RUTHFULLY YOURS

Early in Saleem Haddad’s “Guapa” (Other Press, 358 pages, $16.95), the novel’s narrator, Rasa, accompanies an American journalist to an interview with an opposition leader, acting as her interpreter. The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern nation that could stand in for any of the countries convulsed during the Arab Spring. Rasa has taken part in the protests, but when he meets the opposition leader, a religious populist who wants to usher in a strict Islamic state, he’s flooded with doubts. For as well as being American-educated and reform-minded, Rasa is gay. “I joined the protests so that I would no longer have to wear a mask. What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?”

“Guapa”—the title refers to a clandestine gay bar Rasa frequents—is about the furtive, outcast status of gay men in the Arab world. Mr. Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and lives in London, threads the book’s conflicts through both political and personal spheres. Just as Rasa is squeezed between Islamism and authoritarianism, his place in the household is thrown into doubt when his grandmother catches him sharing a bed with his lover. His fear of government reprisal is matched by his ingrained horror of violating the codes of eib, a word that loosely translates to “shame” and refers to Arabic societies’ strict rules of social conduct that deem homosexuality a perversion.

“Infidels” (Seven Stories, 143 pages, $23.95), the third of his books to be translated into English, centers on Jallal, the teenaged son of a Moroccan prostitute whose own sexual initiation comes at the hands of men in bathhouses. This world is described in a succession of raw, polemical monologues spoken by Jallal and his relatives (all in a rough-and-ready translation from French by Alison Strayer). Jallal’s grandmother, who initiated the family trade, rages at the hypocrisy of being “damned, and so very much in demand.” The angriest voice is the boy’s: “For the tens of thousands of people around us, we deserve our pariah status, our grim fate, because we do nothing to change it, break out of it. Maman, one day you’ll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure.”

An outsider’s fury fuels Jallal’s coming of age, which takes him in exile to Egypt and then Belgium. There he meets and falls for Mahmoud, another disenchanted expat who introduces him to a mystical form of Islam based on ecstatic love and liberation. The planned endpoint of their febrile religious conversion? A suicide bombing in Casablanca.

Mr. Taïa unblinkingly recounts this folie à deux as it moves toward a “sublime explosion” designed “to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act.” Jallal’s testimony boils with resentment, self-loathing, vindictiveness and a flailing desire for personal salvation. “I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change,” he says, “for my heart to open and let in the light.” In view of the deadly attack in Orlando, Mr. Taïa’s unnerving portrait of self-radicalization feels all the more relevant.

Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States.

Consider our eyes. Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant? This is often a matter of life and death. How do eyes do their job?

Eyes twitch, jerk, and flick rapidly from detail to detail in order to identify an object. There are no built-in sequences, no shortcuts. The eyes must twitch – perhaps dozens of times – until a positive identification is made. The technical term for these twitches is a saccade (which rhymes with façade).

Many such eye movements occur every time you see a car, painting, building, celebrity, insect, etc. Your eyes flick top-to-bottom, side-to-side, point-to-point, finding more and more details until the brain is certain.

Scientists can track these eye movements. It’s remarkable how much activity is required to identify a single face – that is, to be sure it’s not a similar face. The eye might go to the ears, then nose, then lips, back up to the hairline, and around again. There might be 10, 20, or 30 saccades before you confidently decide, “This is Mary in accounting.”

When the first symbol languages were introduced, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, nothing changed. A picture of a bird is the same as a real bird, from the point of view of the eyes making sense of it. Designs such as Chinese ideograms are again the same thing. Hieroglyphics were objects just like birds and flowers.

On June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a four-to-three decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. The majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, gave the victory in the case to the University of Texas. The decision allows the university to continue to grant strong preference in admissions to minority students based on their race.

The National Association of Scholars deeply regrets the Court’s final decision in this case, which has endured more than eight years of litigation. Along with many others, we had hoped the Court would at last hold the University of Texas to the standard of “strict scrutiny” for its use of racial classifications. Instead, Justice Kennedy’s opinion cobbles together rationalizations, excuses, averted glances, circumventions, and just-so stories that add up to permitting the University of Texas to persist in racial discrimination among applicants.

Racial Favoritism

Kennedy’s twenty-page opinion, also signed by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, ends the case in which Abigail Fisher claimed that she was unjustly refused admission to the University. Her complaint centered on the University’s practice of using racial preferences among its criteria for selecting students among those who were not automatically admitted under Texas’s so-called “Top Ten Percent Plan.” That plan grants students graduating in the top ten percent of each Texas high school class automatic admission to the state’s public universities. Fisher, who is white, finished high school just outside the top ten percent of her class. She then applied for regular admission. The University, however, used a system of racial favoritism to select among students in this category.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now certified that this system of favoritism passes muster with the Court’s previous rulings on when race can and cannot be used in distributing public benefits. The Court’s “strict scrutiny” rule generally restricts the use of racial classifications to cases where there is a “compelling public interest” and where no less intrusive measure exists to achieve that interest.

The Make-Believe University

But there is no compelling public interest for the use of racial classifications or racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas. And other means of increasing the numbers of black and Hispanic enrollees are easily at hand. Because these facts are plain, Justice Kennedy and his majority colleagues enrolled themselves in a make-believe university where:

The university employs racial preferences not for the sake of increasing black and Hispanic enrollment but to obtain “the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity.”
The university does not employ numerical quotas, but seeks to maximize “diversity.”
The university does not have “elusory or amorphous” goals in its racial preference policy, but has “articulated concrete and precise goals,” these being:
Ending stereotypes
Promoting “cross-racial understanding”
Preparing students for “an increasingly diverse workforce and society”
Cultivating leaders with “legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry”
The university adopted so-called “holistic review” not to evade accountability for using race in admissions but because none of the “alternatives was a workable means of attaining the University’s educational goals.”

Outside the make-believe of the Supreme Court’s sorry record of jurisprudence on race in college admissions, these claims are sheer nonsense. The University of Texas uses race in college admissions simply for the advantages that racial politics provides.

For nearly a decade, incidents of antisemitism have been on the rise in the University of California system and numerous other colleges in the Golden State. Some say that California colleges make more headlines about incidents of antisemitism than for academic or athletic achievements. The most recent academic year was no exception.

According to the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative, 69 antisemitic incidents occurred on 20 different California campuses during the recent academic year. UC Berkley led the way with eight instances, followed by UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz with seven each.

“When it comes to antisemitism, California schools continue to top the list, both in number and severity. To those of us closely monitoring the rise of campus antisemitism over the past few years, this comes as no surprise since many California schools were ground zero for the campus anti-Zionism movement,” explained AMCHA Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin. “Examination after examination demonstrate a direct connection between anti-Zionist activities on campus and acts of anti-Jewish hostility. The problem is not going away. In fact, it’s picking up steam and must be addressed immediately.”

AMCHA tracks all reported incidents of antisemitism on college campuses throughout the US. To be classified as antisemitic, an incident must meet the definition established by the US State Department.

In 2015, 464 antisemitic incidents on campus were reported across the country. The first half of 2016 has seen 254 occurrences. At the current pace, 2016 will see an increase of nearly 10 percent in antisemitism on college campuses nationwide.

A 2015 study performed by AMCHA of antisemitic activity on campuses across the country revealed that four of the five most active anti-Jewish campuses are part of the UC system. The same study showed that “99 percent of schools with one or more active anti-Zionist groups had one or more incidents of anti-Semitic activity, whereas only 16 percent of schools with no active anti-Zionist student group had experienced anti-Semitic activity.”

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Brigitte Gabriel Moment with Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America.

Brigitte discusses What is Really Driving the Terrorists, unveiling what really inspired Omar Mateen — and why Obama and the media don’t want you to know it.

Don’t miss it!

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

This week, MK Michael Oren stood up to his boss in the Kulanu party, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, to the political Left, including hundreds of retired security brass, and to the IDF General Staff. The former ambassador to Washington urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to sign the multi-year security assistance deal that US President Barack Obama demands Israel accept.

The problem isn’t the money. By all accounts, Obama’s multi-year military assistance package is generous.

The problem is that in exchange for the expanded military aid, Obama is demanding that Israel surrender its diplomatic and military independence to the White House.

For more than 40 years, every US administration – including the Obama administration – that has sought to harm Israel in any way has hit up against an unmovable obstacle. Whether the White House wanted to enable the UN Security Council to pass an anti-Israel resolution, place an embargo on military exports or bureaucratically slow them down to force Israel to stand down during wartime; whether the White House wanted block expanded trade deals, crowd out Israel’s military industries, or sell game changing weapons systems to Israel’s enemies, the US Congress has always stopped it in its tracks.

Israel-haters in the US speak endlessly about the supposedly all powerful and malign “Israel lobby,” which controls US foreign affairs. But the simple truth is that it wouldn’t matter all that much if AIPAC were to shut down tomorrow. Even without AIPAC, Israel would enjoy the support of Congress.

It would continue to enjoy that support because the vast majority of Americans support Israel and expect their representatives in Congress to support Israel.

In other words, the “Israel lobby” is none other than the American people.

As Oren warned, Obama’s military assistance package would disenfranchise the American public when it comes to US policy toward Israel. The agreement bars Israel from asking that Congress augment the assistance that Obama has offered and bars Congress from acting. So if a future administration chooses to breach the agreement, or to suspend it, or if conditions change and Israel requires other assistance, Congress would be barred from stepping into the breach.

Then there is the assistance agreement’s assault on Israel’s military independence.

Apparently truth is not a valued commodity in Washington. By now, most people have read the profile of Ben Rhodes in the New York Times by David Samuels in which Mr. Rhodes, who is described as Obama’s “foreign policy guru” created an echo chamber—a fictitious reality of under-educated, newly minted journalists — to make the Islamic Republic of Iran appear much more benign than it actually is in order to sell the Iranian nuclear agreement to a skeptical American Congress and public.

I had expected heads to roll over this. Yet, not a single person has been fired. In fact, those who are most culpable have only been promoted up the ladder in the Obama administration where total fictions are peddled as truths, and where empty bromides are offered about how they would like ISIS and other radical Islamist terrorists to be treated.

For example, yesterday, while visiting grieving families of the 49 loved ones who were murdered by Omar Mateen in Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch prescribed how we should respond to this tragedy. “Our most effective weapon is compassion, unity and love … We need to find our common humanity,” remarked the Attorney General.

Love? Tell that to someone whose son’s head has been savagely cut off by ISIS or whose daughter has been kidnapped and raped and then sold into slavery.

There is currently a rigid dogma among some inside the beltway now, not to acknowledge that ISIS hates Yazidis, Christians, Shiites-or any Muslim who does not practice their precise brand of Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians and (of course) Jews, as well as gays.

Recently, members of my staff were in a Democratic congressional office, and the staffer refused to acknowledge that simple fact. He insisted that this was simply an LGBT issue. (Period. End of story.)

This administration has substituted wishful thinking for realistic sound policy, and it has become contagious. And one of the cornerstones of this wishful thinking is that Islam, in all its many varieties, is a religion of peace.

And when the facts do not fit their paradigm, then just edit out the facts. This is what occurred last Sunday, June 19th on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when the Attorney General had announced that they were to “release the partial transcripts of the killer’s calls with law enforcement” that night when Omar Mateen killed 49 people on Saturday, June 11th.

Each generation looks back at the generation behind it and weeps. Surely these children will be the death of our society, they think. Well, people looking at the current crop of American college students — and the administrators who enable them — while thinking such things may very well be right.

On top of the myriad other nonsense on college campuses, it now seems that some professors are being investigated for admitting that the Official Line ™ isn’t the only opinion out there:

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

In at least one of the cases, a transgendered student was offended merely because the professor acknowledged the opinion that some believe transgender isn’t a real thing.

He’s not accused of arguing that position, even for the sake of argument. Nope. Just admitting that it exists was too offensive.

Whether transgender is a real thing, a psychological condition, or the result of a science fiction experiment brought to life by a howler monkey on meth is irrelevant. Honestly, the professor not having expressed his personal opinions on the matter is irrelevant. What is relevant is that American college students just can’t handle opinions different from their own.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lies about Israel not only as a matter of course but as one of policy. It was no surprise, then, when he stood up at the European Parliament on Thursday and regurgitated a claim made this week that rabbinical figures in the Jewish state had urged the government to poison Palestinian wells.

Abbas knew that this classically anti-Semitic blood libel was as false as a similar one, spread last week, that claimed Israel forced Palestinians from a certain village to flee by drying up their water supply during Ramadan. In fact, a pipe had burst, and it was immediately repaired. But not — as media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out — before the “water apartheid” lie, first “reported” by Al Jazeera, was picked up by The Independent, the International Business Times, Radio New Zealand and The Times of London.

In keeping with the tradition of his predecessor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas encourages the invention of all kinds of blood libels, which he then states as fact, both to his own people and to the international community. Each libel is more ludicrous than the previous one, and they would be funny if they weren’t reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and didn’t serve the same purpose: to foster the kind of Jew-loathing that enables genocide.

But annihilating Israel and the Jews is not the real reason that Abbas perpetuates utterly insane accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. More immediate personal concerns preoccupy the PA leader, who knows his days are numbered, literally and figuratively, if he does not remain relevant at home and abroad.

Indeed, Abbas constantly faces the possibility of being ousted by members of his own faction, Fatah, and by Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza. He manages to survive by enlisting financial and political support from the United States, Europe and the United Nations.

A professor at the University of Northern Colorado assigned Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” to his students — and watched as they proved the essay’s point.

According to a report obtained by Heat Street, students filed a complaint with the school’s “Bias Response Team” based on the professor’s lesson. The professor, whose name has been redacted, seems to have assigned the essay as part of a broader lesson about the value of debate: After reading “The Coddling of the American Mind,” students were instructed to chart out competing arguments on topics such as transgenderism, abortion, and global warming.

Doubtless, the professor intended to use those first-order issues as a bridge to the more challenging second-order question: Why does debating controversial subjects provoke so much controversy itself? Instead, he unwittingly gave the world more proof that American higher education has gone off the rails: The mere notion that people disagreed about such issues was, apparently, cause for an investigation. The Bias Response Team was put on the case.

What, precisely, is a Bias Response Team? Around the country, universities are increasingly using them as part of an effort to do . . . something. The University of Northern Colorado describes that something as follows in response to an inquiry: “The intent of the bias-response team is to facilitate discussions between members of the campus community when non-legal concerns of offensive behavior are reported.” UNC offers further assurance that “there’s nothing punitive about” Bias Response hearings, and that “this is about understanding, not punishment.”