Fast Takes: Reality confronts anti-Zionists, Dems’ damning ‘affordability’ record and other commentary

Conservative: Reality Confronts Anti-Zionists

“Every facet of the ‘genocide’ accusation against Israel has fallen apart,”  thunders Commentary’s Seth Mandel, including “claims of genocide, deliberate starvation/famine, mass targeting of journalists, and others.”

It was all “a global propaganda scheme on a scale we’ve probably never seen before,” as the “villainous portrayal of Israel during the war was exactly backwards.”

Beware: “Acclimating to reality will be disorienting” for the “Hamasnik cult” as it awakens, for “even the purveyors of the Big Lie are finding” facts “difficult to avoid.”

The word “genocide” usefully “stopped you from having to defend your worldview.”

Now that “reality is steadily intruding” on mythology, “adherents of the anti-Israel propaganda cult” will let us know if “we all can in fact inhabit reality together.”

From the right: Dems’ Damning ‘Affordability’ Record

Democrats are out to “capitalize on voter frustration with inflation by running on ‘affordability,’” note The Wall Street Journal’s editors, yet inflation rose an “average 5% a year during the Biden years,” significantly higher than in either Trump term.

Indeed, even “as inflation heated up in 2021, Democrats urged the central bank not to raise interest rates.”

And now Dems “want to raise the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage to $15 or higher,” though “businesses pass on higher wage costs to consumers to the extent they can.”

Recall, too, that Democrats said Obamacare “would reduce healthcare costs”; instead, “premiums for employer plans have roughly doubled since 2010.”

Hoping life will be “more affordable under their policies is indulging hope over expensive experience.”

Female athlete: We Must Stand Up for Each Other

When her “softball team lost in the semifinals of the Minnesota state tournament,” Kendall Kotzmacher recalls at Fox News, she felt “devastated, confused, and hurt” — because “the opposing team was allowed to put a boy in as the pitcher on a girls’ team”; that also let it go on “to win the girls’ high school state championship.”

The “consequences” of letting boys play in girls’ sports “didn’t stop with [her] team,” because “at the elite level, one tournament can change a player’s future.”

Though lectured in college that “a person could identify as another gender by adopting stereotypes associated with the opposite sex,” she now understands that “when adults fail to protect girls, girls can still find the courage to protect one another.”

UN watch: Nix This Awful Sec-Gen Candidate

The straw poll showing Guyana’s ambassador to the UN, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, coming in close second for UN secretary-general  “should ring alarm bells in Washington,” warn Ben Cohen & Richard Goldberg at The Hill.

“Although Guyana is a U.S. ally, Rodrigues-Birkett’s positions are more aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, the Cuban regime and Hamas.”

E.g., as “the U.S. is attempting to maintain dominance in the AI sector,” she “has endorsed China’s newly launched World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.”

Washington calls for the “disarmament of Hamas”; she accuses “Jerusalem of executing a ‘veritable genocide.’”

The US sees Cuba as “a totalitarian regime”; she says Havana’s “been kind to everyone.”

The United States has the power to “veto a recommendation to elect Rodrigues-Birkett. It should do so, even if that comes with protests back in Guyana.”

Border beat: ICE Proves ‘Quiet’ Does the Job

“This summer ICE racked up the largest numbers of arrests of illegal aliens ever recorded” — and did it “without the theatrics” of Kristin Noem’s Minneapolis mess, cheers Mark Krikorian at Commonplace.

While the left “howls” that those deported are “not exclusively the ‘worst of the worst,’” recent data “suggest that about half those arrested by ICE in July were convicted criminals” or facing pending charges.

Yet the administration should “make clear that ordinary illegals have to be removed” too, because “there’s a reason we have limits on immigration.”

Then again, “the lowest-key way of shrinking the illegal population is self-deportation,” where “ICE isn’t involved at all.”

— Compiled by Seth Barron & Abigail Hennessy