RUTHFULLY YOURS

In “Getting Hard to Tell Satire from Reality” News: A group of college kids actually signed a fake petition demanding that the song “White Christmas” be banned from radio stations because it’s racist.

In a how-bad-has-it-gotten experiment, conservative MRCTV reporter Dan Joseph took the seemingly ridiculous petition to a college campus (Joseph doesn’t name which campus in the video, but George Mason University signage can be seen in the background of at least one of the shots) to see how many students would sign it.

“Tell Local Radio Stations to Stop Playing the Song ‘White Christmas’ as it is Insulting to People of Color and Perpetuates the Idea That Being White is Automatically A Positive Attribute in Our Society,” the petition stated.

The fake petition received 18 signatures in about an hour, according to MRCTV.

While students were signing the petition, Joseph made comments such as calling the song a “microaggression” and saying that he preferred “racially ambiguous” Christmases.

FYI: The “white” in the song refers to snow — the preferred color of which is usually white for reasons completely unrelated to race.

“Rosenwald,” a documentary film about the early 20th-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, disappeared from theaters much too quickly after being released in August. An Academy Award nomination next month, when the honorees will be announced, may be a long shot for writer-director Aviva Kempner, but it would give the film the wider audience it deserves. It also would be a public service.

The Chicago-based Rosenwald, a son of German-Jewish immigrants, made his fortune in the early 1900s running Sears, Roebuck & Company when it was the nation’s largest retailer. The film’s main focus, however, is Rosenwald’s largely unsung philanthropic collaboration with Booker T. Washington, the former slave and black educator best known for his self-help philosophy and for training black teachers in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction ended, white backlash resulted in scarce funding for black public education in southern states, where nearly 90% of the black population lived. Washington therefore sought assistance from northern philanthropists like Rosenwald, who graciously obliged.

PARIS—Western security officials are struggling to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports, which could be used to hide operatives planning attacks in Europe or the U.S. among refugees.

Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.

But the near-absence of communication with the Syrian government means Western officials are lacking key information that could be used to identify the passports, according to a confidential analysis by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.