Keir’s pathethic Palestine fantasy, the politics of hate and other commentary

From the right: Keir’s Pathetic Palestine Fantasy

“If you want a state, kill some Jews,” grumbles Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “recognition of a State of Palestine while Hamas continues to hold half-starved Jews in its dank tunnels.” “The Foreign Office has already updated its maps of Israel and the Palestinian Territories to reflect the PM’s decree that a State of Palestine should exist,” but: “Do these people think it’s still the 1920s and puffed-up ministers in London’s opulent offices of state have the ‘right’ to redraw the map of the Middle East as they see fit?” Starmer says Palestinian statehood “is about ‘keeping alive’ the hope of peace.” Yet he “has taken action that directly boosts the moral fortunes” of “Jew-killers” as he and his allies “fantasize that the violent haters of the West can be pacified with pieces of political fruit.”

Campus watch: The Politics of Hate

Knowing how to “disagree respectfully” is important, agrees John Ellis at The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t address what “political hatred on college campuses is about, or what it is doing to us.” If it were just about “political differences,” then being “more tolerant” would be fine. But a dichotomy between “a group of people who are wronged and another who are the wrongdoers” dominates college campuses. “In this kind of politics, hatred isn’t a matter of style” but the essence of ideological positioning. “If you ask a campus radical to give up hating, you would be asking him to give up his political framework.” It is unclear how long America can “tolerate a system of higher education that is poisoning” the nation.

From the left: Let Haters Fail on Their Own

“Don’t do it, President Trump,” pleads Racket News’ Matt Taibbi: don’t let FCC Chair Brendan Carr “turn the federal government into broadcast media police,” as it would end “the spectacle of people like Jimmy Kimmel suffering” — “the greatest Schadenfreude robbery in history.” If Carr follows through on his threats to enforce vague, decades-old broadcast “standards,” we’ll be stuck with “already-dispatched figures like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert reanimated and turned into martyrs.” Please, “Let the dead sleep, instead of waking them and forcing citizens like me to defend them.” Step back: “The market is doing its job, in a big, funny way. Why put a stop to that?”

Libertarian: Free-Speech Culture Besieged

“The true foundation for free speech in the U.S. has always been a culture that supports unfettered expression,” argues J.D. Tuccille, but now “it’s obvious that free speech culture is besieged.” Some celebrate Charlie Kirk’s murder, while Attorney General Pam Bondi “threatened to crack down on ‘hate speech,’” and FCC Chair Brendan Carr “leaned on ABC to fire a comic who got mouthy about Kirk.” Siccing the government on people over speech, once “championed by the illiberal left,” is now “a position also taken by the nation’s top cop.” Most Americans still support “free speech for everybody,” but “a sizeable” 41% think it should be curbed in some cases. The First Amendment “won’t be enough if its foundations in the culture continue to erode.”

Eye on Africa: Christian ‘Cleansing’ in Nigeria

“It has been a harrowing year for Christians in Nigeria,” laments The Free Press’s Josh Code. “Since 2009, Islamist extremists in northern Nigeria have destroyed more than 18,000 churches and killed over 50,000 Christians nationwide,” plus “another 5 million Christians have been displaced within the country.” This year, “over 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed.” Some US lawmakers have called the murder and persecution of Nigerian Christians ‘religious cleansing,’” but the State Department has yet to classify Nigeria “as a ‘Country of Particular Concern.’ ” Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced a bill making that designation and “imposing sanctions on officials there.” Sadly, Western media “coverage of the persecution of Nigerian Christians has been sparse and grim.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board