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December 2015

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The Pea of Victimization Under Twenty Campus Mattresses By Richard L. Cravatts

By on December 1st, 2015

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

An ever-growing list of these remarkably outrageous demands is even being archived at a site, The Demands.org, and which, as of this week, comprised the juvenile manifestos of groups on over 60 campuses, including calls for removals of college presidents (as happened at University of Missouri, as the most conspicuous and significant example), the renaming of buildings and schools named for racists and other moral reprobates (as happened at Princeton and indignation over its former president, Woodrow Wilson), and various similar calls for increased recruitment of minority faculty and students, enhanced centers and facilities for minority students, increased financial aid to “students of color” and other underrepresented groups, and a litany of other minority-centric benefits and amenities.

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An Obvious, Unused Home For Refugees The Arabian Peninsula’s oil-rich nations are oddly absent in talks about where those fleeing Syria can go. By Douglas J. Feith

By on December 1st, 2015

Ten thousand Syrian refugees should be brought to the U.S., President Obama says, because that’s “who we are.” Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, have used similar language to explain America’s obligation. More than half of the nation’s state governors have objected. On Nov. 20, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, in effect, to block the administration’s resettlement plan on security grounds.

While the debate rages in the U.S., and as Europe struggles to cope with refugees streaming north, too little attention has been directed to the region where the refugees could best start life anew: the Arabian Peninsula and its Arabic-speaking oil-rich countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Approximately 4.3 million Syrian civil-war refugees are now in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, and registered with the United Nations. Vast camps attest to the refuge these countries have provided even though they struggle without the oil wealth of their neighbors.

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Chris Christie’s Second Wind Long before the ISIS strike on Paris, he was making the hard arguments on terror.By William McGurn

By on December 1st, 2015

Think of Chris Christie as one of 14 Republicans vying for the presidential nomination and the odds appear insurmountable. But think of him as a defensive lineman with a talent for stripping the ball from an opposing quarterback and the race now becomes far more interesting.

Back in the October CNBC debate, the quarterback was Jeb Bush, who fumbled when asked whether the feds should regulate fantasy football. Mr. Christie gave the answer Mr. Bush should have: “Fantasy football? We have ISIS and al Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football?”

Cue to Paris, where world leaders are meeting this week to discuss . . . climate change. This time the hapless quarterback is President Obama, who declares the conference a show of “resolve” against Islamic State terrorists.

“This is the president once again living in his fantasy world rather than the world as it actually is,” says Mr. Christie, calling in from the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “He really believes that folks are worried about climate change when what they really care about now is the Islamic State and Syria and terrorism.”

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Liberalism’s Imaginary Enemies In Paris, it’s easier to battle a climate crisis than confront jihadists on the streets. By Bret Stephens

By on December 1st, 2015

Little children have imaginary friends. Modern liberalism has imaginary enemies.

Hunger in America is an imaginary enemy. Liberal advocacy groups routinely claim that one in seven Americans is hungry—in a country where the poorest counties have the highest rates of obesity. The statistic is a preposterous extrapolation from a dubious Agriculture Department measure of “food insecurity.” But the line gives those advocacy groups a reason to exist while feeding the liberal narrative of America as a savage society of haves and have nots.

The campus-rape epidemic—in which one in five female college students is said to be the victim of sexual assault—is an imaginary enemy. Never mind the debunked rape scandals at Duke and the University of Virginia, or the soon-to-be-debunked case at the heart of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about an alleged sexual assault at Harvard Law School. The real question is: If modern campuses were really zones of mass predation—Congo on the quad—why would intelligent young women even think of attending a coeducational school? They do because there is no epidemic. But the campus-rape narrative sustains liberal fictions of a never-ending war on women.

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Obama’s Appalachian Tragedy The president’s anti-coal policies have devastated West Virginia. Since 2009, 332 mines have closed. By Paul H. Tice

By on December 1st, 2015

‘The traveler comes to the Appalachians in the lovely season. He sees the hills, the streams, the foliage—but not the poor.” That passage comes from “The Other America,” Michael Harrington’s 1962 book that opened the eyes of liberal policy makers to America’s invisible poverty. The classic work helped provide the intellectual ammunition for President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty,” announced in his State of the Union address two years later.

Fast forward to today. The latest touchstone of liberal policy, the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions, is causing economic destruction and pushing poverty higher in the Appalachians. But those backing the climate-change agenda are doing their best to keep this reality hidden from the public.

Since 2012, 27 coal-mining companies with core operations in Central Appalachia, a region roughly centered in southern West Virginia, have filed for bankruptcy protection. The list includes a number of large-cap, publicly traded entities, such as Alpha Natural Resources, James River Coal and Patriot Coal. Production of coal in southern West Virginia declined by 45% between the first half of 2011 and the first half of 2015, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Since 2009, 332 coal mines in West Virginia have been closed, and 9,733 jobs—roughly 35% of the industry’s total employment in the state—have been lost, figures from the West Virginia Coal Association show.

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What Do They Want? by Nidra Poller

By on December 1st, 2015

Our French feminine newscasters are attractive, charming, refined, and fashionably dressed. (Though a few have disfigured themselves with silicone lips that interfere with their ability to speak). Compared to their American and British counterparts, they are stunningly beautiful. And it just might have something to do with French culture, because women on the French channel of Israel’s i24 news are in general better looking than their colleagues on the English channel.

I’m not sure of the appropriate vocabulary for their profession. Some are simple newsreaders, others are full-fledged journalists. They don’t go into the grimy field like the American and British big names that stood up, rain or shine, at Place de la République for hours on end last week. Decades ago they were called “speakerines,” a word that has been dumped, along with “concierge” for custodian and “garcon” for waiter. For some reason that escapes me, our indoor journalists have taken to baring their arms to the shoulder when temperatures drop and normal people are bundled up in sweaters and jackets. In my experience, TV studios are more likely to be cool than overheated. But I was surprised to see a sweet young thing on the 14th of November dressed in a summery pastel sleeveless top reciting press releases filled with shock and gore. By the end of the day the word had apparently gone out. Since then, it’s jackets or long sleeves, all black for the first week, now varied but still appropriate to a grieving nation.

Since Paris was attacked, these anchors have been asking invited guests, “What do they want?” Well, if they’re terrorists it follows that they want to terrorize us and résistance consists of not being afraid. We’ll go to concerts, restaurants, cafés, and shopping centers. The terrorists will not prevail. Then, since they are all Muslim, it means they want to divide our society, turn us against all Muslims, so we will resist by holding hands, forming human chains, and proclaiming friendship with our Muslim fellow citizens. TV cameras focused on a blindfolded man at Place de la République carrying a sign that said “I’m Muslim, give me a hug.” Of course he got lots of hugs. No one seemed to notice that the blindfold was a keffieh… like the ones worn by the caliphators that brought the jihad flag to the statue of Marianne in the summer of 2014.

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The Selective Amnesia of Neocons by Edward Cline

By on December 1st, 2015

One of the most significant critical phenomena occurring within the last five years was the persistent and oftimes viciously personal neoconservative (“neocon”) attack on Diana West’s compelling and thoroughly documented account of how the U.S. lost World War II because of Soviet infiltration and manipulation of the Roosevelt administration. These machinations were fiddled not so much by Josef Stalin, as by his fifth column and domestic politburo of American Stalinists and an obliging U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The book is American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. The U.S. government then was termite-riddled with Soviet agents and sympathizers (“fellow-travelers”), much as our government now is termite-riddled with Muslims.

I reviewed Diana West’s path-breaking book in May 2015 in my Rule of Reason column, “Blaming the Right Culprits.” In it I wrote:

Diana West has performed yeoman’s work in exposing the Soviet-FDR connection in American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. She has aired out America’s dirty laundry and hung it out to dry. Neocons and other strange creatures attacked her for contradicting their over half-century-old meme that FDR was a blameless dupe of Joseph Stalin and that there were no real Soviet agents and fellow travelers in FDR’s administration.

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The American war against the Jews: Caroline Glick

By on December 1st, 2015

Despite the substantial funds that have been devoted to fighting anti-Israel forces on campuses, they have not been diminished.
The foundations of American Jewish life are under assault today in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Academia is ground zero of the onslaught. The protest movements on campuses are first and foremost anti-Jewish movements.

For the past decade or so, Jewish communal leaders and activists have focused on just one aspect of this anti-Jewish campaign. Jewish leaders have devoted themselves to helping Jewish students combat the direct anti-Semitism inherent to the anti-Israel student movements.

Despite the substantial funds that have been devoted to fighting anti-Israel forces on campuses, they have not been diminished. To the contrary, with each passing year they have grown more powerful and menacing.

Consider a sampling of the anti-Jewish incidents that took place over the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago, Daniel Bernstein, a Jewish student at University of California Santa Cruz and a member of the university’s student government was ordered not to vote on a resolution calling for the university to divest from four companies which do business with Israel.

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The Iran Deal’s Slow Death: Michael Ledeen

By on December 1st, 2015

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelledeen/2015/11/30/the-iran-deals-slow-death/

Back when the negotiations were still under way for The Deal between Iran and the P5+1, I accurately forecast the outcome would be a “No Deal Deal.” I described it this way:

Obama/Kerry/Rhodes won’t take “no” for a definitive answer, so we’re probably going to see a new form of creative appeasement. Short version: It will be a “no deal deal.” Iran promises to try really really hard to be nice and we pay for it. Everyone agrees to commit to a “real” agreement by the end of the year. Iran gets money–the continuation of the monthly payoff, and under-the-table arrangements like the gold shipment the South Africans delivered to Khamenei–and we get smiles.

There is no deal, per se–nobody signs anything–but we get the worst of it any how. If John Kerry thinks that’s enough for a Nobel Peace Prize, he’s got an even lower opinion of the judgment of the Oslo crowd than I do. And he may be right. Chamberlain was widely praised as a great peacemaker for a while, and Carter was greatly admired when he proclaimed we had given up our “inordinate fear of Communism.” And we’ll keep talking, won’t we? And Obama just reiterated–at the Pentagon no less–that guns don’t defeat ideologies, only good ideas do.

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British PM releases anti-ISIS strategy while Obama combats bad weather: Jim Kouri

By on December 1st, 2015

U.S. Lawmakers this week will be pushing the Pentagon and other administration officials to come up with a tougher policy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) even though President Barack Obama refuses to make any adjustments or revision following the Paris Islamic terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the head of Britain’s government, who always appeared to be decisive in contrast to Obama, promulgated the United Kingdom’s strategy for both ISIS and Syria’s oppressive regime.

The government of the United Kingdom on Thursday released a strategy detailing the arguments for why it would be “militarily, legally, and morally right for Britain to join the U.S.-led coalition in attacking Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) targets in (President Bashar al-Assad’s] Syria,” according to Friday’s Homeland Security News Wire.

The 38-page dossier was released just before Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a speech in front of the House of Commons in which he called on all House members to vote for authorization to conduct the proposed anti-ISIS campaign that includes the removal of Assad and his regime.

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