RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — Police have stepped up security for Jewish students at a major state university in upstate New York after graffiti threatened to “kill all kikes,” using a derogatory term to refer to Jewish people.

A picture of the vandalism, scrawled on a men’s bathroom at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was obtained by The Times of Israel.

University police were notified of the incident last week, after a Jewish student noticed the inscription and told the school’s Hillel director, Dan Metchnik, who then informed university officials.

Police ordered university facilities to remove the language from the bathroom stall and opened an investigation. They further specified that they believe it to be an isolated incident.

The university put out a statement condemning the hate crime and confirmed that, in response, university police had increased patrols near the Hillel office and elsewhere on campus where students were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Metchnik, an Israeli, was shocked to learn of what happened. “We’ve had some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expression on this campus in the last few years,” he told The Times of Israel. “But we haven’t seen this kind of vicious and explicit anti-Semitism, not for awhile.”

There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall “Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.

While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.

It doesn’t.

The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.

Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.

Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.

Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.

Vermont, the state that gave us unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is home to another radical liberal breed named Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Along with Sanders, Sen. Leahy represents the left flank of the Democratic Party and often finds himself at loggerheads with its more centrist members.

Not unsurprising, Leahy is also a visceral critic of Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy and stalwart U.S. ally. In 2011, citing alleged human rights violations, he proposed a bill that would have cut funding to three elite Israeli units that conduct counter-terror operations in Judea/Samaria and Gaza, prompting intervention by Israel’s then defense minister, Ehud Barak.

In 2012, Leahy employed veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric to oppose an amendment proposed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that called for the State Department to provide a more accurate accounting of which actual Palestinian refugees were being serviced by U.S. tax dollars. In opposing Kirk, Leahy implied that those who favored the amendment had other interests and not those of the U.S. in mind thereby invoking the blatantly anti-Semitic “Israel firster” canard, which implies divided Jewish loyalties.

Leahy now seems to have set his sights on obtaining “justice” for Arab terrorists neutralized by Israel while conducting terror attacks against Israelis. He recently sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to investigate “gross violations of human rights” alleged to have been committed by Israel’s security forces. The letter, which also names Egypt as an offender, claims that Israel may have engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article lamenting the lack of “diversity” in my discipline. Philosophy, so goes the article, just hasn’t been welcoming toward minorities and women.

Thankfully, such enlightened departments as that found at Penn State University have endeavored to “decolonize the canon.”

Of course, academia isn’t in the least bit interested in promoting the only diversity that can, or should, mean something in an institution of “higher learning.” Its equation of “diversity” with gender and racial representation is part of the problem.

Indeed—and I say this as someone who is an academic who happened to have grown up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Trenton, NJ—there exists far more intellectual diversity at the corner bar than can be found in your average college or university.

Not only does the data confirm the endless anecdotal evidence that legions of academic dissidents like myself have acquired over the years. The data reveals that academics are moving even further to the left.

The most recent study available was conducted by the University of California. Its findings were released a little more than three years ago in the November of 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education.

The study identifies five ideological or political categories: “far left,” “liberal,” “middle of the road,” “conservative,” and, finally, “far right.” What it finds is that faculty of all ranks from both universities and colleges, institutions that are private and public, large and small, religious and non-religious, self-identified as “far left” to a significantly greater extent than they had just three years earlier: In 2008, 8.8% so self-identified. In 2011, that number had risen to 12.4%.

Earlier this month, the Israeli authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation into the conduct of left-wing organization Breaking the Silence for collecting classified military information. This came following an expose on Channel 2 news that showed Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies of reported wrongdoing in the Palestinian territories from IDF soldiers, soliciting operational information. The Israeli NGO claims to be a human rights organization, but it has compelled young people to divulge sensitive information about troop movements and other operational maneuvers.

It is difficult to make a case for how collecting sensitive, classified information about the IDF can possibly help the Palestinian cause, short of planting the illusive hope in the minds of Israel’s enemies that they can defeat the Israeli militarily. And the sooner the Palestinians wake up from that corrosive illusion, the more lives will be saved, on both the Palestinian and the Israeli side of the conflict.

Yet, with a criminal investigation hanging over them, Breaking the Silence still gave a talk at the Brown University-Rhode Island School of Design Hillel and was scheduled to give another at the Columbia/Barnard Hillel on Thursday.

This is not the first time Breaking the Silence has gone on tour to distort and air Israel’s dirty laundry to American Jewish college students. In 2013, Breaking the Silence appeared at the Hillel houses of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. This is, however, the first time that they are on tour while under criminal suspicion.