RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Apparently, some tutors are concerned that an SAT math question with a chart showing more boys than girls in math classes may have made taking the test too difficult for females to handle emotionally.

According to an article in the New York Times, the content of the question is an example of what’s called a “stereotype threat.”

“When people are reminded during a test of a negative stereotype about their race or sex, psychologists say, it creates a kind of test anxiety that leads them to underperform,” the article explains.

According to the article, the question was one of two that some people in the test-prep industry felt fell into this category. The other one was a verbal question that included a historical passage from the 19th century that argued that a woman’s place was in the home.

Now, the article does admit that, according to the College Board, “No differences in the scores of boys and girls of comparable ability were found on the questions in dispute.”

So, what’s the problem? Well, according to the article, the issue isn’t really about scores on specific questions. Rather, the tutors are concerned that the very presence of “stereotype threat” questions may be a reason why males score better than females on the SAT in general.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents the Mark Christian Moment with Mark Christian, the President and Executive Director of the Global Faith Institute. He is the son and nephew of high ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his home country of Egypt. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Dr. Christian dedicated his life and work to the proposition that “the first victims of Islam are the Muslim themselves.”

Dr. Christian discussed Can Any LGBT Individual Survive a Day Under Sharia Law?, unveiling the connection between Islamic theology and the jihadist massacre in Orlando.

Don’t miss it!

By Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman/JNS.org http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2016/6/2/mekonen-puts-a-face-on-the-stories-of-the-idf-and-ethiopian-jewry#.V3D8SjU_nSY=

Squeals of laughter and high-spirited traditional Ethiopian dancing, coupled with deep and mournful cries of loss and pain. The piercing sound of bullets whizzing above a soldier’s head. “Ready, aim, fire.” The quiet smile of a night under the stars with your fellow comrades.

“Mekonen: The Journey of an African Jew,” the latest production from the film-focused educational non-profit Jerusalem U, is the story of an intrepid and introspective young Ethiopian-Israeli soldier.

The film, which debuted on Israeli Independence Day last month, is a spinoff of Jerusalem U’s previous documentary, “Beneath the Helmet: From High School to the Home Front” (2014), which followed five Israel Defense Forces (IDF) recruits, including Mekonen Abebe, through their military training. “Mekonen” follows up by honing in exclusively on Abebe, a young Ethiopian shepherd who overcame financial and familial hardships to realize his dream of becoming an officer in the IDF.

“After nearly every screening of ‘Beneath the Helmet,’ the audiences had burning questions about Abebe. They connected with him and wanted to know more about where he came from and how the next chapter of his story would unfold,” said Rebecca Shore, Jerusalem U’s creative director and the director of “Mekonen.”

The film, according to Jerusalem U CEO Raphael Shore, is part of the organization’s series of mission-driven productions that are meant to engage, educate, and empower Jewish young adults—particularly on college campuses, where anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are on the rise.

“We create these products to try to inspire and push back,” Shore said at the premiere event for “Mekonen” in Israel, which welcomed more than 200 youths who were culminating a year studying in Israel before attending college in the United States. “We all tend to think of ourselves as small. But we are all leaders. I hope you step up.”

“There is definitely growing anti-Semitism on campus—swastikas being painted on houses, assaults. We see it growing,” said Moshe Lencer, an international ambassador for the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi). “But on the other side, the pro-Israel camp is growing, too.…The students use these movies to help put a face to the story.”

But as much as “Mekonen” is a pro-Israel film, it is also the universal story of the Ethiopian aliyah (immigration to Israel)—and of aliyah in general.

“I decided to participate in ‘Mekonen’ to be there for others who need hope,” Mekonen Abebe, charming and modest, said in an interview with JNS.org. “It’s to give the weaker segment of society, those who are struggling, an example that you can win from nothing.”