RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-Zionism and anti-Israel sentiments in Sweden have morphed in recent times into blatant anti-Semitism. In the city of Malmo (known for its violent Arab and Muslim population), a Jewish teacher in a Swedish public school was fired last month for being Jewish. The teacher identified only as A, is an Israeli-Jewish woman who immigrated to Sweden 39 years ago with her native born Swedish husband who served with the UN Observers Force in the region. A claimed that her school principle warned her that the students “hate the Jews,” and added that she would be “abused by both the Swedish and the Arab students.”

A’s experience is not unique in 2016 Sweden, and not just in Malmo. Naomi Lind, another Israeli woman living in a Stockholm suburb, also encountered the same anti-Semitism as a teacher in Swedish public schools. Lind moved to Sweden from Israel in 1982, and taught computer science to adults and youngsters. She recalled that on one occasion a young female student who was upset by a grade Lind gave her, responded with “I hope Hitler would rise from his grave and finish his work.” Lind remembered the difficult situations in her work that compelled her to leave her job. “I always felt that the school administration felt uncomfortable with me because I was an Israeli and a Jew.”

Lind, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, pointed out that her school administration refrained from dealing with the anti-Semitic and hurtful remarks of the girl that invoked Hitler.

Visiting Sweden late last summer, this reporter witnessed the fear and discomfort Jews in Sweden now feel. In discussions with Swedish Jews, I was told of avoidance to wear Jewish identifying symbols such as a kippah or a necklace with a Star of David. Ralph, 29, a veteran of the Swedish army, put it plainly by stating, “There is no place for Jews in Sweden.” He added that he was planning to move to the U.S. Many young Jews have moved to Israel.

A synagogue in central Stockholm had its windows boarded to hide the fact that it was a Jewish place of worship. There was no sign at the entrance to mark it as a synagogue. This was not happening in a remote village but just a few miles from the seat of the Swedish government and its people’s parliament.

Gender equality is now so thoroughly advanced, thanks to Western men, that feminism’s latest wave is free to insist the hijab is no instrument of oppression but a symbol of choice and liberation! You’ve come a long way, baby. Once, only men were privileged to make public fools of themselves.

“Can a privileged white male like me talk about equality and diversity?” While clearly suffering from ‘white-male guilt’, former Victorian politician Rob Hulls, writing in the Fairfax press, grudgingly answered in the affirmative. Bully for him, but that he thought the question worthy of sweating over is instructive. White men are not the flavour of the times. Indeed, those supporting Donald Trump are often described in left-wing media (e.g., in The Huffington Post) as “angry white men” whose influence is dwindling in the racial mixing pot.

I take no personal credit as a white man but it seems queer to me, without in the least belittling other parts of humanity, that the very part of humanity which has made this modern West, in which gender equality and ethnic and sexual diversity can flourish, is the subject of scorn and derision. I will focus on gender equality.

Men and women are one in Christ (Galatians 3:28) and therefore equal; no ifs, buts or maybes. And, in any event, indubitably, life is better for everyone and infinity less mean spirited in societies in which men and women have equal status. But, as we all surely know, that something is closer to God’s intention and better, doesn’t necessarily mean it will hold sway. For most of history and in most places it hasn’t. To wit: bad things have happened, are happening in many parts of the world, and can happen in our part of the world unless we guard the ramparts.

Equality as a state of affairs is often misunderstood. Turning to arithmetic: two plus two makes four but, equally, so does one plus three. Being equal is not the same as being the same. When it comes to men and women there is one important and statistically significant difference across all ethnicities and cultures. Men, on the whole, and with few exceptions, are stronger and more aggressive than are women.

Throughout most of history women have occupied a secondary position to men – certainly outside the narrow confines of the home. Their childbearing role undoubtedly contributed to this. But, undoubtedly, their lesser physical strength and aggressiveness were defining. This hasn’t changed, yet women in the Western world now occupy positions of authority in all walks of life.

After the Paris powwow in December the action switched to Davos. Then the serried legions of jetsetting carbonphobics repaired to the four corners of this tormented planet with renewed messages of a doom that only other people’s money can avert.
The Paris COP 21 at the end of last year may have set an all-time record for conference attendance of officials, NGOs and lobbyists—40,000 plus at least 5000 from the media. Virtually every world leader made an appearance, many changing their schedules at short notice to attend the opening rather than the close. There may have been a thousand booths of different organisations and countries, and in the course of the deliberations there would have been over 800 formal meetings and presentations.

During these meetings statesmen and NGOs repeated the same messages they had delivered dozens, sometimes hundreds of times. We heard how the ice was melting, the rivers were drying and sea levels were rising. We heard how tropical diseases were going to engulf us unless we took action and how, in view of the rapid expansion of renewable technology, that action was going to be much cheaper. Moreover if we used less energy we would be better off because we would spend less money. National spokesmen boasted of the sacrifices they were making and how much they were doing to advance the clean/low energy cause at home and abroad, while NGOs urged faster and further action.

The conference featured a constant series of street theatres. 350Org staged a major concert featuring, among others, Patti Smith, Flea (of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers), and Thom Yorke (of Radiohead). When musicians are lecturing us on policy we know the end of rational government is near.

The only note of dissent was the counter-conference hosted by the Heartland Institute, which featured genuine scientists, including the recently deceased great Australian Bob Carter, who demonstrated that:

the earth was not warming to a level that might cause unease;
there was no increase in inclement weather events;
sea levels were not rising;
the emission-restraining actions by the developed world would be meaningless since the developing world, especially China and India, would take no such measures and their emissions already exceeded those of the developed world.

The protesters outside and inside the Heartland event far exceeded the invited attendees. Among them, with his own camera/sound crew, was the University of Queensland’s John Cook, who originated the story that 97 per cent of scientists agree about human-induced global warming. Actually, only 1.6 per cent of the thousands of papers Cook and his activist team studied were said to have explicitly endorsed the warmist view and even some of these scientists have rejected the researchers’ classification of their papers.

Politics and diplomacy were the dominant issues in Paris. Few were concerned about the science or economics of climate change. Even the source material in the IPCC Fifth Assessment issued in 2014, once the 6000 pages of jargon and intimidating diagrams had been navigated, asserts that with a three-degree warming total loss of global GDP compared with business-as-usual is just 2 to 3 per cent over the course of a century. That’s just half a year’s growth even without any mitigatory action, such as planting different crops. Meanwhile the apparently trivial costs of preventing the emissions rest upon massive new breakthroughs in renewable energy technology and a Philosopher’s Stone discovery of how to capture and store the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

In view of the IPCC’s sober assessment of losses from climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) could hardly endorse the double-digit losses in global GDP claimed by hack studies like those of Stern and Garnaut. It did however promote alarmist studies, such as one that topically claimed climate change was killing more people than terrorism.

In January, the UN cavalcade moved on to Abu Dhabi where UN chief Ban Ki-moon said: “Sustainable energy is the thread that connects economic growth, social equity, and our efforts to combat climate change.” Leaders of the world’s mendicant states queued up to divert to themselves funds from this major oil producer and owner of Manchester City.