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Campus Lunacy, Part II The student “renaming” craze.Walter Williams

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Professor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He recently wrote an article titled “The hypocrisy behind the student renaming craze.” Students, often with the blessing of faculty, have discovered that names for campus buildings and holidays do not always fit politically correct standards for race, class and sex.

Stanford students have demanded the renaming of buildings, malls and streets bearing the name of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest who was often unkind to American Indians. Harvard Law School is getting rid of its seal because it bears the coat of arms of the Royalls, a slave-owning family. This renaming craze is widespread and includes dozens of colleges and universities, including Amherst, Georgetown, Princeton, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. The students have decided that some politically incorrect people from centuries ago are bad. Other politically incorrect people are not quite so bad if they were at least sometimes liberal; their names can stay.

San Diego State University students are not demanding that the school eliminate its nickname, “Aztecs,” even though the Aztecs enslaved and slaughtered tens of thousands of people from tribes they conquered — often ripping out the hearts of living victims. Should UC Berkeley students and faculty demand the renaming of Warren Hall, named after California Attorney General Earl Warren, who instigated the wartime internment of tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens? UC Berkeley students and faculty might consider renaming their Cesar E. Chavez Student Center. Chavez sent his thug lieutenants down to California’s southern border to use violence to prevent job-seeking Mexican immigrants from entering the United States. President Woodrow Wilson was a racist who, among other racist acts, segregated civil service jobs. Should Princeton University rename its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs plus rename its Woodrow Wilson fellowship program?

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Obama’s Nuclear Contrition Drastically increasing the chance of nuclear war. Caroline Glick

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima. While there meeting with this G-7 counterparts, Kerry strongly hinted that his visit was a precursor to a visit to the site of the first nuclear bombing by President Barack Obama next month.

The irony of course is that for all his professed commitment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, Obama is responsible for drastically increasing the chance of nuclear war. Indeed, Obama’s own actions lend easily to the conclusion that he wishes to do penance for America’s decision to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, (and so end World War II with far fewer dead than a land invasion of Japan would have required), by enabling America’s enemies to target the US and its allies with nuclear weapons.

Obama views his nuclear deal with Iran – the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – as his greatest foreign policy achievement.

Unfortunately for his legacy building and for global security, for the past several weeks news stories have made clear that critics of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran – who claimed that far from preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the deal would enable Iran to develop them in broad daylight, and encourage Iran to step up its support for terror and regional aggression – were entirely correct.

All of the warnings sounded by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other leaders have been borne out. All of the warnings sounded by the leaders of the Persian Gulf kingdoms were correct.

Every major commitment Obama made to Congress and to US allies in the wake of the deal have been shown in retrospect to have been false.

Obama told Congress that while the deal did require the US to drop its nuclear sanctions against Iran, the non-nuclear sanctions would remain in place. In recent weeks, media reports have made clear that the administration’s commitment to maintain non-nuclear sanctions on Iran has collapsed.

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Let’s Create a Real Palestinian State It’s not a nightmare if you can make it come true. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that.

The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was shot up when terrorists turned it into a base) for decades. It’s time to finally get our Palestinian jackpot. But to make it happen, we need to be realistic.

Forget the peace process. Forget negotiations. They’ve never worked before. They’re not going to now.

And there’s nothing to negotiate anyway.

There are almost a million Jews living on territory claimed by the PLO. Removing them would be the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing against an indigenous population today. It would also be impossible. But the same people who insist that the United States, a country of 318 million, can’t deport 11 million illegal aliens, think that Israel will somehow deport 1/8th of its own population if they just chant loudly enough about “occupation” outside Jewish businesses in London or San Francisco.

Ethnically cleansing 8,000 Jews from Gaza/Gush Katif led to nationwide civil disobedience, riots and, eventually, the fall of a political party and three straight terms for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now imagine trying to deport 800,000 people from their homes simply because they’re Jewish.

And it wouldn’t just be the Jews alone being rounded up into trucks, buses and maybe boxcars.

52 percent of Arabs in East Jerusalem would rather be Israeli citizens than live under the PLO. Are we supposed to deport 100,000 Arabs from Jerusalem to make way for this imaginary “Palestinian” state?

How much ethnic cleansing do we have to do to make the Islamic colonial fantasy of Palestine real?

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Why the BDS Movement is Destroying a Future Palestinian State by Fred Maroun see note please

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

This is a decent try by an apparently very decent man…..but an Arab Palestinian state of any size or demographic constitution would destroy the future of Jewish Palestine, namely, Israel….rsk

Israel could have played by Arab rules and deported all Arabs in the land it occupied, but it did not. Precisely because Israel respected the human rights of Arabs, and despite its own self-interest, Israel gave the Palestinians a platform from which to seek the destruction of Israel.

One can only hope that the Palestinians, like Egypt and Jordan, will soon decide to live in peace with a neighbor which turned out to be far better in the way it treats Palestinians than the Palestinians’ own “Arab brothers” — not all that bad, after all. One can only hope that Palestinian leaders will start promoting a culture of peace rather than a culture of hate.

From the moment Israel declared its independence, one of the main Arab tactics has been to exploit the Jews’ Achilles heel – their highly developed culture, which respects and values life, and their support for human rights.

Of Arab origin, I have long known about the Arab stereotype of the West and Israel — that they are weak because they care about the lives of their own people and they are eager to respect the human rights of their enemies. Golda Meir is reported to have said, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Until now, Israel has conformed to that Arab stereotype — such as with “knocks on the roof” in Gaza to warn residents to leave buildings being used for military purposes before they are targeted — but in conversations with Zionists, it seems that this attitude is changing. While Jews will always value life, their determination to minimize enemy casualties and to respect their human rights at almost all costs might be unraveling, and it is the Palestinians who are likely to pay the price.

During the War of Independence, the Arab side ensured that not a single Jew was left on the Arab side of the 1949 armistice lines, but a large number of Arabs were allowed by Jews to remain on the Israeli side. Today those Arabs constitute 20% of the Israeli population.

Israel’s respect for the human rights of Arabs living in Israel has been used by Arabs against Israel. The idea of any Jews on the Arab side is demonized and any “normalization” with Jews is aggressively discouraged

By contrast, Arabs living in Israel have consistently elected Arab parliamentarians, even anti-Zionist ones who openly support Palestinian terrorists. If Israel expels those politicians from the Knesset — as there is a proposed law to do — it is accused by the West of being undemocratic, but if it does not expel them it is seen by Arabs as weak.

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The Anti-Momentum of the Delusional, Destructive John Kasich By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

First, there was Jim Gilmore. Then, there was Ben Carson. Now, there’s John Kasich. This Republican nomination cycle boasted a bumper crop of candidates with delusions of grandeur. Two of them, at least, had the sense to pack it in.

Not the governor of Ohio, who has already been mathematically eliminated from securing the Republican nomination outright. At present, John Kasich has won only one state (his home state) and four — count ’em: four — non–Buckeye State counties. He hasn’t won a delegate since March 15. And one week after Ohio, he came in fourth in Arizona in a three-man race, losing by 23,000 votes to Marco Rubio, who by then had dropped out.

What’s the opposite of momentum?

RELATED: Why Won’t John Kasich Go Away?

With Republicans preparing for a string of states likely to prove friendly to Donald Trump — New York, Trump’s home state, votes next Tuesday, followed a week later by the “Acela Corridor” (Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland) and Pennsylvania — this might seem like Kasich’s time to shine. He’s a moderate man for moderate states, right? Maybe not. A new PPP poll has Kasich up on Cruz in New York by just five percentage points (25 to 20), and a recent Fox News poll has Kasich leading Cruz by just two points — and both of them lapped by Trump.

Meanwhile, one gets the impression that Kasich isn’t even trying to win. The governor failed to file a full slate of delegates for the Maryland primary, meaning that even if Kasich wins the state, he won’t be able to claim all of its delegates. At RedState, Moe Lane wrote in March: “There’s no really good way to say this, so I’ll just be blunt: Depending on where you live in Maryland, you will be provably throwing away your vote if you vote for John Kasich” (the emphasis is his).

And recall: This is the same candidate who didn’t collect enough signatures to get on the ballot in Illinois or Pennsylvania. (The only reason his name appeared in Illinois is that no candidate challenged him; and in Pennsylvania, the Rubio camp dropped its challenge.)

If Kasich’s “strategy” is unclear, so is his ultimate aim. Maybe he thinks he can win at a contested convention, that 1,237 delegates come to their senses in Cleveland and spirit him to the nomination on the basis of his generally favorable polling against Hillary Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head matchups. The GOP nomination might be “a bizarre process,” as Kasich said on CNN earlier this week. But it’s not that bizarre.

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Did Cosmo Interview Hillary Clinton — or a Robot? I really can’t tell the difference. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Cosmopolitan published an interview on Tuesday that I think was with Hillary Clinton — although I can’t be completely sure, seeing as her answers sounded more like they had come from a robot than an actual human being.

I’m not exaggerating. This interview was so boring and so unproductive that Cosmo clearly struggled to even come up with a headline for it. After all, the one that it went with — “Hillary Clinton Responds to Bernie Sanders’ Remark That She’s ‘Condescending’ to Young People” — was not even really accurate.

Sure, Hillary was asked about the remark, but she didn’t exactly answer. In fact, she exactly didn’t answer, responding with “Well, he’s criticized me for so many things in the last week, I’m not going to respond to his comments.”

Then — just like a perfectly functioning machine — she swooped in with a preprogrammed political talking point:

“I will say this,” she said. “I’m excited that so many young people are involved in this campaign.”

“I think it’s great if they support me, if they support Senator Sanders, the fact that they are committed to being part of the political process is a great development,” she added.

Whoa . . . so Hillary’s thoughts on this are, in essence: I like young people. It is good for young people to like politics. It is good. Hot take, Hil!

Her answer to a question about a controversial skit she performed this weekend with Mayor de Blasio that featured a joke criticized by some in the media as racist was equally (read: not at all) insightful:

“He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”

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A Trump Administration Would Cave to Putin, Threatening Poland and Israel His bromance with Putin endangers key American allies. By Robert Zubrin

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

As the New York primary approaches, Empire State residents with international connections may wish to consider the implications of a Donald Trump presidency for lands overseas that are dear to many of their hearts.

Trump wants to gut NATO. He has openly expressed admiration for Russian revanchist strongman Vladimir Putin, and he has hired several Kremlin-allied persons as his top advisors. These include Carter Page, an investor in the Russian gas giant, Gazprom, and a vocal supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Paul Manafort, a henchman of deposed Ukrainian dictator Victor Yanukovych, on whose behalf Putin’s invasion was initiated. Furthermore, Trump has been endorsed by Aleksandr Dugin, the totalitarian “Eurasianist” philosopher and geostrategist, and a leading advocate for the policy of expanding Russia into a transcontinental Eurasian bloc incorporating most of Europe and Asia.

What do these affiliations mean for several countries that could soon be in the Kremlin’s line of fire?

Let’s start with Poland. Polish independence was extinguished in the late 18th century, and with the exception of a 20-year period between the wars was not fully recovered until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Putin wants to restore the Soviet bloc, or at the very least, the Czarist empire, which included not only Ukraine, but most of Poland, and the Baltic states as well. This means that, as far as Putin is concerned, Polish independence must be crushed. His potential methods for achieving this objective include both military and economic means.

Russia’s military dominance in the region is obvious. Its only potential counter is NATO, an alliance that Trump says is obsolete. The threat of Russian military aggression against Poland and the Baltic states had been greatly enhanced by the failure of the Obama administration to honor America’s commitment to defend Ukraine with more than token support. Trump’s advisor Carter Page, however, has attacked Obama for defending Ukraine too strongly, with the administration’s economic sanctions against Gazprom no doubt being particularly objectionable. Such an approach — without NATO protection or even the threat of retaliatory sanctions — would make a Trump administration a virtual green light for further military aggression by the Kremlin in Eastern Europe.

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Why Cruz Is the Likely Choice at the Convention By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

I wouldn’t say that the GOP is falling in love with Ted Cruz, but maybe it’s falling in like.

In arguably the most improbable political season of our lifetimes, this fact has to rank high on the list of things no one could have seen coming. If they gave out report cards for first-term senators, Cruz would get an “F” in the “plays well with others” category. Party leaders believed that his 2013 gambit to shut down the government over Obamacare was a disaster for everyone but Cruz, and they have harbored a not-so-secret disdain for him since.

But that’s all over — at least for now.

Like Perseus pulling Medusa’s head out of a sack to petrify his enemies, Cruz has been able to dangle the prospect of a President Trump to strike fear in the hearts of even his biggest detractors.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) once said choosing between Donald Trump and Cruz was like choosing between being shot or poisoned. Graham chose his poison. He’s out there raising money for Cruz. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), whose hatred for Cruz was the stuff of Sicilian blood feuds, seems to have reconciled himself to the fact that Cruz is the only person who can stop Trump. McConnell’s definitely not in love, but he recognizes that these are the cards we’ve all been dealt.

RELATED: Cruz Is a Safer General-Election Bet than Trump

Team Cruz fears that people such as McConnell will use the convention in Cleveland this summer to reshuffle the deck and get a new deal — a new candidate more palatable to the establishment. “There is still distrust over whether or not the party is actually willing to accept Cruz as the nominee or if they’re using him to shut down Trump only to then stab Cruz in the back come summer,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk-show host and Cruz backer, told the Washington Post.

The concern is understandable but overblown. Although a contested convention is likely, the “white knight” scenario, in which someone other than Cruz, Trump, or John Kasich swoops in and “steals” the nomination, is not.

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Is NATO Worth Preserving? By Victor Davis Hanson —

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

Donald Trump recently ignited another controversy when he mused that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete. He hinted that it might no longer be worth the huge American investment.

In typical Trump style, he hit a nerve, but he then offered few details about the consequences of either staying in or leaving NATO.

NATO is certainly no longer aimed at keeping a huge Soviet land army out of democratic Western Europe, as was envisioned in 1949.

The alliance has been unwisely expanded from its original twelve-nation membership to include 28 countries, absorbing many of the old communist Warsaw Pact nations and some former Soviet republics. NATO may have meant well to offer security to these vulnerable new alliance members. Yet it is hard to imagine Belgians and Italians dying on the battlefield to keep Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces out of Lithuania or Estonia.

Today’s NATO pledges to many of its newer participants are about as believable as British and French rhetorical guarantees in August 1939 to protect a far-away Poland from its Nazi and Soviet neighbors.

No NATO member during the 40-year Cold War invoked Article Four of the treaty, requiring consultation of the entire alliance by a supposedly threatened member. Turkey has called for it four times since 2003.

The idea that Western Europe, beset with radical Islamic terrorism and unchecked migrations from the war-torn Middle East, would pledge its military support to the agendas and feuds of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist and non-democratic regime is pure fantasy.

Few NATO members meet the alliance’s goal of investing 2 percent of gross domestic product in defense spending. Instead, socialist Europe expects the United States to carry most of NATO’s fiscal and military burdens.

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The Age of Discontent By Richard Fernandez

Posted By on April 14th, 2016

In the nearly 30 years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall the fortunes of freedom have experienced a drastic reversal. In the Philippines, where the color revolutions all began in 1986, the son of Ferdinand Marcos is among the leading candidates for the vice-presidency. “The Philippines is steadily giving into ‘strongman syndrome’, the misguided belief that tough-talking and political will alone can address complex 21st-century governance challenges.”

Soon, Philippine (cacique) democracy as we know it may come to an end, as the Filipino people increasingly opt for political outsiders as well as the offspring of a former dictator, who have promised decisive leadership and national discipline. The latest survey suggests that a provincial mayor, Rodrigo Duterte, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. are cruising towards the top two positions in office.

If “political outsiders” and “strongmen” sound attractive to the voters in the 2016 election cycle, they’re in lots of company. A Bloomberg report notes that voter anger and consequent shift toward political outsiders is world-wide. “From the supporters of Donald Trump to the street protesters of southern Europe, voters around the world are mad as hell. Inequality, immigration, and the establishment’s perceived indifference are firing up electorates in a way that’s rarely been seen before. As these charts show, the forces shaping the disruption of global politics have been building for years and aren’t about to diminish.” Among their findings are:

The share of wealth owned by the middle class declined in every part of the world on a relative basis;
U.S. workers’ share of income has dropped to near the lowest since World War II;
Incomes in Europe’s southern crisis countries have fallen since 2009 relative to the northern Europeans;
The European youth has lost its future. In Spain and Greece, unemployment among those under 25 is close to 40 percent;
U.S. student debt is soaring, while median pay for recent college graduates has barely budged;
Europe’s asylum and border policies have collapsed under the pressure of refugee and immigration flows;
In 2015 only 19% of Americans trusted their government “just about always” or “most of the time” – down from 54% after the 9/11 attacks;
It’s the same picture in Europe as distrust of government has surged, to a high of 84% in Spain

In brief the report suggests that “the future” — that favorite word of the Left — has disappeared. Nearly 90% of French parents, 72% of British, 65% of American and 56% of German are convinced their children will be worse off than they are. Not that the “present” is any better. For one thing the threat of major “war”, that condition the Left promised to save the world from, has grown under the stewardship of their Nobel Peace prize winner.

In the light of these global trends the situation in the Philippines is not unique but typical. The Bloomberg report argues that all over the world insurgent parties, often featuring strongmen who promise the trains will run on time, are on the rise. In place of the Color Revolutions three decades ago there is an enormous nostalgia for the age of diktat. The Wall Street Journal describes an Arab democracy activist who evolved into a suicide bomber. A Japan Times article argues that the Arab Spring has taught Western diplomats that the best way to spread progress is through stable autocracy. If one were to ask leftists what’s the biggest foreign policy mistake of the last 20 years the answer would probably be ‘not leaving Saddam in power’.

Inside the Beltway, the analysts are awakening to the possibility that faith in old-time democracy may be dying in America too. Eli Saslow of the Washington Post begins by way of focusing on a funeral in Oklahoma. “Anna Marrie Jones: Born 1961 — Died 2016.”