RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance.

The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for “modernizing Islam.” But most of his catalogue of Christian violence and persecution is little more than the tu quoque fallacy. It ignores the fact that Christian violence was typical of the whole pre-modern world, a sad banality of human existence like plagues, war, torture, and famine. The comparison of premodern Christian violence to today’s Islamic terror is as irrelevant as rationalizing modern torture and executions, like the mutilation and beheading regularly practiced in Saudi Arabia, by bringing up the hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering the English used to punish traitors in the 14th century.

The moral panic over U.S. undergraduate life features increasingly illiberal demands to restrict open debate, due process and voluntary association—and the first impulse of most college administrators is to capitulate. So raise a toast to Dartmouth College President Phil Hanlon for responding with pragmatism instead of politics.

For several years the New Hampshire school has been conscripted into the national debate about sex assault, binge drinking, hazing and various forms of “privilege.” Protestors claiming to be oppressed by their Ivy League education occupied Mr. Hanlon’s office for two days last year, while Rolling Stone magazine attempted to smear the college as it did the University of Virginia.

Mr. Hanlon answered this week with a student-life reform plan, and the media seem most impressed with his ban on hard liquor on Dartmouth property. They’ve forgotten the lesson of the 21st Amendment, which is that prohibition rarely succeeds. Students who obey the rules will somehow make do with beer or wine, though perhaps a young entrepreneur is being handed the opportunity to become the Jay Gatsby of Hanover.

It is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

Message N°1

When you witness an event like this, an expression of collective opinion and determination on a scale never seen in the nation’s history, you can’t simply dismiss it. Of course you can, you are free to dismiss it. But I don’t. And that’s based on what I saw and heard.

Message N°2

What explains the mobilization of 3.7 million people in France?

Media discourse has changed, government discourse has changed, measures are being taken. Why? In response to the will of the people. The Hollande government did not create this collective movement, it is trying to keep pace with it.

How many hundreds of thousands had never made the connection between jihadis who attack Jews and those who ram shoppers at a Christmas market, attack the London tube, or plot to blow up la Tour Eiffel? The Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly made the connection for them.

Message N°3

I am still wondering how you can scoff at the millions of French people who stood up to be counted that day (the latest estimate is a total of 4.5 million), and look on Marine Le Pen with such benevolent respect.

We know what the perversions of antiracism have wrought. Is anti-jihad going to play the same tricks?

The Rialto school district in California gave eighth graders an 18-page assignment that asked them to consider arguments on whether the Holocaust was an “actual event” or a “propaganda tool that was used for monetary gain.”The project created media outrage, but the school district initially defended the assignment, saying that Common Core standards are intended to teach critical thinking. The school district, through interim superintendent Mohammad Z. revised its position when L.A.-based Anti-Defamation league expressed its concerns.

The assignment given to the eighth graders read:

“When tragic events occur in history, there is often debate about their actual existence. For example, some people claim the Holocaust is not an actual historical event, but instead is a propaganda tool that was used for political and monetary gain. Based upon your research on this issue, write an argumentative essay, utilizing cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain. Remember to address counterclaims (rebuttals) to your stated claim. You are also required to use parenthetical (internal) citations and to provide a Works Cited page.”

Saudis Behead Three as Obama Visits

A visit by President Obama did not dissuade officials in Saudi Arabia from carrying out three beheadings within hours of Obama’s meeting with new Saudi King Salman.

Obama cut short a visit to India to fly to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to offer his condolences to the Saudis following the Jan. 23 death of Salman’s predecessor King Abdullah, and to meet with the new king.

On that same Tuesday, the Saudis beheaded Yassir bin Hussein al-Hamza, who reportedly confessed to smuggling amphetamine pills into the kingdom.

They also beheaded Omar bin Yahya bin Ibrahim al-Barkati, who was convicted of incest, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.

A third convict, Pakistani Latif Khan Nurzada, was executed for trafficking heroin into the kingdom, AFP reported.

The three beheadings brought to four the number of men beheaded since King Salman assumed the throne on Jan. 23.

Eric Pickles writes to 1,100 imams and community leaders, urging them to tackle radicals and make young Muslims proud of Britain

The Government has taken the unprecedented step of writing to every mosque in the country to tell Muslim leaders that they must do more to root out the “men of hate” who are preaching extremism.

Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has written to 1,100 imams and Islamic leaders urging them to publicly condemn the Al Qaeda terrorists behind the Paris massacres, The Telegraph has learned.

Whitehall is unable to defeat jihadist ideology alone and Muslim leaders have “a responsibility” to prevent young men and women from becoming radicalised, Mr Pickles said in a letter sent last Friday.

Eric Pickles is Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and is MP for Brentwood.

Seventy years ago this week, Soviet troops stormed a large complex of Nazi prison camps in south-west Poland. They quickly discovered the apparatus for mechanised mass murder. The camps were called Auschwitz-Birkenau: a byword for the darkest depths of human depravity, and a period of unparalleled evil in human history.

Last Sunday, I travelled to Poland to represent the UK at this year’s liberation ceremony. The event was more poignant than ever, as it’s likely to be the last significant anniversary where survivors are present. It was also more sombre, because it takes place in the aftermath of another violent and disgusting attack on European Jews.

Recently I’ve heard people try to distinguish the antisemitism that propelled the Holocaust from the murders in Paris. They argue the former was born from fascism and ancient European prejudices, while the latter was driven by Islamic extremism and Middle Eastern politics.

This distinction is superficially reassuring. After all, we overcame the Third Reich 70 years ago. And as for those Jew-hating jihadists, well, they hate everybody else too. But there’s a problem: there is no distinction. It’s a delusion.

As I have said before, the irrational hatred of Jews is like cancer. It can be defeated, even crushed, but it can come back. Last year, Europe experienced a relapse, and only the most naïve would dismiss the potential risks that lie ahead.

It’s not a lie if you believe it. That’s the defense that the New York Times is going with.

It begins by exonerating Neil DeGrasse Tyson for smearing Bush by backing up his defense that he had confused the president’s tribute to the dead astronauts with a remark about Muslims that he never made. The problem with this defense is that the two remarks “Our God is the God who named the stars” and “the same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today” are different.

Furthermore Tyson’s critics had found a whole list of similar problems with his public statements, including various versions of the same story about jury duty that had supposedly happened to him.

But the absurd cover-up hits new heights when it references Hillary Clinton’s fake sniper incident.

Miriam Weeks, better known as Belle Knox, even better known as “the Duke porn star,” is sophomoric — but then, she is still a sophomore – and, having stockpiled a supply of that most important American commodity – fame – she has announced her intentions to inflict her sophomoric analysis on the world at large as a political activist, being, as she is, a College Republican of a purportedly libertarian bent. Apparently, the sins of the Right have not been sufficiently punished by Meghan McCain (remember Meghan McCain?), and so the Fates have sent us a half-educated prep-school pornographer in pursuit of a women’s-studies degree, one who describes her political preferences with superfluous deployments of the word “like,” e.g., “My dream list would be like Ron Paul, or Rand Paul would be really cool. That’d be pretty awesome.”

Like, awesome.

That the work of Miss Weeks and her colleagues in carnality is perfectly within the usual libertarian/conservative/constitutionalist circle of individual liberty – we prefer a large circle – is not entirely beside the point, but it is at this point a minor question. Miss Weeks says, “I think that my work and being in the porn industry definitely hits on so many libertarian themes like free speech, and censorship, and, you know, choice and autonomy over our bodies,” but, having been born in 1995, Miss Weeks was in diapers (not the sort worn by those of her colleagues serving some of the more exotic tastes) the last time there was a half-serious attempt at regulating pornography in the United States, in the form of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a dopey and ham-fisted gesture in the direction of restricting online pornography that was gutted by Reno v. ACLU.