RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta- June 15th, 2015 and there has been much valuable writing about this decidedly valuable “Great Charter.” The oppressed and harassed Jews of England did not benefit a whit from the statutes of the Magna Carta.

Although the Magna Carta stated “No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” clauses 10 and 11–now airbrushed by historians–were overtly anti-Semitic, depicting Jews as rapacious money lenders.

In fact, only three years later in 1218, England became the first European nation to require Jews to wear a marking badge, a yellow patch to be worn on outer clothing identifying them as Jews. Disproportionate taxation, extortion, restraint of trade, blood libels and oppression continued apace. Jews were not spared the tyranny and rapacious edicts of the monarchs.

This culminated in the Edict of Expulsion of 1290 which remained in force for 360 years. Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657.

The United Nations Human Rights Council is set to shortly release a so-called fact-finding report on the war last year in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, prepared by its “commission of inquiry.” The report is scheduled for “debate” by the Human Rights Council members on June 29th. The only thing that is likely to be debated is which member of this hypocritical body, consisting of some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, gets to use the most strident adjectives to condemn Israel for alleged “war crimes and “crimes against humanity.”

As Yair Lapid, the chairman of Israel’s centrist Yesh Atid party said in predicting a one-sided anti-Israel report, it will further prove that the United Nations has “lost its mind.” He added that despite the massive number of tragic deaths and collapse of rule of law in countries such as Syria, Iraq Sudan, and Libya, “only Israel is obsessively investigated again and again and again, always with the assumption that the Jews are to blame for everything.”

In recent days, there have been two resignations that caught my eye:

The first was from Professor Sir Tim Hunt, FRS. He’s a Nobel Laureate – a genuine one, not a pretend one like Michael E Mann, who is the Rachel Dolezal of Nobel Laureates. But this bloke Hunt is the real deal – He won the Nobel in 2001 and the Royal Society’s almost as prestigious Royal Medal for his discoveries on cell-cycle control. He is a brilliant man.

Six days ago, Sir Tim was in Seoul for some science conference and was required to make a few remarks, among which was a septuagenarian scientist’s ill advised attempt at humor:

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.

Not the funniest joke in the world, but the genius of a scientist is often inversely proportional to his social ease. So he did not anticipate that a throwaway line about how girls are so emotional about these things would result in the girls getting so emotional about these things.

While he was on the flight back to London, University College told his wife, Professor Mary Collins (herself a prominent immunologist), that he could quit or be sacked. So he was forced to resign – from University College, and then from the Royal Society’s Biological Sciences Awards Committee, and then from the European Research Council. There’s not a lot left for him to resign from, although the Armies of the Outraged are optimistic they can get the Royal Society to expel him entirely.

So now the man who made the girls cry is blubbing himself:

“Tim sat on the sofa and started crying,” says Collins. “Then I started crying. We just held on to each other…”

Hunt is under no illusions about the consequences. “I am finished,” he says. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.”

The Royal Society, the oldest learned society in the world but these days as modish as any social-justice Tweeter, is said to be irked that Sir Tim did not offer a more fulsome apology. Personally, I can’t see why he should apologize at all. If you don’t like his remarks, have at it. But, if you ask me which is worse – a society where old men make harmless démodé semi-jokes that no-one laughs at; or a society that utterly destroys a man for one such irrelevant aside – I know which I prefer: the latter is a profoundly evil place. University College and the Royal Society should be ashamed.

~Meanwhile, in Spokane County, Washington, the aforementioned Rachel Dolezal has resigned as President of the local NAACP, the black civil rights group, because she is, in fact, white. Spokane County is less than two per cent black, and would seem to have no very pressing need for a local NAACP chapter. But, if you build it, they will come, even if a remarkable number come with the faint whiff of burnt cork and singing “De Camptown Races”. “NAACP” stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Ms Dolezal is a very literally colored person: she tans her skin and applies contouring make-up in order to “pass” for black.

The most important anniversary this year falls on Monday June 15th, marking the day, eight centuries ago, when a king found himself in a muddy field on the River Thames near Windsor Castle with the great foundational document of modern liberty under his nose and awaiting his seal. Here’s what I had to say about it earlier this year:

The world has come a long way since Magna Carta, and not always for the best. A couple of years back, testifying to the House of Commons in Ottawa about Canada’s (now repealed) censorship law, I said the following:

Section 13 is at odds with this country’s entire legal inheritance, stretching back to Magna Carta. Back then, if you recall–in 1215–human rights meant that the King could be restrained by his subjects. Eight hundred years later, Canada’s pseudo-human rights apparatchiks of the commission have entirely inverted that proposition, and human rights now means that the subjects get restrained by the Crown in the cause of so-called collective rights that can be regulated only by the state.

In our time, sexism and racism have become the province of the rich.

Discrimination by sex and by race are ancient innate pathologies and transcend particular cultures. But the American idea of sexism and racism in the 21st century — unfailing, endemic, and institutional discrimination by a majority-white-male-privileged culture against both women and so-called non-white minorities — has largely become a leftist construct.

We can see how these two relativist -isms work in a variety of ways.

One, the frequent charge of racism and sexism is predicated not so much on one’s gender and race as on one’s gender, race, and politics. Certainly, few on the left worried much about the slurs against Sarah Palin during and after her vice-presidential run. America’s overclass in the media and leftist politics constructed a sexist portrait of a clueless white-trash mom in Wasilla, Alaska, mindlessly having lots of kids after barely graduating from the University of Idaho. Even Bill Maher’s and David Letterman’s liberal armor would not have withstood leftist thrusts had, mutatis mutandis, the former called Hillary Clinton a c–t or the latter disparaged Ms. Clinton as “slutty flight attendant” and joked that, when a teen, Chelsea Clinton had had sexual relations with a Yankee baseball player in the dugout. Ironically it was the by-her-own-bootstraps lower-middle-class Palin who braved the frontier, no-prisoners, male world to become governor of Alaska; in real terms, she is the true feminist. In contrast, according to doctrinaire feminism, Hillary Clinton does not measure up. She has largely clung, in mousy fashion, to her two-timing husband, excused his serial and manipulative philandering with young women of less clout and power, traded on his political nomenclature, and piggy-backed on his career.

These people, step by step, want to make every expression of Israeli and Jewish cultural life subject to their idea of how a nation under constant threat of terrorist bombardment should behave.

They denounce Israel as a militaristic society and then attempt to outlaw every non-militaristic cultural and artistic expression from that society.

The letters page of The Guardian in the UK is regularly filled with letters, jointly signed by “correct-thinking” people who hope that in so doing, they will give themselves both a little puff of publicity and simultaneously signal their loyalty to all modern virtues. The pecking order can be rough. Ordinarily the paper selects the headline names to put under the letter and then adds “and 57 others” or some such. So if you’re the Guardian’s idea of a household name, your name will get in print. But if you are one of the space-filler “C-list” celebrities, people will have to guess whether you are among the “others.”

Even visionary calls for Islamic reform by Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, were not publicly welcomed by a single Western leader.

An ideology that encourages its adherents to engage in deadly rioting, burn down embassies, and kill people over cartoons, but that shows no great signs of sorrow as little girls are sold and raped, most likely does not have much to contribute to advancing civilization.

An ideology that treats women as property, that murders or imprisons intellectuals and that sentences a blogger to 1000 lashes and ten years in jail — if he survives — has no right to blame troubles on the West or anyone else.

This view has nothing to do with the West or any kind of Western intervention.

One hundred twenty-one illegal immigrants now facing murder charges were previously released by federal officials from 2010 to 2014, despite President Obama’s previous assurances that his administration is focusing its resources on the deportation of violent criminals.

The Obama administration released the figures to Congress in a May 28 letter. “Between FY 2010 and FY 2014, there were 121 unique criminal aliens who had an active case at the time of release and were subsequently charged with homicide-related offenses,” Sarah Saldaña, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Commitee chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.).

Hillary Clinton “re-launched” her floundering campaign Saturday on Roosevelt Island, formerly and fittingly known as Welfare Island. Clinton’s desperate effort to associate herself with “everyday Americans” contrasts starkly with the crooked elites with whom she and Bill normally cavort.

In fact, the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary’s elaborate slush fund, includes numerous donors and even one-time board members with dodgy backgrounds, shady dealings, and even criminal convictions that should repel rather than lure a once and perhaps future president of the United States. Peter Schweizer’s meticulously researched new best-seller Clinton Cash (complete with 635 endnotes) delineates this ultimate power couple’s sordid circle.

The last time Jeb Bush ran for office, it was 13 years ago. Barack Obama was serving in the Illinois state Senate. No one had heard of Obamacare or the tea party, and wouldn’t for years. It was before the invasion of Iraq, before Hurricane Katrina, before the financial meltdown. We had just invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. It was a political epoch ago.

If timing is everything in politics, Bush has, among other things, a timing problem. He had an exemplary record as a conservative reformer in Florida almost a decade ago, but the achievements and fights of the other Republican governors running for president have been the stuff of contemporary headlines. He is a gifted politician, but his father and brother preceded him to the presidency, giving his campaign an inevitable dynastic air as the vehicle of “the third Bush.”