RUTHFULLY YOURS

The argument that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the world took another blow this month when—for the first time in the history of the United Nations and of Israel—the Israeli ambassador was elected to head one of the U.N.’s permanent committees.

The General Assembly’s Legal Committee, also called the “Sixth Committee,” covers the United Nations’s international law operations, which include matters related to terrorism and to the Geneva Conventions.

There was a tough diplomatic fight over this, so it is worth handing out kudos.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, addresses a Security Council meeting on the Middle East on January 26. Elliott Abrams writes that it has been reported in the Arab press, though impossible to prove because there was a secret ballot, that several Arab countries voted for the Israeli ambassador to head one of the U.N.’s permanent committees. Mike Segar/reuters

First, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, who was mocked by many on the Israeli left and in the Israeli media (and yes, there is a large overlap) when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed him, showed that he is a very competent diplomat.

He was a member of the Knesset and a minister when appointed but had no diplomatic experience. He has obviously learned the job, and fast.

Second, kudos to the United States Mission to the U.N., which fought very hard to get votes for Israel.

A major new novel features a Jewish activist organizing protests against the Roosevelt administration’s abandonment of European Jewry. A recent off-Broadway play (being made into a movie by an Academy Award-winning actor and director) depicted Jewish activists and leaders clashing over Holocaust rescue.

With his appearance in literature, theater, and film, the once-controversial Peter Bergson is finally entering the popular culture. And the U.S. Jewish community at long last seems to be coming to grips with one of the most painful chapters in its history.

Seventy-five years ago this summer, Bergson (real name: Hillel Kook) and a handful of colleagues launched what would become perhaps the most dramatic political action campaign in American Jewish history.

To advance their demands to rescue Europe’s Jews and create a Jewish state in Palestine, these activists placed hundreds of full-page ads in newspapers, lobbied in Congress, and organized a march by 400 rabbis to the White House. Such tactics were radical steps for Jews in the 1940s. Many immigrants and children of immigrants, still nervous about their place in American society, were uneasy about broadcasting Jewish concerns in the pages of the major newspapers.

Bergson liked to call himself a “nuisance diplomat,” and his group’s activities did prove to be quite a nuisance to the Roosevelt administration, which insisted the rescue of European Jews was impossible. The Bergsonites mobilized enough congressional and public pressure on President Roosevelt to help force him to create a U.S. government agency, the War Refugee Board, in early 1944. During the final fifteen months of World War II, the board played a central role in rescuing some 200,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Originally published under the title “Why Is A San Francisco University Secretly Partnering With An Arab College That Promotes Jihad?”

SFSU President Leslie Wong has come under criticism for failing to take sufficient action against anti-Israel hate groups on campus.

San Francisco State University (SFSU), which has a well-deserved reputation as a breeding ground for anti-Israel radicalism, became national news in April. That’s when campus police stood by as a hate-Israel group, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), shouted down and disrupted a lecture by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, prompting much criticism of SFSU’s president, Leslie Wong.

But there’s worse. As revealed by an investigation into SFSU by Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, SFSU has partnered with a Palestinian university that’s a hotbed of radicalization.

What our investigation turned up:

SFSU signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with An-Najah University of Hebron in 2014 at the behest of Rabab Abdulhadi, director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Najah states on its website that the MOU was signed on September 10, 2014 and Abdulhadi sang its praises at an April 2015 reception:

The memorandum of understanding that President Wong signed with An-Najah National University in Palestine … is the first time that we have any agreement with any university in the Arab or Muslim world and we are very excited about that.

Wong also trumpeted the MOU at the 2015 reception, boasting of his role in helping bring it to fruition:

When I returned from Palestine two years ago, I said I want to be one of the first major universities to sign an agreement with An-Najah or any of the other Palestinian universities, or any of the universities in the Arab world.

An elementary school in New Jersey allegedly called the police on a third grader for talking about brownies — yes, as in the baked good — over concerns that the word “brownies” may have been a racial slur.

According to the student’s mother, her nine-year-old son was participating in a conversation about the bakery treat during his end-of-the-year class party at William P. Tatem Elementary School on June 16 when another student remarked that his comment was racist. Rather than explain to the accusing student that the name of the baked good is a generally accepted term and not racially charged whatsoever, the school actually called the police.

Yes — the police.

“He was intimidated, obviously,” the mother, Stacy dos Santos, said, according to Philly.com.

“There was a police officer with a gun in the holster talking to my son, saying, ‘Tell me what you said,’” she continued. “He didn’t have anybody on his side.”

According to Philly.com, the police department also contacted the boy’s father, and the incident was referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency — because after all, hearing a nine-year-old talking about snacks definitely makes you wonder how he could possibly be safe living in a home with people who raised him to behave that way.

According to dos Santos, her son spent his last day of third grade at home because of the incident, and he feels so “traumatized” over it that they’re hoping to send him to a different public school in the fall.

Unfortunately, another school in the same district may just be more of the same. After all, according to both school officials and police, they were told during a May 25 meeting with representatives from the county prosecutor’s office that every little thing that could maybe potentially be considered criminal – even things that Police Chief Kevin Carey called “as minor as a simple name-calling incident” — should be reported to the cops. What’s more, Carey also said that “just about every incident” should be reported to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. According to Philly.com, Superintendent Scott Oswald estimated that the cops may have been called to as many as five incidents per day in the district of 1,875 students over the last month.

Not surprisingly, Philly.com reports that parents are not big fans of the policy — and that they have written letters and taken to social media to express this. Hopefully, it can make a difference. After all, what good can come from involving law enforcement anytime some kid talks about snacks is really not clear — but the potential for harm is.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/actress-helen-mirren-rejects-efforts-to-boycott-israel/Helen Mirren rejects efforts to boycott Israel | The Times of Israel

Oscar-winning actress Helen Mirren says she is a “believer” in Israel and rejects efforts to boycott it.

Mirren showered Israeli artists with praise Wednesday and said she opposed efforts by pro-Palestinian groups to boycott them.

Mirren is in Israel to host the Genesis Prize, an award known as “the Jewish Nobel.” The $1 million prize is being awarded to Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman for his accomplishments as a musician, teacher and advocate for the disabled.

Mirren, who first visited as a volunteer in the 1960s, says she has a strong connection to Israel.

Mirren is one of the few actors to have won the so-called Triple Crown — an Oscar, Tony and Emmy. She received her Academy Award for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the 2006 film “The Queen.”

The intellect of so many in Israel’s governments have led them along the dead end path of the peace process, forcing them to taste the bitter fruits of appeasement.

Sovereignty refers to the defined right of nations, the ‘ownership’ of their territories and national interests.

A nation is referred to as ‘sovereign’ in terms of its independent identity and rights. Sovereign rights are exercised within national territories.

A nation has the legal right to insist on its sovereign status and the right to protect its interests. As the Governor of Texas stated recently on the Sean Hannity program, “Sovereignty is a key component of a Nation.

The British people groaning under the increasingly onerous and tyrannical power of the European Union finally had had enough and in a national referendum voted to leave the EU and regain their borders and national sovereignty. Other nations, such as Holland, Hungary, Poland and even France, may in time follow Britain’s lead.

But will Israel assert its rights in its own sovereign, ancestral and biblical lands from the River to the Sea?

Will its leadership have the courage to withstand the burdensome and illegitimate pressures that the Obama regime, the United Nations and the European Union place upon it to abandon its heartland and give it away to the Jew hating Muslim barbarians who call themselves Palestinians?

For 49 long years, since the liberation of east Jerusalem and biblical Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation – territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the ‘West Bank’ – the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not fully annexed. Instead, too much has been sinfully abandoned.

Israel’s foolish failure to declare again and again its historical and ancestral patrimony in its own biblical, physical and spiritual homeland has allowed a hostile world to thus assume that Israel itself does not believe it has legal or indigenous sovereignty in its own territory or in its eternal capital, Jerusalem.

It is a sure sign of warmist desperation in the wake of the abject failure of global warming climate models to accurately predict the future. Michael Mann, one of the leading touts of warmism, yesterday told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee:

“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.

“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle….”

Please allow me to translate: The best tool we have to scare people into supporting carbon taxes and regulations that would empower the ruling elites to control every aspect of wealth generation is propaganda pretending that bad weather, like hurricanes and floods are caused by an increase in carbon dioxide, and essential atmospheric ingredient that promotes higher crop yields necessary to feed the earth’s burgeoning population. Most people do not realize that catastrophic weather events have been apart of human history forever, so we can fool them into believing that we can prevent them in the future by limiting the combustion of hydrocarbons.

Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times notes:

His comment drew hoots from climate skeptics, including the website Greenie Watch, which posted his comment under the headline, “‘Scientist’ Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming.”

“Unsurprising. The statistics are pretty doleful for Warmism,” the site said in a Monday post. (snip)

Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.

In his June 14 address to the nation, President Obama attributed Omar Mateen’s attack on patrons of Orlando, Fla.’s, Pulse nightclub to “homegrown extremism,” saying “we currently do not have any information to indicate that a foreign terrorist group directed the attack.”

While Obama acknowledged that the Islamic State has called for attacks around the world against “innocent civilians,” he suggested these calls were incidental, emphasizing that Mateen was a “lone actor” and “an angry, disturbed, unstable young man” susceptible to being radicalized “over the Internet.”

It is a terrible thing to misunderstand one’s enemy so deeply. The doctrine of jihad invoked by terrorist groups is an institution with a long history, grounded in legal precedent going back to the time of Muhammad.

Militants who invoke the doctrine of jihad follow principles influenced by Islamic law. The point to be grasped is that the doctrinal basis of jihad generates conditions that can incite “bottom up” terrorism, which does not need to be directed by jihadi organizations.

When the Ottoman Caliphate entered World War I in 1914, it issued an official fatwa calling upon Muslims everywhere to rise up and fight the “infidels.” In 1915, a more detailed ruling was issued, entitled “A Universal Proclamation to All the People of Islam.”

Young people face many worries and uncertainties as they grow toward adulthood, so it really is immensely unfair that those with agendas work so hard to add to their burdens. Physicist John Reid has set out to relieve one of those fostered anxieties with A Young Persons Guide to the Green House Effect. A sample:
Climate change is a hot topic. Despite the experts telling us that `the science is settled’ it just does not appear to be the case.
Because the environment scare and the nuclear war scare were fresh in people’s minds they decided that the two things were connected and that rising CO2 must be causing the temperature to go up. They started calling CO2 a ‘pollutant’ like DDT and radioactive fallout. The increase in CO2 is supposed to be due to humans burning coal and oil in industry, but there are other explanations for it.

Many scientists believe there has been an hysterical over-reaction to these observations and that, apart from the fact that both CO2 and temperature have both been increasing recently, there is really no evidence to connect the two things. It is just a delayed reaction to the ‘Future Shock’ of the scary 1950s.
When CO2 and water vapour in the atmosphere increased at the end of the last Ice Age, which had lasted for more than 80,000 years, it made the earth warm again . It made the big ice caps melt and raised the level of the ocean. That happened 11,000 years ago and created a boom time for Homo Sapiens (us). Apart from a few random fluctuations, our climate has been warm and stable ever since.

After the Orlando attack, Obama ranted that it did not matter what we called Islamic terrorism. “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIS less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.”

The “Islamic terrorists by any other name would smell as sweet” argument is the last resort of the losing side. It dismisses the whole issue as a matter of semantics with no bearing on the real world.

And that’s a neat rhetorical trick for the political side that relentlessly refuses to acknowledge reality.

One of the more shocking moments in Jeffrey Goldberg’s extended Atlantic write-up of Obama’s foreign policy came with his conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia. Obama, who has refused to recognize any connection between Islamic theology and violence, and made the hijab into a civil rights issue, told the Australian leader how he had seen Indonesia turn to “fundamentalist” Islam and noted, unfavorably, the large numbers of women now wearing hijabs as a sign of that fundamentalism.

Obama blamed the Saudis for pushing Wahhabism through imams and madrassas into Indonesia.

It wasn’t an original critique, but also not one that you hear much in Obama’s circles. When Obama reportedly tells world leaders that there will be “no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity” and undergoes reforms the way that Christianity did, it’s like suddenly having Khrushchev explain why Communism can’t work and will end up falling apart.