RUTHFULLY YOURS

Swedish political correctness goes into reverse as black teacher is excluded from “black film” class

The expulsion of the black trainee school teacher simply for being black is being described in the wider Swedish media as an instance illustrating that the country’s politically correct attitudes may need a re-think.

In what close observers of political correctness in Europe are describing as one of the most remarkable confusions in recent years, it is being reported from Sweden that a black student school teacher was sent out of a “black film class” for fear of prejudicing discussion among the mainly white students.

Sweden’s The Local, reported: “A Swedish trainee teacher was asked to leave the classroom because the pupils were about to discuss a film with black actors, and her presence could “inhibit the debate”.

The school’s “logic” was framed in terms of a deeply-held belief in Swedish officialdom that racial, religious and cultural groups think in terms of the groups to which they belong, rather than in terms of any given item that they are asked to talk about.

The teaching student, from Malmo University, has filed an official complaint to Sweden’s discrimination ombudsman. She said that the film had focused on criminality among young black boys. After it had been shown, the class teacher threw her out so that the students could discuss the matter without her presence getting in the way of the discussion.

“To make a long story short you could say that the school’s actions have been, to say the least, remarkable,” the student teacher, Hosana Hadgu, was quoted by The Local as saying.

Sweden is well known for taking a bizarre approach on some occasions to issues involving race, religion and culture though usually such instances reflect a hypersensitive attitude to minorities.

For example, in December 2013 the Swedish parliament removed a baroque masterpiece of a semi-naked Juno from the building’s dining room for fear of offending Muslims and feminists. The move provoked, in equal measure, hilarity and consternation among art lovers.

The expulsion of the black trainee school teacher simply for being black is being described in the wider Swedish media as an instance illustrating that the country’s politically correct attitudes may need a re-think.

Samantha Power neglects opportunity to stop Iran from gaining seat UN women’s rights body, then tweets her outrage

Has there ever been a more transparent human rights poseur than UN Ambassador Samantha Power? The self-styled “genocide chick” rose to academic prominence riding the topic of genocide (she’s against it, doncha know), formulating a doctrine she called “responsibility to protect.” Like any good marketer, she turned that into a catch-word “R2p” and played footsie with the prospect of using her slogan to justify intervening in Israel to protect the poor Palestinians who just want to be left alone so they can slaughter Jews with no counter-punching from Israel. Cultivating a glamorous persona based on her fashionable ectomorph body type and flowing long red hair, she has risen to the stratosphere of political academics.

Power definitely knows PR, but actual diplomacy and even basics of showing up are another thing. Patrick Goodenough of CNS News reports:

The Obama administration on Wednesday criticized Iran’s election to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) – but neither the U.S. nor any other delegation objected when given the opportunity to do so, thus allowing Iran to get the seat “by acclamation.”

Iran will now serve on the CSW, a body dealing with gender equality and the advancement of women, for another four-year term, having already been a member since 2011.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power took to Twitter to express her views: “Yet again Iran unopposed & was ‘elected’ to Commission on Status of Women. Given record on women’s & human rights, this is an outrage.”

But Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman for four U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. during the George W. Bush administration and is a close observer of the world body, was unimpressed with her reaction.

“Ambassador Power can tweet her outrage after the fact all she wants,” he said. “She should have been in the room for the vote and demanded a secret ballot rather than allow an automatic acclamation by her silence.” (snip)

… had just one ECOSOC member objected to Iran’s candidacy, a secret ballot vote would then have been called. And had Iran not received the required minimum 28 votes, that would have allowed another member state from Iran’s regional group, Asia, to step in as an alternative.

Yet neither the U.S. nor any other member of ECOSOC objected. Other democracies on the council include 13 European nations, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and India.

A webcast of the ECOSOC session shows just how the process unfolded.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Treatment to stop epilepsy development. Attacks of epilepsy that have been brought on by head injury could be prevented using a new treatment developed by a team including scientists from Ben-Gurion University. In laboratory tests, Losartan (marketed as Cozaar) significantly cut down seizures.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/blood-pressure-drug-could-end-injury-caused-epilepsy/

Genetic-engineered tissue to repair muscle injury. For the first time ever, Israel Technion scientists have transplanted engineered muscle tissue containing major blood vessels to repair a damaged abdomen. The breakthrough may lead to full abdominal surgery in humans using laboratory-generated tissue.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Technion-breakthrough-Transplanting-of-engineered-tissue-to-repair-muscle-injury-348040

The DNA on/off switch. Hebrew University of Jerusalem geneticists have identified how different species of animals can have so many identical genes. Genes are silenced by on/off patterns in the epigenome. They also explain how twins with identical DNA sequences can have so many different characteristics.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16953

What gene silencing can achieve. Weizmann Institute graduate Leemor Joshua-Tor describes her research which includes the discovery of a protein that can destroy defective genes in the RNA that are responsible for viruses and diseases such as macular degeneration and cancer.
http://www.newsday.com/business/executive-suite-leemor-joshua-tor-1.7537860

Hypoparathyroidism treatment gets US boost. Israel’s Entera Bio has obtained orphan status from the US FDA for its oral treatment for hypoparathyroidism (decreased function of the parathyroid glands). The condition results in muscle cramping, twitching, or involuntary contraction, and several other symptoms.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-dna-biomedical-jumps-on-orphan-drug-status-1000933656

Radio waves treatment for Barrett esophagus. Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center now offers radiowave treatment instead of surgery to eliminate abnormal cells and prevent the development of cancer in patients suffering from Barrett esophagus. Instead of 10 days’ hospitalization, patients go home the same day.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Health-Scan-Radio-wave-treatment-instead-of-surgery-for-Barrett-esophagus-349921
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The world’s top producer of in-cab mobile terminals. Israel’s Micronet supplies half a million terminals for fleet vehicles such as trucks and taxis – more than any other manufacturer. The company’s new A317 model just released now allows users to run apps developed for Android-based tablets.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tablet-firm-is-top-mobile-terminal-maker/

Belt protects against radiation. Israel’s Stemrad has developed a belt to protect first responders from gamma radiation – for situations such as the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The belt protects the pelvic area, where most of the body’s renewable bone marrow is concentrated.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Israeli-company-develops-radiation-belt-for-nuclear-emergencies-347862

Israeli radar to protect South Korea from the North. A team of South Korean military and acquisition officials has been dispatched to Israel to purchase low-altitude surveillance radars capable of detecting small, unmanned drones from North Korea. South Korea recently discovered three UAVs near the border.
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20140409000962

The cutting edge of desalination. British trade journal Global Water Intelligence has bestowed its top awards on Israel’s IDE Technologies. Initiatives such as the Soreq plant and the Carlsbad project “will ensure that IDE remains at the cutting edge of the desalination industry for at least another four decades,”
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-ide-wins-award-for-sorek-desalination-plant-1000933165

Israeli scientists spring-clean the planet. To mark Earth Day, Weizmann Institute’s latest e-magazine includes the work of Professor Berkowitz who has transformed toxic chemicals in water into harmless compounds. Also Professor Bayer who designed bacteria that turns waste paper into sugar. And much more.
http://www.weizmann-usa.org/e-news/14-04/landing/spring-cleaning-for-the-planet.htm

An app to make you enjoy music. Weizmann graduate Yuval Karminka found that 85% of non-musicians wish they had learned to play a musical instrument. He then founded JoyTunes that produces popular music learning apps that encourage the novice musician to advance in their practicing.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3028711/whos-next/piano-hero-how-joytunes-makes-young-musicians-actually-like-practicing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn_b_bcX3tg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwJUFdEXPAc

Israelis get their jabs. The vaccination rate among Israeli children is among the world’s highest and the availability of free immunization is among the best the world, the Health Ministry announced during World Immunization Week. About 95 percent of babies and children receive routine vaccinations at well-baby clinics.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/95-percent-of-Israeli-children-get-their-recommended-vaccinations-350313

“Love of the prophet requires hatred of the Jews,” the Moroccan Muslim cleric al-Maghili (d. 1505) declared, as quoted by Dr. Andrew G. Bostom’s latest book Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran. Bostom’s masterful compendium shows that al-Maghili’s sentiments are hardly rare in Islam, making a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran a nightmarish threat for Israel and beyond.

The “civilizational war waged by Shiite and Sunni jihadists” today is “consistent with Islam’s classical jihad theory,” Bostom demonstrates with copious quotation of Islamic theological sources and historical primary sources. Of 40 Koranic references to jahada or “struggle,” the Arabic root of jihad, for example, 36 address violence, according to one study. “Muhammad himself,” normative canonical Islamic accounts indicate, “was the ultimate prototype sanctioning jihad terror.” Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna therefore had a “seamless connection” to “traditional Islam itself,” as his translated writings show.

Additionally, “orthodox Islamic jurisprudence” holds that “non-Muslims peacefully going about their lives—from the Khaybar farmers whom Muhammad ordered attacked in 628, to those sitting in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01—are complicit.” In particular, Muhammad the “Muslim prophet-warrior developed a penchant for assassinating individual Jews and destroying Jewish communities by expropriation and expulsion… or massacring their men and enslaving their women and children.” Only humiliating submission to Islam and its “blood ransom jizya poll tax” per Koran 9:29 can spare Jews and Christians as dhimmis this fate.

A “central antisemitic motif in the Koran… decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews… for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah.” The “Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is… a litany of their sins and punishments.” A “sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” even appears in Koran 5:64. “Sunni dogma” in particular holds the black-Jewish Abdullah ibn Saba “responsible… for promoting the Shiite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s political innocence.”

Jews under Muslim rule had to observe the “rightful bounds” of a “subjected relationship,” even “in mythically ‘tolerant’ Muslim Spain.” When Granada’s Muslim rulers appointed Jewish grand viziers, the “results were predictably tragic” in 1066. Pogroms claimed 4,000 Jewish lives, more than those lost 30 years later during the First Crusade’s Rhineland passage. Today, “Zionism… has posed a predictable if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order, jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews, of unprecedented, even apocalyptic magnitude.”

News Media Ambush Cliven Bundy
…and sucker-punch “conservatives.”

First, the purpose of this column is neither to confirm nor deny that I agree with Cliven Bundy’s purported “racist” remarks, as reported in the New York Times. That is a fabricated issue, and in a court of law would be an objection-rich leading question. Unlike many politicians and media names who supported Bundy’s defiance of the Bureau of Land Management’s paramilitary raid on Bundy’s ranch and the theft and slaughter of many of his cattle, I’m not going to “distance” myself from the man and what he stands for, which is the courageous stand he has taken against a looters’ government. There is no good reason to sneak off and hide in a corner.

No, the purpose of this column is to castigate all those supporters who turned tail and beat a hasty retreat in order to placate those who are the true “racists” of our time: the liberal/left. After all, no one can risk criticizing any facet of the welfare state or the political establishment without now being called “racist” by the liberal/left.

Tom Roten, who interviewed me on his radio show on April 25th, observed that it took the New York Times several days to concoct its “racist” charges, which were insinuated on its April 23rd article, “A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side,” because Bundy’s remarks were made and recorded on April 19th.

Rand Paul, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, and other “conservative” voices – such as the “Young Conservative” site – ought to have known better. They speak often enough on the subject of how the liberal/left media look for a chance to smear and denigrate individuals whose ideas go counter to the prevailing received liberal/left wisdom ,and will stoop to any tactic to accomplish the marginalization or even elimination of opposing viewpoints. They ought to have been able to spot a set-up and call it for what it was.

No, they ran like rabbits. You wonder if they’re as smart as they claim to be. Instead, they fell for it as well as did Cliven Bundy, but not as innocently. Paul, Hannity, Van Susteren, and the others have the luxury of crafting their statements.

Many among the dysfunctional family of nations would still rather have us out of their sight than see us where we are, sovereign in our own land.

Strangely, to gauge the depth of the family of nations’ predisposition against the family of Israel, we should embark on a detour to faraway Guyana, or as it was once known – British Guiana. The forgotten “New Balfour Declaration,” that earmarked that crown colony as an alternative to the Jewish National Home in this country, is particularly relevant on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It encapsulated all the “goodwill” that the family of nations could once muster toward the beleaguered Jewish people. Things are still no better.

Yesteryear’s Guiana unexpectedly contextualizes the ongoing unique bias towards the Jewish state today and its depiction as an outlaw occupier (even in tiny stretches of its own homeland, directly contiguous to its own miniature independent domain).

Indeed, the bias that preceded the very founding of the Jewish state pretty much foreshadowed the antagonism it would arouse decades later.

That antagonism doesn’t derive from aversion to Israel’s supposed strength (i.e. our so far insufferably successful self defense). It fulminated most shamefully when the Jewish people couldn’t conceivably have been more helpless – on the eve of the Holocaust. Worse yet – this antagonism wasn’t merely rife in the Third Reich. It also thrived among the democracies, even if in a sinisterly duplicitous guise.

In Germany, anyone who read Hitler’s Mein Kampf was in no doubt about what’s in store down the line. Concentration camps already operated; Jewish heads were busted in the streets; Jewish businesses were vandalized; Jewish property was robbed; Jewish books were burned; Jewish children were kicked out of school; all Jews had to don yellow-star patches and add either Sara or Israel to their Germanized given names.

Nonetheless, this didn’t really change churlish attitudes towards Jews in democratic societies, though it annoyingly ramped up the discomfiture quotient. Jews were attempting to escape and the free world resented them for knocking at its gates. The British Foreign office, in rare candor, referred to them as “unwanted Jews.”

Fiendishly mocking western hypocrisy, Hitler tauntingly invited the flustered democracies to shelter his Jews, if they were so fretful about them. He knew that for all their feigned piety, these countries wouldn’t take his provocative dare.

The Brandeis University administration professes to be deeply concerned about the rights of black Africans.

In the 1980s, it divested its holdings in companies that did business with the South African apartheid regime. In 2000, it invited Bishop Desmond Tutu to give its commencement address, despite Tutu’s long record of hostile statements about Jews and Israel.

So when the news broke April 14th that 100 black schoolgirls in Nigeria had been kidnapped by an Islamist militia “to use as cooks and sex slaves” (as The Associated Press put it), one would have expected the Brandeis campus to be up in arms.

Eager students should have been circulating petitions in front of the cafeteria and collecting spare change to purchase food packages to send to the hostages.

High-minded professors should have been digging out their magic markers to create picket signs demanding action to save the girls from their Islamist abductors.

Amateur folksingers should have been holding impromptu concerts in the middle of campus to raise awareness of the plight of these “cooks and sex slaves.”

The Brandeis administration should have been announcing that it would be giving an honorary degree to an African woman who has been outspoken against Muslim extremist violence against black women in Africa.

Oh, wait. They did that already.

Chloé Simone Valdary on Her Passionate Defense of Israel — on The Glazov Gang
An African-American Zionist discusses her love of the Jewish state — and the Left’s vicious and racist attacks on her.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/chloe-simone-valdary-on-her-passionate-defense-of-israel-on-the-glazov-gang/

How long will we, as a society, tolerate the proactive propagation of harebrained, hazardous hallucinations-irrespective of how demonstratively detrimental they are to the security of the state & safety of its citizens?

The real question is not whether the Palestinians are willing to accept some semantic formula having to do with the Jewish state, but whether they are ready to accept the Jewish state itself. This question is raised in all its gravity by the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel for the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants… Israel can live without any semantic recognition of the Jewish state, but not with this demand. Is the Palestinians’ current position their final word? The only way to put this to the test is by submitting a peace plan that would offer the Palestinians a viable state on the basis of the 1967 lines, with a right of return to the Palestinian state, but not to Israel. Because the present Israeli government will not produce such a plan, the United States should.

– Alexander Yakobson, “Jewish state – Semantics versus the real thing,” The Jerusalem Post, April 17.

Don’t you get it? They don’t want peace. They want victory. We should want the same.

– JPost reader “rebaaron” in a talkback to Yakobson’s article.

This is not an article for those weak of stomach. It approaches bluntly – some might say brutally – most searing issue of today, one that threatens to rip apart the fabric of Israeli society. However, the topic must be broached boldly, without allowing the niceties of politically correct protocol to blur the issues.

The legitimate limits on free speech

Dancing at the Abyss: What Beirut’s Debutante Ball Says about Lebanon

Car bombs are a fact of life and the civil war in neighboring Syria continues to flood Lebanon with refugees. Nevertheless, the Debutante Ball in Beirut takes place every year. Wealthy Lebanese families from across the globe send their daughters to waltz on the brink.

Is it because of 3/4 time, that sweetly narcotic sound of the waltz? Or perhaps due to the white, elbow-length gloves, ball dresses and tiaras? As Beatrice, Nadine and Layal walk up the staircase — smiling as they hold up the shimmering folds of their gowns — they seem lost in reverie. Even the rebellious Gaelle, with her braided armbands and shorter hair, says what everyone is saying: how excited she is to be a princess for an evening. And all in white!
The annual Debutante Ball at the legendary Casino du Liban in Beirut, complete with pomp and pirouettes, is the highlight of the Lebanese ball season. The women spend hours putting on their dresses and getting them to hang just so, each of the garments designed by a different local fashion designer. The preparations, including dancing lessons for the debutantes and their beaus, have gone on for months. And for the last few days, local residents were worried about whether the airport would be open, and whether some attack might make the whole affair seem irreverent. But everything went well this year. The ladies on the ball committee, the management, so to speak, are smiling, and chairwoman Regina Fenianos is issuing her final orders.

That some might find a ball like this, in light of the situation in the country, a bit galling is nothing but a misunderstanding, says Fenianos. Though the circumstances are serious indeed: Opposing camps in the north are firing at each other almost daily, car bombs explode frequently in the south, the economy is in free fall and a fifth of Lebanon’s current population is made up of refugees from the Syrian civil war.

“We know what’s going on,” Fenianos said at the dress rehearsal on the day before the ball. “But we are showing the real Lebanon! We have been holding this ball for 16 years and nothing can stop us, neither crises nor bombs. We also danced in 2006, two months after the war with Israel!”