RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-oic-organizes-for-censorship.html

I begin this column with a quotation from Soren Kern’s Gatestone article of December 11th, “OIC Blames Free Speech for ‘Islamophobia’ in West”:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, an influential bloc of 57 Muslim countries, has released the latest edition of its annual “Islamophobia” report.

The “Sixth OIC Observatory Report on Islamophobia: October 2012-September 2013” is a 94-page document purporting to “offer a comprehensive picture of Islamophobia, as it exists mainly in contemporary Western societies.”

But the primary objective of the OIC—headquartered in Saudi Arabia and funded by dozens of Muslim countries that systematically persecute Christians and Jews—has long been to pressure Western countries into passing laws that would ban “negative stereotyping of Islam.”

I’ve written in the past about the OIC’s continuing campaign to insulate Islam from serious and satirical criticism here, here, and here in its call for international censorship. In this column I will discuss some angles Kern does not emphasize or discuss in his column.

The OIC report is unique in that it is illustrated and features photographs of individuals the OIC has found guilty of “Islamophobia,” images of “offensive” newspaper headlines and photographs, and even of “defamatory” FaceBook pages and “tweets” that identify the alleged criminals. These can be found between pages 10 to 83, which constitute the bulk of the report and represent a “catalogue of crimes.”

Kern writes, in reference to the OIC report:

But the common thread that binds the entire document together is the OIC’s repeated insistence that the main culprit responsible for “the institutionalization of Islamophobia” in Western countries is freedom of speech, which the OIC claims has “contributed enormously to snowball Islamophobia and manipulate the mindset of ordinary Western people to develop a ‘phobia’ of Islam and Muslims.”

According to the OIC, freedom of expression is shielding “the perpetrators of Islamophobia, who seek to propagate irrational fear and intolerance of Islam, [who] have time and again aroused unwarranted tension, suspicion and unrest in societies by slandering the Islamic faith through gross distortions and misrepresentations and by encroaching on and denigrating the religious sentiments of Muslims.”

“Freedom of expression” occurs six times in the document, while “freedom of speech” occurs only once. Not that it makes a difference which term the document employs. (Hillary Clinton would agree.) The term “hate speech” occurs fifteen times, while “hate crime” was used thirty-five times, most frequently in the “catalogue of crimes.” The OIC demanded that Islam be “respected” seventeen times, and cited the importance of “interfaith dialogue” twenty-one times, even though such “dialogue” notoriously is set on Islamic terms and can go only one way, with concessions made by Christians and Jews, and none made by Muslims.

The term “toleration” and its variants, such as “intolerance,” occur fifty-seven times in the document. What this means in practice is that Western societies must “tolerate” the depredations of Islam and “accommodate” Muslims at the price of Western civil liberties, while any resistance or criticism of Islam’s ideology and practices, such as primitive Sharia law, can be designated as bigoted “intolerance.”

Haaretz reports that the University of Haifa has decided not to grant an honorary doctoral degree to Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Aumann because the University disapproves of Aumann’s political opinions. He is decidedly non-Left.

The story in Hebrew appears here: http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium-1.2189627

A few months ago the same University of Haifa had no problem granting an honorary PhD degree to Shulamit Aloni, and has granted similar degrees to other far leftists. Prof. Aumann won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his pathbreaking research in game theory and strategy.

The University of Haifa has been in the news recently for the naked politicization of some of its academic units. The university’s law school was the focus of a blistering report by the Im Tirtzu Zionist student organization exposing the fact that some of its law clinics were coercing students into providing legal aid to convicted terrorists and are also collaborating with anti-Israel radical NGOs such as Adalah. The law school had earlier prohibited the singing of the national anthem Hatikva at its graduation ceremonies. Other university universities are similarly politicized and the School of Education operates an indoctrinational “peace education” program. The University also continues to allow the anti-Semitic “ALEF LIST” chat list to operate under university auspices and to proliferate anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate propaganda (see http://isracampus.org.il/ALEF%20Watch.htm for details). In the past the University of Haifa employed Ilan Pappe and granted him tenure. All of this has been in the name of “pluralism and diversity.”

It turns out that Prof. Aumann is not covered by the University’s devotion to pluralism and diversity.Want to tell the University heads what you think of all this?

Write to

President of the University of Haifa
Mr. Amos Shapira
University of Haifa
Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel
Tel: 972-4-8240101
Fax: 972-4-8288110
E-mail: president@univ.haifa.ac.il
a.shapira@univ.haifa.ac.il

Rector of the University of Haifa

Prof. David Faraggi

University of Haifa

Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel

Tel: 972-4-8288094

Fax: 972-4-8342101

Email: faraggi@stat.haifa.ac.il

Chairman of the Board of Governors

Mr. Leon Charney

Law Office of Leon H. Charney

Broadway 1441

New York, NY 10018

Phone: 212-819-0994

E-mail: charney@lhcharney.com

University “Friends of” Offices Outside Israel are listed here: http://www.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/friends.htm

Home The secret is out: The United States’ policy toward Iran is made by Tehran, not the White House. On December 7, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warned, “If Congress adopts sanctions … The entire deal is dead. We do not like to negotiate under duress.”     Zarif’s threat worked magic. President Obama and […]

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=23792&m=22276&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce Western policy makers and media have misconstrued/misrepresented the Palestinian refugee issue, ignoring its global context and core data. Moreover, the Palestinian claim of dispossession – which impacts the US financial aid to UNRWA, and is defined as a key issue in the peace process – fails the reality test.   The Global Context At the end of 2012, the […]

http://news.investors.com/121313-682910-hud-targets-surburan-zoning-as-racially-exclusionary.htm

Stanley Kurtz wrote all about this last year in

Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities by Stanley Kurtz (Aug 2, 2012)

“The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to expand its view of discriminatory housing practices to include local zoning rules to control building in suburban neighborhoods, a New York county official battling the federal agency warns.

Rob Astorino, the Republican executive of Westchester County, says his Manhattan suburb illustrates what the rest of the country can expect under a sweeping anti-discrimination regulation HUD is expected to finalize by Christmas.

“The battle for zoning in Westchester County (will be) the battle everywhere,” Astorino said Tuesday during an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) briefing on Capitol Hill.

HUD has cut off $17 million in funding to Westchester for refusing to sue local municipalities to modify zoning ordinances to accommodate more subsidized housing. HUD claims the ordinances, which like almost every locality in America, set limits on building density, are racially “exclusionary.”

“HUD has said that even quarter-acre (lot) single-family zoning, in their view, may very well be discriminatory and perpetuate ‘segregation,'” Astorino said. “And (it) must be looked at, and even maybe attacked.”

Disparities Vs. Discrimination

Over the past few years, Westchester, one of the toniest communities in America, has built 400 affordable-housing units in mostly white neighborhoods. It’s under federal orders to build 350 more at a total cost of $51 million.

But HUD’s not satisfied. “This is about changing every block, every neighborhood to the viewpoint of federal bureaucrats at HUD,” Astorino said.

Under the Obama administration, housing officials no longer limit their view of housing discrimination to overt acts such as landlords and Realtors steering minorities away from predominantly white areas. They now consider any race-neutral policy that has the “effect” of creating “disparate access” for minorities to good jobs, schools and other suburban “assets” to be a racist “barrier.

The South African reality differs from the Western lore.http://www.nationalreview.com/node/366317/print

‘Go safely Umkhonto. Umkhonto we Sizwe. We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them — kill the whites.” These are lyrics from the anthem of Umkhonto we Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation.” The organization is better known as the MK, the military wing of the Marxist African National Congress (ANC). The MK was established by its commander, Nelson Mandela, to prosecute a terrorist war against South Africa’s racist apartheid regime.

Mandela had been out of prison for about two years in September 1992 when, fist clenched in the “black power” salute, he was filmed singing the anthem with a number of his comrades. Interestingly, but not ironically, as Mandela and others repeated the refrain about killing Boer farmers, it was a white man who stood next to him, similarly clench-fisted and singing. The man’s name is Ronnie Kasrils. A Soviet-trained terrorist who helped Mandela found the MK, Kasrils was a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party.

So was Mandela. No surprise there: Communism was, and remains, the animating ideology of the ANC. That makes it the enduring tragedy of South Africa.

I admit to finding this week’s Mandela hagiography tough to take. It was, to be sure, predictable. As we’ve observed time and again, once the culture and the institutions of opinion have been surrendered to the Left for two or three generations, you cannot be too surprised to wake up one day and find that the United States is no longer the country you’ve so confidently described as “right of center.” Still, while high-wattage fawning was to be expected in the mainstream media, the conservative press, too, tripped over itself to praise Mandela. That was disheartening.

http://bit.ly/1c0g0tT

Jean Schopfer, nom de plume Claude Anet (May 28, 1868—January 9, 1931), was a tennis player who reached two singles finals at the Amateur French Championships, winning in 1892 and losing in 1893. Schopfer/ Anet’s Through Persia in a Motor-Car, published in English translation during 1907, chronicled his ~1905 first hand observations of the chronic plight of Iran’s Jews under Iran’s Qajar dynasty Shiite theocracy, despite the alleged “Constitutional movement” era reforms. Notice the continued application of Shiite Islam’s heinous “najas” or impurity regulations, based upon the perceived physical (as well as spiritual) “contamination” of the non-Muslim infidel Jews.

Living in the midst of a fanatical and hostile population, Jews in Persia are reduced to the last extremity of degradation. Nearly all trades are forbidden to them; everything they touch is considered defiled. They cannot even live in the house of a Mussulman. There is very little justice in Persia for anybody—for the Jews there is none at all. Every possible exaction is practiced on them; nobody takes their part; and they live in appalling poverty, while their moral and physical degradation is beyond description.

http://spectator.org/articles/57079/nsa%E2%80%99s-porn-trackers According to the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, Americans are less safe from terrorist attacks than they were a year or two ago. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal) said, according to a Washington Post report, that terrorist groups are more numerous and have more sophisticated, hard-to-detect bombs. That story included Cong. Mike Rogers’s (R-MI) […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/israel-betrayed-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood actor, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv and Monty Morton, a Walking Encyclopedia of Facts.

The Gang gathered to discuss The ObamaCare Nightmare. The discussion occurred in Part I and focused on the catastrophe that Obama’s health care plan is inflicting on America.

Watch both parts of the two-part series below:

Part I:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/a-new-reign-of-terror-in-north-korea/print/ The North Korean regime announced the execution of its second-in-command yesterday; the latest casualty in a far-reaching purge by Kim Jong-Un. The rift may increase the chances that the world’s largest exporter of WMDs and persecutor of Christians will collapse, but that scenario opens up dangers of its own. The excellent One Free Korea blog says that the execution […]