What Happened: August 20, 2021

The Big Story

Today’s ‘Big Story’ is guest-written by Tablet senior writer Armin Rosen.

There is a conspicuous lack of national outrage over the murder of Shmuel Silverberg. On Wednesday, a group of five assailants shot into the windows of Yeshivas Toras Chaim in Denver, Colorado. Silverberg, a young teenager, was chased to a back door by the attackers, who forced their way inside. They shot at a rabbi, missing him, and then shot Silverberg at close range before fleeing.

The alleged attackers are blond-haired juveniles. A few of them had extensive criminal records. It is entirely possible that this band of roving sociopaths selected the yeshiva entirely at random and that the Denver police are correct when they say that this does not appear to be a hate crime. Then again, there really aren’t that many Orthodox Jewish institutions in the sprawling metro area of Denver. We’ve seen other cases like this recently. In May, 31-year-old Israeli citizen Efraim Gordon was shot to death in Baltimore in May in an act that his family says was clearly motivated by antisemitism but local police deny was a hate crime.

As a rule, U.S. media and society in general defaults to a racism-related motive whenever the member of a minority group dies at the hands of people or institutions alleged to have been corrupted by white supremacy, no matter how tendentious the allegation may be in practice. But Silverberg’s death, and the official dismissal of any hate motive, has been almost totally ignored outside of Jewish outlets and local news in Denver. Perhaps it’s natural that Borough Park-based Hamodia, with its focus on the country’s Yeshivish and more moderate Haredi communities, has already broken important details of Silverberg’s death.

But if one of the only madrassas or gurdwaras or African Methodist Episcopal churches in an interior U.S. city came under inexplicable deadly attack with no apparent robbery motive, it would almost certainly trigger nationwide outrage from media figures and public officials. It is equally unlikely that those same figures would wait for any additional facts to be established before calling for another round of national conservation and reckoning and demanding changes to public policy.

At this very moment, elite institutions of the media are actively summoning outrage over allegedly piggish comments by a would-be game-show host. There will be cause for cynicism if the killing of a Jewish teenager in a manner that would scream “hate crime” in the case of someone from any other American minority group is treated as nothing more than a parochial Jewish affair.

Read more here: https://hamodia.com/2021/08/19/yeshivah-bachur-shot-inside-yeshiva-menahel-also-attacked/

Today’s Back Pages: Weekend Reads

The Rest

The president of the United States indicated in public remarks Friday that he does not know how many Americans remain in Afghanistan. “We want to get a strong number as to how many people are there, how many Americans, and where they are,” President Biden said in a televised speech. Two immediate impressions from the speech: First, the president appeared rambling and unsure of the facts on the ground. He stated unequivocally that there was “no indication Americans can’t get to the airport.” But contrary to Biden’s assertion, there are ample indications that U.S. citizens—who must reach the airport on their own in order to be evacuated—are unable to do so due to Taliban interference and other factors. (See examples here: https://twitter.com/IanPannell/status/1428782204985937922 and here: https://twitter.com/JimmyPrinceton/status/1428756995650240513). He also appeared to contradict himself on the presence of ISIS in Afghanistan.

Finally, we must brace for the reality that as dire as the situation is now, it can rapidly get much worse. U.S. civilians still in Kabul are, for now, essentially Taliban hostages who the group can choose to release or detain as it pleases. The small contingent of U.S. troops securing the airport is vastly outnumbered. In the event that the current de facto truce degenerates into open fighting or the Taliban begins massacring Afghan civilians, the United States will be able to call on airpower and other means at its disposal, but such an outcome will be very bloody on both sides. “I cannot promise what the final outcome will be,” President Biden acknowledged in his speech.

There was no coup attempt in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, four unnamed FBI officials told Reuters. The agency has “scant evidence” of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” It’s important to ask why information vital to the public record is being leaked anonymously by individual FBI agents instead of publicly disclosed by the agency. It may have something to do with the fact that for the past six months, these riots were compared to Pearl Harbor by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) and to the 9/11 terrorist attacks by pundits such as George Will and multiple politicians, and used to justify making U.S. citizens targets of the same counterinsurgency and counterterrorism tactics that were used to such great effect in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. The myth of an organized coup attempt on Jan. 6 was used to manipulate Americans into seeing each other as evil enemies rather than fellow citizens with a different point of view. Now FBI officials admit it isn’t true.
Read more here: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-fbi-finds-scant-evidence-us-capitol-attack-was-coordinated-sources-2021-08-20/

A Scroll reader and healthcare professional who is familiar with the research on global vaccination efforts and asks to remain anonymous writes in to comment on the new booster shot initiative in the United States:

“The CDC has known Israel was doing poorly with the vaccine since mid-July but didn’t share the data with other officials. A likely reason officials everywhere are suddenly owning that the shots are failing at five months is they have to: Having taken the strategic decision to push boosters, they now have to justify it.

A viral video viewed over 100,000 times in recent days spread across social media under the hashtag #kabulairport and purported to show thousands of Afghans rushing into an airport building in Afghanistan, but it was actually taken at a Texas sports stadium in 2019.

The Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and a host of Arab countries, including Bahrain, celebrated its one-year anniversary last week. In a sign of the progress made, here’s a Shabbat Shalom message from Asma Alatwi, a Bahraini citizen who calls herself “proudly the first Bahraini [who] has a BA in literature of Hebrew & Language.” ​​

Thank you to our dear friend @asma_alatwi, the 1st Bahraini to hold a BA in Hebrew literature & language and the founder of @shemotacademy, for sharing this wonderful video in honor of #ShabbatWithAGJC!

We’re very excited that Asma will be joining us for Shabbat dinner tonight! pic.twitter.com/W7IuhwRBnc

— Association of Gulf Jewish Communities (AGJC) (@gulfjewish) August 20, 2021

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Facebook Thursday arguing that the social media giant illegally bought up competitors such as Instagram and WhatsApp to protect its advertising business. The FTC’s original antitrust case against Facebook was thrown out by a federal judge in June, who faulted the federal agency for failing to prove details on exactly how much of the social-networking market is controlled by Facebook. The FTC claims that Facebook is a competition-destroying monopoly and aims to break up the company.

It looks like new vaccine mandates in New York will disproportionately impact Black and Asian residents.

I’m perplexed by how this mandate is not being pilloried for being obviously racist https://t.co/fOnWIDiVqJ pic.twitter.com/7JXYUJHDw6

— Ellie Bufkin (@ellie_bufkin) August 20, 2021

Tell me that you’re a member of the American ruling class who holds ordinary citizens in utter contempt without telling me.

The bashing of former President BARACK OBAMA’S birthday bash is having a chilling effect on the D.C. party scene as (especially Democratic) pols and their staffers scramble to figure out when and where — or even if — they can party again. More in Playbook: https://t.co/Fh5HivK9YK

— POLITICO Playbook (@playbookdc) August 20, 2021

Australia’s largest city, Sydney, is extending its COVID-19 lockdown—which has kept residents at home since June—through the end of September.

BPThe Back Pages

Weekend Reads

Two essays about Afghanistan from the summer of 2020.

—The United States’ political and military leaders treated the war in Afghanistan like a business proposition. They did not believe in the concept of an American victory and therefore could not articulate, let alone achieve one.

This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and sta­tistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures. They believed that generating a vast machinery of lethal power, surveillance, and administration to impose order in places far outside the United States was better than devising means to manage instability in a way that would protect America’s direct interests. Many did not believe in American interests at all, a formulation that thinking people of both parties found crude and sinister through both the Bush and Obama years.

The illusions of the ruling class, who continue to tighten their control over American life, turned Afghanistan into a 20-year jobs program and money-laundering operation.

Pursuing nebulous, open-ended concepts like stability in the course of “building a new nation” in Afghanistan proved a poor sub­stitute for older ideas like victory. It did, however, create a lot of jobs through an expanding military-government-corporate-NGO admin­istrative complex that employed many tens of thousands of people whose best intentions, funded out of the war’s trillion-dollar budget, blurred the natural borders of warfare, and contributed to a state of indefinite imperial occupation.

Read it here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/data-driven-defeat-information-versus-interests-in-afghanistan/


—Now, stop and recall the furor over “Russian bounties” from last summer. Do you remember it? The claim that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers and Donald Trump did nothing about it was spread by The New York Times and The Washington Post, became the subject of enraged monologues by Rachel Maddow and cable news hosts, and was repeated by virtually every major media outlet in the United States. Except that it was all a lie. There were no Russian bounties. The point of the story was to sabotage then-President Donald Trump’s negotiations and keep the war from ending. The press, the chattering class, and the leading politicians of both parties all pushed that lie. Many of them are now cashing in with new articles and TV appearances earnestly lecturing Americans about who’s responsible for the failure in Afghanistan.

On June 26, as reports were circulating about a plan being pushed by President Trump to withdraw nearly half of the remaining 8,600 troops from Afghanistan, The New York Times revealed a secret plot that supposedly showed America’s arch foe meddling in the country’s longest war: “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” The report was vague, sourced only to anonymous security officials, and generally seemed out of place to anyone who pays attention to developments in Afghanistan. The obvious problems with the story—starting with the fact that it was brazenly planted in the press at the precise moment where it was most useful as a political weapon—seemed to only increase its momentum. It was picked up, re-reported, treated as a settled matter, and a grave scandalous crisis by politicians and pundits willing to accept any tale, no matter how politically convenient or deranged-sounding, that suggests Trump is in league with evil Russians.

Was it really that cynical? Yes, it was.

The Afghan war, like the grave threat to American democracy posed by the grand Russia narrative, serves a small ruling elite that is incapable of governing effectively on behalf of the many, but displays a superb talent for subverting the will of the democratic majority in order to stay in power and advance its own interests. Why shouldn’t we stay in Afghanistan forever? If throwing more American lives into the war is what it takes to defeat President Trump, the evil Putin-loving fascist who wants to bring the troops home, isn’t that worth it? Anyway, who’s it hurting? Not us.

Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/trump-war-afghanistan-foreign-policy