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June 2016

EDUCATION? FROM RICHARD BAEHR

My friend Rich, the Chicago scribe, sends out a batch of informative e-mails on a variety of issues. This week he focused on education. The funniest is first in this list:

Santa Monica college students have a wedding ceremony as they marry the ocean. Who served as best wave? How will community property be divided in the event of a divorce? Naturally, faculty members are organizing this.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2016/05/26/insane-santa-monica-college-students-married-the-oceanand-got-intimate-with-it-n2169501?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

The leftist pollution of the American mind does not begin in college, but earlier. California is about to adopt a new history curriculum for grades K-12. As the largest state, new textbooks designed for California will be adopted elsewhere, and the curriculum itself, in textbooks or not will also be transported outside the state.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/california-poised-to-adopt-ultra-leftist-k-12-history-curriculum.php

It is almost impossible to overstate the sickness that is now prevalent at American universities, especially elite schools , the ones for which parents and kids will do near anything in order to gain admission.
Yale : Students demand the right to determine what material they will learn in individual courses- no more colonialist dead white male poets
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/01/decolonize-yale-students-circulate-petition-opposing-white-male-major-english-poets-requirement/?utm_source=hadaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Free speech is risky at Yale: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418/

Dartmouth: The gutless president whiffs, and there are no penalties for black students who invaded the library one night, disrupting those who were studying for finals,shouted racist epithets at them, taunted them, and physically threatened others. Now imagine the reverse, where white students shrieking white lives matter invades a library full of black students on a saturday night. This is of course an absurd thing to imagine, but try it out. Had the same events gone down with the races switched ,how many of the white students, all easily identifiable from the videos taken, would still be in school?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/dartmouth-and-double-standards.php

Oberlin- the school where social justice warriors come to graze:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/oberlin-is-an-insane-asylum/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges

RUTHIE BLUM; WHY ISRAEL MUST NOT APE AMERICA

Beaten down by decades of moral-equivalency abuse, Israelis treated the case of the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo this week as they do any debate surrounding the legitimacy of ‎firing a weapon.‎

With an IDF soldier on trial for shooting a subdued Palestinian terrorist to death — and a brouhaha that ‎attracted international attention while causing domestic angst — the issue of whether an ape suffered ‎a wrongful death pales in comparison.‎

This is not to say that the Hebrew-speaking media did not consider the case of Harambe the gorilla ‎worthy of coverage. On the contrary, the item captivated Israeli news outlets as much as it did others.‎

But what was absent in the discussion in the studios of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was the vitriol ‎against the zookeepers in Ohio, who had been faced with a painful choice that had to be made in ‎unfortunate circumstances. When a 3-year-old boy fell into the enclosure of a 420-pound ape — ‎and was swung and dragged every which way, into and around water — the life of one was suddenly ‎thrust into the balance against that of the other.‎

What made the event particularly tragic for all concerned was that the gorilla did not appear to be ‎attacking the toddler with purposeful aggression; in fact, he seemed confused about what to do, and ‎had he been female, the whole episode might have turned out differently. But his immense strength, ‎grip and erratic movements could have killed the child, even inadvertently. Anyone watching the video ‎of the events can see this clearly. Indeed, the little boy is unlikely to have survived even minutes ‎more in the clutches of the 17-year-old silverback.‎

Furthermore, according to the zoo, shooting the gorilla with a sedative dart would first ‎have agitated him and would have taken time to take effect, and therefore was not an option. So the only ‎recourse was to rescue the boy at the expense of the ape. ‎

Animal-rights activists and many other Americans responded to this life-saving gesture as though it ‎was an act of first-degree slaughter. Indeed, “murder” was the word bandied about on social media — ‎aimed both at the zoo and at the child’s mother, who was accused of being at fault for not preventing ‎her son from climbing the fence of the enclosure and falling in. The harsh criticism culminated in a ‎Change.org petition titled “Justice for Harambe,” which has garnered hundreds of thousands of ‎signatures. ‎

ANOTHER OUTRAGE: THE EU INCLUDING FACEBOOK AND YOU TUBE CENSOR INGRID CARLQVIST, GATESTONE’S SWEDISH EXPERT

TO CONTRIBUTE GO HERE: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/contribute.php

On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube.

On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone’s Swedish expert.

It’s no coincidence.

Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feed — called “Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” As you can see, Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched.

It’s a video version of this research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viral — racking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days.

But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship, and it now has teams of political informants — with the Orwellian title of “trusted reporters” — to report any cases of “xenophobia” or “hate speech” to Facebook for immediate deletion.

It’s political censorship. It’s outrageous. And it’s contrary to our western values of free speech, political freedom and the separation of mosque and state. But in another way, it’s a tremendous compliment — the world’s censors think that Gatestone Institute’s work is important enough and persuasive enough that it needs to be silenced.

Well, not if we have anything to say about it. We raised such a ruckus about this attack that the Swedish media started reporting on Facebook’s heavy-handed censorship. It backfired, and Facebook went into damage-control mode. They put Ingrid’s account back up — without any explanation or apology. Ironically, their censorship only gave Ingrid’s video more attention.

Facebook and the EU have backed down — for today. But they’re deadly serious about stopping ideas they don’t like. They’ll be back.

As you know, just last week we started releasing high-quality original videos, hosted by our Gatestone experts. Our first four videos have already been watched by more than 150,000 people!

It’s a great way to make our research come alive — and as Ingrid’s viral video shows, to get our ideas noticed.

So I want Gatestone’s talented experts to make more videos — a lot more! We need to win the battle of ideas. Can you help?

Each video costs us approximately $500 to produce. But as Facebook’s attack on us shows, they’re worth every penny.

Will you help us do that?

THE GLAZOV GANG THE DEBORAH WEISS MOMENT: BALLET JIHAD

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Deborah Weiss Moment with Deborah Weiss, a Human Rights lawyer who is an expert on the subject of free speech and terrorism related issues. She is the author of The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s Jihad on Free Speech. Visit her website at vigilancenow.org.

Deborah discussed Ballet Jihad, unveiling a Muslim convert’s agenda to restrict the world of ballet in the name of “tolerance.”

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Deborah discuss Freedom of Speech: Under Attack in America, unveiling how the U.S. is submitting to Islamic blasphemy codes and the high price it will pay for doing so.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/06/02/the-deborah-weiss-moment-ballet-jihad/

JACK ENGELHARD: TRUMP MEETS THE SENSITIVE PRESS

There will be blood between Trump and the news media as long as Trump stays in the picture.

One of the Democrats in the audience asked Trump if that’s how it’s going to be — a bumpy ride throughout the campaign and into the White House?

“Yes,” Trump responded sharply. “That’s how it’s going to be.”

Gasps all around. Poor devils, they are not used to a contender who speaks from the heart and without a teleprompter.

So fasten your seat belts, Mr. and Mrs. America, there will be blood between Trump and the news media as long as Trump stays in the picture – and there is no chance of a peace process between the two sides while 82 percent of the news media self identify themselves as card-carrying Liberal Democrats.

Poor devils, they are not used to a contender who speaks from the heart and without a teleprompter.
“The press should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump told a roomful of reporters who’d come to ask, “Where’s the money?”

Over the past few months, even up to Tuesday’s tempestuous rock and roll and now historic Q and A, they’d been chasing Trump to produce the money he’d promised to deliver to various Veterans’ charities. So he called this meeting to explain, and explain he did.

He provided the names of the beneficiaries and the amount of cash that he’d handed over, which amounted to nearly six million dollars. About Hillary and the millions she’s been hoarding through foreign donations, nobody asks, and she has the nerve to demand that Trump open all hisbooks pronto.

For Trump, it wasn’t about that – it was about The Washington Post andThe New York Times and reporters far and wide chasing him down about EVERYTHING.

He’d taken enough. So he took this opportunity to call them “unfair” and “sleazy,” one and all.

Who me? they murmured. For Uber Conservative Bill Kristol, who’s gone loco against Trump, Trump had this choice reference – “Loser.”

Iran’s Chess Board How the Islamic Republic is strategically dominating the Middle East — and the U.S. is assisting. Caroline Glick

Early this week it was reported that after a two-year hiatus, Iran is restoring its financial support for Islamic Jihad.
Strategic thinking has always been Israel’s Achilles’ heel. As a small state bereft of regional ambitions, so long as regional realities remained more or less static, Israel had little reason to be concerned about the great game of the Middle East.

But the ground is shifting in the lands around us. The Arab state system, which ensured the strategic status quo for decades, has collapsed.

So for the first time in four generations, strategy is again the dominant force shaping events that will impact Israel for generations to come.

To understand why, consider two events of the past week.

Early this week it was reported that after a two-year hiatus, Iran is restoring its financial support for Islamic Jihad. Iran will give the group, which is largely a creation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, $70 million.

On Wednesday Iranian media were the first to report on the arrest of a “reporter” for Iran’s Al-Alam news service. Bassam Safadi was arrested by Israel police in his home in Majdal Shams, the Druse village closest to the border with Syria on the Golan Heights. Safadi is suspected of inciting terrorism.

What Happened to One Air Force Veteran Threatened by ISIS First Edward Cline was terrorized by the Islamic State. Now he’s being terrorized by his landlord at Lawson Enterprises. by Daniel Greenfield

Cyrus Skeen, Edward Cline’s fictional detective, has survived countless brushes with death and danger across eighteen novels, the latest of which, Exegesis, is coming out just now. Its author, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran, has lived a life that in some ways has been as difficult as that of his fictional protagonist.

But while Cyrus Skeen brushes off threats with witty quips and a keen intellect, his creator’s keen intellect and wit have come up against the harsher reality of ISIS terror and the willingness of some in our country to appease that terrorism by turning on its victims.

The Islamic State has been publishing lists of thousands of names of those it claims will be its targets. One such list included 3,600 New Yorkers. Another contained the names of 43 government employees and yet another listed 70 members of the military. But many of those on the hit lists were ordinary people, like Julie, a dogwalker living in Brooklyn. They received calls from FBI agents and then they went back to living the routine of their ordinary lives.

For the most part.

Edward Cline will not go back to his ordinary life. After he was visited by the FBI, his landlord, Lawson Enterprises, chose to kick a 70-year-old Air Force veteran threatened by ISIS into the street.

According to Cline, Lawson Enterprises informed him that he posed a “risk” to the safety of the other tenants. It is not ISIS that poses the risk, but its target and its victim, who must be put out on the street. Cline has no means of moving and nowhere to move to. After initially being ordered to leave by July 1st, he was offered a “courtesy” extension to July 19th, which was later rescinded, leaving the elderly writer with few options and less time. Cline described the experience as taking “years” off his life.