RUTHFULLY YOURS

Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky famously postulated that the test of a free society is the ability to express opinions in the town square without fear of reprisal. Most American colleges wouldn’t pass that test, according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire).

The foundation reports that 55% of the 437 colleges it surveyed this year maintain “severely restrictive” policies that “clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech.” They include 61 private schools and 180 public colleges. Incredibly, this represents progress from Fire’s survey seven years ago when 75% of colleges maintained restrictive free speech codes.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough for First Amendment advocates this year was a Virginia law that bars “free-speech zones” on public campuses. As Fire explains, free-speech zones are a common tool that administrators use to restrict demonstrations to remote areas of campus. Colorado Mesa University limits free speech to “the concrete patio adjacent to the west door of the University Center.”

Such restrictions are unconstitutional, and many public colleges have lifted their quarantines after being threatened with lawsuits. In January a University of Hawaii administrator tried to stop students from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside the campus’s free-speech zone. After students sued, the university revised its policies to allow free speech in “all areas generally available to students and the community.”

Meantime, campus speech police continue to stretch the bounds of what they prosecute under the banner of threats and intimidation. New Jersey’s Bergen Community College in January placed a professor on leave for posting an allegedly “threatening” picture on Google+ of his seven-year-old daughter doing yoga in a Game of Thrones T-shirt that read “I will take what is mine with fire & blood,” a quote from the TV show.

At McNeese State University in Louisiana, students can be punished for bullying if they make “remarks that would be viewed by others in the community as abusive and offensive,” regardless of whether that’s their intent. The University of West Alabama bans “cyberbullying,” which can include sending “harsh text messages or emails.” Would that include scathing evaluations that professors email to students?

Imagine the first one eighth Cherokee, four eighths liar, three eighths dumb, all around woman as President?…..Yikes….but lie for lie Hillary is no bargain either….I’m hoping for a real cat fight….rsk

A group of more than 300 hundred former Obama staffers have written an open letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president of the United States. “We helped elect Barack Obama — now we’re calling on Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016,” the letter is titled.

We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance.

We worked for him — and against all odds, we won in Iowa.

We organized like no campaign had organized before — and won the Democratic primary.

We built a movement — and the country elected the first-ever African American president.

We know that the improbable is far from impossible.

Now, former staffers from President Obama’s campaigns, along with former staffers from OFA, are joining with the thousands of Americans who are calling on Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.

Rising income inequality is the challenge of our times, and we want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy.

We urge Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.

There is a mounting public backlash over what many perceive as the government’s indifference to the growing influence of Islam in German society. This backlash represents a potentially significant turning point.

Despite efforts by German politicians and the media to portray PEGIDA as neo-Nazi, the group has taken great pains to distance itself from Germany’s extreme right. The group says that it is “apolitical” and that its main objective is to preserve what is left of Germany’s Judeo-Christian culture and values.

“Many people in Germany have legitimate concerns about the spread of radical Islamic ideology, which promotes violence against non-Muslims, robs women and girls of their natural rights, and seeks to require the application of Sharia law…. Because the rule of law, tolerance and freedom of religion are fundamental Western values, the PEGIDA movement must leave no doubt that it is precisely these values that it seeks to defend.” — Bernd Lucke, leader, Alternative for Germany Party and professor of macroeconomics, Hamburg University.

Thousands of German citizens have been taking to the streets to protest the growing “Islamization” of their country.

The protests are part of a burgeoning grassroots movement made up of ordinary citizens who are calling for an end to runaway immigration and the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Germany.

The guardians of German multiculturalism are fighting back: they are seeking to delegitimize the protesters by branding them as “neo-Nazis” and by claiming that the Islamization of Germany is a myth contrived by misinformed citizens.

But there is a mounting public backlash over what many perceive as the government’s indifference to the growing influence of Islam in German society. This backlash represents a potentially significant turning point—one that implies that the days of unrestrained German multiculturalism may be coming to an end.

Especially when Al Sharpton is talking.

Cutting the pretense of free exchange and diversity of opinion would be more honest.

Activists outraged at the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not only causing traffic jams and disrupting holiday shopping. They have a new target: President Obama, who the radicals say isn’t doing enough to rectify injustice.

What about opening investigations into the white police officers who killed the unarmed Brown and Garner, what about inviting Al Sharpton and Bill de Blasio to the White House, condemning the decisions of grand juries not to indict the policemen, and calling the ensuing unrest, which has included looting and arson, “necessary” to prick “the country’s conscience”?

Meh. Those things do not appease the Left, which never takes yes for an answer.

“Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands,” reports a disappointed New York Times. For example, Obama “has not stood behind the protestors.” He has not “linked arms with civil rights leaders.” He hasn’t even posed in an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt.

The activists don’t want Obama in the Oval Office. They want him on the picket line. They want to bully the president “into seizing on the post-Ferguson anger.” And they might be winning: “White House advisers say addressing the nation’s racial conflicts is now an imperative for the president’s final years in office.”

Uh-oh. If the president has any sense, he’ll make sure this pledge is as worthless as his red lines in Syria. Sixty-seven percent of adults rate their local police good or excellent, according to a recent poll. A majority of the public already disapproves of Obama on race. As do 57 percent of whites. Does the unpopular Obama (or do his potential Democratic successors) really want to see how high this president’s disapproval rating can go?

Dear Reader (and other victims of the pitiless Cromnibus!)

I learned from Twitter this morning that Gustave Flaubert, born this day in 1821, said, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” So, as Jay-Z says every morning he enters a music studio and as Joe Biden says every time President Obama gives him a fresh 64-pack of crayons, “Let’s make some art, bitches.”

Let’s start with Jonathan Gruber. I have to say I was disappointed by the hearings. Oh, sure, it was good theater-as-human sacrifice of the sort Washington does so well (though I am glad they stopped short of rectal rehydration).

But this was one of those moments where they really could have put the system on trial. Gruber’s consistent answer was that he’s a shabby, shallow, little man who belittles others, including the American people, to make himself look good. “I tried to make myself seem smarter by demeaning others.”

In almost every exchange, Gruber fell back on language you’d expect from a stockbroker tied up in an S&M dungeon. I did it because I am a flea! A worm! I am no master of the universe, I am nothing! Punnnniissshhh meee!

All that was missing were some riding-crop and melted-candle-wax welts, and maybe a shorn scrotum. But, hey man, it’s a defense.

But it’s not a good one. You can blame your arrogance for calling the American voters stupid, but you can’t blame your arrogance for claiming that the bill was designed to hide taxes and deceive the public. If I stab someone 34 times, the jury might want to hear about my arrogance, but whether I’m arrogant or humble, it doesn’t change what I did — and apologizing for it doesn’t clarify where the body is buried.

Gruber’s strategy of emotional self-abasement was very clever because it distracted from the central arguments of fact.

The so-called torture report is worthless as an investigation, but it’s valuable to our enemies.

Jihadists are still waging their war against the civilized world. Check that: Jihadists are currently winning their war against the civilized world. Thank Barack Obama, who fails to grasp the difference between being “the president who ends wars” and the president who retreats from wars, and thus surrenders while the enemy is on the rise.

What is the response of Senate sages to this predicament? Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats saw it as the perfect time to savage the CIA, further burn America’s bridges with anti-terrorism allies, and hand jihadists a huge propaganda victory.

The Islamic State had a response, too: They beheaded four Christian children for refusing to renounce Jesus Christ.

You see where this is going, no?

The Democrats’ “torture” report is a gratuitous hit job — brought to you by the same party that, out of political calculation, aggressively undermined the American war effort in Iraq — only after voting to send our men and women into grave danger there, also out of political calculation.

To be sure, the report is a highly disturbing document. It graphically illustrates the severity of enhanced interrogation tactics used against a small group of top-tier terrorists — terrorists who were responsible for brutally murdering thousands of Americans and who, at the time of their capture, were actively plotting to kill thousands more.

Still, notwithstanding the revelation of a few new gory details, this is old news and its disclosure serves no useful purpose — it is just a settling of scores.

We are tired of hearing that withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will bring peace. We know and you know that it would bring another Gaza. So stop saying it.

We are tired of hearing that land beyond the Green Line is ‘Palestinian land’. The Green Line is simply an armistice line that has no political significance. You know this too.

We are tired of hearing about the “Palestinian people.” They are no different from the Arabs of Syria or Egypt, from which most of their ancestors migrated in the last 150 years or so. There is no Palestinian language or religion, and until very recently they considered themselves simply ‘Arabs’. Their culture is almost entirely defined by their opposition to the Jewish state.

We are tired of hearing that “the Palestinians deserve a state.” We are indigenous here, not them, and their behavior entitles them more to a trial at The Hague than to a state. And they certainly don’t deserve our state, which is the only state they want.

We are tired of hearing about ‘The Occupation’. As Naftali Bennett said the other day, you can’t be an occupier in your own land.

We are tired of hearing that “settlements are illegal under international law.” They aren’t.

We are tired of hearing that “settlement construction is an obstacle to peace.” Arab rejectionism and terrorism is the reason there isn’t peace. By the way, we are pro-peace. We are just not pro-suicide.

We are tired of hearing about the 5 million (or whatever ridiculous number there are alleged to be) ‘Palestinian refugees’ or the ‘Palestinian diaspora’. There were about 700,000 Arabs that left their homes in 1948, mostly of their own volition, more or less at the same time as the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. We resettled ours — resettle yours.

We are tired of hearing anything from anyone associated with the UN. The UN is a parasitic and criminal enterprise dominated by our mortal enemies.

We are tired of stupid post-colonialist rhetoric. We aren’t ‘colonists’ and Arabs don’t have the right to murder us in the name of ‘resistance’. Talking this way reveals you as moral imbeciles.

You can’t recognize a state that has no borders, no single government, and no economy.

We know we can’t depend on any kind of security guarantee from anyone except the IDF. So stop being insulted because we don’t trust you. And don’t ask us to give up any nuclear weapons we might or might not have.

We know that the left-wing parties in Israel are bankrupt of ideas. We aren’t going to vote for them, no matter how much you would like us to. So don’t bother trying to influence our election.

Don’t believe what you read in Ha’aretz.

Jerusalem, undivided, is the capital of the state of Israel. Get used to it, because you can’t change it.

Sincerely,

Ordinary Israelis

Dear Readers,

This is a hard one to write. After more or less 15 years of continuous newspaper syndication, this column you are reading is the end of the line. I am not ceasing to write, of course. All of my content — columns, essays, posts, and, of course, books — will continue to appear at my website, www.dianawest.net, and elsewhere.

But my weekly conversation with readers in good old-fashioned newsprint stops at the bottom of the page. In some ways, that’s too bad. For one thing, there is a kind of journalistic romance to appearing on the pages of a real paper that is still hurled at a front porch. Internet-generated email tends to pale next to the copy of a column that a reader has taken the trouble to cut out of the Sentinel, the Mercury, the Herald, the Register, and mail back to me, highlighted with comments.

There is also the fact that I have relished writing a very conservative column that has appeared not only in identifiably conservative outlets. This, in theory at least, has permitted the column to sing a little outside of the choir — liberal and conservative both, come to think of it — even if I know the tune hasn’t often been exactly catchy. Indeed, given the subjects I have chosen to probe — or, as it feels as each weekly deadline has rolled around, the subjects that have chosen me — I am sure it has been a tough column to read. It is hard to watch the world fall apart.

Back at the beginning, which nearly coincided with the attacks of 9/11, I do confess to writing my little column with the hopeful expectation that simple, direct, non-PC exposure of heretofore unknown facts about then-exotic Islam would eventually, if others and I stuck to it long enough, help shift public debate. This, in turn, would eventually help lead policymakers to enact measures to preserve our liberty, for example, by halting Islamic immigration to prevent sharia (Islamic law) from taking hold here as it has in Europe. I guess I was younger then.

Six or seven hundred columns later, I can’t see anything resembling victory, let alone much progress in moving the debate. Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy, period (as they like to say in Washington). The prospects of exposing, winning, forestalling or staving off whatever it is that has drawn my bead each week does seem to me to have actually diminished. I know that’s depressing, but that’s the hazard of taking stock. It’s also probably a good reason to take a break.

Since I’m looking back over the past decade and a half, I will state what I think amounts to the most momentous story of our age, a story that begins with, as best I can judge, the near-certainty that Barack Obama’s online birth certificate and Selective Service registration card are forgeries. That this has been a non-issue in most conservative and Republican circles for the past six years is the biggest single and essential enabler of the war that Obama and his administration are visiting upon our nation and our Constitution.

Just for the record, I can’t say I hold George W. Bush in higher esteem. Just to go out on a high note, I will point out the greatest political hope for the Western world is the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. The fact that his Party for Freedom is currently No. 1 in Dutch polls is a bright spot on a dark stage.

Of course, I am probably not telling readers of this column anything they don’t already know — another reason I am happy to take a pause. It has been a writer’s privilege to develop arguments on a published, weekly basis outside the filter of conservative media and the Washington Beltway both. From this platform, I have been able to explore many topics that much of the media, right and left, tend to avoid lest they (horrors) risk missing a cocktail party.

Such patterns of denial, I began to realize over the years, lead to the suppression and inversion of morality. Or, is it that the suppression and inversion of morality lead to the denial of facts? Maybe more than anything else, such questions have framed the work of this column, my blog, and, of course, my books, “The Death of the Grown-Up” (2007) and “American Betrayal” (2013).

I am sure they will continue to do so — at least until I can solve the riddle.

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomatic-Conference/Danish-ambassador-JPosts-Caroline-Glick-exchange-verbal-blows-over-EU-attitude-toward-Israel-384438

Europe should apply a double standard to Israel when judging its actions compared to other Middle Eastern nations, Danish Ambassador Jesper Vahr said on Thursday, causing sparks to fly at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference in the capital.

“Israel should insist that we discriminate, that we apply double standards, this is because you are one of us,” Vahr said during a panel discussion on relations between Israel and Europe.

Israelis sometimes ask why Europe applies a different standard to its neighboring countries, such as Syria, Vahr said. “Those are not the standards that you are being judged by. It is not the standards that Israel would want to be judged by,” he said.

Israel should want to be held to European standards, not Middle Eastern ones, he said.

“So I think you have the right to insist that we apply double standards and put you to the same standards as all the rest of the countries in the European context.”

The Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic correspondent, Herb Keinon, who moderated the panel, asked Vahr if his statement couldn’t be seen as “patronizing” to the Palestinians.

Vahr responded: “I am not sure it is,” particularly given that Israel is the stronger party in the conflict and the Palestinians are the weaker one.

It is “natural,” Vahr said, to engage differently with Israel, a country with whom Europe, including Denmark, has an extensive cooperative relationship with in trade and cultural affairs.

Norah O’Donnell is called an “anchorwoman,” defined as “a television reporter who coordinates a broadcast to which several correspondents contribute.” However, would she not vet the material before airing erroneous contributions, or is there intentional complicity?

O’Donnell reported the brutal attack by two Palestinian boys in a Jerusalem synagogue, killing four rabbis and injuring seven. In fact, it was a massacre, with blood everywhere, including on the Torah – but she called the synagogue a “contested religious site.” Contested? Neither the Har Nof synagogue nor the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem is contested. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, has been the capital of the Jewish people through most of history, and was declared the capital when Israel became a state; therefore, the neighborhood and the synagogue are indisputably legal. If it is contested, it is only a war tactic by jihadists, who will use any method to garner supporters when they fear the possibility of loss by modern warfare. Does O’Donnell also contest the Christian churches or Bahi’a, Buddhist, or Hindu temples in Israel? Does she contest the Al Aqsa mosque, over which dominion was ceded by General Moshe Dayan, whether out of generosity or naïveté and his hope for peace with barbarians. How could he have known that the courtyard would someday be a soccer field for boys who use severed heads for sport? Perhaps he should have been more aware of Islam’s bloody 1400-year history!

Ahhhh, the Al Aqsa mosque should be contested, because it sits on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, where King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem as a monument to God and a permanent home for the inner sanctuary, which contained the Ark of the Covenant that held the two stone tablets that Moses received at Mt. Horeb. The ground under the Temple Mount to this day contains artifacts that verify the existence of the Jewish people who worshipped in that Temple; the coins of the monetary system used by the Jews before the Christian Era, pottery, stones with inscriptions, an arch, a colonnade, a grand stairway, Solomon’s Stables, thousands of mikvehs (ceremonial baths), and the continuation of the Western Wall now leading to the city walls and the Lion’s Gate. It should also be contested because the imams have the audacity to preach hate and death to all the Jews from the mosque that sits on Jewish land!

I would like to hear from CBS’s Morning news show and Norah O’Donnell concerning her contesting the Har Nof synagogue; I believe a sincere apology to the Jewish people and a statement of correction are in order.