RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-fleeing-the-nazis-a-legacy-that-wont-run-dry-1466722996 How does one overcome almost unimaginable horror and trauma? For Holocaust survivors Howard and Lottie Marcus, the healing came, in part, from the hope that they could help to provide refuge for other Jews who might find themselves at risk. But after restarting their broken lives in America, this modest couple could never have […]

When one contemplates the radical anti-Israel Left in Israeli academia, Bar-Ilan University (BIU) is not ordinarily the school that jumps to mind. Bar-Ilan is nominally an Orthodox religious school, although lots of secularists and non-Jews study and teach there. Bar-Ilan has fewer tenured anti-Israel leftists than do other institutions, but nevertheless it does have a few. Probably the worst is Menachem Klein from the BIU political science department.

Klein is one the leading Bash-Israel academics who has a special passion for the idea of dividing Jerusalem and removing Israel from its sacred shrines. The 64-year-old was the academic fig leaf for the anti-Israel “Geneva Initiative” of Yossi Beilin and the Far Left. When he was denied an academic promotion a while back, he publicly denounced Bar Ilan University as a thuggish institution.

A member of the board of B’tselem, Klein seems to have never met an anti-Semite he does not like. He favors Israeli leftists negotiating peace with Palestinians, by surrendering to their demands.

In recent years, Klein has devoted his energies to resuscitating the old Stalinist myth about Arab-Jewish euphoria before the rise of Zionism and especially the silly pseudo-history around the notion of the “Arab Jew.” Invented by a small group of Israeli Stalinists led by Tel Aviv University sociologist Yehouda Shenhav, these people claim that Oriental Jews are actually Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion. Never mind the proportion who would slap you silly if they hear you calling them Arabs of any sort. Shenhav has promoted his view that Asian Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and his book, The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity, won rave reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups.

Congress has passed a $576 billion Defense Appropriations bill for 2016 with a wide and bipartisan majority: 282-138, according to Defense News. The Obama administration takes issue with various parts of the bill, including presenting a six-page memo specifically calling for the elimination of Congress’s allocation of $635 million for Israel.

The money for Israel includes $268.7 million in R&D for U.S.-Israel cooperative missile defense programs; $72 million for the procurement of Iron Dome; $150 million for the procurement of David’s Sling; $120 million for procurement of Arrow III; and $42.7 million for U.S.-Israel anti-tunnel cooperation.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the administration opposed the funding increase for Israel because it “would consume a growing share of a shrinking U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s budget… Additional support for Israel means fewer resources that are available for critical U.S. programs at a time when the missile threat from North Korea, in particular, is increasing.”

Here’s a thought for Adm. Kirby and the administration: Man up.

Fund U.S. missile defense programs – and the rest of the U.S. defense budget — at levels appropriate to the threat America faces without shortchanging an ally facing broad, increasing and unremitting threats.

How did we get here?

Thirty years ago, Israel was invited to join President Reagan’s missile defense program by LTG James Abrahamson, the first director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). It was a serious philosophical leap for the IDF, which had until that time understood the only response to rockets and missiles to be offensive — hence escalatory. If Hizb’allah fired one at Israel; Israel fired two in return until the “international community” sought a ceasefire. Uzi Rubin, former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization (IMDO), explained in inFOCUS Quarterly:

The IDF high command was generally skeptical about the strategic value of active defense, and doubted Israel’s defense industries’ ability to master the required technologies. This skepticism was mirrored by the media and elaborated on by civilian military analysts. Only shock and dismay from missiles and rockets hitting Israel’s undefended population centers in 1991 (the Gulf War) and 2006 (the Second Lebanon War), coupled with Iron Dome’s successful defense on the Gaza front brought a change of heart…

“Unfortunately Obama is not alone. The European big three — Cameron, Hollande and Merkel — all parrot the ‘religion of peace’ hoax. Mind you, let’s put it in perspective, they don’t have the same aversion to referring to radical Islamic terrorism; and, so far as I know, have not gone so far as Obama in purging all references to the religion that dare not speak its name from the lexicon of their military and security agencies. The words Islam, sharia law, and jihad are verboten apparently. The words extremism and terrorism, and now presumably ‘thuggism’, are allowed provided they are devoid of any link to Islam. We are in serious trouble. Islamists are beheading infidels and the Commander-in-Chief is parsing his language to cloud the threat. In these circumstances, whether he offends tender sensibilities or not, Trump is what the Western world needs now. Love sweet love will have to wait for a different time.”

The only thing more certain than the next Islamist assault is the parade of world leaders who can be counted to mouth their kumbaya pieties, even as the blood is wiped off the walls. In this, if nothing else, President Obama is the undisputed world leader.
Though the roots of ISIS go back a fair way it did not begin coming to prominence until President Obama withdrew remaining US troops from Iraq in December, 2011, leaving behind, as he put it, “a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” And it was after that, in April, 2013, that al-Baghdadi announced its formation. Yet, wall-to-wall conservative commentators apparently believe that defeating ISIS is the key to preventing the recent atrocities in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Brussels, and in Paris.

Talk about memory loss. The London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai bombings and countless other Islamist attacks occurred before ISIS was a glint in al-Baghdadi’s eye. Thomas Jefferson was fighting Muslim Tripoli pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is the religion stupid! And if and when ISIS is defeated, whatever that looks like, the religion, and its integral supremacist ideology, will persist. The only permanent solution is to degrade and marginalize Islam itself so that its remaining fundamentalist adherents resemble a small group of whacko religious snake dancers.

The religion cannot be saved. It cannot be saved because its very scripture is immutable and corrupting. That’s it, full stop, no argument. Where it holds sway warped views bloom: e.g., support for sharia law, religious intolerance, the inferiority of women, death for apostasy, and for blasphemy, heresy, homosexuality and adultery. Does anyone think that is a coincidence?

Sure, external and home-grown terrorists have to be killed. But the creed of Islam has to be confronted. The made-up hateful words of Allah and the hateful sayings and doings of his earthly amanuensis Mohammed cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged and infect hundreds of millions of people, here now and still to be born. It is a plague on humanity and must be confronted as resolutely as Reagan confronted ‘the evil empire’ and all that it stood for.

To quote the old proverb: “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck.” So it is with Islam. There is no radical Islam, no hijacked Islam, no corrupted Islam, no extreme Islam and no moderate Islam: There is simply Islam.

I remember listening as far back as in 2010 to then White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, answering questions from reporters about the planned 15 story high mosque mere yards from ground zero. It was revealing as he said:

“I think you’ve heard this administration and the last administration talk about the fact that we are not at war with a religion but with an idea that has corrupted a religion.”

There again was that oft repeated phrase that the religion of Islam has been corrupted. But did Gibbs and his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, truly believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and not without a major pillar called jihad with its dire implications for all non-Moslems or, as the Muslim world impudently describes them: infidels.

We hear the phrase by well-meaning but misguided individuals that Islam means peace. No. Islam means submission; not submission to the will of the people, as in a democracy, but solely to the will of Allah. And Moslems may not question the teachings of their prophet, Mohammed.

Islam also teaches that it is superior to all other religions. It is Islam über alles. The Moslem is taught that Judaism and Christianity perverted the will of Allah, and that Islam received the superior revelation requiring, therefore, that Jews and Christians ultimately submit to Islam.

Islam bases its ideology on five pillars – Witness to Allah and his prophet Mohammed; Prayer five times daily facing Mecca and the Ka’ba; Alms giving to the poor and to the mosque; Fasting during the month of Ramadan and Pilgrimage to Mecca.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie focuses on Why Moderate Muslims Can’t Destroy ISIS, explaining how it is connected to why Obama acts like a defense attorney for 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:

The same hatred as from Nazis is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.

It is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses of a poem, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.

It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It’s okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:

“They know there’s a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”

As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they’re silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they’re completing Isis’s act of terror.”

A few weeks earlier, France’s most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:

“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of ‘humanism’ in its ‘multicultural’ version.”

Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.

According to materials distributed by the University of Missouri Diversity Office, saying “you people are so inspiring” in reference to disabled people is not nice, but actually a microaggression.

The piece of advice is one of many included on a handout titled “Racial Microaggressions in Every Day (sic) Life,” which is available on an official school web page.

According to the handout, declaring that you consider people with disabilities to be “inspiring” is a problem because it amounts to “patronization.” Interestingly enough, the Special Olympics includes a link to subscribe to e-mails of “inspiring stories” on its website — which must mean that the supposedly charitable organization is actually just one giant, offensive microaggression.

Personally, I always considered it pretty normal to be inspired by people who are able to overcome difficulties of any kind — be they physical, mental, socioeconomic, or anything else — but I guess not. Thanks to Mizzou, I can see that this is actually very wrong, and that I am in fact a big jerk.

Among the list of sexist “microaggressions” on the handout is the fact that women aren’t asked as often as men are to help move boxes around the office. Of course, statistically and scientifically, men more often are physically stronger than women — but I guess science and facts don’t matter when discussing microaggressions. (Note: One of my favorite things about being a woman is that no one asks me to move boxes.)

The racial microaggressions include “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” and “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough,” because saying these things amounts to saying that “race does not play a role in life’s successes.”

World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald S. Lauder addressing the plenary session of “Building Bridges, Not Boycotts,” the international summit on the delegitimisation of Israel at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, and affirming his organisation’s commitment to the fightback against BDS.

Addressing more than 1,500 students, dignitaries, public officials and representatives of Jewish organisations at the conference convened by, inter alia, the WJC and Israel’s Mission to the United Nations, Lauder pledged that the WJC “will commit all of our resources, and all of our abilities, to help fight BDS.”

And he observed, inter alia:

“I wonder if all those people who support BDS have the slightest understanding of what this movement really means. Those BDS supporters who join marches on campus and chant: ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!’ I wonder if they realize that the River is the Jordan, the Sea is the Mediterranean. These activists are calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. The Muslim groups have their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood …

Make no mistake. The BDS movement doesn’t support the Palestinian people. It is strictly a campaign to delegitimise Israel, which is simply the latest attempt to deny the Jewish People their right to self-determination. Every other people on earth have the right, but BDS wants to deny that basic right to Jews…. ”

“[T]he day of the quiet Jew … of the ghetto Jew are long over,” he warned.