What Happened: August 13, 2021

The Big Story

President Biden has been resolute in recent days that stopping the Taliban is no longer the United States’ responsibility, but that has left U.S. officials trying to bribe the Islamist group to prevent attacks on the small group of Americans left in Afghanistan. There are roughly 5,000 Americans left in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as the Taliban captures one city after another and the Afghan National Security Forces collapse across the country. The Pentagon has also deployed close to 8,000 soldiers—3,000 to Kabul and the remainder in Kuwait as a quick reaction force—to assist in securing the embassy. That leaves the United States trying to avoid a humiliating replay of the 1975 Fall of Saigon, when advancing North Vietnamese troops forced the United States to hastily evacuate its embassy by helicopter, without being pulled back into the war. In an effort to manage an orderly exit from Afghanistan amid the chaos engulfing the country, Zalmay Khalilzad, the top U.S. diplomat negotiating with the Taliban, is holding out future funding as an incentive to keep the group from attacking the U.S. embassy. “Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government,” The New York Times reported on Friday. The appearance of U.S. officials pleading with the Taliban and attempting to buy them off is unlikely to gain leverage over the group or to convince other actors in the region, such as China, Russia, and Iran, that the United States is able to effectively secure its vital interests in the region.

Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/us/politics/taliban-afghanistan-us-embassy.html

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

The first challenge to vaccine mandates to reach the Supreme Court was shot down on Thursday. Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied a challenge from eight students at Indiana University who objected to their school’s vaccine requirement. The decision establishes a legal precedent in what is sure to be an ongoing battle over the power of institutions to require their members to be vaccinated. Currently, it’s estimated that more than 670 colleges and universities have vaccine mandates in place.

A record-breaking number of migrants illegally crossed the U.S. southern border in July. Typically, border-crossing attempts decrease during summer heat waves, but this year the massive influx of migrants that started with President Biden’s inauguration actually increased. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called it an “unprecedented number of migrants” after Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended more than 200,000 people at the border last month—including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children, surpassing the monthly record set in March. Mayorkas also said that more migrants are testing positive for COVID-19. On July 28, The Scroll reported that 50,000 illegal immigrants detained at the border were released into the United States without a court date and told to report on their own to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Maybe the best reason to believe science is to avoid looking foolish.

This is how you “facebook scientists”sound to actual scientists. pic.twitter.com/4Oz59BBsVI

— Sean Boog (@SeanBoog) August 10, 2021

Newly unearthed video footage of Hunter Biden purportedly shows the president’s son in 2019 telling a prostitute he hired in Las Vegas that one of his laptops was stolen by Russian drug dealers. Not the laptop on which the video of Biden and the prostitute was found, mind you, but a different laptop containing explicit sexual content that Biden says on the video was being used against him in a blackmail plot by the Russian drug dealers. Those claims come from an article in The Daily Mail that contains excerpts from the video, such as Biden telling the woman he’s with that he believes the stolen laptop might have been used to target his father and now-president, Joe Biden, as part of a foreign intelligence operation. Scroll readers will recall that former president Donald Trump was also at the center of stories concerning Russian espionage operations and allegedly compromising sex tapes. But whereas in Trump’s cases these rumors, which were repeatedly disproved, received round-the-clock media attention, the Hunter Biden tapes, for which there is actual video evidence, were suppressed by the media, declared “disinformation,” and banned by social media companies in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

But Hunter Biden is not only a spoiled playboy whose drug habit and sex tapes might have led foreign intelligence operatives to the president—he’s also a bad artist who is getting ready to exploit his name and the general indifference to his corrupt scheming to sell stale paintings inspired by nihilism and grift for $500,000 a piece.

Airbnb nearly quadrupled revenue in the second quarter this year, rising to $1.3 billion from $335 million over the same period last year. That puts Airbnb 10% above the pre-pandemic revenue recorded for the second quarter of 2019. But the company is bracing for another downturn, expecting that the bottled-up demand for travel and leisure may get corked again by new COVID-19 restrictions.

The U.S. failure in Afghanistan by the numbers.

Afghanistan

20 years of nation-building

2,312 US soldiers killed, 20k + wounded

$2.4 trillion spent -- $114,285 for every person in the country, at the time we arrived

Collapses immediately upon the start of withdrawal

— John Robb (@johnrobb) August 12, 2021

Following similar policies implemented by Israel and Germany, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized COVID-19 vaccine booster doses for people with compromised immune systems. Most vaccinated people who become infected with the highly transmissible Delta variant of the novel coronavirus report experiencing only mild symptoms.

A few more trends worth knowing about from the latest census data, aside from the top-line story that the U.S. white population declined for the first time in the country’s history: The biggest demographic increase was among people identifying as multiracial, which grew by 276% between 2010 and 2020. The census also shows that all 10 of the largest U.S. cities grew over the past decade. Phoenix is now the fastest-growing big city in the country, as the Sunbelt metropolis with a growing tech sector attracts both new immigrants and people moving out of California. 

The Back Pages:

Weekend Reads

—Stacey Goldman appeared destined for the rabbinate. As a young student, she excelled in the study of Hebrew and Chumash. At 12 years old, she put on tallit and tefillin and started reading from the Torah—mitzvahs that Judaism traditionally reserves only for men. The year of her Bat Mitzvah was the first year that the Conservative movement decided to ordain women as rabbis. Then she went to a secular college where her women’s studies classes made her even more committed to becoming a rabbi as a way to overcome the patriarchy. But when she started the process, something changed. She was pulled from Conservative practice toward more traditional Orthodox Judaism. That’s when she started to question her quest to become a rabbi.

When I entered rabbinical school two years later, I knew it was a mistake. This was apparently also clear to some of my classmates, as someone anonymously told the dean that I was not putting on tefillin every morning. The act that was once so beloved to me at various times during my teenage years had become anathema. It made me feel claustrophobic; just thinking of the binding process made me short of breath.

Read it here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-i-stopped-wearing-tefillin/


—Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur attempts to tell the full story of Sheikh Jarrah, one of the most physically and symbolically contested neighborhoods in the world’s most physically and symbolically contested country. Gur tries to surround the place that became an international rallying cry in the May war between Israel and Hamas, seeing it from every side.

Seventy-two years after that initial purchase, in the throes of the 1948 war, the Jews at the site were forced to flee their homes out of fear of Jordanian and Palestinian violence. (Sheikh Jarrah was the site of the April 14, 1948, massacre of a convoy of Jewish doctors and nurses headed to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.) By war’s end, Sheikh Jarrah, including its Jewish enclaves, was under the control of Jordan’s new military occupation of the West Bank.

Fast forward a few years…

It hardly needs to be said that none of the above is any comfort to the Palestinian families in the neighborhood who have spent the better part of five decades fighting for recognition and against eviction in the Israeli courts. They are not Israeli citizens. They do not feel protected by the institutions of the Jewish state, and they do not really believe that the ideologically driven private Jewish groups suing for the properties and bent on their displacement are not backed by the Israeli state.

The legal fight over the properties began almost immediately after the passage of the 1970 law, which both recognized Jordanian title transfers and allowed Jewish former owners of East Jerusalem properties to reclaim those properties in cases where the Jordanian custodian had failed to transfer ownership.

And then a few more years:

Then came the next dramatic turn in the case, when the fight over the Sheikh Jarrah homes left the narrow confines of a tragedy-riddled land dispute born in the chaos and displacement of war and became part of a broader battle over identity, demographics, and the future of Jerusalem.

In 2000, an Israeli corporation called Nahalat Shimon Ltd. was established as a subsidiary of a Delaware-registered American corporation also called Nahalat Shimon. Three years later, in 2003, Nahalat Shimon Ltd. bought the rights to the Sheikh Jarrah plots from the by-then mostly defunct Jewish trusts for some $3 million.

Read it here: https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-sheikh-jarrah-anonymous-actors-and-an-absent-state-have-created-a-powder-keg/


—Ah, the fact checkers, those guardians of liberal democracy. What’s that you say, “The Co-Founder of the Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under a Fake Name”? I’ll be damned. Defund the fact checkers!

Mikkelson’s alias flies in the face of the site’s mission, once described by The New York Times as “a quest to debunk misinformation online.” It also highlights his penchant for trolling, something he was known for in the early 1990s, when he posted on Usenet forums under the handle “snopes.” At that time, he was so strongly associated with trolling—even tricking advice columnist Ann Landers into running several prank letters—that the practice was sometimes referred to as “snoping.”

Similar pranks and allusions to trolling are littered throughout Snopes’ site. For example, a section called “The Repository of Lost Legends,” which forms the acronym “TROLL,” contains spoof fact-checks with titles like “Mister Ed Was a Zebra.” Another article, “Do People Swallow Eight Spiders Per Year?” which was penned by Mikkelson as a lesson to readers to always check their sources, includes reference to nonexistent tech columnist “Lisa Birgit Holst,” whose name is, in fact, an anagram for “this is a big troll.”

Read it here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson