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2016

Britain’s Muddled Priorities? by Douglas Murray

On the one hand, the overwhelming cause of our current security problems is Islamist terror. It is the number one cause of concern to our police, intelligence services and everybody else with the nation’s security at heart. The public expects to be protected from such terror and expects that protection to come from that security establishment.

Yet all the time, a vocal lobby of Muslim and non-Muslim figures tries to pretend that the threat is not what it is, or that an attempt to depict any and all efforts to protect the country — even one phrase said by one actor in one simulated attack scenario — is some terrible crime of bigotry.

An actor saying “Allahu Akbar” in a simulated terror attack may be offensive to somebody’s religion. But if so, what is more offensive to their religion: one actor saying “Allahu Akbar” as part of a simulation, or countless Muslims around the world shouting the same phrase before real attacks in real time?

Sometimes you can see a whole society’s self-delusion in under a minute. Consider a single minute that occurred in Britain this week.

On Monday night, Greater Manchester Police staged a pre-prepared mock terrorist attack in a Manchester shopping centre in order to test emergency responses capabilities, readiness and response times. At one stage, an actor playing a suicide bomber burst through a doorway in a crowded part of the shopping centre and detonated a fake device.

It turned out that the actor pretending to be a suicide bomber had shouted the words “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greatest”) before the simulated attack. This may have helped make the simulation more realistic, but it had an immediate backlash. Nobody complained about the simulated attacks. What disturbed some people was the simulation of the signature Islamist sign-off.

ISRAEL’S DANGEROUS ADDICTION: VIC ROSENTHAL ****

On this 68th anniversary of the independence of the modern Jewish nation-state, my thoughts naturally turn to the question of how long we will be able to keep that independence, purchased at such great cost.

It’s not an issue that occupies citizens of most other states to the same degree. Although the US has major problems in several areas, I don’t hear Americans talking about losing their independence. They settled that back in the 18th century.

For us, it is never settled, despite international law and despite our successful defense of our homeland. Most of the world does not think that the Jewish people should have an independent state, in many cases because they don’t agree that there is a Jewish people (on the other hand, a ‘Palestinian’ people makes sense to them, or at least they pretend it does).

There is more than one way a sovereign nation can lose its independence. It can be conquered in war, as happened to Carthage in the 2nd century BCE, its people killed, enslaved or dispersed, its wealth carried off and its land sown with salt. It can be invaded and then made into a colony or satellite, its people allowed to live but without self-determination, as happened to the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union after WWII. And it can allow its decisions to be influenced by a more powerful state or states, little by little giving up its independent volition to economic and political pressure, until it finds itself so dependent on its ‘patron’ that it has lost the ability to control its destiny.

Israel is threatened militarily today primarily by Iran and its proxies. It would be wrong to minimize the direct threat to our existence that they represent, and our government and the IDF do take it seriously and prepare for conflict.http://abuyehuda.com/2016/05/israels-dangerous-addiction/

But we are also at risk of a ‘soft conquest’ by another enemy, this one an alliance of supposedly friendly nations, led by one massively powerful country that is considered our greatest friend and supporter. And our leaders seem blind to this danger.

How does a soft conquest work? Here are some of the tactics:

Create economic dependence by damaging the target’s relationships with rival partners.
Create military dependence either directly by ‘protecting’ the target or indirectly by locking it in to you as a sole supplier of arms, ammunition or spare parts.
Strengthen its enemies and weaken the target’s own self-defense abilities so that it will have to depend upon you when threatened.

GOOD NEW FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Switching off antibiotic resistance. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have found new RNA-control switches (“ribo-switches) for genes encoding antibiotic resistance and discovered that these switches are actually “turned on” by the antibiotics themselves. The switches could be turned off by future treatments.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/switching-antibiotic-resistance

Israeli doctors save “no chance” Cyprus baby. (TY Beverly) No newborn with a heart defect like that of Cypriot baby Vassilios had ever survived. But Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center was willing to treat him. After an anxious journey to Israel, Hadassah surgeons achieved the “impossible” and after 10 days Vassilios and his happy parents returned to Cyprus. http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/cyprus-newborn-saved.html

Hadassah saves Al Quds student with organ failure. (TY Beverly) Palestinian Arab student Sara al Katzroy collapsed whilst jogging. She was brought from Jericho hospital to Jerusalem where Hadassah doctors used a Molecular Adsorbent Recirculation System (MARS) to save her liver. Sara now wants to become a nurse.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/sara-katzroy.html

Doctors save Palestinian Arab boy who fell into boiling jam. (TY Barbara Sofer) One of Barbara Sofer’s 68 reasons to love Israel includes this amazing report of how doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center managed to save the life of Mohamed – a Palestinian Arab toddler who fell into a vat of boiling jam.
http://hadassahinternational.org/supermodel-naomi-campbell-visits-childrens-ward-at-hadassah/

Eye spy. Two people have regained their eyesight after receiving the corneas of the late former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who died March 17 after a long battle with cancer. Avraham Gian, 81, and an unnamed 70-year-old woman received the corneas at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/meir-dagans-corneas-give-sight-back-to-2-israelis/

Heart implant is a success. (TY Atid-EDI) UK medical journal The Lancet reported the first implants of the interatrial shunts from Israel’s V-Wave (see previous newsletters). In less than 1 hour, each of 10 Canadian patients suffering poor left ventricular function received new implants and were discharged home next morning.
http://vwavemedical.com/2016/03/28/first-human-results-v-waves-interatrial-shunt-published-lancet/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2816%2900585-7/abstract

Does US News Degrade Law Schools? By Richard Baehr

Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation and Accountability by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2016

The three weekly news magazines, Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report, at one time printed and sold around ten million copies combined each week. All have been greatly reduced in scope and circulation, unable to compete as weekly new journals with rapid-fire instant news feeds available from online sources or 24-hour cable news channels. One of the three, US News, under the direction of its owner Mortimer Zuckerman, chose a different course a quarter century back: becoming the bible of annual higher education rankings. This venture has proven to be a great success, whatever the profitability of the enterprise for the company. Today, US News rankings of undergraduate universities and colleges, top high schools, and graduate and professional programs, have become a primary source of information for applicants, faculty, school staffs, employers, and alumni, and an important measure of status and achievement for the various schools and programs.
The ratings have always been controversial. How do you assess the quality of a program? Are the annual surveys measuring the right things? Are the weightings of various factors which produce a rating score and a ranking reflective of what should matter most in evaluating schools or programs? Do the ratings capture the student experience and the value of a college or graduate program? Are the distinctions among schools real, or just a factor of a need to rank order? Can the ratings be gamed? Do the ratings themselves influence some of the scores that are measured in the next ratings cycle, rather than just neutrally present a status report on a school or program?

Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder’s new book, Engines of Anxiety, focuses on the US News rankings for one particular professional program, law schools. The authors argue that whereas there are alternative rankings for other professional schools or graduate programs, such as business schools, which provide alternatives to the US News survey, and there are many books which try to evaluate and score undergraduate programs, there is no real alternative to the US News rankings of law schools. US News divides undergraduate colleges and universities into national universities, and national small colleges, as well as regional universities and colleges. A business school can pick and choose one of the surveys which ranks its program, or components of its program highly, and sell that to prospective students. But US News has no real competition for its law school rankings (latest rankings here), for which one ranking system is applied to all law schools, virtually all of whom comply with the “system” and submit their data to the magazine each year.

The authors argue that the high compliance rate relates to the fact that US News will estimate a law school’s data for each factor measured when it does not submit its own. This would include data on job placement, admissions rates, LSAT scores, and GPAs for entering students, and the US News“estimates” are designed to be conservative — lower rather than higher than what might be the real experience. Why not get ranked 89th with your own data, than 116th when US News fills in the blanks?

The Greens and Nature Worship By Norman Rogers

The Biblical view of the relationship between man and nature is set out clearly in Genesis 1:28:

God blessed them [mankind] and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

The view of the Sierra Club is well described by this:

Humans have evolved as an interdependent part of nature. Humankind has a powerful place in the environment, which may range from steward to destroyer. We must share the Earth’s finite resources with other living things and respect all life-enabling processes. Thus, we must control human population numbers and seek a balance that serves all life forms.

In the Biblical view, mankind rules nature and exploits it. In the Sierra Club view “humankind” must blend in with all the other animals and not burden the natural order. The Sierra Club view represents a step backward from monotheism to nature worship. They cannot admit that they are practicing a religion, because if they did many of the laws passed in response to lobbying by the Sierra Club and similar organizations would be unconstitutional, according to the first amendment, as a “law respecting an establishment of religion…”

John Muir, the founder and first president of the Sierra Club, made clear the religious nature of the club in his protest against the damming of the Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park: “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

In the preface to the book Dark Green Religion, the green religion is described as:

Dark green religion — religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care — has been spreading rapidly around the world.

TEACHING WHILE WHITE: EILEEN TOPLANSKY

Teaching While White (TWW) is becoming an occupational hazard these days. So is being a white student, for that matter. At the “Unofficial Scripps College Survival Guide,” students learn that “white peers and faculty — portray Claremont Consortium as a haven for liberal ideology and acceptance. It’s a rhetoric that has led many white students to believe that racism does not exist on campus.” Thus, “as white students, [they] must identify the ways that [they] are engaging in the perpetuation of white supremacy and work to unlearn [their] racism.”

Of course, “reverse racism does not exist because there are no institutions that were founded with the intention of discriminating against white people on the basis of their skin. Many white people claim to be victims of reverse racism when people of color associate negative characteristics with white people or have a general dislike for them as a group. This is not reverse racism because racism is privilege plus power and people of color do not have racial privilege. Moreover, distrust or anger at white people is a legitimate response to a repetitive history and current state of racist violence.”

And so Rachel, Anna, Emi, and Jasmine, authors of the above, state that “[t]he solution to white privilege is to ‘ask people of color to absolve [white people] of [their] guilt.'” But even that is “not an adequate response… [since] whites must be accountable and hold other white students accountable, too.”

I would like to ask the authors if I decide to be black tomorrow a la Rachel Dolezal, would I still be guilty of white supremacy? After all, an Indian-American student got into medical school by pretending to be black.

Germany: Christian Refugees Persecuted by Muslims “Incidents are deliberately downplayed and even covered up.” by Soeren Kern

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8043/germany-christians-persecuted Thousands of Christians in German refugee shelters are being persecuted by Muslims, sometimes even by their security guards, according to a new report by the NGO Open Doors. “A major obstacle to the survey was that many victims were afraid to participate. … Their concern was not only on the possible consequences for them […]

HIS SAY: DAVID GOLDMAN ON TRUMP VS. HILLARY CLINTON

A fit of high dudgeon has gripped many of my Republican friends, ex-friends, and soon-to-be-ex-friends now that Donald Trump has all but won the Republican nomination. My advice to them: get over it. This presidential race will look like Alien vs. Predator. I’m for Predator, without a second’s hesitation, because he’s our Predator. For all his faults Donald Trump would be (and I’m confident will be) an incomparably better president.

I’m not pleased about the outcome of the primaries. I supported Ted Cruz and helped out in his campaign with economic research and news analysis. Yes, Trump is a vulgarian with poor impulse control. I don’t like him and find his vulgarity objectionable and his insulting remarks about Mexicans (for example) deplorable. The mother of my children is Mexican, and I take this sort of thing personally. If I ever have the opportunity I will give Trump a black eye.

But there’s a war on–three different wars, in fact. To remain neutral is moral cowardice; to choose the wrong side would be downright wicked.

First, there is a war on between Judeo-Christian principles and the political correctness inspired by the Frankfurt School and the French existentialists. Lunatics have seized control of our universities and have stamped out dissent with the zeal and vigilance of the Spanish Inquisition or the Taliban. The distinguished historian Paul Johnson said it best in a Forbes essay:

America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone. For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.

DAVID COLLIER: ANTI-SEMITISM AT THE HEART OF THE LABOUR PARTY

Last night, I went to an event at the student central in Malet Street organised by supporters of the Labour Party. Part of the Birkbeck campus. The event was titled ‘Antisemitism, Zionism and the left’. The purpose was to address the ‘witch hunt’ taking place against anyone who criticises Israel. Something that is seen by some as part of a co-ordinated attack to unsettle Corbyn and remove him from power.

Given what was said, it is clear that Corbyn’s issue with antisemitism runs far deeper than a few councillors or MP’s. There were about 150 people there. Had there been a vote, every single card carrying Labour member present would probably have agreed, reposted or repeated, every single comment made by those suspended. Antisemitism is not a comment made in careless anger by these people, it is embedded in their world vision.

The panel was made up of 6 speakers.

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist and filmmaker
John Rose, author of the Myths of Zionism
Arthur Goodman:, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Weyman Bennett, Unite Against Fascism
Lindsey German, Stop the War Coalition
Walter Wolfgang, veteran Labour Party activist
Labour and antisemitism denial

Our Elites Can Afford to Support Looser Immigration Policies By Victor Davis Hanson

Support for, or opposition to, mass immigration is apparently a class issue, not an ethnic or racial issue. Elites more often support lenient immigration policies; the general public typically opposes them.

At the top of the list are Mexico’s elites. Illegal immigration results in an estimated $25 billion sent back in remittances to Mexico each year. The Mexican government worries more about remittances, the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange, than it does about its low-paid citizens who are in the U.S., scrimping to send money back home. Remittances also excuse the Mexican government from restructuring the economy or budgeting for anti-poverty programs.

Mexico sees the U.S. the way 19th-century elites in this country saw the American frontier: as a valuable escape hatch for the discontented and unhappy, who could flee rather than stay home and demand long-needed changes.

American employers in a number of industries — construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and others — have long favored illegal immigration. Low-wage labor cuts costs: The larger the pool of undocumented immigrants, the less pressure to raise wages. That was why Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1970s occasionally patrolled the southern border in its vigilante-style “illegals campaign” to keep out undocumented immigrants while opposing guest-worker programs.

Moreover, the additional social expense associated with millions of undocumented workers — in rising health-care, legal, education, and law-enforcement costs — is usually picked up by the public taxpayer, not by employers.

Ethnic elites also favor lax immigration policies. For all the caricatures of the old melting pot, millions of legal immigrants still rapidly assimilate, integrate, and intermarry. Often within two generations of arrival, they blend indistinguishably into the general population and drop their hyphenated and accented nomenclature. But when immigration is mostly illegal, in great numbers, and without ethnic diversity, assimilation stalls. Instead, a near-permanent pool of undocumented migrants offers a political opportunity for activists to provide them with collective representation.