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Ruth King

Why Academic Departments Should Steer Clear of Activism Against Israel Facts and history are not the concern of the morally-elevated professoriate. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/why-academic-departments-should-steer-clear-richard-l-cravatts/

The obsessive loathing of Israel by large swathes of academia was evident last spring as Hamas showered southern Israeli town with some 4000 rockets and mortars. These woke, virtue-signaling moral narcissists, however, instead of denouncing genocidal aggression on the part of Hamas, of course took it upon themselves to condemn—in the loudest and most condemnatory terms—the Jewish state, not the homicidal psychopaths intent on murdering Jews.

Tellingly silent as rockets were launched indiscriminately by Hamas into southern Israeli towns with the express purpose of murdering Jews (each of which rocket, incidentally, representing a war crime), these virtue-signaling students and faculty only became indignant at the violence and body counts once Israel was forced to protect its citizenry by defensive action to suppress Hamas’s lethal aggression.

Students, faculty, programs, and whole departments on campuses around the world stumbled over each other in the rush to issue “solidarity statements” to express support for the ever-aggrieved Palestinians and to denounce only the military and political response of Israel, assigning complete blame for the present conflict to the Jewish state. The corrosive Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), for instance, crowed that “Statements in support of Palestinian rights, many advocating for BDS, have been endorsed by more than 350 academic departments, programs, centers, unions and societies and garnered nearly 24,000 signatures from scholars, researchers, students and university staff worldwide.”

These statements of solidarity varied slightly depending on the academic discipline of its authors, but there was a commonality to the pseudo-academic language. While the statements claimed to seek “global social justice in [their] intersectional teaching, scholarship, and organizing,” absent from most of the statements was any notice of the injustice and violence currently being meted out against Israelis, either as a result of the shower of some 4300 Hamas rockets launched from Gaza in the latest assault with the intention of murdering Jewish civilians, or the latest conflict as part of an ongoing intifada which has claimed the lives of  Israelis who have been injured and murdered by genocidal Arabs wielding knives, guns, rocks, incendiary kites, and even automobiles used as weapons.

The ‘Squad’ Joins the China Appeasement Caucus Boycott Israel, not Communist China. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/squad-joins-china-appeasement-caucus-daniel-greenfield/

The ‘Squad’ of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, and Rep. Cori Bush, already full-time members of the Hamas caucus, expanded their horizons by joining the Communist China appeasement caucus. 

Earlier this year, Kerry visited China and returned bearing a warning from his old masters that unless the United States dropped President Trump’s sanctions on the Communist regime over its slave labor, and on China’s military hackers stealing our technology, there would be no deals on global warming. The Xi regime also demanded that America allow its Confucius Institute front groups to conduct infiltration on American campuses, ban pro-democracy protests outside its consulates, and allow it to repress Hong Kong, and conquer Taiwan without any interference.

After his latest treasonous expedition, Kerry became the loudest voice of appeasement even in an administration that was already appeasing the Taliban, Iran, Russia, and China. The Communist regime aided Kerry by undermining other administration envoys, keeping up the pressure from the outside even as Hanoi John and his allies applied pressure from the inside.

Last month it was reported that Congressional allies were circulating a letter urging “U.S. collaboration with China” and insisting that, “There is no conceivable way to address the climate crisis without substantially strengthening communication and collaboration between our nations.” In a treasonous Freudian slip, they couldn’t stop calling it what it was, “collaboration”.

Who would possibly sign a letter like that? Even most Democrats wouldn’t “collaborate”.

COP, PLOP, Flop by Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/11/cop-plop-and-flop/

At least some of the media are making hay over the hypocrisy of the global elite arriving at Glasgow via 400 private jets to lecture us about CO2 emissions. The jets created such a shortage of parking slots that some were obliged to fly the extra 50-70km to Prestwick and Edinburgh just to park.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s $US180 billion man, flew in with his $US65 million Gulfstream to rendezvous with Prince Charles, who also arrived by private jet. Bezos had been partying in Turkey with Bill Gates on a rented super yacht, the Lana ($A3 million a week hire), with a few 150km side trips by helicopter. 

Within several hours last Sunday week leaders from Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Mauritania and Kenya came in by private jets. World leaders do need secure transport, but as one blogger commented, “The fools could just stay home and shut up.”

The best one-liner about Glasgow to date is from an ex-No 10 Downing special adviser Steve Hilton writing in the Daily Mail: “A gigantic flatulent mess of incoherence and sanctimony”. One such specimen: ex-President Obama jetting in to tell teen demonstrators, “You need to help educate your parents and grandparents, your uncles and aunts, your teachers, your employers.” Sure, Barack, that makes sense.

But my tale today is not about the presidents and billionaires but the 40,000 bureaucrats, activists, grifters and useful idiots now jamming Glasgow accommodation and gabfests. They’re being told by the ridiculous Prince Charles that this is the “last chance saloon” to save the planet and humanity, as they were told at the first Conference of Parties at Berlin in 1995 and every other one of the annual gabfests since.

Please Go, Brandon – Americans Want This President Out

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/12/please-go-brandon-americans-want-this-president-out/

A poll taken earlier this month shows that voters believe job No. 1 for President Joe Biden is to vacate his office. His replacement, of course, would be the vice president whose approval rating is so low it hardly registers. Take a bow, voters. This is the mess that America has become.

When 1,000 voters were asked what is “the single most important goal for Biden over the next year,” the top answer at 20% was “resign/retire/quit.” That answer was almost twice as popular as the No. 2 response, “economy/jobs,” which logged in at 11%. These are the unsurprising-to-many findings of a Suffolk University-USA Today poll taken over three days last week. 

“Nearly half of those surveyed, 46%, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected,” says USA Today, which didn’t bother to include in its report that voters want Biden to leave, but did admit there’s a “gloomy landscape” ahead for Democrats in next year’s midterms. 

Medical Journals Pour Forth Hundreds of Articles on Race and Racism By John Murawski,

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/11/medical_journals_pour_forth_hundreds_of_articles_on_race_and_racism_803026.html

Part 2 of 2 Articles (Part 1 Here)

The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and its JAMA network of other periodicals have published about 950 articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in the past five years – about a third appearing in just the past year.

A search for “health disparities” on the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed.gov search page shows an exponential “hockey stick” trend in recent years, with articles through October already surpassing last year’s total of 10,719. By comparison, “ovarian cancer” yields 7,134 search results last year, while “aortic aneurysm” yields fewer than 4,000.

These numbers attest to the fact that the academic study of racial justice, power and privilege is no longer the sole domain of non-scientific university departments, such as sociology, literature and education. The trendy topic has migrated to peer-reviewed medical journals, where editors now view systemic racism as a leading cause of disproportionate illness and premature mortality among black people.

A PubMed.gov search for articles on “health disparities” shows a “hockey stick” trend lately.
PubMed.gov

“The rules of the game have definitely changed, and these changes can be easily seen at the highest level,” said Shervin Assari, a professor of family medicine and urban public health at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically black medical school in Los Angeles.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd killing by a Minneapolis cop, medical researchers have seized on systemic racism as a unifying theory that explains the shorter life expectancies and more prevalent chronic conditions among black Americans. The mass conversion to systemic racism as the canonical explanation for health disparities has swept through the medical profession with stunning velocity, emboldening scholarship with the certitude of a single explanatory narrative.

The immorality of confusing victims with villains By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-immorality-of-confusing-victims-with-villains-opinion-684741
The sentencing this week of Arad resident Aryeh Schiff returned a longstanding Israeli debate about the “purity of arms” to the fore. Though the crime for which he was convicted in July wasn’t military in nature, the arguments surrounding it are reminiscent of those raised in relation to the IDF.

A year ago in December, the then-70-year-old was arrested for shooting and killing 36-year-old Bedouin Mohammad al-Atrash – an ex-con with a hefty rap sheet – who had broken into his car and was driving it away. Schiff recounted that he and his wife were awoken by a noise that they realized was the auto theft in progress.

He then ran outside with his pistol drawn and fired twice at the car. The first thing he did when he discerned that the thief had been hit was to phone the police and an ambulance.
Paramedics evacuated Atrash to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where he was pronounced dead from a bullet wound to the head. Meanwhile, Schiff fully cooperated with interrogators, admitting that he had not first fired a warning shot in the air. He claimed, however, that he had aimed at the car’s tires, not the robber in the driver’s seat.

“All my life, I will have to live with the fact that I killed a person unintentionally,” Schiff told the Beersheba Magistrate’s Court. “My grief is deep for taking a person’s life… I am very sorry for the tragic event.”

POLICE AND prosecutors told a different story, however, based on video footage of the incident, which showed Schiff pointing his weapon at Atrash. They appealed the court’s decision to release Schiff on house arrest for the duration of the investigation, requesting that he be charged with reckless manslaughter, and claiming that he posed a flight risk. After extending his remand three times at the behest of the prosecution, the court finally sent Schiff home.

The following July, three months ago, the Beersheba District Court rejected Schiff’s claim of self-defense and convicted him of manslaughter. He was sentenced to nine months of community service through a plea bargain, thwarting the prosecution’s initial demand that he be imprisoned for four to six years.

Not surprisingly, responses to both the case itself and the verdict were divided along political lines, with the Right backing Schiff and the Left assuming its customary, bleeding-heart stance.

Meretz MK Mossi Raz, for example, called the sentence an “embarrassment,” warning against the “normalization” of citizens taking the law into their own hands. Of course, he had to add, “I can’t help thinking that if Schiff had been an Arab, his punishment would have been far more severe.”

Never mind that the second part of his statement is especially ridiculous, given the major problem of violence and lawlessness in the Arab sector, which police and prosecutors have been at a loss to tackle and that the government keeps vowing to rectify. Raz’s point was clear: to suggest that nationalism and racism are responsible for all of Israel’s societal flaws.

What Is an America that Holds Prisoners Indefinitely without Charging Them? E. Jeffrey Ludwig

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/what_is_an_america_that_holds_prisoners_indefinitely_without_charging_them.html

The U.S. is facing a serious constitutional crisis over the handling of the cases of defendants in the Jan. 6 so-called “insurrection” in Washington, D.C. to protest the presidential election modus operandi and the results.  Those being held for many months without a trial are being denied their habeas corpus rights under the U.S. Constitution and even dating back to English law hundreds of years before our Constitution was implemented.  Not only are they being incarcerated without having had a trial, but there is some evidence that they are being mistreated or are being held 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, which is a punishment accorded only the most dangerous criminals, such as serial killers and terrorists.

What are habeas corpus rights?  According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “[h]abeas corpus is a fundamental right in the Constitution that protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment.  Translated from Latin it means ‘show me the body.’  Habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument to safeguard individual freedom against arbitrary executive power.”  A citizen must be charged and cannot be held indefinitely.  A charge requires a trial, and, if found guilty in a trial, there is a sentence for a specific amount of time.

Even PolitiFact — hardly an unbiased fact-checker — relates, “The vast majority of defendants have been released from custody while awaiting trial, but some [my italics] held in jail have been kept in solitary confinement.”  The fact that exact numbers for how many are held in solitary confinement or for how long suggests to this writer evasion by the Washington, D.C. jail authorities.

Despite the attempt by outlets like PolitiFact to minimize the problem of solitary confinement, a number of GOP senators have voiced their concern about this problem, and even the ACLU — certainly not an outreach arm of the Republican Party — has become involved.  However, the Republican senators who are concerned do not have a specific number.  The lack of definitiveness in this area is alarming.

Wokeness M.D. by Tevi Troy

http://www.tevitroy.org/25821/wokeness-medicine

Twenty years ago, the physician Sally Satel argued in her book PC M.D. that political correctness had taken over medicine. PC M.D. described a lowering of standards to increase doctor diversity, the blithe use of dubious “recovered memories” in sexual-abuse allegations, and the endorsement for political reasons of questionable techniques such as “therapeutic touch.” Some of these concerns no longer have much purchase in our common cultural conversation. But Satel’s larger point continues to resonate: Politics, and especially leftist political theories emanating from the universities, can interfere with the practice of medicine in a deleterious way.

These days, the problem is not “politically correct” medicine, but “woke” medicine. PC’s impact on medicine was real, and worrisome, but the current fear is that PC’s implications could pale before woke’s troubling impositions, which are more intensive in both scale and scope across multiple sectors in health care.

To what extent is ideology influencing the medical field?

The first question is whether wokeness is directing doctors to treat patients unequally. Wokeness at its heart looks at intersectionality and judges people’s merits and worth on their place along the spectrum of oppression. This pernicious concept means that those with more claims to historic oppression should be granted preferable treatment over those with fewer claims—with white “cisnormative” males having none of said claims. The enshrinement of this concept contravenes the foundational principles enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, the ethic that has guided medical practice for millennia.

The Hippocratic Oath does not actually say, “First, do no harm.” What it does say is this: “Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick.” It specifically directs doctors to avoid the mistreatment of patients, “whether they are free men or slaves.” The practical effects of this doctrine are extraordinary. At the national level, for example, Israeli doctors famously treat victims of terror attacks and the perpetrators of such attacks the same way, with no distinction. This approach has long been widely accepted as a signal of a doctor’s morality and good character and has been broadly absorbed in our popular culture.

The Sissy Generation By Andrew Gorlin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_sissy_generation.html

Just 70-80 years ago we had what was dubbed “The Greatest Generation” – the people who had fought and won World War II.  Now, just a couple of generations down the road, we have unconditionally surrendered to a disease with minuscule mortality (for the vast majority of the population), and which is to a large degree treatable. How did that happen?

Roll back to the first months of 2020, when we just learned about the sinister new virus which was killing people and for which we had neither vaccine nor cure. We were scared – in the 21st century, we don’t expect to encounter something to which our medicine has no answer. A lot of things about COVID-19 were unknown at the time, but one of the first confirmed pieces of information was that this virus spares children.

What great news! Whatever calamity befalls us, children are always our main concern. Now, when we know that they are safe, shouldn’t we, adults, breathe a big sigh of relief, return to normal life and let the doctors do what they always do: treat the sick, research for a cure, work on the vaccine? I can imagine that this would have happened a few decades ago, despite the (incorrect) perception that the mortality rate was maybe small, but still meaningful, a few percentage points. Yet the only developed country that behaved more or less like that was Sweden. The rest of mankind locked themselves up and essentially stopped living normal lives.

The word that we heard the most during this time was ‘safety.’ Coming to work is declared unsafe — sure, we can stop working, no big deal. Going to school is unsafe — cheer up, kids, you are staying home today — and next week, and then month after month after month. Wear your mask everywhere and stay at least 6 feet away (better 20) from everybody. Safety is king!

How did we end up here? As very often happens the course happened first gradually, then suddenly. The worship of safety began long ago and now it’s everywhere. Everything we buy and use, from lawnmowers to toasters to toothbrushes, undergoes elaborate safety checks and is accompanied by instructions for safe operation. And not only is it a legal requirement but, for many people, safety became the most important feature of any device. There is a commercial on TV promoting gutter guards.  A woman asks her husband: ‘Do you climb a ladder to clean the gutter?” “Yes.” “But it’s unsafe!” — enough said, everybody needs to get the damn thing.

Of course, nothing is wrong with being safe, and many things that we do toward that end are good and reasonable — like seat belts, and later airbags in cars. But more and more the idea of ‘being safe’ has morphed into ‘feeling safe’, so the natural desire for safety is now abused beyond recognition. In other times, the idea of banning a group of people from entering some location would be called ‘segregation’; today the leftist students who don’t want to be around anybody with different views demand ‘safe spaces.’ When a controversial speaker is invited to speak at a university, protesters wouldn’t say ‘we hate this guy’ (which would be the truth, but ‘hate’ is a loaded word nowadays, better not to use it); instead, they declare that such an event would make them ‘feel unsafe’.

AMA Becomes a Shill of the Left By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/ama_becomes_a_shill_of_the_left.html

By now the left-wing agenda in schools is increasingly more evident. Incomprehensible writing of the lowest level is now the norm but with an additional twist — students in the nursing field now spout such ideas as demonstrated in the following:

Dear Professor, I do not understand [why] you took points off for using ‘their’ instead of his or hers.  I used that specific word because I am not just referring to my one gender, regardless of whether it relates to one individual or more than one. I have been told to avoid gender biases. As a result, I disagree with the number of points taken off because I chose not to use his or her, as I was not referring to just one gender.

But this is no surprise for anyone in the educational field today because according to the Left  “white language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.”

Now the Left has co-opted the medical establishment. In the publication titled: Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts” put out by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the AAMC Center for Health Justice, science is essentially perverted.

In essence, it signals the death of scientific inquiry and serious thinking and ushers in a world where it is “critical to address all areas of marginalization and inequity due to sexism, class oppression, homophobia, xenophobia and ableism.”

According to the AMA, there is “outright resistance and denial that racism exists.”  To promote their left-wing agenda, the AMA asserts that “the field of equity, like all other scholarly domains, has developed specific norms that convey authenticity, precision and meaning.”