RUTHFULLY YOURS

Have you ever asked yourself, ‘would I have helped a Jewish friend or neighbor in Nazi Europe?’ Would I have tried to rouse my fellow citizens in America, when isolationism was the rage? Would I have even noticed there was a call of conscience? Would I have told myself to ignore what was happening around me, until my world was in ruins?

I have no illusions of possessing extraordinary courage. Luckily, as Americans, we do not live under a terror regime. We can inform ourselves easily on the advance of radical Islam. We can speak out. We can exercise our individual conscience. We can listen to the still, small voice that determines our own moral worth.

We are living at what Churchill called “a hinge of fate.” Iran is poised to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranians speak of genocide against the Jews and worldwide conquest as fondly as Hitler did. In America, we are all players in this drama.

The entire lesson from the 20th century is to prevent calamitous developments before it is too late. We have had national unanimity on this point. For thirty-five years there has been bi-partisan recognition that Iran is a terror state, dangerous to Israel, the Saudis, Europe, America. Iran has become more dangerous, not less. Iran has also become weaker economically. The Saudi oil price war gives us a real chance that economic sanctions could bring the mullahs down. Except that Obama lifted the sanctions and no longer wants the regime brought down.

Islamists such as Arfan Bhatti, Mullah Krekar and Ubaydullah Hussain have openly said they want Sharia law introduced in Norway, and placed above Norwegian law.

With such requests for divisiveness at it core, it is hard to see how Islam can not be in constant conflict with its surroundings.

There simply has been no real debate about the ripple effects created from this cultural collision-course between Humanism and Islamism.

It is probably high time to take a long, critical look at the contents of the Qur’an and see what values and spiritual seeds it can plant in people’s minds. Europeans are just starting to face a reality with which Israelis have lived for years.

Here, those who seem “out of line” risk being publicly and privately destroyed by self-appointed “anti-racists,” who do their best to sabotage anyone with the audacity to voice an opinion different from theirs.

Either way, this reaction shows that the openness for discussing sensitive issues is not much better in Norway than in Pakistan.

Politicians need to be especially wary of those they choose as advisors. It is so easy to be an extremist in moderates’ clothing.

Bernie Lewin’s Hubert Lamb and the Transformation of Climate Science is available online from the Global Warming Policy Foundation

They were there at the start, when the study of climate was in its infancy, but today the names of meterologists such as Hubert Lamb are seldom mentioned by those colleagues and their heirs who very quickly grasped that sound science doesn’t pay half as well as a good scare story.

Hubert Lamb the father of modern historical climatology and founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, issued this warning to his fellow meteorologists in 1994:

‘A precarious and threatening situation has developed for climatology: a tremendous effort was made to land research funds in all countries, mostly the USA, on the basis of frightening people about the possible drastic effect of Man’s activities, and so much has been said about climate warming that there will be an awkward situation if the warming doesn’t happen or not to the extent predicted.’ (emphasis added)

Two decades later it is widely acknowledged that the slight warming trend of the 1980s slowed and then stalled not many years after Lamb published his warning. Indeed, the frightening predictions of those times have not been realised. But whether this places climatology in ‘an awkward situation’ remains moot across the sceptical divide.

Back in the 1970s Lamb was undoubtedly Britain’s most prominent climatologist. Whenever a climate-related topic required comment, journalists would call him. With radio appearances and the occasional invitation to publish his own plain-language account, this softly spoken scientist had quite the public profile.

Today, it is not widely known that our global warming consensus once faced such a prominent critic. Indeed, Lamb was one of the earliest and most vocal sceptics. Folks are often also surprised to learn that Lamb’s response to the warming scare was far from unusual. Many of the other leaders in the field during the 1970s also grew concerned about its distorting influence. Alas, the more they said so, the more they were marginalised on the wrong side of an increasingly polarised debate.

A few of these former leaders are well known in the current controversy, lampooned as deniers and merchants of doubt. But most are forgotten. Many, like Lamb, are now dead.

Consider Robert White, perhaps the most prominent figure at the World Meteorological Organisation during the 1970s. In 1979 he chaired the first World Climate Conference, which asked all nations ‘to foresee and to prevent potential man made changes in climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity’. But a decade later White became concerned that the politics was getting ahead of the science. In 1989 he warned of an ‘inverted pyramid of knowledge’ where ‘a huge and growing mass of proposals for policy action is balanced upon a handful of real facts’.

In that same year White teamed up with others of the old guard in the US raising concerns with their government. These included two former leaders of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography: William Nierenberg (director from 1965 to 1986), and Jerome Namias, the renowned climate forecaster and leader of the Climate Research Group throughout the 1970s.

The USA also had Reid Bryson, the founding director of the world’s first centre dedicated to climatic research at the University of Wisconsin. He was always, and openly, more concerned about an overall cooling trend.

Elsewhere, rumours ran rife of secret doubters unwilling to risk their funding. But still there were surprises, like Brian Tucker in Australia. From the late 1970s he had overseen the research into greenhouse warming as head of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Physics. Retiring in 1992, he came out guns blazing.

Others were caught out of step before they were ready to go, including some prominent figures in the European leadership. Hendrik Tennekes was the director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute from 1977 until he was sacked 1990. Afterwards he claimed a link between his ousting and the recent publication of his doubts in the popular press.

More than two centuries in his grave, the philosopher’s warning that politics should and must be more than “an auction of popularity” has never lost its relevance, not least as radicalism and ballot-box venality continue to undermine both moral government and the polities of the West
Does Edmund Burke have anything to say to the modern world? Born in Dublin in 1729, he died at Beaconsfield, his debt-laden property in England, on the July 9, 1797. He was without personal scandal, a devoted family man, and a member of the House of Commons for nearly thirty years. His debts were constant and only relieved by aristocratic patrons whose generosity was not unexpectedly exploited by his enemies. His bequest to prosperity was never to be material. He left behind a voluminous literature in the form of books, pamphlets, speeches and letters. His mind was wide-ranging and his reading voracious. As editor of the Annual Register, he wrote commentaries on the major intellectual works of the period.

Most of his writing, however, concentrated on the political events of the age, in which he took a leading, sometimes determining, role. They included the American and French revolutions. In the debates about those events, he found it necessary to go behind the action to deal with fundamental philosophical questions and propose analyses, most of which remain worthy of study. His insights on politics and the role of politicians are as fresh today as when he put them to paper more than 200 years ago.

He is often acclaimed as the father of modern conservatism. This is largely due to his views on the prescriptive nature of tradition, custom and convention in a healthy, functioning society. It is true that he placed crucial importance on not interfering with social and political arrangements that had passed the test of time. Without further explanation, however, the title of conservative can be misleading. He was not a straightforward traditionalist, one resistant to rational change. Indeed, he said that the ability and willingness to change – change consistent with continuity – ensured a society’s conservation.

First, quit singing Kumbaya and accept that some people just need killing. As to the ones who don’t, which is to say the very many Muslims who sympathise with those who do, curtailing Muslim immigration while simultaneously reforming the welfare system would be two more very useful measures.P.S. The above steps might be avoided by finding jobs for budding terrorists. This suggestion comes courtesy of US State Department spokesperson Marie Harf.

In “The Weird Beards Are Winning” (18/2) I said that identifying the enemy is an essential precursor to developing a winning strategy. By the way, I am not using the perpendicular pronoun to claim any revelatory insight. It is not revelatory. It is the bleeding obvious. How is it possible to defeat an enemy you are too intimidated to name?

Islamism is the enemy. World domination is its goal. Yes, I know, that’s been mostly tried in movies. But it has been tried in real life too. And here we go again; despite the witless wishing and hoping on the part of our effete political elite.

Islamism is a fanatical ideological movement which draws its inspiration directly from a literal (not an invented) interpretation of Islamic scripture. It is pursuing its goals on two fronts. First, by way of terror and militancy to gain ground and intimidate Muslims into allegiance (join us or get your head cut off is a powerful persuader aimed at 1.6 billion Muslims). And, second, by way of politicking, preaching and populating to weaken and collapse the fabric of Western civilisation.

“What to make of people who actually cheer at the mention of American exceptionalism? Well, post-1960s liberalism had so won over the culture, and so congealed into the new moral establishment, that conservatism — as a politics and a philosophy — became a centerpiece in liberalism’s iconography of evil. It was demonized and stigmatized as an ideology born of nostalgia for America’s past evils — inequality, oppression, exploitation, warmongering, bigotry, repression, and all the rest.”
Or, the battle of Left and Right for the moral meaning of America.
I was recently invited to make some remarks at a charity dinner for a cause that I strongly support. The organizers worried that, because their cause affected only Third World nations, they would have a hard time raising money from an American audience. Localism, it seemed, in everything from farm produce to charity giving, was the new vogue. People wanted to see their dollars at work locally rather than watch them disappear into the coffers of some international organization.
Could I help them make the case for international giving? On the night of the dinner it occurred to me to make the point that America was the world’s exceptional nation — not that its people were superior, but that its wealth and power bestowed upon it a level of responsibility in the world that other nations did not have to bear. Exceptionalism as a burden, not a vanity, was my point. Through my wife I had had an involvement with a charitable organization that focused on the problem of obstetric fistula in Africa. On a visit to Africa in behalf of that group, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much we Americans were respected for our compassion and generosity, quite apart from our wealth and military power. The people I met saw something essentially good in the American people.
On one blazing hot afternoon in a remote village in the nation of Niger, a local chieftain, dramatically bedecked in the head wrap and flowing robe of his desert people, told me through an interpreter that it was striking to him to meet people who would come halfway around the world to help his people — to visit, as he said in a phrase that mixed pathos with eloquence, “a country lost in the sun.” I recounted this story at the charity dinner simply to make the point that American exceptionalism in the world had as much to do with the largesse of our character as with our great wealth and power, and that causes like the one at hand only enhanced our reputation in the world as a fundamentally decent nation — a beacon, as it were, of human possibility. I thought this would be the easiest of points to make. And things were in fact going smoothly until I uttered the words “American exceptionalism.” Instantly — almost before I could get the words out of my mouth — quiet boos erupted from one side of the banquet room. Not loud ugly boos, but polite remonstrative boos, the kind that respectfully censure you for an impropriety.
I was shocked. This was a young, bright, prosperous American audience reproaching me for mentioning the exceptionalism of our nation. It was as if they were saying, “Don’t you understand that even the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ is a hubris that evokes the evils of white supremacy? It is an indecency that we won’t be associated with.” In booing, these audience members were acting out an irony: They were good Americans precisely because they were skeptical of American greatness. Their skepticism was a badge of innocence because it dissociated them from America’s history of evil. To unreservedly buy into American exceptionalism was, for them, to turn a blind eye on this evil, and they wanted to make the point that they were far too evolved for that.

Beset on all sides, it stands firm Jerusalem —
“Israel stands, battered but battle-hardened, in many ways more successful than ever. Yet with the Islamist tide rising relentlessly throughout the region, how much longer can it last? The Israelis stand united and confident, committed to fighting for what they have. That’s more than the Europeans can say, and maybe more than we can say. Still, Israelis are nervous about the future. When here, it feels as if there were always a hurricane just nearby, threatening to make landfall. ”
In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo and kosher-supermarket massacres in Paris, thousands of French Jews have contacted Israeli authorities to begin the process of aliyah, the “ascent” of emigrating to Israel. Many are likely to settle in the charming 19th-century “German Colony” of Jerusalem — where you will nowadays hear a lot of people speaking French. Stopping by a Parisian-style bistro in the German Colony, I meet Meir Schweiger, a modern-Orthodox rabbi of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
As I do with most Israelis, I ask Rabbi Schweiger how he sees the prospects for peace. He recalls how things were in the 1970s and 1980s, after he first moved to the Gush Etzion, a large block of settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron in the West Bank. Back then, he tells me, Jewish settlers routinely went shopping in nearby Palestinian markets. Palestinian businessmen were often well known among settlers and could move freely in and out of settlements with their employees. Peaceful coexistence started deteriorating in 1987, with the first intifada, and ended altogether in the terrible second intifada of 2000 to 2003, which killed nearly a thousand Israeli civilians and ended only with the construction of a separation wall. Schweiger recounts that the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah militia, went into nearby Palestinian villages to distribute weapons and incite violence.

It’s been another wild, wacky and worrisome week in higher education. There’s the “activism” class at the University of Michigan that teaches capitalism should be “overthrown.” There’s the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor who offered students extra credit to attend a rally against Gov. Scott Walker. There’s the UCLA student who was told at one point that she could not serve on the student government – because she is Jewish. There’s the University of Wisconsin-Madison College Republicans who were viciously attacked for defending higher education budget cuts.
There’s the professor who was cleared of wrongdoing after he forced students to recite a satirical anti-American pledge that characterized Republicans as racist, homophobic and anti-poor. This is the highlight reel from just this week. But I could go on and on. Indeed, that is one of the most shocking aspects of working as editor of The College Fix. Day in and day out, month after month and year after year, we report on troubling campus developments, and it just … never … ends. I keep wondering – can anything, will anything – be done about how our centers of higher education are completely controlled by the left, by social progressives and outright socialists who hold disdain for America and yet continue to shape our country and its future?

The best thing Obama can seem to say about the country is that it elected him into office.
Dear Reader (Unless you’re that lucky lady with Joe Biden standing pressed-up behind you as he pretends to search for your car keys while whispering the contents of this “news”letter to you), So the question of the moment is whether Rudy Giuliani should be flayed or simply drawn-and-quartered for saying that Obama doesn’t love America. Naturally, this has led to Giuliani being called a racist, because the best working definition of racism in America today is any criticism of Obama that stings.
Kevin Williamson runs through the highlights of what is, by now, a pretty old argument. My own view isn’t so much that Giuliani is right, but that he’s not exactly wrong either. Look, it was like a week ago that we were talking about Obama’s inability to criticize the Islamic State without first going out of his way to flagellate the West and America over the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and Jim Crow. Is it really so crazy to think a guy who feels compelled to warn his own countrymen not to get on their “high horse” about child rapists and slavers (who are also beheading and/or immolating and/or burying alive Americans, Christians, Yazidis, and fellow Muslims) might subscribe to an, um, unconventional form of patriotism? (Personally, I think looking down your nose at men who do such things doesn’t require a high horse, or even a pygmy horse, or even any horse at all.

A recent report by the Parliamentary Committee on Antisemitism noted “a palpable concern, insecurity, loneliness and fear following the summer’s rise in incidents and subsequent world events.”In California, where I was earlier this week, Jews and non-Jews are asking the same questions. Is Europe finished? Is it time for the Jews of Europe to move to Israel? And then finally: Are we in America also vulnerable to this earthquake? The French atrocities last month and last weekend’s attacks in Copenhagen, in which Jewish targets were singled out for murder along with cartoonists and their supporters upholding the right to give offence to Islam, have forced into public attention the murderous hatred of the Jews in the Islamic world.

Europe has been discovering to its horror that once again Jews are being made victims in its midst – and once again it is powerless to protect them.

Jews are leaving France in great number because the risk of violence to them there has become acute. In Britain many Jews don’t see a problem at all, especially if they live inside a Jewish community bubble and don’t care much about Israel.