RUTHFULLY YOURS

Various reports indicate that the death toll from the jihadist attack overnight at a popular gay club in Orlando may exceed 50 people, with more than 50 others wounded. The terrorist’s identity has been reported: He is Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old American citizen and devout Muslim from Fort Pierce, Fla., the son of immigrants from Afghanistan.

The FBI has indicated that Mateen, who was killed in a shootout with police at about 5 a.m., was an Islamic extremist. Representative Peter King (R., N.Y.), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, says the shooter was “trained in the use of weapons.” As we have noted here many times, military training is generally the key that separates competent terrorists from wannabes. But whether actual or would-be jihadists, these Muslims are motivated by Islamic supremacism, the belief that sharia, Islam’s ancient, totalitarian law, must be imposed on society.

Based on all this, there is abundant Washington and media speculation that the attack is “ISIS-inspired.” This is consistent with the bipartisan, government-approved inanity we have been following for a quarter-century, what I often call the political class’s concoction of “An Islam of Their Very Own.” It goes something like this:

Islam is a religion of peace, period. End of discussion. “Violent extremist” outfits such as ISIS and al-Qaeda kill wantonly, with no real ideological motivation. ISIS and al-Qaeda are thus not Islamic, but actually anti-Islamic — and if they cite Islamic scripture to justify their atrocities, they are “hijacking” and “perverting” Islam. Because we must see these groups as “anti-Islam” rather than Islam, it is acceptable to call a mass-murder attack “terrorism” only if law-enforcement develops some plausible tie to these groups. Otherwise, if a Muslim is involved, stick with “workplace violence” and the like. Finally when an attack committed by a Muslim is too obviously terrorism to deny, call it “ISIS-inspired,” or “al-Qaeda-inspired,” or “Hamas political resistance,” etc. — but by all means do not, absolutely do not, ascribe it to Islam in any way shape or form.

This is idiocy. Will today’s event, the worst mass shooting in American history, help us see that?

We need to consider separately Islam and its sharia law.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive order pressuring institutions and businesses to maintain ties with Israel has riled college campuses in the state, where students have called for divestment from the country.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, issued the order earlier this month, saying New York would discontinue investments with organizations boycotting Israel.

College students have long called for their universities to divest funds from institutions they object to, including private-prison and fossil-fuel companies. Initiatives to pressure Israel economically have become known as the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS.

Alphonso David, Mr. Cuomo’s counsel, said the new executive order wouldn’t pertain to schools that heeded requests for divestment, but those that did so could violate existing state laws against discrimination. He also said student groups calling for their schools to divest from Israel wouldn’t be affected by the order.
Still, students have expressed concern that the order would weaken their efforts.

“NYU can use this as another excuse as why they refuse to divest,” said Ellis Garey, a New York University graduate student who said she voted this year in favor of a student-union resolution calling for boycotting Israel. She was part of a group of students and activists who protested outside Mr. Cuomo’s Manhattan office on Thursday. CONTINUE AT SITE

So Obama decided to warn everyone that Manhattan is about to turn into Atlantis.

“The majority of people believe in things like science — and scientists. And so when scientists tell us that the planet is getting warmer and we need to do something about it, the majority of people think that’s a good idea, let’s do something about that, because we don’t want Manhattan to be underwater.”

Manhattan going underwater isn’t science. It’s science fiction.

It’s the sort of thing you get from watching movies like The Day After Tomorrow where evil Republican politicians neglect the Flying Global Warming Monster and suddenly waves cover Manhattan and everything freezes.

That’s not science. It’s hardly even science fiction.

Here’s what Obama’s science really looks like.

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.

The Left’s false prophesy

It happened again, this time in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv. Two terrorists opened fire on civilians with the intent of taking as many Israeli lives as possible before they would inevitably be stopped. The murderers were successful. They brought lethal weapons to a place of joy and celebration and gunned down the innocent, one by one. We now know that cousins Muhammad and Khalid Muhamra, both 21, carried out the attack. The terrorists were both from the village of Yatta, near the city of Hebron in Judea, and their peers celebrated their crime both on social media and in the city streets, handing out treats to honor the attackers.

Last night, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai was asked by Army Radio to comment on the Palestinian celebrations following the terror attack in Tel Aviv that took four lives and wounded 18. The mayor responded by saying, “We might be the only country in the world with another people living among us under occupation, without civil rights. … You can’t keep people in a situation where they are under occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion that everything is fine.”

Not only is this an outrageous statement — the mayor chooses not to condemn the terrorists or the people handing out food and candies in celebration of what they refer to as “Operation Ramadan,” but rather the Israeli government and its policies — but Huldai’s words also reveal a deep and dangerous naivete.

To blame the murders on “a 49-year occupation” or to believe that giving up Judea and Samaria, or any other piece of land for that matter, would end the violence and the terrorism is to gamble with people’s lives.

I spent a good deal of time on social media in the hours after the Tel Aviv attack on Wednesday, as I do every day, and what I saw on Twitter was not calls for peace or even posts about how, once the Palestinians get the West Bank, they will build a country and create a state. No. What I saw under the hashtag #OperationRamadan were calls for the terrorists not to stop until the entirety of Israel was theirs. This is not a peace process or a protest, but a war that has very little to do with territory or borders, but rather the very existence of the Jewish State.

“Commanders for Israel’s Security” are a group I would much rather respect than ridicule, but drivel is drivel, even when it comes from men with an illustrious past and an accumulated 6000 years of security experience.

One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967 (Deputy PM Yigal Allon, former commander of Palmah strike-force, 1976).

…historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory…Now the victors are the vanquished… (Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, 1938).

The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse… Then we will move forward (Abbas Zaki, PLO ambassador to Lebanon, 2009).

It genuinely distresses me to have to write this article—but I feel I have little option.

Despite my personal bias

I confess that I have a strong personal bias in favor of men who have devoted years of their lives to the defense of their country and endangered themselves to protect others. The members of the Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) certainly fit that bill – comprising a group of over 200 former high-ranking officers in the IDF, intelligence services and police.

Today, however, we are faced with the bitter irony of a spectacle, in which scores of ex-senior security officials, who spent most of their adult life defending Israel, are now promoting a political initiative that will make it indefensible.

Recently, CIS, an allegedly non-politically partisan organization, which ran a virulently anti-Netanyahu campaign in the run-up to the March 2015 elections, published what purports to be a “plan” to break the ongoing deadlock over the “Palestinian issue”, appealingly but misleadingly, entitled “Security First: Changing the Rules of the Game-A Plan to Improve Israel’s Security and International Standing” .

In broad brush strokes, the seminal elements on which the entire proposal is based are that Israel should:

(a) Proclaim, unilaterally, that it forgoes any claim to sovereignty beyond the yet-to-be completed security barrier, which in large measure coincides with the pre-1967 “Green Line”, adjusted to include several major settlement blocks adjacent to those lines; but,

(b) Leave the IDF deployed there—until some “acceptable alternative security arrangement” is found – presumably the emergence of a yet-to-be located pliant Palestinian-Arab who will pledge to recognize Israel as the Jewish nation-state; and

(c) Embrace the Saudi Peace Plan–a.k.a. Arab Peace Initiative (API) subject to certain changes which the Arabs/Saudis recently resolutely refused to consider.

Noxious brew of the fanciful, the false & the failed

President Obama is burning his so-called bridges to a “green energy” future that will leave America’s families and industries powerlessly impoverished.

Any notions that generously subsidized solar and wind will significantly compensate capacity losses from shuttered coal plants and overregulated oil and natural gas suppliers are scientifically and economically delusional.

And as for any prospects that truly clean non-fossil nuclear or hydropower can make up the slack, forget about that too.

Let’s start with some simple arithmetic. If you have heard some USenergy2015really exciting news that the Obama Administration has already doubled the amount of total U.S. energy derived from “renewable alternative” sources (solar, wind, and biofuels), that would be true.

Thanks largely to $150 billion in generous federal subsidies, combined total renewables (not including hydropower) grew from supplying slightly more than 2% of our “primary fuel” (including electricity) to a whopping 4% today.

Meanwhile over the same period, the total increase of non-subsidized oil and gas also doubled, but added eight times more energy than the total growth of wind, solar, and biofuels combined. Oil and gas now supply about 63% of all U.S. primary fuel. Coal provides another 19%.

BilLGatesBill Gates, a leading “green energy proponent,” candidly discussed false industry narrative in a November 2015 Atlantic magazine article titled “We Need an Energy Miracle.”

Referring to “self-defeating claims of some clean-energy enthusiasts,” he said, “They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbons. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements.

What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what?”

As Gates pointed out, “The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this [economical energy technology] thing is. So false solutions like divestment or ‘Oh, it’s easy to do’ hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated.”

In 850 BC, the legendary Greek author, Homer, introduced the mythical king of Ithaca, Odysseus, as a role model of leadership. Sailing home from the battlefield, Odysseus overcame sweeping temptations to dwell on wishful-thinking rather than reality. Odysseus overcame supreme seduction to stray away from the proper course of navigation, and join the beautiful Sirens, who lured sailors with their seductively hypnotizing voices, music and looks to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

In 2016, the modern day Sirens of the Western media and policy-making try to divert (and confuse) Israel from the proper course of combatting terrorism, contending that “one’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter;” that Palestinian terrorism is reaction to occupation; that Palestinian terrorists are “lone wolves” not institutional; and that Islam is a religion of peace, not terrorism. However, contrary to freedom fighters, Palestinian terrorism – a branch of the 1,400-year-old inherent Islamic terrorism – has targeted Jewish and mostly Arab non-combatants (sometimes hitting combatants) deliberately, institutionally and systematically, as prescribed by the Quran, the Palestinian Covenant and Palestinian hate-education in schools, mosques and the media.

Moreover, Palestinian terrorism has plagued the Middle East since the 1930s – before the 1948 establishment of Israel and the 1967 Six Day War – focusing on Israel’s existence, not “occupation;” triggering civil wars, subversion and terrorism in Egypt (1950s), Syria (1960s), Lebanon (1970s and 1980s) and Kuwait (1990); assisting Saddam Hussein’s and Assad’s repression of Iraq and Syria; and systematically siding with anti-US and anti-Western rogue regimes, such as North Korea and Iran.

In 2016, Israel’s leadership is cajoled by modern-day Sirens from Israel, the US, Europe and Arab countries to stray away from its national security course of navigation, which has been charted by costly geo-strategic experience, security constraints and requirements, historical reality and commitments made to constituents.
The modern-day Sirens attempt to allure Israel to join a tempting, seemingly-unprecedented regional peace-for-our-time initiative, pampered by peaceful Arab talk, US and NATO security guarantees, possibly Western troops on Israel’s borders and a lavish economic package. Israel is enticed to accept a demilitarized Palestinian state on its borders, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel, and the miniaturization of its size – in the increasingly tectonic Middle East – to a 9-15-mile-sliver along the Mediterranean, over-towered by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, which are the “Golan Heights” of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Israel’s only (Ben Gurion) international airport, Israel’s major freeway (#6) and 80% of Israel’s population and infrastructure.

The contemporary Sirens try to smog Israel’s critical requirements of strategic depth for (routine) Middle East stormy days such as potential upheavals in Jordan and Egypt, which would cause havoc domestically, regionally and globally, posing a survival threat to the Jewish state. Middle Eastern realism requires security contingencies for future – rather than present day – lethal threats, emerging dramatically, unpredictably and frequently.

The 1970’s Black Liberation Army engaged in bombings, murders and prison breaks to further its purpose of “taking up arms for the liberation … of black people in the United States.”

Today, its little publicized, but very effective progeny, relabeled Black Liberation Collective (BLC), has chapters in almost 100 college campuses “dedicated to transforming institutions of higher education through … direct action and political education,” including, one chapter proclaims, “collective resistance” by “Black students from across the country.”

BLC’s objective is to end academic freedom. One chapter expressly attacks “first amendment enthusiasts” as “either unaware or unconcerned with the persistent racial inequality that prevents students of color from even accessing this right.” BLC rejects free speech as protecting “an imagined denial of rights to the dominant group [whites], instead of the … persistent denial of rights to the oppressed [Blacks].” Translated: the majority must surrender their Constitutional rights or Blacks will never have theirs. Further, they demand that colleges prosecute anyone who expresses a contrary view: “prosecute criminally … defamatory speech in the college community.” Duke’s chapter paraphrases it to prohibit any speech on campus “that offends [or] “insults groups.”

These BLC demands violate the Supreme Court ruling that “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right of freedom of expression.” Most colleges’ written guidelines guaranty academic freedom.

Typical is Brown University’s mandating it “must be a place where ideas are exchanged freely. By asserting their right to protest, individuals cannot decide for the entire community which ideas will or will not receive free expression.”

The reality is, however, that most colleges today ignore these principles to appease BLC mobs. Last year, former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, was forced from the podium and prevented from speaking at Brown.

BOSTON, June 10 (Reuters) – As lawmakers across the United States battle over whether to allow transgender Americans to use public restrooms that match their gender identities, universities are scrambling to ensure that dorms meet federal standards.

At a time of year when the nation’s 2,100 residential colleges and universities are sorting out student housing assignments, they also are poring over a May letter from the Obama administration that thrusts them into the national debate on transgender rights.

Known as the “dear colleague” letter, it makes clear that federal law protects transgender students’ right to live in housing that reflects their gender identity.

Schools that fail to provide adequate housing to transgender students could face lawsuits or the loss of any federal funding they rely on.

Although hundreds of universities had begun to offer gender-inclusive housing in response to student demand in recent years, many are now reviewing or expediting their plans so they can provide the option to incoming students for the first time this fall.

The policies are intended not only to accommodate transgender students, university officials say, but to help siblings, gay students who want to live with straight friends of the opposite gender or simply groups comfortable with mixed-gender housing.

Palestinian journalists are spearheading a campaign against Israeli reporters. They have been taught that any journalist daring to criticize the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas is a “traitor.” They expect Israeli and Western journalists to report bad things only about Israel.

“It is very sad when you see that your colleagues on the other side are inciting against you and doing their best to prevent you from carrying out your work. This is harmful to the Palestinians themselves because they will no longer be able to relay their opinions to the Israeli public.” — Israeli reporter who has been covering Palestinian affairs for nearly a decade.

For Palestinian journalists, to be seen in public with an Israeli colleague is treasonous.

Many Western journalists turn a blind eye to assaults on freedom of the media under the PA and Hamas. They know they will be unwelcome in these places if they write any story that reflects negatively on Palestinians. Besides, the campaign against Israeli journalists is being waged by Palestinians, and not Israelis. To them, this fact alone makes it a story not worth reporting.

Nearly every Israeli media outlet has a journalist whose task is to report on what is happening on the Palestinian side. Until recently, these journalists would travel to Ramallah and other Palestinian cities in the West Bank to interview ordinary Palestinians, representatives of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and various Palestinian factions.