RUTHFULLY YOURS

As most AT readers know, President Obama recently scolded those who don’t want to admit “Syrian refugees” to the United States, saying there should not be a religious test. He had the temerity to suggest it was “un-American,” as if being American means abandoning national security to exchange our lives and future for the lives of some other group of folks, many of who hate us.

In any case, for all of Barry’s faux passion and outrage about religious tests, he had nary a word to say about the religious test that is the core of Islam – the test put forth to non-Muslims before terror strikes, sparing those who can recite passages from the Quran before massacring those who cannot. The dead did not pass the religious test.

Obama does not speak about the religious test put forth to Yazidis and Christians and other non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East when jihadists show up in their town and at their door and in their homes and demand they convert to Islam. Or die. Because they failed the religious test.

Obama does not speak about the religious test when “Palestinians” take to the streets of Israel and knife, or run over, or shoot Jews because they are Jews, with 23 murdered and 192 wounded in the most recent wave of attacks. It’s a war against Jews because they fail the test.

Or perhaps I should say “wayward wimmin”. After all, they are all feminists.

Then again, what kind of feminism is it which would support BDS against the nation in the Middle East that has done more for gender equality than any other, and which was the first in the region (i.e. from its inception in 1948) to give Arab women the vote?

What psychosis motivates the extreme leftists who’ve hijacked the women’s movement as they have hijacked certain Protestant churches and imposed upon them that warped worldview that imperils Western society and gives aid and comfort to its enemies?

Here’s some of the whacko weirdness:

Not least among those welcoming the respite of Thanksgiving must be the nation’s college and university administrators. After student protests evicted Tim Wolfe as president of the University of Missouri, officials at other institutions of higher learning (if we may still call them that) were harassed by shouting or otherwise threatening students. At Princeton University, students occupied the office of the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, demanding that he throw Woodrow Wilson down the memory hole.

Even at the remove of several weeks, it is remarkable to recall that the disturbance at Yale University was over “offensive” Halloween costumes. But amid the protests, some important principles are now at risk, notably free speech. We asked at the time where the adults were on campus—either school presidents or boards of trustees? The answer, so far, is that most have caved like wet cardboard. The most hopeful adult response has come from 18- to 22-year olds—the students themselves.

Security checks are necessary – all Israelis are used to opening their bags and passing through metal detectors before being allowed to enter a bus or train station, shopping mall or concert hall.

Palestinian terrorists have taken the lives of more than 20 people, ranging in age from 18-year-olds to a man in his seventies, since the latest wave of attacks started on October 1. (Although arguably, this is not a wave but more like a stormy sea: The exact moment when it started is hard to pinpoint.) People have an understandable need to rationalize the attacks. I can tell you what is not the trigger: Checkpoints.

Recently I have heard an increasing number of Palestinians and their supporters claiming that it is the fear and humiliation of military checkpoints that are “fueling the despair” that leads people to decide to kill Israelis, using whatever they can: knives, scissors, guns, axes, or cars driven into a crowd of pedestrians.

The frustration at checkpoints is real. The need for checks even more so.

It is the equivalent of security checks at an airport. Once upon a time, pre-flight security checks were perfunctory. That was before the Palestinian hijackings that began in 1968, targeting Israelis and Jews. Since September 11, 2001, airports everywhere enforce rigorous rules, some obvious, others verging on the ludicrous.

It is becoming increasingly egregious to persist with the shabby charade that any consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.

After years of counterproductive concessions and compromise, it is unlikely that the situation is still retrievable by consensual means… remedial measures will require coercive action on a wide scale… Unless the Jews convey the unequivocal message that any…challenge to their sovereignty will be met with overwhelming lethal force, they will increasingly be the victims of such force at the hands of their Arab adversaries – “Into the Fray,” The Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2014

It was with these the words that I concluded my column written almost exactly a year ago. In it, I warned that the country was “on the cusp of carnage” – which was also the title of the column.

No consensual resolution possible

Within days, carnage was upon us, with Jews at morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue hacked to death by hate-crazed Arabs brandishing meat-cleavers. Since then, the brutal butchery has continued unabated, indeed, accelerating considerably in recent weeks, with a score of Israelis being slaughtered by Palestinian Arabs.

Alexander Levlovich, Naama Henkin, Eitam Henkin, Aharon Banita-Bennett, Nehemia Lavi, Alon Govberg, Chaim Haviv, Yeshayahu Krishevsky, Richard Lakin, Omri Levy, Avraham Asher Hasno, Benjamin Yakubovich, Ya’akov Litman, Netanel Litman , Reuven Aviram, Aharon Yesayev, Yaakov Don, Ezra Schwartz, Hadar Buchris, and Ziv Mizrahi were stabbed, stoned and shot to death – literally for no other reason than being Jewish.

With each gory week, it is becoming increasingly pointless to pretend some consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.