RUTHFULLY YOURS

On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a four-to-three decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, gave the victory in the case to the University of Texas. The decision allows the university to continue to grant strong preference in admissions to minority students based on their race.

The National Association of Scholars deeply regrets the Court’s final decision in this case, which has endured more than eight years of litigation. Along with many others, we had hoped the Court would at last hold the University of Texas to the standard of “strict scrutiny” for its use of racial classifications. Instead, Justice Kennedy’s opinion cobbles together rationalizations, excuses, averted glances, circumventions, and just-so stories that add up to permitting the University of Texas to persist in racial discrimination among applicants.

Racial Favoritism

Kennedy’s twenty-page opinion, also signed by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, ends the case in which Abigail Fisher claimed that she was unjustly refused admission to the University. Her complaint centered on the University’s practice of using racial preferences among its criteria for selecting students among those who were not automatically admitted under Texas’s so-called “Top Ten Percent Plan.” That plan grants students graduating in the top ten percent of each Texas high school class automatic admission to the state’s public universities. Fisher, who is white, finished high school just outside the top ten percent of her class. She then applied for regular admission. The University, however, used a system of racial favoritism to select among students in this category.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now certified that this system of favoritism passes muster with the Court’s previous rulings on when race can and cannot be used in distributing public benefits. The Court’s “strict scrutiny” rule generally restricts the use of racial classifications to cases where there is a “compelling public interest” and where no less intrusive measure exists to achieve that interest.

The Make-Believe University

But there is no compelling public interest for the use of racial classifications or racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas. And other means of increasing the numbers of black and Hispanic enrollees are easily at hand. Because these facts are plain, Justice Kennedy and his majority colleagues enrolled themselves in a make-believe university where:

The university employs racial preferences not for the sake of increasing black and Hispanic enrollment but to obtain “the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity.”
The university does not employ numerical quotas, but seeks to maximize “diversity.”
The university does not have “elusory or amorphous” goals in its racial preference policy, but has “articulated concrete and precise goals,” these being:
Ending stereotypes
Promoting “cross-racial understanding”
Preparing students for “an increasingly diverse workforce and society”
Cultivating leaders with “legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry”
The university adopted so-called “holistic review” not to evade accountability for using race in admissions but because none of the “alternatives was a workable means of attaining the University’s educational goals.”

Outside the make-believe of the Supreme Court’s sorry record of jurisprudence on race in college admissions, these claims are sheer nonsense. The University of Texas uses race in college admissions simply for the advantages that racial politics provides.

For nearly a decade, incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise in the University of California system and numerous other colleges in the Golden State. Some say that California colleges make more headlines about incidents of antisemitism than for academic or athletic achievements. The most recent academic year was no exception.

According to the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative, 69 antisemitic incidents occurred on 20 different California campuses during the recent academic year. UC Berkley led the way with eight instances, followed by UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz with seven each.

“When it comes to antisemitism, California schools continue to top the list, both in number and severity. To those of us closely monitoring the rise of campus antisemitism over the past few years, this comes as no surprise since many California schools were ground zero for the campus anti-Zionism movement,” explained AMCHA Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin. “Examination after examination demonstrate a direct connection between anti-Zionist activities on campus and acts of anti-Jewish hostility. The problem is not going away. In fact, it’s picking up steam and must be addressed immediately.”

AMCHA tracks all reported incidents of antisemitism on college campuses throughout the US. To be classified as antisemitic, an incident must meet the definition established by the US State Department.

In 2015, 464 antisemitic incidents on campus were reported across the country. The first half of 2016 has seen 254 occurrences. At the current pace, 2016 will see an increase of nearly 10 percent in antisemitism on college campuses nationwide.

A 2015 study performed by AMCHA of antisemitic activity on campuses across the country revealed that four of the five most active anti-Jewish campuses are part of the UC system. The same study showed that “99 percent of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups had one or more incidents of anti-Semitic activity, whereas only 16 percent of schools with no active anti-Zionist student group had experienced anti-Semitic activity.”

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Brigitte Gabriel Moment with Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America.

Brigitte discusses What is Really Driving the Terrorists, unveiling what really inspired Omar Mateen — and why Obama and the media don’t want you to know it.

Don’t miss it!

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff. The former ambassador to Washington urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sign the multi-year security assistance deal that US President Barack Obama demands Israel accept.

The problem isn’t the money. By all accounts, Obama’s multi-year military assistance package is generous.

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

For more than 40 years, every US administration – including the Obama administration – that has sought to harm Israel in any way has hit up against an unmovable obstacle. Whether the White House wanted to enable the UN Security Council to pass an anti-Israel resolution, place an embargo on military exports or bureaucratically slow them down to force Israel to stand down during wartime; whether the White House wanted block expanded trade deals, crowd out Israel’s military industries, or sell game changing weapons systems to Israel’s enemies, the US Congress has always stopped it in its tracks.

Israel-haters in the US speak endlessly about the supposedly all powerful and malign “Israel lobby,” which controls US foreign affairs. But the simple truth is that it wouldn’t matter all that much if AIPAC were to shut down tomorrow. Even without AIPAC, Israel would enjoy the support of Congress.

It would continue to enjoy that support because the vast majority of Americans support Israel and expect their representatives in Congress to support Israel.

In other words, the “Israel lobby” is none other than the American people.

As Oren warned, Obama’s military assistance package would disenfranchise the American public when it comes to US policy toward Israel. The agreement bars Israel from asking that Congress augment the assistance that Obama has offered and bars Congress from acting. So if a future administration chooses to breach the agreement, or to suspend it, or if conditions change and Israel requires other assistance, Congress would be barred from stepping into the breach.

Then there is the assistance agreement’s assault on Israel’s military independence.

Apparently truth is not a valued commodity in Washington. By now, most people have read the profile of Ben Rhodes in the New York Times by David Samuels in which Mr. Rhodes, who is described as Obama’s “foreign policy guru” created an echo chamber—a fictitious reality of under-educated, newly minted journalists — to make the Islamic Republic of Iran appear much more benign than it actually is in order to sell the Iranian nuclear agreement to a skeptical American Congress and public.

I had expected heads to roll over this. Yet, not a single person has been fired. In fact, those who are most culpable have only been promoted up the ladder in the Obama administration where total fictions are peddled as truths, and where empty bromides are offered about how they would like ISIS and other radical Islamist terrorists to be treated.

For example, yesterday, while visiting grieving families of the 49 loved ones who were murdered by Omar Mateen in Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch prescribed how we should respond to this tragedy. “Our most effective weapon is compassion, unity and love … We need to find our common humanity,” remarked the Attorney General.

Love? Tell that to someone whose son’s head has been savagely cut off by ISIS or whose daughter has been kidnapped and raped and then sold into slavery.

There is currently a rigid dogma among some inside the beltway now, not to acknowledge that ISIS hates Yazidis, Christians, Shiites-or any Muslim who does not practice their precise brand of Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians and (of course) Jews, as well as gays.

Recently, members of my staff were in a Democratic congressional office, and the staffer refused to acknowledge that simple fact. He insisted that this was simply an LGBT issue. (Period. End of story.)

This administration has substituted wishful thinking for realistic sound policy, and it has become contagious. And one of the cornerstones of this wishful thinking is that Islam, in all its many varieties, is a religion of peace.

And when the facts do not fit their paradigm, then just edit out the facts. This is what occurred last Sunday, June 19th on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when the Attorney General had announced that they were to “release the partial transcripts of the killer’s calls with law enforcement” that night when Omar Mateen killed 49 people on Saturday, June 11th.