Wall Street financiers are pressing elite schools to condemn criticism of Israel. Amid pressure, the University of Pennsylvania on Sunday issued a statement referring to Hamas’s attack as terrorism. …

Though some complaints — like that from Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers — were made in public, the most intense demands have come behind the scenes from Wall Street financiers who make up a powerful block of donors to schools including the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Stanford University and Cornell University.

In conversations with The New York Times, more than a dozen donors said they felt they had a right and an obligation to weigh in. Some of the donors who discussed the matter asked not to be named, because they did not want to speak publicly on a rapidly evolving issue that has elicited death threats on both sides. Some, but not all, of these donors are Jewish, though they hold a range of religious beliefs and not all have a history of being active in pro-Israeli causes.

Years of fund-raising campaigns have led the schools to hew ever closer to this big-moneyed group: Harvard, whose endowment has swelled to nearly $51 billion, named its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after Mr. Griffin [who is not Jewish].

…

At the universities, students have pointed out that the longstanding blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, among other factors, has led to a level of desperation in the tightly packed area, roughly the size of Philadelphia. But students’ responses, too, have varied — from expressions of sympathy for citizens on both sides of the divide to the suggestion that the Hamas attack was a justifiable form of resistance….

Mr. Griffin is a high-profile supporter of Republican causes while other outraged alumni, billionaire financiers Seth Klarman and Lloyd Blankfein, give largely to Democrats.

And this, re the well-heeled Park Avenue Synagogue:

By the time Cosgrove asked his flock to pull out their phones on Shabbat, the congregation had already raised $16 million for the UJA-Federation of New York’s Israel Emergency Fund, responding to a Hamas-instigated war that has now claimed 1,300 Israeli lives. The overall campaign has raised over $75 million for supporting residents in Southern Israel as well as hospitals, soldiers and their families and humanitarian services for Bedouins and Arab Israelis and more. Rabbi Cosgrove invited those in the pews, and those watching the livestream at home, to add to the pot to reach the symbolic number of $18 million. (The Hebrew word for life – chai – is made of the 8th and 10th letter of the alphabet.)

From the ADL:

With our hearts still aching for our brothers and sisters in Israel, we must also direct our attention to the threats here at home.

I am writing to ask for your support as we head into a heightened period of tension, anger and risk for Israel, and for Jews in the U.S. and around the globe.

Support ADL’s Work NOW

The massacre of over 1,400 Israelis by Hamas comes at a time when Jews are already feeling vulnerable in this country and around the world because of the rise of antisemitic vandalism, harassment and assaults.

This vulnerability intensifies in times of conflict in the Middle East, when Jews here are targeted for actions by and against the state of Israel. Anti-Israel activists at rallies in the streets and on campus are shouting their support for Hamas’s unspeakable actions. We have seen banners justifying the atrocities and calling for more violence against Israel. Against Jews.

Both fringe-left groups and white supremacists are openly cheering Hamas’s hate-fueled attack. Some of these extremists are spreading misinformation and amplifying calls for violence against Jews.

…[We] have our work cut out for us. According to the ADL Center on Extremism, the number of anti-Israel and antisemitic incidents is starting to climb. And our experience shows this has only just begun. …

And Christians United for Israel (I was hoping to find the CUFI ads that are playing on conservative news channels, but can’t find any): 

I was innocently reading my New York Times last week when I was startled by this ghastly headline:

“Judge Let Abusive Parents Keep Daughter. Days Later, She Was Dead.”

As we shall see, this wasn’t a mistake; it was the logical consequence of a demented ideology that demands “reuniting” helpless children with their psychotic parents.

See if you can spot any telltale signs that Ella Vitalis should not have been sent back to her parents, Johnson Vitalis and Lafeyette Browne, ever, under any circumstances, even if they were the last people on Earth.

Ella first came to the attention of the authorities last year when she was just 3 weeks old and police, responding to a domestic violence call, found her with two broken ankles, a fractured skull and a brain hemorrhage. The parents had no explanation for any of this.

Child welfare authorities promptly placed both Ella and her 1-year-old brother, Liam, in foster care with their grandmother.

Just a month later, Ella’s father was left alone with her during a child visitation and, in that short amount of time, managed to slice the little girl’s tongue with a “sharp object,” requiring her to be fed intravenously for six days.

So far, Ella’s parents had spent a total of three weeks and a few hours with her, during which time she ended up with multiple broken bones, a brain hemorrhage and a bloody, mangled tongue.

So naturally, when family court judge and de Blasio appointee Erik S. Pitchal was assigned Ella’s case this past August, he ordered the children to be “reunited” with their parents. What a happy homecoming that must have been!

Over the next month, Ella’s parents managed to avoid sending her to the hospital, but judging by the cuts and bruises found on her body in September, it was not from lack of trying. The parents blew off all five follow-up appointments with child welfare specialists, so in September, case workers returned to court and again asked Judge Pitchal to remove the children.

He denied the request. (If only they’d said the parents were objecting to Ella becoming a transgender!) The next day, her parents delivered the fatal blow, striking Ella’s head with a blunt object, leaving her unresponsive. They explained to authorities that the welts all over her body resulted from her “drinking too much milk.” After five days on life support, she died.

Who could have seen that coming besides anybody? One of the judge’s defenders, Gladys Carrion, a former children’s services administrator and currently a senior fellow at the Columbia Justice Lab (and apparently a world-renowned expert on circling the wagons), told the Times, “This is not an exact science.” It’s not “science” at all. It’s having the common sense of a basset hound.

Most people have no idea, but the obsession with keeping “families” together is another zany progressive cause. Part of the reason is that godless liberals who dismiss religion as a bunch of hocus-pocus believe there’s some mystical, supernatural connection between kids and their biological parents — even if the parents are Charles Manson and Lizzie Borden.

But a big reason are those fatal words, capable of annihilating everything in their path: “Disparate impact.” It seems that Black parents are more likely to abuse their kids than White parents. As put by NBC News/Pro Publica last year, inspired by “the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice nationwide, family rights activists have made a renewed push to change the child welfare system — including the repeal of the [1997 child safety law].”

(They’re great people, aren’t they?)

Before the “rights activists” dismantle another basic pillar of civilization in the name of “social justice,” let’s pause to remember why the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act was passed in the first place.

In 1996, Sister Josephine Murphy, who worked at St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, appeared before Congress, begging members to reconsider the “families first” policy of the Family Reunification Act and replace it with “children come first.”

Here’s a portion of her testimony:

“Alice, a little 2-year-old who had to have stitches for vaginal lacerations because she had been raped. Kathy, 2 weeks old, came to us with gonorrhea of the throat. Pam, who at 15 months of age suffered from venereal warts. She had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend and needed surgery because of it. Surgery was scheduled, but before it took place, she was discharged to her mother and right back to the same situation.”

A report by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect listed some of the ways children had been killed by their parents in 1993: Here are a few:

2-month-old: force-fed fatal amounts of Epsom salts and liquid antacids;

5-month-old: scalded to death;

1-year-old: beaten with shoe heel;

2-year-old: severely beaten after bed-wetting;

3-year-old: forcibly hung by neck;

7-year-old: bludgeoned to death;

8-year-old: stabbed in heart.

At that time, about 1,200 to 1,500 kids were being killed by their parents every year. After passage of a law putting kids’ safety above keeping “families” together (and avoiding racial stereotypes!), that number was cut in half. Today, about 700 kids die at their parents’ hands every year.

Under Joe Biden’s active, hands-on leadership, progressives are getting everything they’ve ever wanted. They’ve flung open the border, emptied the prisons, embroiled the nation in faraway wars and established anti-white racism as our national creed. Giving homicidal parents a “second chance” is surely coming up on the agenda.

Let Ella Vitalis’ hideous death remind Americans why we shouldn’t let progressives anywhere near child welfare laws.

COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER