RUTHFULLY YOURS

The higher-education disinvitation sweepstakes continue. Virginia Tech has just disinvited Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow. Riley had been asked to deliver the BB&T Distinguished Lecture at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. But late last week he received an e-mail from the faculty member who arranged the lecture informing him that the head of the Finance Department, the J. Gray Ferguson Professor of Finance, Vijay Singal, had vetoed the invitation. We obtained a copy of this email.

Why? Mr. Riley, who is black, has attracted some negative attention since his publication in 2014 of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Professor Singal feared that whatever controversy Riley had attracted so far would be amplified once he set foot on Virginia Tech’s campus. He imagined there would be amplified controversy over Riley’s speech because Virginia Tech is still reverberating from the last BB&T Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Charles Murray on March 25.

That event was widely noted because of the exceptionally clumsy way that Virginia Tech president Tim Sands handled it. Sands sent an “open letter” to the Virginia Tech community on March 10, ostensibly upholding the invitation to Murray but doing so in such poison-pen language that he practically wrote the placards for the protesters. In Sands’s words, Murray’s work, particularly The Bell Curve, is “discredited,” “flawed,” “used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics,” and “regarded by some in our community as repugnant, offensive, or even fraudulent.”

It emerged that Dr. Sands actually knew little of Murray’s scholarly work, but relied instead on hearsay from Murray’s distempered critics. Murray answered Sands with a pungent open letter of his own; delivered his scheduled lecture despite some protesters; and left the campus with only one significant casualty — namely President Sands’s reputation.

The link between the Murray affair and the disinvitation to Riley isn’t speculative. The letter to Riley telling him his lecture is canceled plunges right into the recent history, including Tim Sands having “embarrassed himself and the university” with his open letter. The professor who wrote to Riley clearly felt chagrined by this turn of events. He is “sure” that President Sands “never read” The Bell Curve, at which he directed such vitriol. And Sands’s remarks, he says, served as an accelerant to a protest at the business school two days before M

This article is co-authored with Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs—

In the uproar following Ken Livingstone’s comments about Hitler having been a Zionist “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” a crucial point has not been raised: the collaboration at the highest levels with the Nazi regime by Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the father of Palestinian nationalism.

The intense criticism against Livingstone is appropriate. Correcting the history of the Zionist movement and its response to the rise of Nazism is paramount. Yet, if dealing in any manner with the Nazi regime delegitimizes a national movement, then Palestinian leader Haj Amin’s close collaboration with the likes of Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Goebbels should make anti-Israel campaigners rethink their strategy of injecting the Holocaust into their assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

There is a world of difference between the desperate effort of Zionist leaders to rescue German Jewry from the Nazis, which by definition required the need to “deal” with Berlin, and Haj Amin’s overt alliance with Nazi Germany including support for the Final Solution.

Anti-Israel campaigners often make the point that Palestinian Arabs should not be “made to pay for the Holocaust,” a “European crime.” This argument fails on two counts. First, it ignores the three millennia of unbroken Jewish habitation of the land of Israel, in which Jews are an indigenous people. Secondly, it denies the close collaboration with Nazi Germany by the Palestinian leadership of that era, which by 1941 knew of, supported and even participated in the Nazi genocide. This is something for which contemporary Palestinian leadership must finally acknowledge and take responsibility.

Scholars have written comprehensively on this Palestinian (and other Arab) collaboration with Nazi Germany. There is no excuse for ignorance on this matter. Jeffrey Herf’s “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World”, Klaus-Michael Mallmann’s and Martin Cüppers’ “Nazi Palestine”, Zvi Elpeleg’s “Through the Eyes of the Mufti: The Essays of Haj Amin, Translated and Annotated,” David G. Dalin’s and John F. Rothmann’s “Icon of Evil” and many other historians documented extensively this chapter of World War Two history.

Just when you think things could not possibly get any worse, they always do. Take the case of the Jews and the British Labour Party, for example.

No, not the Jews who are becoming an increasingly open target of the rampant and rabid anti-Semitism that has been afflicting the so-called liberal side of the U.K. political spectrum for some time now. The election of Jeremy Corbyn to head the party that supposedly represents the mainstream Left was already a bad omen, as it reflected the way the wind was blowing where Israel was concerned.

This did not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Israelis. Europe is in the throes of what National Review columnist and author Andrew McCarthy has been warning about for years: the deadly marriage of radical Islamists to Western leftists, which once would have seemed counter-intuitive. After all, the former oppose everything the latter stand for and then some. This includes, but is not exclusive to, the treatment of women and gays.

The end result is that old-style anti-Semitism, of the upper-crust variety — the type that became totally taboo after World War II saw millions of Jews marched into the gas chambers — has found a new home. This one has a stamp of legitimacy brandished on its front door. It is the right to express vitriol against the State of Israel, the collective successful Jew.

It’s a neat trick and one that worked even before the Holocaust. Exhibiting racism toward people who are affluent, educated, innovative and integrated into your society is a guilt-free pleasure in any case. But being provided an opportunity — in the form of a flourishing state in the Middle East accused by anti-Western forces of behaving badly — to spew unfounded poison is like winning the jackpot.

When coupled with a historical British tendency to glamorize figures like Lawrence of Arabia, this British brew becomes irresistible to those anti-Semites who were forced, or even went willingly, into the closet for a few decades.

Enough has been said over the past couple of weeks about the sorry condition of Britain’s liberal universities and the party that best suits academia. Indeed, the situation has grown so dire — most recently with the election of Muslim anti-Zionist Malia Bouattia as head of the National Union of Students, and the suspensions of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Labour MP Naz Shah — that even Corbyn is saying he will launch an investigation into the phenomenon.

Big Green is big business. The global renewable energy market is estimated at over $600 billion. Obama’s stimulus boondoggle alone blew around $50 billion on green energy. Annual spending is somewhere around $39 billion a year and that’s just the tip of the Big Green iceberg.

California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions. And the endgame is a national and a global
carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.

Environmentalism isn’t a hippie with a cardboard sign. It’s multinational corporations and big banks. It’s environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project. It’s subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense. It’s brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs. It’s a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.

Big Green is booming business. But it can’t succeed on its own. Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Even as the science behind the conspiracy theory that claims humans are warming the planet continues to fall apart, Big Green is escalating its crackdown on climate science. If you are going to falsely claim that 99.99% of scientists agree with you, the best way to ensure that is by criminalizing scientific dissent.

Racism is not a specific illness but a general sickness. Display one symptom and you display them all. If you show me an anti-Muslim bigot, I will be able to guess his or her views on the European Union, welfare state, crime and “political correctness”. Show me a leftwing or Islamist antisemite and, once again, he will carry a suitcase full of prejudices, which have nothing to do with Jews, but somehow have everything to do with Jews.

The Labour party does not have a “problem with antisemitism” it can isolate and treat, like a patient asking a doctor for a course of antibiotics. The party and much of the wider liberal-left have a chronic condition.

As I have written about the darkness on the left before, I am not going to crow now that it has turned darker than even I predicted. (There is not much to crow about, after all.) I have nothing but respect for the Labour MPs who are trying to stop their party becoming a playpen for fanatics and cranks. It just appears to me that they face interlocking difficulties that are close to insoluble.

They must first pay the political price of confronting supporters from immigrant communities, which Labour MPs from all wings of the party have failed to do for decades. It may be high. While Ken Livingstone was forcing startled historians to explain that Adolf Hitler was not a Zionist, I was in Naz Shah’s Bradford. A politician who wants to win there cannot afford to be reasonable, I discovered. He or she cannot deplore the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and say that the Israelis and Palestinians should have their own states. They have to engage in extremist rhetoric of the “sweep all the Jews out” variety or risk their opponents denouncing them as “Zionists”.