RUTHFULLY YOURS

You learn a lot by observing the way people choose to spend their money. Forget about what they say, and look at what they do. College officials endless proclaim their devotion to academic excellence, student achievement, blah, blah, blah. But instead of putting their resources into the faculty, more and more they prefer to spend money on administrators and bureaucrats who don’t teach at all. That’s the argument Mary Grabar makes in her new essay “Save Money With Adjuncts, Spend It On Bureaucrats.”

From her own experience teaching English at Georgia Perimeter College, Mary points to expensive but academically risible initiatives such as “civic learning.” A highly paid VP at the school called for courses with a “civic-engagement or service-learning component.” Among the results was having students serve as docents at the Margaret Mitchell House. Mary comments, “I failed to see how such activities, whether ‘global’ or ushering at a local historic site, would help students struggling with grammar.”

The absence of true leadership has created chaos at home and abroad. What has gone wrong with the U.S. government in the past month? Just about everything, from the fundamental to the ridiculous. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States to warn Congress about the dangers of a nuclear Iran. He spoke without the invitation of an irritated President Obama, who claimed that he did not even watch the address on television. Obama declined to even meet with the Israeli prime minister, announcing that it would have been improper for him to have such a meeting so close to Netanyahu’s re-election bid.
But if Obama was so concerned about not influencing the Israeli elections, why, according to some news accounts, is a Senate panel launching an investigation into whether Obama’s State Department gave grant money to a nonprofit organization, the OneVoice Movement, that sought to unseat Netanyahu with the help of several former Obama campaign operatives? Then, 47 Republican senators signed an unusual letter to the Iranian theocracy, reminding it that any agreement on Iran’s nuclear program negotiated with the Obama administration would have to first clear Congress. Obama shot back that the senators’ letter was undue interference that aided the Iranians.

Slow But Certain Integration in Israel.There’s more promise for improved Arab-Israeli relations than you think.

Weeks of devastating warfare and extremist rhetoric that began after the murders of Israeli and Palestinian boys have prompted many to ask if Israelis and Palestinians can ever get along. Skeptics aside, the answer is yes. Right in front of our eyes, we see how 1.7 million Israeli Arabs and more than 6 million Israeli Jews live in peace, because of how Israeli Arabs have been integrated into the economic, if not social, life of Israel.

Certainly, the decades after Israeli statehood were difficult and military rule over Arab communities lasted into the 1960s. But, over time, Israeli Arabs have come to believe that the Israeli government is serving their interests. They are increasingly seeing themselves as Israeli citizens, not as Palestinian outsiders. Affirmative action policies have significantly increased the number of Arabs employed in government agencies. The educational performance of Arab students has improved significantly as well, leading to a substantial increase in enrollment in Israeli universities. More Arab women are employed in professional careers, and Arabs with high-tech training have transformed Nazareth into a hub where numerous national and international companies run production development sites.

It would be a stretch to say that President Obama lost Israel’s election. But our president has made it pretty clear what he thinks of Benjamin Netanyahu, and last night, Israeli voters made it pretty clear what they think of him too. Netanyahu’s Likud party easily beat its closest rival, and now appears likely to head a conservative coalition or a centrist unity government. President Obama’s distaste for Israel’s reelected leader has two explanations. Netanyahu is the most articulate, most forceful global critic of Obama’s rabid desire for a deal with Iran. He is also the world leader who does the best job providing an alternative to the president’s Pollyannaish approach to Islamic terror. Of course, Israeli voters were considering many issues during this election, and much of the disagreement among Israeli parties is about domestic and social debates, not security policy. Because of the gravity of their situation, Israelis increasingly agree on questions of defense. But it is important that they reelected the loudest, most impassioned defender of their consensus. President Obama’s contempt for Netanyahu is disturbing because he is supposed to — and at times pretends to — have special solicitude for Israel’s security.
Doing so need not mean agreeing with its prime minister on every single question, but the president’s discomfort with the avatar of Israeli strength runs deeper than day-to-day debates. This is not confined to the president, either: It was obvious in the Western liberal hope and expectation that Israeli voters might share their contempt or boot a paranoid like Netanyahu because they care more about housing costs or income inequality. Many Americans are disturbed by the Netanyahu–Obama animosity, and for good reason. In part, it is because they worry what it portends for Israel, which needs allies. But it also reminds them that they lack a leader who has a clear-eyed view of evil and understands peace through strength. Israel reelected a man like that; we will have to wait a little longer to elect our own.

When Republicans complained that Obama refused to talk about Islamic terrorism, he accused them of playing into the hands of ISIS by demanding that he identify the enemy we’re fighting.

When they spoke out against his Iranian nuclear sellout, he accused them of “wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran”. Those hardliners would presumably toe a harder line than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who responded to Obama’s outreach in his first term by saying, “The Islamic peoples all over the world chant ‘Death to America!’” and who stated last year that “This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it.”

(The Supreme Leader of a country which stones teenage rape victims and rapes teenage girls so that they don’t die as virgins, also claimed that “The European races are barbaric.”)

If the moderate Supreme Leader that Obama is dealing with wants Death to America, what could the real hardliners want for America that’s even worse than death? A third term of Obama?

Meanwhile Joe Biden, Obama’s number two, accused Republicans of undermining Obama. This would be the same Biden who threatened to impeach President Bush if he bombed Iran’s nuclear program and who blasted Bush and the idea of an Axis of Evil at a fundraiser in the home of a pro-Iran figure.

In his 1964 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, Barry Goldwater said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…” In that same speech Mr. Goldwater issued a warning more meaningful to today: “Those who seek absolute power [read: extremists], even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth…they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.” Seven years later Saul Alinsky, the “father of community organizing” and whose work influenced the young community organizer Barack Obama, published “Rules for Radicals.” Its opening sentence: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what is to what they believe it should be.” On October 30, 2008, candidate Barack Obama said: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.”

“Radicalism” is defined by Merriam-Webster: “The opinions and behavior of people who favor extreme change, especially in government.” There is no question that what Mr. Alinsky was advocating was extremism. However, during the 2008 campaign only a few “extremists” and “racists” brought attention to the radicals who had influenced Mr. Obama as a young man. Nevertheless, the names and the numbers are legion, and include among others Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Tom Hayden, Saul Mendelson, Dr. John Drew and Professor Charles Ogletree.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Humberto Fontova, the author of four books including his latest, The Longest Romance; The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro.

Humberto came on the show to discuss Obama Comes to Castro’s Rescue, unveiling how the Radical-in-Chief threw a lifeline to a dying tyranny. The dialogue occurred in the context of The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obama-comes-to-castros-rescue-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s quip that “some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals,” faculty at the University of Southampton in England will be sponsoring a three-day conference in April, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism,” conceived of to “explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation.”

Not content with the way history and law have worked out independent of their intellectual meddling, the conference sponsors claim that the event will have great scholarly value and “. . . is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel” and “will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature.”

What does that elevated and academically-inane doublespeak actually mean? Obviously, it is clear, both by the questions posited as the themes of inquiry of the conference, not to mention the list of toxic intellectuals who will present papers at the event, that the purpose and end product of the conference is yet another formalized indictment of Israel—nicely disguised as a bit of academic inquiry and brave new scholarship.

For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.

It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.

Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish.

Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel really got to me. I have been reading Jacobson with pleasure since his 1983 debut novel Coming from Behind and was happily surprised when he was awarded the 2010 Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, although in my opinion he ought also to have won it earlier for his darker novel Kalooki Nights. Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—this one by a giant step.

J, or more preciselyJ, begins with a challenge, first to typesetters and then to readers, to crack the code of the double lines that cross the eponymous letter. Kevern “Coco” Cohen’s father would always “put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp sucking on a cigarette butt . . . to stifle the letter j before it left his lips.” Kevern follows his father’s custom, which might have been taken over from his father. But if this is a family sport, it is not much fun for the son who would have liked to understand this habit of erasure. As a reader who sees the potential jew in every jewel, I was certain I grasped what Kevern doesn’t, but my anxiety then focused on the whys and wherefores of striking or muzzling that portentous consonant.