RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But why is Islam violent? The usual answer is to point to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. That certainly covers the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it fails to explain why Muslims continue to practice it. Even against each other. Violence has become the defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.

Optimists speak of reforming Islam. But such reforms had over a thousand years in which to take place.

Islam is an ideology. Its violence is a strategy. That strategy fit the needs of Mohammed. Mohammed chose to use force to spread his ideology. He needed to recruit fighters so he preached the inferiority of non-Muslims, the obligation for Muslims to conquer non-Muslims and the right of his fighters to seize the property and wives of non-Muslims as incentive for them to join his fight. Furthermore he even promised them that if they should fall in battle, they would receive loot and women in paradise.

The strategy was barbarous, but quite effective. Mohammed had created a new super-tribe in a tribal society. The tribe of Islam united different groups in a mission of conquest. The Islamic religion allowed the varying clans to be more effective and ambitious than their victims. Within a surprisingly short amount of time the chain of conquests made Islam into a world religion. The most effective Islamic conquerors could not only claim vast territories, carving up civilization into fiefdoms, but they could prepare their sons and grandsons to continue the chain of conquests.

Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare far more effective. Its alliance was harder to fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death. But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally tribal. It made tribal banditry more effective, but didn’t change the civilization. It codified the tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic violence against non-Muslims and women today.

And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do was choose a different civilizational strategy.

This academic year will be remembered for its psychological crack-ups over Halloween costumes (Yale), faculty intimidation of student journalists covering protesters (the University of Missouri) and purges of single-sex social clubs (Harvard). But the dishonor roll isn’t complete without documenting how the Obama Administration is further eroding due process on campus.

The Education and Justice Departments have already gone far to subvert the norm that students accused of sexual assault retain individual rights. Now they are targeting the few rights that are left. Under new standards promulgated this spring, students can be punished before any disciplinary hearing has been held, and sometimes after anonymous allegations.

Starting with a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department has reinterpreted the Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions, creating legal obligations that do not exist in federal statutes. Schools can now lose taxpayer funds if they use a “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard for adjudicating assaults instead of the less rigorous “preponderance of the evidence.”

A new round of federal letters appeared starting in April. The one that expanded the definition of sexual harassment the most—and how schools must respond—was the finding of a Justice Department investigation into the University of New Mexico’s grievance protocol.

Justice said UNM violated Title IX in part because of a “failure to provide effective interim safety measures.” Interim measures are imposed on an accused student before any official ruling on guilt. They can include provisional suspensions for the accused; no-contact instructions akin to a restraining order; restrictions on when students can use libraries, dining halls and athletic facilities; evictions from dorms; and bans on extracurricular activities. CONTINUE AT SITE

“The subject is gloomy, but the food will be good—and the music spectacular.”http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/06/is-anti-zionism-on-campus-a-passing-nuisance-or-a-fundamental-threat/

Thus, in late January, spoke Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor at Indiana University and director of its Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. He was describing a four-day international scholars’ conference scheduled for late spring on the university’s Bloomington campus. In the event, the conference did not disappoint in its food, its music—or its gloom, which rose like a miasma from the days-long rehearsals of the varied and abundant forms of anti-Semitism, particularly in the form of anti-Zionism, in today’s world.

As if to reinforce the gravity of the occasion, the conference took place in the interval between the November 2015 terrorist massacres in Paris and the disclosure in April of the social-media posts by Naz Shah, a Labor member of the British parliament, advocating the forcible “relocation” of all Israeli Jews to America and the even greater uproar a month later over anti-Semitism among senior party leaders. Although the focus of the conference was mainly on Europe, both the academic setting and the topic, “Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization,” inevitably launched attendees into the middle of an issue that many American Jews have strenuously tried to avoid: namely, the anti-Israel activity now rampaging through U.S. universities. Is this a fundamental threat, or a nasty but passing nuisance?

The answer suggested by the conference deliberations—“both of the above”—may sound like another evasion, but reflects an understanding of the still-relevant distinction between the seemingly ineradicable persistence of European anti-Semitism and the contrasting benignity of American social and political institutions. It also suggested the need to exploit that distinction before it becomes too late.

I. The European Scene

That today’s anti-Semitism is intimately connected with anti-Zionism is a virtually axiomatic proposition. Still, there are variations, and Europe specializes in them. The scholars at the conference—mostly from outside the United States—did a thorough job of filling in the European background, anatomizing the beast’s profile in individual countries, and connecting it in each case with the details of local politics. Without pretending to do justice to the richness of these presentations, it’s possible to sketch a few main themes before returning to the American scene.

That Old-Time Religion

There are places in Europe—and especially in Eastern Europe—where anti-Semitism is still so unreconstructed, and the sanctions against its open expression so few, that it doesn’t bother to cloak itself in “mere” anti-Zionism. One of these places appears to be the Czech Republic.

Thus, according to Zbyněk Tarant, an expert in cyber-hate at the University of West Bohemia, anti-Semitism on the Czech Internet, once chiefly a staple of neo-Nazi websites but now also part of the arsenal of more general conspiracy theorists, has recently specialized in resuscitating more ancient tropes in order to “explain” current events.

Two Israeli celebrations in recent days underscore the uniqueness and heroism of the Jewish state, while highlighting the concerted effort on the part of its enemies to undermine and delegitimize it.

The first was Gay Pride Week, which culminated in a massive parade in Tel Aviv. The second was the anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem, capped off by a flag march through the streets of the Old City.

Though unrelated in content and focus, what these annual events have in common is their misrepresentation by ill-wishers.

Let’s begin with what Israel’s detractors concocted to counter the consensus, revealed in numerous tourist and other surveys, that Tel Aviv is among the most LGBT-friendly cities in the world. Coming up with the clever catch-phrase “pinkwashing,” left-wing activists accuse Israel of flaunting its gay-rights record so as to obfuscate its abuse of the Palestinians, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Never mind that such Palestinians sneak into Israel, where they can be free to be who they are without fear of rejection or slaughter for their sexual preferences. All one has to do to cast aspersion on the Jewish state is spread lies. It’s an effective propaganda tool, which works like a charm — though in this case, the fun that is had by all during Pride Week appears to trump the mud-slinging.

When it comes to marking the reunification of Israel’s capital 49 years ago, the lies are even more pronounced, as they have had many more years to take hold in the hearts and minds of people who don’t know any better, not to mention many whose motives are impure.

Former NSA head Michael Hayden recently joined a chorus of Trump’s critics blasting him for offending Muslims. “The jihadist narrative is that there is undying enmity between Islam and the modern world, so when Trump says they all hate us, he’s using their narrative,” he said.

That’s true. It’s also meaningless because in this case the narrative is reality.

Jihadists do hate us. Islam has viewed the rest of the world with undying enmity for over a thousand years. Some might quibble over whether a 7th century obsession really counts as “undying”, but it’s a whole lot older than Hayden, the United States of America, our entire language and much of our civilization.

Islam divides the world into the Dar Al-Islam and the Dar Al-Harb, the House of Islam and the House of War. This is not just the jihadist narrative, it is the Islamic narrative and we would be fools to ignore it.

The White House is extremely fond of narratives. The past month featured Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy guru, taking a victory lap for successfully pushing his “narrative” on the Iran deal. Rhodes takes pride in his narratives. His media allies love narratives. But none of the narratives change the fact that Iran is moving closer to getting a nuclear bomb. Narratives don’t change reality. They’re a delusion.

Narratives only work on the people you fool. They don’t remove the underlying danger. All they do is postpone the ultimate recognition of the problem with catastrophic results.

Islamic terrorism is a reality. Erase all the narratives and the fact of its existence remains.

Instead of fighting a war against the reality of Islamic terrorism, our leaders have chosen to fight a war against reality. They don’t have a plan for defeating Islamic terrorism, but for defeating reality.

The day after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the new nation was invaded from all sides by Arab armies. That failed. So humiliated Arab governments turned on their own Jewish citizens to exact the revenge they had publically promised: confiscation of assets, denaturalization, and finally expulsion to the new state of Israel as a demographic time bomb. Iraq was the model. Here’s how they did it.

On July 19, 1948, Iraq amended Law 51 against anarchy, immorality, and communism, adding the word “Zionism.” Zionism itself now became a crime, punishable by up to seven years in prison. Every Jew was thought to be a Zionist, thereby criminalizing every Jew.

After The Third Reich fell, some 2,000 ex-Nazis escaped to Arab countries to continue the war against the Jews. Soon, the familiar sequence of Nazi-style pauperization began in Baghdad. Jewish businesses were boycotted; their owners were systematically arrested. Their funds dried up

The once genteel and gracious life of Jews in Iraq was about to terminate. Zionist groups stepped up activities. Thanks to big bribes paid to Iranian officials, Iraqi Jews in large numbers were now permitted to transit via Iran, eventually 1,000 per month.

With the escapees went their remnant money and some possessions. Quickly, the rapid subtraction of Jews from the financial, administrative, retail, and export sectors proved devastating to Iraq’s economy. Over 26 centuries, Jews had become essential to the economy. An estimated 130,000 Jews lived in the Iraq of 1949, with about 90,000 residing in Baghdad. Jewish firms transacted 45 percent of the exports and nearly 75 percent of the imports.

The Obama presidency has been among the worst in American history but will the disaster be remembered? No easy task, given the Left’s cultural domination. Conceivably, in a few decades millions of youngsters might well learn that our first African-American president was a hero who wonderfully uplifted America.

To overcome this awaiting beatification, let me suggest a Washington DC museum cataloging his ineptitude. Here grade-schoolers on class trips and other visitors could listen to his error-filled speech celebrating Islam’s contribution American life or learn how with only a pen and phone he rewrote the U.S. Constitution.

Especially prominent will be a spacious Policy Wing exhibiting his countless ill-advised schemes, everything from ObamaCare to the transgendered bathroom fiasco. But, with so many possibilities, it is not easy to pick the worst but let me nominate one candidate: a recent White House directive that requires colleges and universities to cease asking applicants about their school disciplinary and criminal past since minorities (i.e., African Americans) are more likely to be “justice involved individuals.” The aim is to remove “barriers” to college (actually, at Colorado College a criminal past may be judged a plus in the admission process).

College admission officers are further being asked to ignore academic dishonesty, e.g., cheating on exams, plagiarism, because here, too, offenders are disproportionately minorities. These criminal encounters, moreover, are not necessarily indicators of flawed character — they could easily be a result of racial profiling, stereotyping, and similar biases. Once admitted, these students will receive extra counseling and legal advice plus coaching to assure a smooth transition to graduation. In fact, so pressing is America’s need for minority college graduates that the White House missive suggests universities dispatch recruiters to jails to ferret out college applicants.

Clearly, White House experts now have a novel and mind-boggling view of fighting crime. To wit, sending former miscreants to college will push them away from crime, so punishing them can only increase crime since colleges will reject those with a criminal record. That is, the greater the retribution the more the crime. So, according to the new logic, if Michael Brown were not incarcerated for stealing a box of Philly Blunts, he would be more likely to be admitted to college and with diploma in hand, live a crime-free life.

Whether a specific miscreant will benefit from this non-punitive policy is indisputable, but what about his neighbors who do not commit crimes? Tough luck. A more plausible argument is that swapping college for prison will only boost crime in largely black neighborhoods and predominantly black schools. In other words, Obama has it backwards.

The New York Times does its lucrative part at taxpayer expense.http://spectator.org/delegitimizing-israel-in-our-classrooms/

The New York Times Upfront magazine, distributed by paid subscription to approximately 1 million American 8th to 12th graders, recently included an article, “How the Middle East Got that Way.” Author Joseph Berger, former Times reporter, blames the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 for the current mess in the Middle East.

In his view, “a century ago, two diplomats carved out lines on the Middle East map, creating new nations and sowing the seeds for much of the strife in the region today.”

Referring to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Berger tells students, “Most Arabs opposed the Zionist movement, which called for a Jewish state in Palestine. But world pressure to create a Jewish homeland increased after World War II… because 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.”

The article emphasizes that Western imperialism created the Arab-Israeli conflict because Sykes (British) and Picot (French) disregarded the wishes and rights of the indigenous Arab population and, Berger writes, “Arab leaders were angry” and “felt betrayed.”

The article continues, “In 1947, Britain, with approval from the United Nations, came up with a partition plan (to) create the nations of Israel and Palestine…. The Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries rejected it… (and) fought an unsuccessful war…. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel expanded territory…by capturing lands where many Palestinians were living…. The occupied Palestinians continue to demand a state of their own.”

Reading this description of historical events, young students, with little pre-existing knowledge about the topic, have no idea why the Jews would want a nation-state in the Middle East, which Berger characterizes as “Arab.” The author portrays the Arabs as victims of Western domination, legitimizing their 1948 rejection of a Jewish state and their subsequent war against newly declared Israel.

Mention history and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.

Add the Middle East to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.

But without an understanding of what happened in the past, it’s impossible to grasp where we are today — and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.

Forty-nine years ago this month, the Six-Day War broke out.

While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved.

Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely consider, or perhaps are even unaware of, context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.

First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn’t exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.

Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they desecrated and destroyed many of those sites.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.

And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.

Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn’t. There wasn’t even discussion about it. And Arab leaders, who today profess such attachment to eastern Jerusalem, rarely, if ever, visited. It was viewed as an Arab backwater.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israel’s first re-transplanted kidney. Israeli surgeons at Beilinson Hospital took out the kidney of a woman who had died of a stroke and transplanted it into her brother. The kidney had been transplanted into the woman in an operation nine years previously. It was the world’s fifth such operation and the first between relatives.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/212939#.V0scRb4bN30

The end to monthly cramps. Israel’s Livia has developed a wearable device that provides instant relief from cramps, and lasts up to 15 hours on a single charge. The device uses electrical pulses to block pain receptors. Female journalists given a free Livia device have described it as “a life-changing technology”.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-israeli-invention-that-reverses-the-curse-of-eve/

Israeli herb extract controls blood sugar levels. Israel’s Frutarom has developed Portusana®, an extract of the herb purslane. Israeli scientists have confirmed its positive effects on blood sugar levels in adults with Type 2 Diabetes. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26854844 http://www.portusana.com/health-benefits/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KENZRUpeAds

Autoimmune treatment gets new lease of life. Professor Nathan Karin of the Rappaport faculty of Medicine at Israel’s Technion Institute invented an antibody that activates cells in the immune system, thereby reducing inflammation. After years of development, Pfizer has now signed an agreement to commercialize the product.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-pfizer-buys-rights-to-biorap-autoimmune-drug-1001128916

US boost for proton beam cancer treatment. Israel’s HIL Applied Medical develops safer focused proton beam lasers to treat tumors (see Sep 2014 newsletter) Now HIL has acquired US company Nanolabz which develops and builds smart nano-engineered targets and alignment systems for the short-pulse laser R&D sector.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-hil-applied-medical-acquires-nanolabz-1001128814

Research into 3D organ printing. Israel’s Chief Scientist has awarded NIS 5.6 million to Israel’s Collplant. It will help finance projects, including the development of plant-based collagen and formulations intended for use as BioInk for 3D printing of tissues and organs.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-collplant-awarded-bio-ink-grant-for-3d-organ-tissue-printing-1001128604

State of the Heart conference. (TY TPS) International researchers and healthcare professionals attended a conference dubbed “State of the Heart.” at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. It addressed global challenges in cardiovascular treatment and highlighted innovative changes in the field as a result of cutting-edge technology.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/state-of-the-heart-israeli-medical-conference-highlights-cardiovascular-advancements/2016/06/03/

Medical tourism showcased in China. (TY Dan) The Israel Chamber of Commerce hosted a special seminar titled Israeli Medical Tourism and Women Empowerment at the Israeli Business and Cultural Center in Beijing. China is impressed with Israel’s physicians, its high-quality healthcare, and advanced medical facilities.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/985786.shtml

Israel’s BioMed Conference. (TY Dan) Israel’s NeuroRx won the startup completion at the IATI Biomed conference in Tel Aviv for its Cuclurad treatment for depression and suicide symptoms. The popular event included some 500 Business to Business meetings between Israeli and Chinese delegates.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160527005297/en/NeuroRx-Wins-Startup-Competition-IATI-Biomed-2016-Israel%E2%80%99s http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stories/422278/500-china-israeli-b2b-meetings-held-during-israeli-biomed-conference.html