Foreign desk: Biden’s Settlements Slap at Israel
If Israeli settlements in the West Bank are a priority problem, President Biden had years to bring it up, The Wall Street Journal’s editors note. “Instead, he waited until Israel was under attack to pile on” and campaign against them. The change — his secretary of state called them “inconsistent with international law” — came “in the lead up to Tuesday’s Michigan Democratic primary, in which Arab-American groups sought to embarrass the President. Some coincidence.” Yet the issue is “complicated”; US policy has generally viewed it as “political, to be resolved in final-status negotiations.” Ronald Reagan rejected the idea settlements are illegal, as did every other president until Barack Obama. They deserve “real consideration, not one-sided declarations to meet Mr. Biden’s political needs while Israel is at war.”
Campus watch: Berkeley Must Expel the Thugs
At a Berkeley event where Israeli soldiers were set to speak, thunder Greg Lukianoff & Angel Eduardo at The Free Press, “student protesters descended on the building” shouting “Intifada, intifada” and allegedly hurling antisemitic epithets. “The mob got their way. The event was canceled.” “This has to stop.” “Violence is not extreme speech, but the antithesis of speech.” Indeed, “the distinction between speech and violence is one of the greatest intellectual developments in the history of civil society.” If students who “violate the norms of free inquiry, open discourse, and freedom of speech on campus are not disciplined,” they will do it again and again. Campuses must have “no tolerance at all for violence” — and “any students who took part in the violence should be expelled.”
Education beat: Saving Kids from Failing Schools
At a tiny school in Mississippi’s Pine Belt, “Black children excel regardless of family income,” cheers Bob Woodson at The Hill. For more than 100 years, “students from the same backgrounds as those struggling through Chicago and Baltimore public schools flourish here.” Piney Woods School pupils thrive “because the school provides a comprehensive moral and intellectual education” and the students have “fully bought into a culture of excellence modeled by teachers they love and trust.” Despite suffering “hardships at home,” students still “attain excellence.” Instead of another fad reform, “we need to cultivate a commitment to excellence, self-sacrifice and virtue.” “We can offer children from even the direst of circumstances the hope of a rigorous education” — and we must.
Culture critic: RIP, a New York Original
“It happened last week,” observes CBS News’ Jane Pauley, “the deaths of three people from very different walks of life.” Besides comedian Richard Lewis and “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Culhane, the New York native and designer Iris Apfel, who “called herself a ‘geriatric starlet’” and “signed a modeling contract” at 97, died at 102. She “rose to fame in the 1950s and ’60s as an interior designer, including on a number of White House restoration projects, eventually working for nine presidents, from Truman through Clinton,” but became a “trendsetter” in later life thanks to her “bold fashions and saucer-size eyeglasses.” As she once said: “When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else.”
From the right: Make Russia Fund Ukraine
“The United States must become more creative in searching for alternative means of supporting Ukraine,” indeed “the West should provide Ukraine with some or all of the nearly $300 billion in assets that have been seized since Russia’s February 2022 invasion,” argue the Washington Examiner’s editors. Western governments have discussed the “possibility of just this asset transfer” but have “failed to make progress,” as “Germany fears that transfers of seized assets will provoke Russian retaliation,” and “France fears oligarchs viewing France as a dangerous place to park their yachts.” But “if the West is incapable even of enabling Ukraine to use oligarchic wealth to protect its people and political sovereignty, that will say much more about the West than it does about Putin’s threats.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
