RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you wonder what has become of us since the Greatest Generation began leaving the stage, consider this elegant 19th century warning from Victorian statesman and author, Sir William Francis Butler:

“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”

Despite that timeless advice, foolishness and political correctness recently joined hands at elite Northwestern University, neatly tucked away in Chicago’s toniest suburbs. As the Chicago Tribune reported last week, faculty opposition caused retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry to withdraw his name from a tentative appointment to head the university’s new institute on global studies.

Top officials at Northwestern had clearly viewed this prospective appointment as a huge win. In addition to his military rank, Gen. Eikenberry was deputy head of the NATO military committee, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and a distinguished public servant, intimately familiar with foreign cultures and decision-making at the highest levels of government. Then there was his gig at the newly minted Buffett Institute, underwritten by a $100 million grant from business magnate Warren Buffett’s sister, one of the largest research grants ever awarded to Northwestern. What could possibly go wrong?

Alas, the president and provost of Northwestern had obviously neglected a standard piece of academic wisdom, namely that faculty meetings are so vicious because the stakes are so small. Normally they are: But that whole ballgame changes when the faculty’s animal cunning is alerted that now, suddenly, something has arrived on campus that might be worth stealing.

Things at Northwestern began going south back in February. An “open letter on behalf of academic integrity” was signed by 46 faculty members but quickly became notorious for dismissing Gen. Eikenberry as a “non-academic career military officer” too closely aligned with American foreign policy to run a truly independent institute. Last week’s Tribune article quoted a professor of foreign languages who insisted, “It wasn’t because this guy was military. That wasn’t the case at all.” But as Max Boot sniffed in Commentary, “Apparently soldiers are good enough to fight and die for our freedom but are not good enough to teach our students. They are too biased, you see – in favor of America!”

Short, intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are the future of higher education.

So it turns out sitting in a chair for four years doesn’t deliver mastery in anything but the acquisition of staggering student-loan debt. Practical (i.e. useful) mastery requires not just hours of practice but directed deep learning via doing of the sort you only get in an apprenticeship.

The failure of our model of largely passive learning and rote practice is explained by Daniel Coyle in his book The Talent Code (sent to me by Ron G.), which upends the notion that talent is a genetic gift. It isn’t–in his words, it’s grown by deep practice, the ignition of motivation and master coaching.

Using these techniques, student reach levels of accomplishment in months that surpass those of students who spent years in hyper-costly conventional education programs. The potential to radically improve our higher education system while reducing the cost of that education by 90% is the topic of my books Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy and The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education.

Let’s start by admitting our system of higher education is unsustainable and broken: a complete failure by any reasonable, objective standard. Tuition has soared $1,100% while the output of the system (the economic/educational value of a college degree) has declined precipitously.

A recent major study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, concluded that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

‘Academically Adrift’: The News Gets Worse and Worse (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

These two charts are the acme of unsustainability: college tuition has skyrocketed, along with federally funded student loan debt.

Four years ago, I wrote an article for American Thinker that I believed was the final word on academic “studies” that were contorted to put conservatives in a bad light. The study, which purportedly found that conservatives “are losing faith in science,” said nothing of the kind. It found that conservatives are losing faith in the scientific community. The authors simply declared the scientific community and science are the same, thus arriving at the conclusion they so desperately wanted to reach.

It was a real twofer: a bogus study that showed exactly why conservatives are losing faith in the scientific community.

But now there appears before the court of public opinion an even better example. Sharp-eyed readers may recall that in 2013, three professors from Virginia Commonwealth University found that conservatives tend to exhibit forms of “psychoticism,” such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but not much of one – and it’s exactly how it was stated in thousands of articles.

Liberals were said to exhibit “neuroticism” and “social desirability” and were therefore more likely to support public expenditures on public assistance.

“Social desirability” can be stated in plain English as a “conscious effort to get along,” says Steven Hayward at Powerline, who brought the important facts to light in recent days.

As he notes, the original article on the study was published in the American Journal of Political Science. The article includes this comment.

In line with our expectations, P [for “Psychoticism”] (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes. Intriguingly, the strength of the relationship between P and political ideology differs across sexes. P‘s link with social conservatism is stronger for females while its link with military attitudes is stronger for males. We also find individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal. Furthermore, Neuroticism is completely unrelated to social ideology, which has been the focus of many in the field. Finally, those higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.

‘Uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood’

An Israeli parliamentarian who arrived on the scene of Wednesday night’s Palestinian terrorist attack in Tel Aviv summed up in a phrase what terrorism is all about.

“Uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood,” is how Likud MK Amir Ohana described what he encountered in the immediate aftermath of the shooting spree at the Max Brenner chocolate shop and cafe in the Sarona shopping complex.

No matter how precisely witnesses describe the attacks Israelis experience on a regular basis — the fear, the screams, and the killings — it is rare for words to capture carnage so well.

Yes, “uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood” tells us everything we need to know about the setting and its significance in the twisted, brainwashed minds of young people in the Palestinian Authority. It is precisely what the two young men, relatives from the village of Yatta near Hebron who brought makeshift assault rifles with them to an eatery on a summer’s eve, had envisioned. It was exactly their goal to slaughter Jews, some of them in casual dress and flip-flops, enjoying a respite from the oppressive heat of the day, others dressed to the nines, celebrating personal milestones.

Indeed, “uneaten birthday cakes next to pools of blood” says it all. It is a reminder of the funerals that will soon take place and the devastation entire families will feel for the rest of their lives; the months of physical rehabilitation and trauma awaiting those who were injured; and the tears of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters praying at bedsides.

“You never get used to it,” said a surgeon from the Sourasky Medical Center, where the wounded — among them one of the two terrorists — are being treated.

The rest of us in Israel, meanwhile, will be treated by the international community to reprimands about the need for peace, just as we are already being bombarded on local talk shows with the urgency for “an agreement with the Palestinians.” Like the terrorist attacks themselves, these pronouncements are repeated virtually without let-up.

The difference this time is the addition of the discussion about how Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new defense minister, who assumed his role only last week, is going to meet the challenge, particularly as a proponent of the death penalty for terrorists, which the Jewish state does not have. Natch.

This is something the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, east Jerusalem and Gaza are keenly aware of, along with the knowledge that if they engage in particularly gruesome violence, they will be hailed as heroes by their society and leaders. Those who are killed while murdering Jews can look forward not only to paradise in the afterlife, but being martyrs after whom sports arenas, cultural events and streets are named.

Thankfully, Lieberman — whose alleged first order of business over the weekend was to strike terrorist bases in Syria — did not talk politics. Instead, he gave a brief press conference at the scene of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had just landed in Tel Aviv from a two-and-a-half-day trip to Russia, ostensibly to mark the 25th anniversary of the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Moscow, but really to cement growing ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is the sad but necessary upshot of the Obama administration’s attitude toward Israel in particular and the Middle East in general.

For some years now, the Obama administration has worked on developing a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Its goals: to be proactive in stopping terrorists from radicalizing and recruiting followers, and to address the factors that allow such actions to occur in the first place. Last week the result of some of these deliberations — a twelve-page strategy fronted by the State Department and USAID — was published.

In its foreword, Secretary of State John Kerry lists some of those countries affected by “violent extremism” (“from Afghanistan to Nigeria”) as well as the identity of violent extremist groups (“Da’esh . . . al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram”). The focus then, seems clear: countries with a significant Muslim population and Islamist terrorist groups. Yet here is where the strategy takes a turn for the surreal, because from the content of the actual strategy, you would not realize any such thing — the document is just that opaque, obfuscatory, and, ultimately, unhelpful.

Regarding why violent extremism takes root, the reader is treated to a variety of possibilities. They include “individual psychological factors . . . community and sectarian divisions and conflicts.” Other explanations are corruption, insufficiently robust courts, and a lack of tolerance among different ethnicities.

Apparently not even worthy of discussion is Islam or Islamism, words that are not mentioned once. This is no accident. There has been a concerted attempt to scrub any religious aspect from the actions of ISIS and al-Qaeda: That is why phrases like “violent extremism” even exist. (First mainstreamed by the British government, “violent extremism” was dreamed up as a way to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Islamist” extremism in the months after the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The phrase swiftly traveled across the Atlantic and into the U.S. government’s vocabulary.)

The Israeli Left has a serious flag problem. Well, a problem with the Israeli flag to be precise. The one with the six-pointed blue star. Not the ISIS flag.

The Left intensely dislikes people who wave Israeli flags, although I think it would be okay with those radical anti-Trump protesters waving Mexican and Iranian flags. At the Israeli Left’s own rallies, like one widely reported recently, one sees oodles of Stalinist red flags, lots of PLO flags, and sometimes one may see Hamas flags, but no Israeli flags.

In a few famous cases, the Left’s contempt for the flag goes well beyond that. A few months ago, the ultra-leftist Israeli “artist” and “activist” Ariel Bronz appeared at an assembly sponsored by the anti-Israel Haaretz newspaper and pranced about the stage with an Israeli flag inserted in his rear end. Haaretz approved and hailed the behavior as the epitome of democracy and patriotism. In an earlier incident one Natali Cohen Vaxberg, also a leftist activist and actress, posted on the web videos of her relieving herself (number two, to be precise) on the Israeli flag. More courageous defense of freedom of speech, squealed Haaretz and its leftist amen choir in delight.

The latest twist in the Left’s jihad against the flag has to do with plans by participants in the upcoming Jerusalem Reunification Day festivities to wave it. This has triggered horrific anger among the enlightened Left. They are particularly irate because celebrants plan to march all over Jerusalem waving flags, including in all parts of the Old City.

That is simply fascism, scream the Leftists, especially because the celebrants will walk through the “Moslem Quarter” of the Old City. Flying flags under the noses of these “occupied” Arabs is intolerable oppression, even though these Arabs have Israeli citizenship and are welcome to join the celebrations and wave flags with the others if they wish.

So now a group of about 100 radical leftists has placed an ad in the press this week, paid for by you-know-who, denouncing plans to wave Israeli flags in Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day. The ad says that as peace seekers the signatories demand that the government and police prohibit the waving of flags in the “Muslim Quarter” of the Old City, which – they add – is near the Temple Mount and the day will be close to Ramadan. It should be noted that the signers do not express any opposition to PLO, Hamas, or ISIS flags flying on the PLO-controlled Temple Mount itself, nor in any leftist street rallies anywhere else in the country.

“After the attack, dozens of Palestinians in Hebron began to celebrate the attack and fire weapons into the air, media outlets said. Also, at East Jerusalem’s emblematic Damascus Gate people celebrated the attack, which comes on the third day of Ramadan.”

At least four people died and 13 were wounded in an attack carried out Wednesday evening by two Palestinians in a popular open-air market in Tel Aviv located in front of the Defense Ministry and the Army Central Command.

Both suspects, one of them wounded by security personnel, were arrested.

The incident occurred about 9:30 p.m. at the Sarona Market, an crowded shopping center with dozens of restaurants and stores located right in front of Israel’s main military base.

According to the preliminary police investigation, the two attackers, who were said to be cousins from the West Bank city of Hebron, arrived at the shopping center, had something to drink and then produced automatic weapons, tried to enter the shopping center and opened fire on the crowd.

Seeing themselves blocked by the market’s Israeli guards, they continued shooting until they ran out of ammunition, then mixed in with the fleeing crowd and disappeared.

United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, by Peter Bergen (Crown, 400 pp., $28)

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden (Penguin, 464 pp., $30)

In mid-April, President Barack Obama boasted that America and its allies were winning the fight against the Islamic State. In a rare visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, Obama noted that though ISIS could still inflict “horrific violence,” America’s 11,500 air strikes had put the group on its heels. “We have momentum,” the president said, “and we intend to keep that.” Only days before, however, senior administration officials sounded gloomier about the state of the war. While American air strikes and other operations had killed 25,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, incinerated hundreds of millions of dollars that ISIS had stolen from banks and seized from kidnappings and extortion, forced it to cut salaries by a third, and taken back some territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, the terror group now had roots in 15 countries and continued to expand its reach in Europe, North Africa, and Afghanistan. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told senators that despite the progress, America and its allies had failed to stop “the recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization of people, especially young people, to engage in terrorist activities.” In February, James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified that ISIS remained not only the nation’s “preeminent terrorist threat,” but that al-Qaida and its affiliates were “positioned to make gains in 2016.” ISIS, he said later, was a “phenomenon.”

Is the threat of ISIS to Americans at home and abroad growing or waning? What has prompted its rise and that of like-minded militant Islamists? And most crucially, how can America and its allies defeat them and their seductive extremist ideology?

No shortage of books has appeared on the issue of Islamic terrorism since al-Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. The rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, which evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is compellingly described in Black Flags, Joby Warrick’s riveting account of how ISIS, aided partly by the strategic errors of Presidents Bush and Obama, managed to seize and impose its barbaric, authoritarian rule on a territory the size of Great Britain. Published last year, the book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a worthy successor to The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s majestic 2006 account of the rise of al-Qaida. Now, new books by Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst and professor at Arizona State University who was the first reporter to interview bin Laden for an American broadcast network, and Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, enhance our understanding of the spread of ISIS and like-minded jihadi groups; the appeal of the extremism underlying them; how law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and American Muslims have responded to the threat of Islamist terror; and how that appeal might be reduced.

Huh? “They appear to be terrorists and they are from the “occupied West Bank”….is the WSJ taking its narrative from the New York Times?….this is the latest of more than 300 attacks by PalArabs targeting Israelis over the past nine months…rsk

TEL AVIV—Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire Wednesday at a popular food market in central Tel Aviv, killing four people and wounding five others in what Israeli police said appeared to be a terror attack.

The attackers were family members in their 20s from the Hebron region of the occupied West Bank, police said. One was arrested and the other was rushed to the hospital after being shot and​subdued by police.

One attacker sat in a cafe at the high-end Sarona Market before standing up and shooting at other customers, according to witnesses. The assault came on a warm summer night at about 9 p.m.

“He got up, he had a rifle in his hand and he was just shooting point-blank at people [who were] sitting down,” said one witness, Avraham Liber, according to a video distributed by nonprofit group the Israel Project.

Meital Gonen, who manages a clothing shop at the market, said more than 10 people took cover in the store after shots began ringing out.

“People were running and screaming ‘blood’ and ‘terrorists,’ and one woman fainted,” she said. Security forces kept the store on lockdown while searches for the gunmen were under way, she said.

Apparently, Amb. Stephen D. Mull has been living under a rock for the past decade.

Mull is man the Obama administration appointed to implement its nuclear deal with Iran. Iran is a country that has consistently vowed to wipe America’s ally Israel off the map. In fact, Iran is considered, by many, to be the greatest existential threat to the State of Israel.

For decades, Iran has threatened to destroy Israel. Just recently, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles that were marked with the statement “Israel must be wiped off the Earth.”

Mull showed a stunning level of ignorance towards a threat to the State of Israel last month when, at a recent hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. While being questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) about letters from the State Department requesting that States revisit and lift laws that divest state funds from Iran, Mull was asked if the State Department would do the same for Israel and send a letter urging States against BDS. Mull then claimed that he was “not sure what that [BDS] is.”

How does he not know what BDS is?

The BDS. Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement against Israel is a discriminatory movement against the State of Israel that’s over a decade old and has been working to isolate the State of Israel both financially and diplomatically. Some consider BDS as much of a threat to Israel as Iran.

It’s not necessarily the duty of the State Department to urge U.S. states against BDS. However, as a top diplomat assigned to implementing a deal with a country calling for the destruction of both the U.S. and its ally Israel, Mull should have a general understanding of the threats these countries face.