RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past month, Ben Sasse, the junior U.S. senator from Nebraska, has been tweeting out his “lessons from the ranch”—or, rather, his daughter’s lessons. While her peers across the country might have spent much of the past few weeks lolling about their bedrooms, staring at smartphones instead of doing homework, 14-year-old Corrie Sasse was hours from home, laboring as a farmhand in exchange for room and board.

“We just believe in work,” Mr. Sasse tells me. “In our family we try to figure out ways that our kids can work.” The freedom to do so is one benefit of home schooling, since Mr. Sasse and his wife, Melissa, clearly consider working hard an education in itself.

Corrie seems to have taken the ranch assignment in stride, texting updates to her father, who then shared them on Twitter. Production agriculture, she learned, can be a dusty, dirty, smelly business, not least during calving season, when this particular ranch expects 300 new arrivals.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”

We should confirm, for the uninitiated, that the pregnancy-check generally involves a shoulder-length disposable glove . . . but still. Mr. Sasse says that surprise, more than anything, helped his daughter overcome the ick factor: “It was just all of a sudden, the moment they were at, and she was told to do it, and that was the work that needed to be done that day.” Corrie donned the long glove too.

Text #FromTheRanch: “Am not going to call now. I need to get some sleep before checking cows—and feed the fats—at midnight. . . By the way, Dad, the ‘fats’ are cows soon to be slaughtered.”CONTINUE AT SITE

At Israeli Apartheid Week, campus haters claim to be fighting “colonialism” by fighting Jews. Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, dedicated to a country that doesn’t exist and which has produced nothing worth studying except terrorism, features diatribes such as Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh’s Palestine Re-Covered: Reading a Settler Colonial Landscape”. This word salad is a toxic stew of historical revisionism being used to justify the Muslim settler colonization of the indigenous Jewish population.

Colonialism is CPS’ favorite word. When Israeli social workers remove abused children from Muslim homes, that’s colonialism. Israeli farms are a form of environmental “colonialism”. When non-profits aren’t representative enough, it’s the fault of the “Israeli settler-colonial regime.” If it rains on Thursday, it’s caused by “colonialism,” preferably of the “Israeli Zionist colonial settler regime” variety.

But you can’t colonize colonizers. The Muslim population in Israel is a foreign colonist population. The indigenous Jewish population can resettle its own country, but it can’t colonize it.

Not even if you accuse Jews of being a “super-double-secret settler colonial regime.”

Muslims invaded, conquered and settled Israel. They forced their language and laws on the population. That’s the definition of colonialism. You can’t colonize and then complain that you’re being colonized when the natives take back the power that you stole from them.

There are Muslims in Israel for the same reason that there are Muslims in India. They are the remnants of a Muslim colonial regime that displaced and oppressed the indigenous non-Muslim population.

There are no serious historical arguments to be made against any of this.

“I can’t have a serious conversation with you about the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and violence because” this author’s question “is driven by a certain ideological agenda,” declared University of Denver Middle East studies professor Nader Hashemi. His dismissal typified the ideological blindness towards the MB of a March 17 presentation by the Islamist-aligned Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) before about thirty-five at Washington, DC’s National Press Club.

Hashemi concurred with his fellow panelists that enactment of the recently introduced Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act will “pour oil on the raging fires that are consuming” the Middle East. Despite the act’s extensive catalogue of MB violent support for Islamic supremacy in numerous affiliates across the Middle East, he echoed the panel in rejecting an American terrorist designation for the MB’s founding Egyptian branch. He contrasted a supposedly moderate MB with extremist groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and (Greater) Syria (ISIS) and warned that when “moderate forms of political Islam are crushed and denied a public voice, radical Islam thrives.”

Citing Rachid Ghannouchi of Tunisia’s MB-affiliated, deceptively moderate-sounding Ennahda party, Hashemi stated that the “only way to defeat ISIS is to offer a better product to the millions of young people in the Muslim world . . . Muslim democracy.” He drew from the swift fall of Arab dictators in the “Arab Spring” the lesson that “dictatorial rule is fundamentally precarious” and suffers from an “absence of internal political legitimacy.” The “Arab Spring” validated for him President George W. Bush’s 2003 statement that “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” notwithstanding his costly Iraqi regime change experiment in “Muslim democracy.”

Many students at Scripps College are absolutely furious that Madeleine Albright will be their commencement speaker — because Albright is a “white feminist.”

“It was announced recently that the 2016 commencement speaker will be none other than former Secretary of State, white feminist and repeated genocide enabler Madeleine Albright,” senior Kinzie Mabon wrote in a piece for the Student Life, the school’s official newspaper.

That’s right. Albright may have been the first female Secretary of State, but that doesn’t matter! She’s also white — something so awful that it automatically makes her an unacceptable choice.

Now, to be fair, not all of Mabon’s criticisms of the selection are unwarranted. For example: Mabon explains that — as a woman who does not support Hillary Clinton — she does not want to have to “sit quietly” and listen to someone who once insinuated that women who do not support Hillary Clinton have a “special place in Hell.” As a fellow woman in this category, this is definitely something I can understand.

According to an article in the Claremont Independent, however, much of the objection to Albright’s selection was specifically due to “the fact that Albright is white.”

The article chronicled some of students’ complaints on the matter, including:

2012 and like 2008 appeared to be people of color. but also SO MANY white women.

and

*Just out of curiosity* does anyone know how many POC we’ve had as guest commencement speakers at Scripps? 2…3?