RUTHFULLY YOURS

– Nurit Greenger, Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) Founder & President introduced the Program to the Tennessee Legislators in Nashville, Tennessee, causing a wave of great interest and much support.C.H.I.P‘s entire vision began with Whitwell [Tennessee] Middle School Paper Clips Project and the Whitwell Children Holocaust Memorial. This is a project about the discrimination of others, about the Holocaust, the result of the Nazis discrimination of Jews. Whitwell Middle School Paper Clips Project has set the case in point that a change could be made, one young student at the time.
For the past two years C.H.I.P, that has set itself up to the task to take middle school students to Israel and thus start building a generation with the emphasize on the teaching of basic western values of tolerance and indiscriminating behavior, along the values that are captured in the Ten Commandments, has been gathering growing support.
“C.H.I.P, means chipping away at ignorance” stated Mrs. Linda Hooper, the visionary of the Paper Clips Project, who is leading the way for 22 Whitwell Middle School students and 10 chaperones to partake in the C.H.I.P Project this coming May, 2016.
Assisted by Lydia Taylor of Hayovel who initiated the Tennessee legislators’ introduction to C.H.I.P, this past week in February, Ms. Greenger was invited to meet with the several Tennessee legislators: Tennessee General Assembly Senator Janice Bowling, David Alexander-Tennessee State Representative and Randy Boyd Commissioner, Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. The visit has captured the endorsement of C.H.I.P by the legislators.

Who supports the Islamic State (ISIS) and why do Sunni nations seem to tolerate it?

Patrick Sookhdeo, a Muslim convert to Christianity and scholar of Islamic faith and politics, “suggests a pessimistic prospect; Islamic State is likely to remain a persistent threat, even if it suffers overwhelming defeats.” So reads his recent book Unmasking Islamic State: Revealing Their Motivation, Theology, and End Time Predictions, an insightful primer into the Islamic State (IS) jihadist polity currently ravaging Mesopotamia and beyond.

Islamic State “is the most well organized Sunni jihadi organization in the Middle East and may well have the most sophisticated structure of any terrorist organization currently active,” Sookhdeo writes. Islamic State presents an alliance of convenience between high ranking military officers and officials from Saddam Hussein’s deposed Baathist dictatorship and jihadist organizations that originally fought Iraq’s American-led regime change. The result is a “powerful fusion of Salafi/Jihadi ideology with professional military and counterintelligence strategies and urban warfare tactics, as well as bureaucratic know how needed to run state.”

“With the declaration of the caliphate Islamic State has become the leading jihadi group worldwide, supplanting Al-Qaeda [AQ] as perceived leader of the radical Islamist movements,” assesses Sookhdeo. Kidnapping for extortion, looting of bank gold deposits and other valuables like antiquities, and black market oil sales mean that “Islamic State has become the richest jihadi organization in the world,” worth over $2 billion in some estimates. Having “constructed a viable territorial state,” Islamic State “is constantly opening up new, unexpected fronts and bringing other jihadi groups under its umbrella” globally. The “information strategy now employed by Patrick Sookhdeo, Andrew Harrod, Islamic State, Saudi, ISIS, ISIL makes most of Al-Qaeda’s efforts seem old-fashioned.”

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Allen Bloom (1930-1992)

American philosopher, classicist

and author of Closing of the American Mind

In a message to Congress on internal security in August of 1950, Harry Truman said: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

President Truman was speaking at a time when Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was coming to prominence with his attacks on “perceived” Communists in government. (Not all of his accusations were false, but his tone and manner were venal.) While Mr. Truman did not approve of Senator McCarthy’s harangues, he knew the Wisconsin Senator was free to bloviate. Silencing him would prove more dangerous to democracy than letting him spout off. Mr. Truman’s counsel has applicability in the corridors of our politically correct colleges and universities where demands to censor those who are seen as purveyors of “hateful” messages have gained approval of presidents and deans. “Inclusiveness,” with these folks is okay, as long as it does not include those who offer ideas outside accepted norms.

Student disruptions regarding conservative speakers is not the problem. It is the acquiescence to their demands by faculty and administrators that risks upending a free society. Students have always had a juvenile streak. I know I did. But professors, deans and college presidents are expected to act and respond like adults – to be the keepers of Mr. Truman’s precept for freedom.

Those who argue that “hateful” speech should be censored cite Adolph Hitler, a demagogue and master of invective. He spewed venom. It was not his words of hate that made him a monster. It was his shutting up of his critics. Hitler took the extreme measures of imprisoning or murdering those who disagreed or he thought inferior. But it was the silencing of critics, no matter the means, that was wrong. Keep in mind Voltaire’s admonishment: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

One way the young learn is by questioning conventional thinking. Socratic methods abet the self-examined life, critical to a liberal arts education. Inquiring minds seek answers, and most students are in college to learn. But they do not do so when they are pampered, when “safe” places are substituted for difficult lessons. Consider: Would the provision of a “safe” place help students at Bowdoin because they were offended by other students wearing sombreros to a tequila party? Were they truly upset, or were they pushing the administration because they knew they could? Were Cornell students really offended by the word “plantation,” that it evoked images of slavery? If so, where does political correctness end? There are 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, many of which are sure to be disparaging to someone somewhere. Should we rely on college administrators or government bureaucrats to determine which words to use? Who will police us and what punishments will be forthcoming? Such control smacks of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s nightmarish novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“Israel is a water superpower.” So wrote Renaissance man and entrepreneur-commentator Seth M. Siegel in his recent bestselling book “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World.”

This fascinating volume analyzes the amazing pioneering story of how a once-poor, parched Israel became a prosperous, high-tech startup nation, offering solutions unto the countries of an increasingly water-starved world.

Siegel presented Israel as a laboratory for a growing global population endangered by impending socioeconomic and national security water crises examined by official top-secret American studies. “Sixty percent of Israel is desert, and the rest is semiarid,” he noted, adding that Israel’s “annual rainfall, not generous to begin with, has dropped by more than half.” Nonetheless, this former third-world country at its independence in 1948 “now has one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Middle-class life is the norm in Israel.”

Siegel said that “despite its challenging climate and unforgiving landscape, Israel not only doesn’t have a water crisis, it has a water surplus.” Prior to World War II, British economists gloomily predicted that the territory of the British Palestine Mandate on which a Jewish national home was to emerge could sustain no more than 2 million people. By contrast, the “geographic area of Palestine today is home to more than 12 million people” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Israel exports annually water-intensive produce worth billions of dollars.