RUTHFULLY YOURS

As yet more evidence that academics are regularly able to engage in what George Orwell sardonically referred to as “doublethink,” “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” this month 40 professors of Jewish studies published a denunciation of a study that named professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”

While the 40 academic “heavyweights” claim they, of course, reject anti-Semitism totally as part of teaching, they were equally repelled by the tactics and possible effects of the AMCHA Initiative report, a comprehensive review of the attitudes about Israel of some 200 professors who signed an online petition during the latest Gaza incursion that called for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars—academics the petitioners claimed were complicit in the “latest humanitarian catastrophe caused by Israel’s new military assault on the Gaza Strip.”

“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative and authors of the report.

Calling “the actions of AMCHA deplorable,” the indignant professors were insulted by the organization’s “technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences,” something which, they believe, “strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built.” That is a rather breathtaking assertion by academics; namely, that it is contrary to the core mission of higher education that ideas and instruction being publicly expressed by professors cannot be examined and judged, and that by even applying some standards of objectivity on a body of teaching by a particular professor “AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and,” as academics who do not want the content of their output to actually be examined for the quality of its scholarship are always fond of saying, “has a chilling effect on research and teaching.”

Only in the inverted reality of academia could a group of largely Jewish professors denounce a study which had as its core purpose to alert students to professors who have demonstrated, publicly and seemingly proudly, that they harbor anti-Israel attitudes, attitudes which unfortunately frequently morph into anti-Semitic thought and speech as part of discussions about Israel and the Middle East. Since the individuals named in the report teach in the area of Middle East studies, they are also likely to bring that anti-Israel bias into the classroom with them, and students, therefore, would obviously benefit from AMCHA’s report.

The nation of Canada is reeling today from a brutal terrorist attack in the capital city of Ottawa that claimed the life of Canadian reservist Nathan Cirillo. The attacker has been identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a 23-year-old convert to Islam, who was killed by authorities as he opened fire inside the Canadian Parliament. The incident comes just two days after two Canadian soldiers were deliberately struck by a speeding vehicle driven by another Islamic convert, leaving one soldier dead. The twin attacks have demonstrated that even the unassuming nation of Canada is not immune to the threat of Islamic terrorism, which once again has been allowed to flourish under a lax regime of global leadership.

Shortly before 10 a.m. Wednesday morning, Zehaf-Bibeau, using a keffiyeh to cover his face and brandishing a long-barreled rifle, approached the Canadian National War Memorial, dedicated to the memory of Canadian soldiers who have lost their lives in defense of the country. Corporal Cirillo was standing watch at the Tomb of the Unknown solider when he was shot in the abdomen by Zehaf-Bibeau at point-blank range. Zehaf-Bibeau then ran to the Canadian Parliament, where he was killed following a shoot-out with authorities.

Cpl. Cirillo, a 24-year-old father, was rushed to the hospital, but tragically succumbed to his injuries. A parliamentary guard sustained a gunshot wound to the leg during the attack and is said to be recovering.

Warning signs for Canadians have abounded in recent weeks. In early October, reports broke that an ISIS-connected terrorist plot had been thwarted by authorities. Two separate intelligence agencies warned Canadian law-makers that the threat of Islamic radicalism inside the country was growing. However, officials ultimately downplayed the idea that an any attack was imminent. Nonetheless, less than a week ago the government quietly raised the domestic terrorism threat level to medium for the first time in four years.

I have trouble with political labels. I understand they are convenient for political reasons, but they miss the essence of the individual. Compartmentalization works to the advantage of politicians, pollsters and the media, and fits a nation sickened with attention deficit disorder. Instant messaging and Twitter feeds are the way we communicate. Interviews are relayed to viewers in sound bites, designed to fit the political philosophy of the cable station or network running them. Political ads run thirty seconds. Since the principal goal of a political candidate is to get elected, he or she would rather mimic the polls. The last thing any politician wants to do is explain a complex situation that requires thought and reason. Either they don’t understand the problem, or they believe we are incapable.

As humans, we are complex. After almost seven years of writing this column, I thought it useful to more fully explain my beliefs regarding inequality. I get pegged and boxed like everyone else. Some may be surprised; others not, but in fairness I thought this digression worthwhile.

The question of equality is on everyone’s mind. My belief is that the world is Schumpeterian. Change is always with us, and for the most part, the new and the better knock off the old and less viable. There are obvious exceptions, but, on balance, change is healthy. There are times when change is slow and other times when it is revolutionary. We are living through one of the latter periods. But change is also destabilizing. It puts at risk, as do all evolutionary forces, those least capable of adapting.

Inequality is our natural state. There have always been utopian dreamers who have sought a world that was totally equitable. But men and women differ intellectually, physically, emotionally and in their character and aspirations. Some are diligent and hard working; others are careless and lazy. Cynically, both Communism and Nazism promised redistributive equality, but obviously delivered something far different, including oppression and forced inequality.

Our nation was founded with the principle of equality under the law, which is a right, and with the promise of equality of opportunity, which is a worthy, but ultimately unattainable, goal. Some are born to wealth, others to poverty; some to homes with book-lined walls, others to the illiterate; some in cities, others on farms. As a society we can set goals of equal opportunity, but we mislead when we promise what can never be realized.

The state, though, does have a responsibility to ensure that the stairway to social and financial success is available to all. The mark of a fair society is the ease with which intelligence, aspiration and hard work make that escalator accessible.

An expert witness says blacks and Hispanics are “less sophisticated voters” who can’t figure out how to register.

Attorney General Eric Holder has waged a litigation war against voter-ID laws as well as state efforts to reduce early-voting periods and eliminate same-day voter registration. These practical reforms, he huffs, are intended to suppress the votes of minorities. But the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and a number of civil-rights groups against North Carolina over such measures is unintentionally revealing. The filing makes it clear that these self-appointed champions of minorities have a thoroughly patronizing attitude toward black and Hispanic Americans.

As John Fund has succinctly explained, early voting, a relatively new phenomenon, is a bad idea for several reasons. It increases the expense of campaigns and elections, diffuses the effectiveness of get-out-the vote efforts (potentially hurting turnout), and encourages voters to cast ballots before they have all the relevant information about candidates. Same-day registration is a recipe for fraud, since it prevents election officials from checking eligibility and the accuracy of voter-registration information before the voter casts a ballot.

There is no constitutional right to either early voting or same-day registration. Indeed, many states have neither. Failure to offer these options does not constitute racial discrimination, nor is it discriminatory to shorten an early-voting period to ten days (from 17), as North Carolina has done. Early voting is a costly administrative headache for election officials. That reducing it is de facto racism is the bizarre claim being pushed by the U.S. Justice Department, the NAACP, the ACLU, and others in their suit against North Carolina.

Why are such measures supposedly discriminatory? According to the “experts” hired by the Justice Department and the NAACP to testify in the North Carolina lawsuit, they’re discriminatory because African Americans are “less sophisticated voters” and can’t figure out how to register and vote. No, really, that’s what they said.

America’s inept response to Ebola indicates that we’re vulnerable to biological weapons.

Americans should be grateful that it is only Ebola we are dealing with right now. After all, compared with other viruses, the Ebola virus is more difficult to transmit, and the contagion period corresponds with outward symptoms. Other viruses are far more contagious, and their contagion periods occur when sick persons show no symptoms.

As has been the case with the multiple attempted terrorist attacks that failed only because of operator error, our government’s prevention and response efforts to the Ebola virus leave much to be desired. Better to be lucky than good is a nice cliché, but it cannot be how America faces a 21st century fraught with danger.

Recall, it was just a few months ago that a raid in the Middle East produced a laptop with significant details on how to develop and use biological weapons. We could minimize al-Qaeda’s ability to weaponize viruses, but the Islamic State has too many people and too much funding for us to take the possibility of a biological threat lightly any longer.

The response thus far to the Ebola virus indicates that the federal government has done too little over the last decade to prepare for a biological event in America. The fumbled issues we see reported on the nightly news were well known by the federal government.

Beginning 15 years ago, the federal government used a national full-scale exercise program to identify issues in preventing and responding to a wide variety of terrorist threats. As a senior official in the Bush administration, I oversaw the national exercise program, TOPOFF 3, in 2005. In TOPOFF 3 we tested the federal, state, and local response to a pneumonic plague in New Jersey.

Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, many of the threats we currently face are self-created.

In October of 1962, America worried whether an untried young president, John F. Kennedy, could keep us safe from nuclear-tipped missiles from nearby Communist Cuba.

Today’s October worries are more insidious: the Ebola virus, the macabre Islamic State, a tottering stock market, a bellicose Russia, and a crisis of confidence in our government.

Much of what the Obama administration and the Centers for Disease Control initially swore about the Ebola virus proved false. The virus really did infect Americans at home, despite assurances that there was “no significant risk.” There always was a danger of infected West Africans entering the U.S. The CDC protocols did not protect nurses from infection by Ebola patients.

Banning all travel from West African countries where the virus is epidemic may not stop Ebola from spreading throughout the U.S. But the administration still cannot offer convincing reasons why we should not try just that. Instead, a purely medical decision seems hopelessly embedded in the administration’s usual politically correct spin.

The U.S. is even more inept in dealing with the Islamic State. That terrorist virus, too, could have been contained, had we just kept some peacekeepers in the mostly quiet Iraq of 2011. But once again politics, not strategic logic, explains why the administration pulled all troops out of Iraq — a recklessness that turned up as a 2012 campaign talking point.

The stock market is wobbly, and for good reason. A record number of Americans have dropped out of the workforce. The quiver of traditional priming — zero interest rates, massive deficit spending, huge government stimulus — is now empty. Yet the economy still remains weak.

The march of the New Marxists goes on, now with children’s literature.

If you’ve been wondering what to get for your favorite child this non-denominational Christmas, a Teutonic author of kid lit is here to help.

Kreuzberg-based performance artist and writer Bini Adamczak’s 2004 Kommunismus: Kleine Geschichte, wie endlich alles anders wird will be appearing soon in English translation, according to The New Inquiry. The children’s book tells of a series of struggles by a ragtag group against a powerful and multifarious foe — like the Harry Potter series, but without a Voldemort: “In my book there is no evil character,” Adamczak tells Critical Theory. “However, the process of reification is represented in the coming to life of things: chairs, for example, or factories. Even though they are made by people they become independent and act on their own. But even the factories are not simply evil but act under conditions (of the market) that they can not chose. Sometimes they even feel sad and have to cry.”

So it’s like Beauty and the Beast — everyday objects becoming animated? Not exactly. Adamczak specializes in political and queer theory, and her book unites these two strains in a way kids are sure to love. “Everybody in the book is somehow female,” Adamczak tells us, “but there are as many different shades of femininity as there are people.” According to a biographical sketch, the author is “an unstable alliance of everyday reproduction modes, unwanted heritages and quarrelsome spectres, such as deconstructivist feminisms and the orthodox critique of value.”

As Hillary and Bill Clinton prepare for another White House ramble, the country is fated to endure more than a few 1990s flashbacks, often including attempts to whitewash the real history. The latest character to re-emerge is Monica Lewinsky, the former intern who is doffing her beret to reinvent herself as an anti-cyberbullying activist.

In a speech this week at a Forbes magazine conference that went viral on the Web, Ms. Lewinsky describes herself as a “survivor” of online abuse—she became “the creature from the media lagoon.” As the worst abusers, she cited Matt Drudge and the New York Post, which gave Ms. Lewinsky a term of tabloid endearment as “the portly pepperpot.” Another culprit was “a politically motivated independent prosecutor,” or Ken Starr.

The problem is that Ms. Lewinsky was actually the victim of the Clinton lagoon, as White House operatives tried to destroy her reputation when the scandal broke. The real bullies weren’t online but in the West Wing.

On Jan. 21, 1998, Mr. Clinton told his aide Sidney Blumenthal that Ms. Lewinsky “came on to me and made a sexual demand on me,” according to Mr. Blumenthal’s deposition to Mr. Starr. Mr. Clinton added that he “rebuffed her” and then she “threatened him. She said that she would tell people they’d had an affair, that she was known as the stalker among her peers, and that she hated it and if she had an affair or said she had an affair then she wouldn’t be the stalker any more.”

Mr. Blumenthal then repeated this tale to anyone in the press corps who would listen, and the “stalker” smear soon made it into multiple media reports under the authority of “a White House source.” Mrs. Clinton for her part described Ms. Lewinsky as “a narcissistic loony toon,” as the first lady’s friend Diane Blair recounted in the personal papers archive opened in 2010 by the University of Arkansas library.

The election trend must be moving toward the GOP because the media are predicting a disastrous result for Republicans on Nov. 4—if they win. The latest media trope is that Republicans are in such dreadful political shape that even victory would really mean catastrophic defeat.

The New York Times started this off a few weeks back with a piece arguing that a Congressional GOP sweep would be wonderful news for Hillary Clinton . She could then run against Congress in 2016. The success-is-failure theme has gained steam and in the latest iteration, by the liberal journalist Ron Brownstein of the Atlantic, the looming midterm results are “an obvious problem for Democrats—and perhaps an even larger one for Republicans.”

The arguments are that lower voter turnout in the midterms will cause Republicans to embrace the illusion of a mandate and ignore that they are doomed demographically as minorities become a larger share of the electorate. They will overreach on policy, dance to their no-compromise wing, and set up their 2016 nominee for inevitable defeat.

So Democrats will win if they keep their Senate majority but they also win if they lose it. You almost have to admire the ideological brass at work here, and it is always possible that this pre-defeat spin will turn out to be right.

The political spin doctors can no longer compete with a simple set of facts.

In “Pulp Fiction,” a movie about crime, there is a character named The Wolf. The Wolf is known as a “cleaner.” His line of work is cleaning up the mess made by incompetent criminals. As played by Harvey Keitel, the cleaner is a man of focus, competence and authority. I thought of the cleaner when President Obama called in Ron Klain.

Mr. Obama said Mr. Klain would be the Ebola czar. But the rest of the Beltway political community said he was something else. Some said Mr. Klain was a famous political operative. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, called him an “implementation expert.” Those who have been around politics too long said Mr. Klain was a fixer.

Political fixer is not an entirely dishonorable profession. Presidents, governors, mayors—nearly all at some point need someone who can hose down the blood, do the laundry and get the boys back to doing business as usual.

Or used to.

Ron Klain may be the last fixer.

No more revered idea exists in politics than “message control.” A political idea is brought forth, and its originators are expected to control how the public thinks about that idea. This half-fake, half-real protocol has worked well. Then came ObamaCare.