Free Republic

Hamas’s unprecedented invasion of Israel would in “no way” have transpired under the presidency of Donald Trump, according to world-renowned military historian and professor Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, who also argued that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine and China would not have sent spy balloons over the U.S., as he urged America to take back its international standing. Speaking on former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson’s “Conversations” podcast Wednesday, Dr. Hanson suggested that “to his credit,” former President Donald Trump demonstrated American deterrence and determination through his assassination of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani and destruction of...

Hamas has always repelled most of the civilized world. But the world was either too scared or too woke to say just that. But now Hamas’s premodern violations of all human norms have relieved most nations of any pretense of having to support it—at least for now. “Necklacing” and “baby burning” were its most recent contributions to its standard terrorist repertoire of hostage-taking, raping, beheading, and executions. Most people will now hope Hamas gets what it deserves, while elites offer empty platitudes about “ending the cycle of violence” and “proportionality”. As for the “world community” of the UN, the Davos...

If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from a military response, the United States will have to change radically its policies in the Middle East. In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers. < SNIP > That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election...

The Biden administration is furiously trying to contextualize its past, unsupportable policies that have sown global chaos, especially in the Middle East. But the more it spins, the clearer its culpability. Does it really believe that the long-agreed-upon U.S. green-lighting of $6 billion in sanctions relief to Iran has had no role in Iran’s terrorist support of Hamas, whether psychological or material or both? Do they think we are that stupid? < SNIP > Americans should not listen to what Biden’s team now conveniently says, but instead to what it actually does in the upcoming weeks when it is under...

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends. (video in link below) https://youtu.be/2V6jH-6F6K0

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large. Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent. Europe still remains the most popular tourist spot on earth. Its hallowed architecture, art, infrastructure, and natural beauty still remind millions of visitors of the world’s once most dynamic and grandiose civilization. Even now, European nations, in and out of the Europe Union, still produce a combined gross domestic product of $24 trillion, second only to the United States. Europe’s exports are among the...

Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, political commentator, and farmer. He says cultural Marxism inside our major institutions and American weakness abroad have led to chaos around the world. Victor joins PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to provide clarity about the wars in Ukraine and Israel and give insight into the collapse of America’s borders and universities.

It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe. Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life. College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of...

Israel's conventional disproportionality is proving more effective than the terrorist disproportionality of Hamas. Proportionality in war is a synonym for lethal stalemate, if not defeat. When two sides go at it with roughly equal forces, weapons, and strategies, the result is often a horrific deadlock—like the four years of toxic trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I that resulted in 12 million fatalities. The purpose of war is to defeat the enemy as quickly as possible with the least number of causalities—and thereby achieve political ends. So, every side aims to find superior strategies, tactics, weapons, and...

One of the many satanic paradoxes of the Third Reich’s architecture of the Final Solution was the requirement—mandated after the 1939 outbreak of the war—that Jews anywhere under German rule or occupation had to wear a yellow badge or armband with the Star or David. Yet was not all this elaborate bureaucratic need for identification embarrassing to the Nazi apparat? After all, if Nazi doctrine about supposedly manifest Aryan “racial” superiority—Nordic looks and build, superior intelligence, stable disposition—were so persuasive, then why the need for Jews to identify themselves? In contrast, the Star-of David IDs were prima facie proof that...

U.S. President Joe Biden is caught in a quadfecta of corruption, cognitive decline, a failed agenda and eroding polls. Amid this apparent vacuum, an opportunistic Barack Obama, who used to be more discreet in managing his third term, is re-entering the arena. Last week, he came out as the overseer of the Biden administration’s AI agenda, even as his foundation’s “Democracy Forum” was warning Americans about the need for “inclusive capitalism” and the pathologies of “material consumption”—all this from a multi-mansioned multimillionaire. Now, Obama is weighing in on the Gaza war by undercutting his third-term presidential proxy. Yet just as...

Continued existence of small and vulnerable countries hinge on Western alliances and support. The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people. The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the...

Peruse campus literature. Watch clips from university protests. Scan interviews with pro-Hamas protestors. Read the chalk propaganda sketched on campus sidewalks. Talk to raging students in the free speech area. And the one common denominator— besides their arrogance—is their abject ignorance. Take their following tired talking points: “Refugees” We are told that the Palestinians after more than 75 years of residence in the West Bank and Gaza are “refugees.” If that definition were currently true, then, are the 900,000 Jews who were forcibly exiled from Muslim countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia after the 1947, 1956, 1967...

The best way of understanding it is that Israelis are Jews and the ancient plague of anti-Semitism is again sweeping the globe. There is something surreal, even sick about the current Gazan war. Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop “Free Palestinian from the River to the Sea.” More recently, they are also yelling, “Israel, you can’t hide, we caught you in genocide.” Consider the hypocrisy of that dual messaging. Hamas and its supporters are openly and eagerly calling for the genocidal end of Israel by...

The tragedy is that realist deterrence is moral, while naïve appeasement is immoral. Classical diplomacy warns leaders to be neither obsequious and appeasing abroad, nor gratuitously boastful and hard-headed. The usual advice is don’t-tread-on-me resoluteness, or what Teddy Roosevelt characterized as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” The alternatives – whether “speak loudly and carry a twig,” “speak softly and carry a twig,” or “speak loudly and carry a big stick”- are far worse. Our current diplomats have unfortunately forgotten that golden mean of guarded language backed with credible warnings of overwhelming force. And the result is a verbal...

Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century AD empire celebrated their newfound “diversity” of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals. These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it. Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire. Ironically, Rome’s prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians...

Before graduating, students should demonstrate a minimum competence in math, science, and general knowledge. The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large. Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education. Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world,...

Iranians have little clue they are one stupid missile volley, or one reckless intervention away from a devastating Western response. Iran understandably believes it is riding quite high. It is flush with cash. It hints it almost has the bomb—and might use it soon. The Iranians are bragging about their new tyrannical allies like Russia and China. Iran boasts of now being the self-proclaimed leader of jihad on behalf of all Muslims. It gloats that it is feeding the Russian war-machine by exporting its own drones. Tehran proudly supplied and funded Hamas’s savage murdering of Jewish children in Israel. It...

As Hamas goes, so with it go many of the following related Western pretensions. The Passions of 9/11, Redux It has been 22 years since we saw crowds throughout the Middle East celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians—and since newspapers had daily “idiot watch” notices of American intellectuals defending radical Islamist mass murderers. And now the madness is back again, and we are witnessing the recrudescence of normalizing radical Islamic terrorists abroad. I suppose the theory is that no one in America cares much about radical Islamists foaming at the mouth, whether abroad or here. And the result is that...

Ever since Hamas was “elected” to run Gaza and then followed the usual “one election/one time” Middle East formula, it has bragged nonstop that its agenda is to erase Israel off the face of the earth (cf. the wall map in the office of our Rep. Rashida Tlaib). Its unabashed nihilist boasts resonated throughout the Palestinian “movement.” Its fiery threats delighted the Arab street. Indeed, Hamas was soon celebrated as the most “authentic” of the radical Palestinian terrorist movements. Which cadre of thugs could top its end-of-days rhetoric, its assured and steady supply of money and weapons from Iran, its...