RUTHFULLY YOURS

Campus crybullies are frantically outdoing each other to come up with the nastiest and craziest assaults on free speech and sanity. Robby Soave appears to have found a new winner.

Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.

The demands are for a College of Power and Liberation to teach social justice…

No individual student should have to take on the task of monitoring and challenging injustices within the university. The College of Power and Liberation will provide and support students who are trained and educated in recognizing and addressing these injustices.

and lots of paid positions denouncing political incorrectness… because you can’t expect them to hate people for free.

Though many students, staff and faculty members are committed to doing the important yet difficult work of confronting racism, misogyny, trans- and homo-phobia on this campus, the reality is that students have continuously been expected to live in and address these systems of disempowerment while simultaneously being exploited in order to uphold this image of an “active mind changing lives”. This work is often done without recognition or compensation for labor, time, and effort. The College of Power and Liberation demands an annually dedicated revenue of $45,000 for compensation of students and faculty doing de-colonial work on campus.

Earlier this month yet another tunnel Hamas was building in Gaza collapsed, killing at least one Hamas operative. It was the sixth Gaza tunnel collapse in recent months, one of which killed seven of the fighters.

What’s behind it is a matter of public speculation in Israel. Hamas, of course, says Israel is behind the collapses. The latest Israeli media reports claim that the cement Hamas has been importing into Gaza since the summer 2014 war is of poor quality, and that explains the rickety tunnels.

Yet when, after a tunnel collapse in February, the Israeli official responsible for the territories was asked whether Israel was involved in these incidents, he replied: “God knows. I would suggest the residents of the Gaza Strip not to occupy themselves with the tunnels and to get away from them, especially after seeing the results in recent days.”

Israelis living along the Gaza border have indeed been complaining bitterly about hearing tunnel-digging activity at night. The Israeli government has issued what sound like vague assurances. Hamas claims to have seen Israeli combat engineers operating at the border. Some Israeli pundits have suggested that at least some of what the Israeli residents are hearing at night is Israeli digging.

But whatever is causing the tunnel collapses, they’re a metaphor for Gaza’s fate since the war in July and August 2014.

In that war Hamas fired about 4600 rockets at Israel. The great majority were shot down or widely missed their targets. The war did manage to claim the lives of about 70 Israelis, most of them young soldiers—a “glorious” achievement for Hamas.

The following is not an example of academic hijinks, but a serious academic attempt to feminize glaciers.

I bet you didn’t know that glaciers were sexist. Well, maybe they’re not. But they definitely lack the feminist touch as it relates to “epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge.” Or…whatever.

Yes, it’s gender theory meets climate change in a clash of two of the titanic irrelevancies of the age. And the results are as banal as you would expect them to be. The paper was vomited forth by a group of University of Oregon historians — obviously the perfect candidates to write a paper on climate change. And they spared no liberal shibboleth in the making of this mish mash of hash.

Hit and Run:

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money’s worth. From the abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

The striking teachers are exposing the Palestinian Authority (PA) as playing Western donors for suckers.

No one, in fact, knows how many Palestinians are on the Palestinian payroll.

Donors might not be aware, for instance, that they are paying over 50,000 employees from the Gaza Strip to not work. This has been the case since 20007, when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip. In response, the PA ordered all its employees to boycott Hamas and promised to pay them full salaries for sitting at home.

The Palestinian committee has been tasked to avoid scandal and ensure that donors do not get to the bottom of the case.

Western donors want to see a list of the names of Palestinians who are on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the PA is not happy about it.

What is driving this demand? Thousands of Palestinian school teachers in the West Bank are striking for better conditions. The Palestinian leadership, in response, has ordered a security crackdown on the strikers.

To justify the crackdown, PA officials have claimed that the strike was organized by Hamas as part of a conspiracy to embarrass and undermine the regime of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The United Methodist Church is following in the footsteps of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the United Church of Canada, who all passed resolutions boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel.

In a sort of blundering naiveté, the United Methodist Church is ignoring what is surely inevitable: the very divestment they ostensibly imagine will stop the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may actually serve to exacerbate it.

“Not all is lost. Many of the delegates to the General Conference come from Africa. They have witnessed jihad up close and personal and will likely have a much more sympathetic view of Israel’s predicament than many of the delegates who live in the relative safety of the United States.” — Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst.

“The BDS Movement has already fulfilled part of its potential – as a stalking horse for those seeking to destroy Israel by other means. … It’s committed not to peace but to a piecemeal elimination of Israel.” — Dr. Harold Brackman, Simon Wiesenthal Center.

On May 10, 2016, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) will gather at the Oregon Convention Center, hosting thousands of Methodist leaders, delegates and visitors.

This leading policy-making event meets once every four years to revise church law and adopt resolutions on current moral, social, public policy and economic issues. The conference also approves plans and budgets for church-wide programs.

A major Jewish group is gathering signatures for a petition against ABC to cancel the series Quantico, amid allegations of anti-Israel and antisemitic content.

The Zionist Organization of America has been protesting what it considers the “blatant, vicious defamation of Jews, Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), promoting ugly lies against the Jewish people and the Jewish state” on the TV thriller about a group of FBI recruits training to become special agents.

In a statement released on Friday, ZOA President Morton A. Klein and Director of Special Projects Liz Berney referred to a previous complaint they had lodged with ABC – on October 30 – and what they considered an “unhelpful letter” from the network, which “failed to address Quantico’s factual anti-Semitic errors.”

Since then, they wrote, rather than doing something to rectify the situation,

Quantico intensified its anti-Semitism and its vicious portrayals of the IDF as “war criminals” when in fact, the IDF is the world’s most moral army.

Quantico also escalated its practice of mocking and portraying Jews as sniveling, untrustworthy, duplicitous, disloyal, war criminals, violent, unable to see the “greater good,” people who “follow orders” that are wrong; terrorism-plotters and ugly bomb-makers. Quantico also makes absurd “Islamaphobia” claims; portrays Muslims as moral and beautiful; glorifies a Muslim Imam who defies the FBI; and glorifies Arab terrorists and Palestinian-Arab “resistance” (a euphemism for Palestinian-Arab attacks on Jews).