RUTHFULLY YOURS

A gaggle of hard lefties and fellow travelers is out to stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking Tuesday to the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with close White House ties.

Netanyahu is in DC mending fences after he fought hard against President Obama’s Iran nuke deal, hence the CAP event.

But various hard-left activists, liberal church types and Arab groups don’t think anyone should be allowed to hear what Bibi has to say. Backed by thousands of online signatures, they complain the CAP event grants legitimacy to Netanyahu’s “ever more expansionist policies of occupation.”

This, when he’s not even giving a speech, just joining a dialogue with Neera Tanden, CAP’s CEO and a veteran of both Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. And he’s taking audience questions, where critics can press him hard.

Sometime in the near future the EU is expected to publish guidelines on consumer labeling of all Israeli products produced over the so-called “Green Line,” the armistice line created when the war against the nascent Jewish State ended.

The EU considers all Jewish cities and towns over the pre-1967 lines to be illegal. As such, anything produced, grown or packaged in either eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria or the Golan Heights will be labeled so that consumers can more easily boycott those products.

The guidelines will be published by the office of Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief. No vote is required for this measure to be taken.

There is pushback to that labeling plan coming not only from Israel, but also from many members of the U.S. Senate.

A federal appeals court Monday upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the Obama administration’s plans to defer deportations for more than four million undocumented immigrants.

The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds an injunction by a Texas federal judge that has blocked President Barack Obama’s 2014 immigration initiative, after leaders from 26 states challenged its legality.

The appeals-court ruling was widely anticipated, after a three-judge panel of the same court rejected the Obama administration arguments to quickly lift the injunction in May. But it paves the way for a potential appeal of the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court—and all but ensures that the immigration initiative will remained mired in a legal dispute through most, if not all, of Mr. Obama’s term in office.

In an article at the Washington Post, Janell Ross tackles the question of global attitudes toward immigration using data from Gallup polling and a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Unfortunately, there are some problems with Ross’ conclusions, starting with the following claim:

Adults with a college degree are more likely than those with lower levels of education to want to see immigration kept at its present level or increased.

The devil is in the details on this generalization. According to data from the IOM report itself, at a global level, those with a college degree (defined as “High education” by the report) are more likely to favor a decrease (36 percent) in immigration than those with “Low education” (31 percent), and there is no clear statistical difference (i.e., within the likely sampling error) between immigration views for those with “Medium” and those with “High” levels of education. There is also no difference in the proportion saying they want immigration levels increased (down at only 20 to 23 percent across all categories) with education.

Obama and Netanyahu Pledge to Strengthen Ties Prime minister says he is committed to a two-state peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians Carol E. Lee and Rory Jones :

President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to publicly minimize their longtime discord as they met Monday for the first time in more than a year.

Mr. Netanyahu, in a notably conciliatory remark, told Mr. Obama he is committed to a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians that includes a two-state solution. The Israeli leader’s statement was a sharp reversal from his rejection of a two-state solution earlier this year, which had angered the White House.

“I want to make clear we have not given up our hope for peace,” Mr. Netanyahu said, seated alongside Mr. Obama in the Oval Office.
The White House has given up on reaching a peace agreement before Mr. Obama leaves office in 14 months, a point the president’s top aides publicly underscored in advance of Mr. Netanyahu’s visit.

Headlines blaring that processed and red meat causes cancer have made this steak-and-bacon-loving nation collectively reach for the Rolaids. Vegans are in full party mode, and the media is in a feeding frenzy. But there is more to this story than meets the (rib)eye.

With United Nations climate talks beginning in a few weeks in Paris, the cancer warning seems particularly well timed. Environmental activists have long sought to tie food to the fight against global warming. Now the doomsayers who want to take on modern agriculture, a considerable source of greenhouse-gas emissions, can employ an additional scare tactic: Meat production sickens the planet; meat consumption sickens people.

Someone at Yale University should have dressed up as Robespierre for Halloween, as its students seem to have lost their minds over what constitutes a culturally appropriate costume. Identity and grievance politics keeps hitting new lows on campus, and now even liberal professors are being consumed by the revolution.

On Oct. 28 Yale Dean Burgwell Howard and Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee blasted out an email advising students against “culturally unaware” Halloween costumes, with self-help questions such as: “If this costume is meant to be historical, does it further misinformation or historical and cultural inaccuracies?” Watch out for insensitivity toward “religious beliefs, Native American/Indigenous people, Socio-economic strata, Asians, Hispanic/Latino, Women, Muslims, etc.” In short, everyone.

Who knew Yale still employed anyone willing to doubt the costume wardens? But in response to the dean’s email, lecturer in early childhood education Erika Christakis mused to the student residential community she oversees with her husband, Nicholas, a Yale sociologist and physician: “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns,” but she wondered if colleges had morphed into “places of censure and prohibition.”