RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jerusalem – I want to explain why I am in Israel.

I am here with 450 American (and a German and a Canadian) listeners to my radio show. About 400 are non-Jews.

We are here on a “Stand with Israel” tour organized by the syndicator of my radio show, the Salem Radio Network. I am accompanied by my wife, my producer Allen Estrin and his wife, and my radio colleague Mike Gallagher.

#ad#​People frustrated with the direction of America and the direction of the world regularly ask: “What can I do to make any difference?”

Here is one of the best answers I know: visit Israel. And do so especially when there are terror attacks.

If every time there were a spate of attacks on Israel, few people canceled their trips to Israel in response or — if I may imagine a much better world than the one we live in — tourism to Israel actually increased, three huge things would be achieved.

It was doubtful that the University of Missouri would stand up to a left-wing pressure campaign targeting its president, but when the football team joined the campaign, it was all over.

Missouri is an SEC school, where even a mediocre football program — Mizzou is 1-5 against the rest of the conference — has formidable financial and cultural power.

If anyone running the university had any guts, the school would have told the team, “Come back and talk to us when you can beat sad-sack Vanderbilt, or at least score more than three points against them.” Given the team’s performance, the proper rejoinder to its threatened boycott should have been, “How would anyone notice?”

Instead, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, is out in one of the most parodic PC meltdowns on a college campus to date. The Missouri episode shows how the political climate on campus falls somewhere between a Tom Wolfe novel, a Monty Python skit, and the French Terror.

Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?

It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”

Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .

For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion.

What senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.

Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel.

Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that can be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas, not much different than Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.

The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Obama’s hostility to Israel usually plays out in a good cop-bad cop routine. As the top dog in a political party that still wants Jewish votes, he does not deliver bellicose anti-Israel speeches from balconies. Instead he leaves that to “bad cops” like Hillary Clinton, who described her role as the “designated yeller” at Netanyahu back in her Secretary of State days, and Joe Biden.

While Netanyahu and Obama had another bland White House session whose only purpose was to show that they can sit together in the same room without yelling at each other, the passive-aggressive attacks from Obama Inc. didn’t stop.

Biden is Obama’s go-to guy for starting incidents with Israel even during the Hillary days. Not much has changed now as Netanyahu’s visit was preceded by a Biden speech ranting that, “There is no excuse, there should be no tolerance for any member or employee of the Israeli administration referring to the president of United States in derogatory terms. Period, period, period, period!”

That’s four periods. If you’re counting.

For close to a half-of-a-century, leftist college professors have betrayed their vocation, a calling to educate their students into the intellectual traditions that compose Western civilization.

A liberal arts education is intended to civilize its recipients, to inculcate in them those excellences of head and heart that had always been recognized as the intellectual and moral virtues constitutive of human flourishing.

However, once leftist professors began working around the clock to convince their students that the West, far from being the repository of a rich plethora of wisdom and strength that the liberal arts ideal presupposes, is, rather, the source of the world’s evils, this classical conception of the liberal arts became more difficult to sustain.

The left produced nothing more or less than a paradigm shift. The older conception of the West implicates an ideal personality type, what we may call “the Heroic.” The newer vision of the West implies its own ideal personality type: the Victimized.

Campus leftists disrupted a Yale University conference on free speech and terrorized attendees Saturday as part of a lingering protest against school administrators’ allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.

Attendees at the “Fifth Annual Conference on the Future of Free Speech: Threats in Higher Education and Beyond,” sponsored by the school’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program, were given an unscheduled demonstration of the threat that college students pose to higher education today as they were harassed and spat upon by protesters.

This is the same campus that conservative icon Buckley, one of its most famous alumni, savaged in his seminal 1951 jeremiad, God and Man at Yale. The campus was the site of a war between “Christianity and atheism” and “the struggle between individualism and collectivism [which] is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

A holy war of conquest and extermination is being waged against America and the West, against Christians and Jews, and against infidels generally. Iraq, Syria, Israel and the United States are among the prime targets of this war, which is being waged with a savagery by al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas that has shocked the world. But even more shocking than the barbarism of these groups is the fact that there are organizations on American campuses that support the agendas of these terrorists and spread their propaganda lies, and do so with the financial and institutional support of university administrations.

Two of these organizations, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather group to al-Qaeda and Hamas. They are the chief sponsors of annual campus events called “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” whose sole purpose is to spread the propaganda lies of the terrorist organization Hamas, and to demonize the Jewish state. They lead chants which call for the destruction of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” They are the chief sponsors of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, inspired by Hamas, whose goal is the economic strangulation of the Jewish state. Leaders of the Muslim Students Association have gone on to high-level positions in al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The most notorious of these was Anwar al-Awlaki, the head of al-Qaeda in the Yemen, who inspired the Fort Hood massacre and who before that was president of the Muslim Students Association at Colorado State.