business owners are “reluctant to criticize the SLA” for fear of losing their livelihoods. Last year, Hochul “called for a ‘policy-neutral’ overhaul of liquor laws” to make it “easier for businesses to comply” with SLA regulations, yet a state commission composed of industry players opposed any “meaningful” reform — with one member noting, “the current system works great!” Businesses “struggling to survive” — and so “fearful of criticizing it publicly — would beg to differ.”
Conservative: Flunking a Basic Moral Test
“A whole lot of people are proudly, loudly announcing for all the world to see that either they see the state of Israel and its people as the moral equivalent of the butchers of Hamas, or they outright are rooting for Hamas,” thunders National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The Democratic Socialists of America “insist that the Hamas massacres of civilians were ‘not unprovoked.’ ” Asks Geraghty, “What did that Holocaust survivor in a wheelchair who was dragged off to Gaza do to ‘provoke’ Hamas, other than exist in a world where a whole bunch of hateful maniacs wish they could eradicate the Jews?” Rep. Ilhan Omar and the rest of The Squad “couldn’t come out and say, ‘You should not massacre kids. You should not rape women. You should not parade kidnapped children before cameras.’ This is the most basic moral test imaginable.”
From the right: Antisemitism Rages on Campus
In the wake of college students’ support for Hamas’ attacks, the Washington Examiner’s Zachary Faria fumes: “There is not another area of life in which antisemitism is more acceptable, and indeed even more praised, than on college campuses.” Harvard groups signed a letter claiming “they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,’ ” Columbia students defended “the slaughter . . . calling the Israelis, not the bloodthirsty antisemitic terrorists, ‘extremist,’ ” and “Students for Justice in Palestine at Northwestern University essentially said the massacre was self-defense.” All three schools consider “themselves to be indispensable in shaping the future leaders of the country,” yet “all three contain a number of students who not only are pro-terrorist and pro-Hamas massacring Jewish civilians but will proudly put out statements to publicize that fact.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
