RUTHFULLY YOURS

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,Is a keen observer of life,The word intellectual suggests right away A man who’s untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden could well have carried his lampoon further by pointing out that any intellectual these days is most likely to be untrue to his country, his compatriots, and their culture. It seems to come naturally to some characters to condemn what they are expected to praise, and praise what they are expected to condemn. Accordingly, the assumption takes root that Western societies are unjust at many a level, and that they do things much better somewhere else.

One approved model used to be the Soviet Union, then it was Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba, and there are even socialists now who look to the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. A small but
vociferous number of academics and littérateurs repeatedly put across some inner vision that possesses them, falsifying reality in the manner ofartists.

The primary explanation of this phenomenon is snobbery. The works of a Gore Vidal, a Norman Mailer, a Harold Pinter, an Edward Said, and alltheir kind are exercises in superiority. To hold opinions about national politics and purposes contrary to those of everyone else seems like flattering evidence of being cleverer than the masses who can’t think
things out for themselves and don’t know they are being hoodwinked. In this mindset, doing harm is progressive and unpopularity is proof of courage.

A particular subsection of intellectuals comprises Jews who are engaged in a very old battle to define their identity. Scattered in many countries and living among Christians or Muslims, they were nonetheless always a nation, with a faith and languages and customs of their own. The obvious strategies for survival were to avoid drawing attention to themselves, to stay apart, to do whatever was asked by the powers that be, and finally to flee if persecution was threatening martyrdom.

Move over, vegetarian; the “climatarian” is now taking the smug seat at the dinner table.

This new term is a convergence of two political crusades: climate change and the food movement. It landed on the New York Times list of the top new food words for 2015. Here’s how the Grey Lady defined the term:

climatarian (n.) A diet whose primary goal is to reverse climate change. This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores, cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste.

Climate activists are ratcheting up their attempt to blame global warming on food production and consumption, targeting the meat industry in particular. As the public tunes out stale climate-change rhetoric, climatarians hope to turn attention away from your SUV and onto your dinner plate.

They have plenty of help to make their case. A dire report released last November by Chatham House at the Royal Institute of International Affairs claims that the livestock sector is responsible for emitting about 15 percent of greenhouse gases, which “is equivalent to tailpipe emissions from all the world’s vehicles.” The United Nations pegs the figure even higher, at about 25 percent. They want us to think that if we cut out meat, we’d dramatically reduce emissions.

A specious report from the cancer agency of the World Health Organization last year warned that processed and red meat are carcinogenic. The group’s goal is to foment public fear about America’s favorite protein, despite a dearth of scientific evidence to back it up

In its latest act of illicit intervention in Israeli public life, the foreign (mainly U.S.)-funded “New Israel Fund” (where their ‘New Israel” means Palestine) has filled the Israeli press and the country’s billboards with a McCarthyist anti-democratic vilification poster that essentially endorses all who seek to deny freedom of speech in Israel to non-leftists.

It is the NIF’s response to the campaign by the student Zionist movement Im Tirtzu against ‘Shtulim’ (plants) in Israel, meaning foreign-funded anti-Israel subversives. In the NIF ad, it shows Yitzhak Rabin with the slogan “THEY already took care of that plant,” meaning “THEY” collectively murdered Rabin. By THEY the NIF does not mean Yigal Amir and his brother. It means all Israeli critics of the left.

For decades, the mantra of Israel’s anti-democratic left has been that Rabin’s death was caused by the exercise of freedom of speech by non-leftists in Israel, especially when they criticized Rabin and called him names. Their conclusion is that criticism of the left by non-leftists is a clear and present danger that produces murder and so must be suppressed. Just how they know that assassin Yigal Amir’s behavior was not caused by his attending law school has never been explained. In any case, the catechism of the left, which includes most journalists, is that the Rabin murder was caused by “incitement.” Curiously, they are not reminding people what Rabin really thought of leftist NGO B’tselem!