RUTHFULLY YOURS

The current American election campaign is being touted as the most fraught in recent history. After arduous internal battles, the Republican and Democratic parties have finally nominated their candidates for the presidency of the United States — presenting the public with a choice between two unpopular and widely vilified candidates.

This turn of events is disheartening, as it is causing many voters to claim they will shun the ballot box in November. Far more disturbing, however, is the societal genie it has let out of the bottle — open expressions of Jew-hatred across the political spectrum. Thanks to social media, it is neither necessary nor possible to sugarcoat or qualify the nature of the comments on Facebook and Twitter. Nor can the words of angry mobs defending their candidate of choice by attacking their opponents be interpreted as political criticism.

The cat is out of the bag, and its name is anti-Semitism.

First came the white supremacists sending Donald Trump’s critics — whether Jewish or only perceived as such — to the gas chambers and bemoaning the fact that “Hitler didn’t finish off the job.” And now there are the Black Lives Matter and Students for Justice in Palestine gangs, banishing “Zionist pigs” from the Middle East and American universities. Oh, and burning the Israeli flag outside the Democratic National Convention — to protest Hillary Clinton’s victory over contender Bernie Sanders, a Jew. The irony would be sweet if it weren’t so tragic.

Meanwhile, as was revealed by the latest report released by the AMCHA Initiative — a watchdog organization that monitors anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses — Jewish students are the group most targeted for systematic attack. According to the report, which bases its findings on the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, this phenomenon has sharply increased since last year alone. And the top institutions of higher learning at which Jews feel least safe are Columbia, Vassar and the University of Chicago — illustrious schools filled with Jewish students, academics, alumni and donors.

As the late historian Robert Wistrich told me in an interview nearly a decade ago, “On the substantive issue of when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic, I think that there are good criteria. Every rational person understands the difference between criticism and defamation. If you talk about an individual in a defamatory way, you’re going to the heart of his character, his essence. The same is true of countries.”

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/07/28/nonie-darwish-moment-facebook-punishes-me-for-violating-sharia/

Nonie discusses Facebook Punishes Me For Violating Sharia,sharing how she was banned for committing a thought crime about Islam.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Nonie discuss: Why is Obama Defending Islam at Any Cost?, revealing the true reason the Radical-in-Chief positions Muslims as victims in every speech on terror:

For almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today.

Earth’s climate probably is the most complicated non-living system one can study, because it naturally integrates astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, hydrology, oceanography, and cryology — and also includes human behavior by both responding to and affecting human activities. Current concerns over climate change have further pushed climate science to the forefront of scientific inquiry.

What should we be teaching college students?

At the very least, a student should be able to identify and describe the basic processes that cause Earth’s climate to vary from poles to everestequator, from coasts to the center of continents, from the Dead Sea or Death Valley depression to the top of Mount Everest or Denali. A still more literate student would understand how the oceans, biosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere – driven by energy from the sun – all work in constantly changing combinations to produce our very complicated climate.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s definition of climate science literacy raises the question of whether climatology is even a science. It defines climate science literacy as “an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society.”

How can students understand and put into perspective their influence on the Earth’s climate if they don’t understand the myriad of processes that affect our climate? If they don’t understand the complexity of climate itself? If they are told only human aspects matter? And if they don’t understand these processes, how can they possibly comprehend how climate influences them and society in general?

Worse still, many of our colleges are working against scientific literacy for students.

‘GMOs” get a lot of attention. Devotees of organic and “natural” food want to avoid them, on principle. Anti-technology activists prattle about their imaginary dangers. Pandering to special interests, confused members of Congress have been trying to find a way to require labels on them, which they finally accomplished with legislation last week. But that effort, like others, became fatally tangled up in terminology.

The problem is that there’s no such thing as a GMO, except in the fevered imagination of bureaucrats, legislators, and activists. The bipartisan “compromise” on GMO labeling passed last week includes a weird, unscientific, politically motivated hodge-podge of products that makes absolutely no sense. For example, corn or soybeans modified with recombinant-DNA (“gene-splicing”) techniques would need to be labeled, while oils from them would not.

That’s not the only flaw. Genetic engineering is a seamless continuum of techniques that have been used over millennia, including (among others) hybridization, mutagenesis, wide-cross hybridization (movement of genes across “natural breeding barriers”), recombinant DNA, and now gene-editing. But, inexplicably, the new legislation covers labeling only if a food “contains genetic material that has been modified through in vitro recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) techniques” and “for which the modification could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or found in nature.” Older techniques and also anything modified with the newest gene-editing techniques would be exempt.

This is the proverbial legislative sausage-making at its worst.

The new law does accomplish one important thing — the preemption of individual states’ ability to impose other labeling requirements — which was the primary motivation for legislation in the first place. But that could easily have been accomplished without instituting mandatory labeling.

This confusion about terminology is not new. Three decades ago, on January 13, 1987, when I was special assistant to Food and Drug Administration head Frank Young, he and I co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Biotechnology: A ‘Scientific’ Term in Name Only,” that began this way:

In the three days since Israel passed a law mandating new reporting requirements for NGOs that are primarily funded by foreign governments, there’s one question I have yet to hear any of its critics answer. If, as they stridently claim, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with NGOs getting most of their funding from a foreign government, then why would simply being required to state this fact in all their publications exercise a “chilling effect” (the U.S. State Department) or “stigmatize” them (the New Israel Fund) or result in “constraining their activities” (the European Union)?

The obvious answer is that the critics know perfectly well it isn’t alright: An organization that gets most of its funding from a foreign government isn’t a “nongovernmental” organization at all, but an instrument of that government’s foreign policy. In fact, with regard to the EU, that’s explicit in itsfunding guidelines: For an Israeli organization that conducts activities in the territories to be eligible for EU funding, it must comply with EU foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, incidentally, also explains why 25 of the 27 organizations affected by the law are left-wing: The far-left is the only part of Israel’s political spectrum that shares Europe’s opinions on the conflict, and hence, that Europe is willing to fund.

Yet if an organization is an instrument of a foreign country’s foreign policy, it’s very hard to argue that it’s an objective “human rights organization,” as the organizations in question bill themselves. Rather, it’s an overtly political organization that seeks to pressure Israel into adopting the foreign government’s preferred policies. And making this known definitely could be “stigmatizing,” in the sense that Israelis might be less willing to trust an organization’s assertions once they realize it has a not-so-hidden policy agenda that could be influencing its reports.

That, however, is precisely why Israelis have a need and a right to know where these organizations’ funding is coming from–especially given this funding’s sheer scale. And it’s also why there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about the law, as explained in depth by legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich here.

Who is supplying Mohamed Dahlan with money? The United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is their cash that has enabled Palestinians in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to purchase weapons and buy loyalty for Dahlan in preparation for the post-Abbas era — especially disgruntled young Fatah activists in the West Bank who feel that Abbas and the PA leadership have turned their backs on them.

This power struggle will not end with the departure of Mahmoud Abbas. The next Palestinian president will surely be one of Abbas’s current loyalists. This in itself will drive Dahlan and his ilk to continue railing against the old guard.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas faces a real threat; its name is Mohamed Dahlan.

Abbas has become obsessed with Dahlan, according to insiders. The PA president, they report, spends hours each day discussing ways to deal with the man and his supporters. And, it is rumored, Abbas’s nights are not much better.

Backed by at least three Arab countries, Dahlan, a former Palestinian security commander from the Gaza Strip, seems to have unofficially joined the battle for succession in the PA.

The 54-year-old Dahlan, young enough to be Abbas’s son, continues to deny any ambition to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PA. Yet Dahlan’s continued efforts to establish bases of power in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip belie his claims.

In Pumpkin Flowers, Matti Friedman provides a brief, finely written account of an army outpost in Israel’s security zone in southern Lebanon in the 1990s and the men who served there. ‘Pumpkin’ was the outpost’s name, while ‘flowers’ was the Israeli army’s code word for wounded soldiers. The term, writes Friedman, reflects “a floral preoccupation in our military intended to bestow beauty on ugliness and to allow soldiers distance from the things they might have to describe.” The Pumpkin itself was far from poetic, a “rectangle of earthen embankments the size of a basketball court” where there was “nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime.”

Born and raised in Toronto, Friedman had only been in Israel a year and a half when, at the age of 19, he was stationed on that hill. While he tells a personal story, the parts of the book where he describes the endless waiting, the bursts of combat, and the yearning for home contain a universal message that applies to every soldier in every war on every battlefield. Friedman himself only enters the book about halfway through. In order to give a fuller account of life on the Pumpkin, he starts with the story of Avi, one of the soldiers he would eventually replace. Although Friedman did not know Avi, he was given access to his letters and discovered that the soldier wrote almost as well as he did.

In February 1997, only a month away from discharge, Avi died in a mid-air collision between two IDF helicopters ferrying troops to their outposts on the security zone. All 73 aboard the two helicopters were killed. Although Hezbollah would take credit for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, it was this accident, Friedman says, that shifted Israeli attitudes against the occupation. People began to believe the security zone was killing more people than it was saving—that instead of being a solution to a problem, it was itself the problem.

Friedman, who went up to the Pumpkin in 1998, offers not a hint of braggadocio about his own experiences, although it is clear he acquitted himself well under fire. He writes that a simple message hung from the wall of every outpost: “The Mission: Protecting the Northern Communities.” By the time Friedman left, he admits he no longer believed the message. “[B]y this time, like many Israelis I had replaced one simple idea —‘the Mission: Protecting the Northern Communities’—with another, that ceding the security zone to our enemies would placate them.” Israel pulled out of Lebanon only a few months after Matti completed his service on May 24, 2000.

Confronting antisemitism and Israel hatred http://edgar1981.blogspot.com/

While today Israel enjoys wide support on both sides of the American political aisle, this was not always the case. Late in 1956 the eminent political theorist Leo Strauss took the unusual step of commenting on contemporary political affairs to come to Israel’s defense. Strauss was moved to write by attacks against the nascent Jewish state in the conservative National Review. In this letter to Willmoore Kendall, a professor of political philosophy, founding editor of National Review, and an admirer of Strauss, Strauss reflects on the Jewish state based on his observations as a visiting professor at Hebrew University. Israel is a modern Western country with a spirit nurtured by the Hebrew Bible, he explains. Claims that the state is racist are unfounded. Strauss reminds his readers that political Zionism aims to reconnect the Jewish people with their heritage and restore the inner freedom and dignity that was lost in the ambiguous results of European emancipation.

The original letter is reproduced in full below. It was later edited and republished as an official Letter to the Editor in the January 5, 1957 issue of National Review.

November 19, 1956
Professor Wilmoore Kendall
Department of Political Science
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Professor Kendall:

For some time I have been receiving The National Review. You will not be surprised to hear that I agree with many articles appearing in the journal, especially your own. There is, however, one feature of the journal which I completely fail to comprehend. It is incomprehensible to me that the authors who touch on that subject are so unqualifiedly opposed to the State of Israel. No reasons why that stand is taken are given; mere antipathies are voiced. For I cannot call reasons such arguments as are based on gross factual error, or on complete non-comprehension of the things which matter. I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations. I have been teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the whole academic year of 1954-1955, and what I am going to say is based exclusively on what I have seen with my own eyes.

The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that “everything good is heritage.” I know of no country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.

But the country is poor, lacks oil and many other things which fetch much money; the venture on which the country rests may well appear to be quixotic; the University and the Government buildings are within easy range of Jordanian guns; the possibility of disastrous defeat or failure is obvious and always close. A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

I hear the argument that the country is run by labor unions. I believe that it is a gross exaggeration to say that the country is run by labor unions. But even if it were true, I would say that a conservative, I take it, is a man who knows that the same arrangement may have very different meanings in different circumstances. The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all non-doctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers. They came from Russia, the country of Nicolai the Second and Rasputin; hence they could not have had any experience of constitutional life and of the true liberalism which is only the reverse side of conservatism; it is all the more admirable that they founded a constitutional democracy adorned by an exemplary judiciary.

Anti-Netanyahu electioneering by the Obama gang confirmed.

A Senate report — in spite of itself — tells all.

It turns out that back in 2013 the State Department donated $350,000 to an NGO called OneVoice. The supposed aim was to enable OneVoice’s Israeli and Palestinian branches “to support peace negotiations.”

Since that was not a partisan political aim, the State Department’s funding of the NGO was seemingly kosher. But things — as detailed in a report released Tuesday by a bipartisan Senate subcommittee — got tricky.

The State Department authorized OneVoice to use the grant for a 14-month period ending in November 2014. OneVoice, as noted by the Times of Israel, used the funds to create an “organizational infrastructure” — and then, when the 14 months expired, handed over that organizational infrastructure to another Israeli group, known as V15, that was partisan with a vengeance.

The V in V15 stands for victory. It so happened that, in December 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the Knesset to dissolve itself, which it did, and new elections were held in March 2015. V15’s aim was, pure and simple, to defeat Netanyahu and replace him with a center-left candidate; their slogan was “Anyone but Bibi.”

As the report by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs describes it:

In service of V15, OneVoice deployed its social media platform, which more than doubled during the State Department grant period; used its database of voter contact information, including email addresses… and enlisted its network of trained activists, many of whom were recruited or trained under the grant, to support and recruit for V15.