RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ms. Lagnado, a Journal reporter, is the author of two memoirs of her Egyptian-Jewish family, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” (Harper Perennial, 2008) and “The Arrogant Years” (Ecco, 2012).

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579395514091677086#printMode

Recently I was contacted by a fellow Vassar alumna through Facebook.She wanted to know if I was aware that our genteel alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Israel, pro-boycott sentiment.

Suddenly, my stomach was in knots—a feeling that Vassar has managed to evoke in me ever since I went there in the 1970s. An Orthodox Jewish girl from Brooklyn on a full scholarship, I fixated on this Seven Sister school as my entryway to the American dream, the epitome of style and grace that also prided itself on teaching “critical thinking.”

In this case the cause of my angst was a young woman named Naomi Dann, the president of the Vassar Jewish Union. She had penned a piece for the campus paper strongly supporting the recent move by the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic exchanges—a decision denounced by college presidents across the country, including Vassar’s.

Her piece strung together all the familiar buzzwords and clichés used by Israel’s critics: “atrocities,” “oppressive,” “abuses,” “colonial,” and, of course, “apartheid.” Signed jointly with the co-president of Students for Justice in Palestine, Ms. Dann even slammed Vassar’s president and dean of the faculty for daring to oppose the boycott against the Jewish state.

http://www.meforum.org/3760/israeli-universities

A top-notch higher education system that promotes critical thinking is a must for an advanced economy and society. It is a prerequisite for advanced scientific research and technological expertise, both of which are crucial for economic growth. But what is a good university? What kind of education should it offer and at what cost?

“Will Dropouts Save America?,” asked Michael Ellsberg in a 2011 piece published by The New York Times, a paper that reveres universities and is considered the flagship publication of the American liberal Left.

Ellsberg said most of the high-tech entrepreneurs and the drivers of the Internet economy — from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — were college dropouts, having realized that they were wasting their time in class.

“American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees,” Ellsberg wrote. “But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs. … No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.”

Things are much worse in Israel. Universities help shape a radical view where entrepreneurship is frowned upon. The ethos they espouse is diametrically opposed to the Zionist vision that touted hard work as the linchpin of a merit-based society. Liberal arts programs focus on “redistributing wealth” rather than on pursuing a successful career, as if wealth just descends from the heavens and simply needs to be distributed “fairly” (whatever that means).

http://www.romirowsky.com/14451/jewish-big-tent More and more, we hear from faculty and students about the need to have an “open tent” or a “big tent,” of ideas and opinions specifically, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. While the nature of public discourse demands expressing a multitudes of ideas and opinions, the kind of openness espoused by this […]

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/the-israeli-left-pursues-the-treason-vote/

It has long been Israel’s answer to merging Orwell with Chelm, the mythical town of amusing stupidity in Jewish folklore. For years, the Israeli government has provided social security and other social welfare payments to convicted Arab terrorists and murderers. If an Arab otherwise entitled to unemployment insurance, welfare payments, pensions, or other “social” payments happens to engage in terrorism and happens to be imprisoned, he and his family continue to receive the welfare payments. If the terrorist dies, his dependents collect survivor benefits, like orphans in the US whose parent has passed away but was covered by social security. Terrorists disabled while planting bombs or attacking Jews could collect disability insurance stipends.

In 2012, an initiative was begun in the Knesset led by David Rotem (from the Yisrael Beitenu party), to cut the stipends and pensions paid to convicted murderers and terrorists by 50%. That is correct – the Knesset was only one-half working against welfare support for terrorists, by preserving only half of the stupidest idea in human history. Rotem wanted to eliminate the Paychecks for Terrorists Program altogether but there was too much opposition from the rest of the Knesset and the government’s pin-headed lawyers. Israel’s Ministry of Justice bureaucrats opposed any reduction in the welfare benefits for the mass murderers. It would be unjust, you see. Insensitive to the needs of the families of the terrorists. The Israeli Left denounced the initiative as “anti-democratic.”

This past week a related initiative in the Knesset sought to deny pensions to convicted terrorists freed from prison, such as in any of those mind-numbingly stupid “prisoner exchanges” in which Israel sets the mass murderers free to wander the avenues and byways. The bill does not really strip them of welfare payments altogether, it just says they cannot start collecting benefits until the full prison term to which they had been sentenced is finished. That way they cannot collect early if they are released before the end of the sentence.

What is amazing is that the Israeli Left voted against the bill. How dare anyone deny terrorists and their families the benefits of Israeli welfare payments! The Menshevik Israeli Labor Party voted against the bill, showing that its electoral strategy seems to be to challenge the ultra-leftist Meretz party over which party will attract the most votes from the treason constituency. But even within the Netanyahu coalition, there were dissidents who voted against the bill and in favor of the terrorists.

In particular, Amram Mitzna voted for the terrorists. Mitzna is now a member of Tzipi Livni’s party, which is part of the Netanyahu coalition. This is the same Mitzna who once was a contender for Prime Minister from Labor, and before that served as the Third-Worldish mayor of Haifa.

Saudi Arabia: The Middle East’s Real Apartheid State

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/saudi-arabia-the-middle-easts-real-apartheid-state/

There is a country in the Middle East where 10 percent of the population is denied equal rights because of their race, where black men are not allowed to hold many government positions, where black women are put on trial for witchcraft and where the custody of children is granted to the parent with the most “racially superior” bloodline.

This Apartheid State is so enormously powerful that it controls American foreign policy in the Middle East even as its princes and princesses bring their slaves to the United Kingdom and the United States.

That country is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from President Kennedy, who accomplished what the Ottoman Empire and the League of Nations had not been able to, but that hasn’t stopped its citizens from selling castrated slaves on Facebook or its princes from beating their black slaves to death in posh London hotels.

The Saudis had clung to their racist privileges longer than anyone else. When rumors reached Mecca that the Ottoman Empire might be considering the abolition of African slavery and equal rights for all, the chief of the Ulema of Mecca issued a fatwa declaring “the ban on slaves is contrary to Sharia (Islamic Law)… with such proposals the Turks have become infidels and it is lawful to make their children slaves.”

But Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth eventually made slavery economically unnecessary. Early on, African slaves worked for foreign oil companies which paid their masters, but they were a poor fit for the oil economy. The Kingdom no longer needed agricultural slaves and pearl drivers; it needed trained technicians from the West and international travel made it cheaper to import Asian workers for household labor and construction than to maintain its old trade in slaves.

The Saudis replaced the 450,000 slaves of the 1950s with 8.4 million guest workers. These workers are often treated like slaves, but they are not property and are therefore even more disposable than the slaves were. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but Nepal alone reported 265 worker deaths in Saudi Arabia in a single year.

Human Rights Watch has described conditions for foreign workers in Saudi Arabia as resembling slavery.

Jeremy Boreing sheds light on the new conservative media watchdog group — and the crucial gap it’s filling in the culture war.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/truth-revolt-enters-the-battle-on-the-glazov-gangx/

This week’s special editon of The Glazov Gang was joined by Jeremy Boreing, a writer and filmmaker who is Executive Director of Friends of Abe and the Managing Editor of TruthRevolt.org, the new conservative media watchdog group started by Ben Shapiro with David Horowitz at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Jeremy’s recent film, The Arroyo, is a modern western that follows one man’s struggle against the lawlessness on America’s southern border.

Jeremy sat down with Jamie Glazov to discuss TruthRevolt.org, his film, the best way conservatives can battle the Left’s destructive agenda, and much, much more.

Watch the two-part series below:

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/61342?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=c9a11893c7-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-c9a11893c7-291109133 But is it paranoia? Or is it a reasonable assumption that a President who feels free to ignore the Constitution might have plans that do not include peaceful elections or his departure from the office? An organization, Patriots for America, is calling for millions of Americans to descend on Washington, D.C on May 16 […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7463

n his first year in office, U.S. president Barack Obama was asked about his belief in the concept of “American exceptionalism.” The president’s response was a sharp break from the concept as understood by his predecessor in the Oval Office, George W. Bush, and many Americans. The more generally accepted concept was summarized by writer James Kirchik as the notion “that our history as the world’s oldest democracy, our immigrant founding and our devotion to liberty endow the United States with a unique, providential role in world affairs.”

The concept, in other words, supports an outlook on America’s role in world affairs that includes our active involvement in these matters, and argues that America has had a positive involvement in world affairs.

Obama’s response as the leader of his country, a country that for decades was the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, was unusual to say the least: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Comparing the United States role in the world to Britain’s, a former great power, now one with one-fifth the population of the United States, or to that of Greece, a country with less than one-thirtieth the population of the United States, and a collapsing economy to boot, suggested that for the new president, neither America nor its history were all that special.

http://cofda.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/texas-police-officers-are-members-of-mahmoudberg-jihadist-compound/
On Aug. 6, 2007, Paul Williams reported for Atlas Shrugs that an Islamic terrorist organization had established over 45 jihadists compounds in rural areas throughout America.
The organization, Jamaat ul-Fuqra, is headquartered in Pakistan. Its U.S. compounds provide paramilitary training to new recruits for the great jihad against the USA. Most of the recruits are African-Americans who converted to Islam while doing hard time in federal prison.
More recently, on Feb. 18, 2014, PJ Media reported that Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) documents have detailed a 22-site network of terrorist training villages sprawled across the United States. The FBI has been concerned about these facilities for about 12 years, but cannot act against them because the U.S. State Department has not yet declared their umbrella group, MOA [Muslims of the Americas]/Jamaat ul-Fuqra, to be a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Now, Pamela Geller of Freedom Outpost writes that a jihadist compound in Texas has placed members on local police forces, thereby ensuring that nothing is done to stop or even monitor the jihadists’ activities.

A version of this column will be published at http://yeoldecrabb.com/ on Monday, Feb. 24, 2014.

A world ablaze – but different fuels

A bane of modern military studies [let’s eschew “science”] is the concept of counter-insurgency – the idea that indigenous revolts around the world can be analyzed with “the scientific method” and a set of general principles if implemented could cure the problem. Common sense tells us that the essence of any dissidence/armed insurrection is its particularity, its basis in specific local conditions. They differ not only in geography but in the characteristics of individual societies. So, yes, the army should not steal the peasants’ chickens is a good maxim – but such bromides do not go far to tell you how to prevent civil war.

At the moment, we have one bitter internecine war in Syria, and three incipient revolts between two or more elements in Ukraine, Venezuela and Thailand. Other conflicts, even messier to define, are growing in the Central African Republic and Nigeria.

The question, of course, is whether there anything that connects all these conflicts? And, if so, what if anything can be done to lessen tension and conflict?

Ukraine

The ambivalence between Ukraine and Russia is as old as the two peoples. In fact, it was from centers in what is now Ukraine that Christianity spread to the Great Russians and where they even got their name. More recently, Ukrainians have suffered disproportionately in the Soviet Union – a bitter irony, often at the hands of ethnic Ukrainian members of the Communist hierarchy. Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s followed on to the horrors of those of World War I when the engineer Herbert Hoover first emerged on the world scene. But a flame of Ukrainian identity survived, expressing itself at the height of Soviet repression in such small protests as citizens of Ukraine’s western metropolis, the old Hapsburg city of Lviv [Lvov, Lemberg] unofficially using “our time” [Central European] rather than Moscow’s time zone to express their identification with the West..