RUTHFULLY YOURS

The true story behind yet another ‘extreme weather event’By Sierra Rayne

As the capital of Canada’s oil sands, Fort McMurray, burns to the ground in a massive forest fire, out come the commentators talking about climate change.

At the National Post, Jen Gerson writes the following:

All that said, it sure doesn’t seem at all implausible that the Fort McMurray fire was caused or, at least, exacerbated by climate change. I mean, come on. It’s 30C in early May. We had no winter. There’s little snow on the mountains. The Bow River never froze. For goodness’ sake, there were rafters on it as if it were high summer over the weekend.

As for the Bow River apparently never freezing, and the rafters on it last weekend, we can ignore that comment, since the Bow River passes through Calgary in the southern end of the province, literally 440 miles south of Fort McMurray. Calgary’s average temperatures in January are a full 10°C warmer than those in Fort Mac, as they call it.

Gerson argues that she will “unpack the thing that has been made unmentionable by those who wish to remain sensitive to Fort Mac’s plight: climate change. Here will be the required caveats; one cannot link any single extreme weather event to climate change.”

Single extreme weather event? Since when is a forest fire an “extreme weather event”? What exactly is that single extreme weather event that took place recently in Fort McMurray?

Is it that “[i]t’s 30C in early May”? Indeed, it did get above 30 C on Tuesday in Fort Mac.

I mean, come on – like that has never happened before. Such as on May 3, 1937 (31.7 C), or May 4, 1944 (33.3 C), or May 2, 1980 (30.6 C), or May 7, 1987 (30.8 C)…or what about April 29, 1980 (30.2 C)?

There was “no winter” in Fort McMurray this year?

The average temperature this past December was -10.4 C, which isn’t close to a record warm for this month. January came in at -13.9 C. Again, nowhere near a record. February was -9.8 C. Yet again, not in the remote neighborhood of a record. Neither March nor April was especially hot, either. Likely warmer than average, but nowhere near record warm.

Even the winter of 2015-16 average temperature looks to be about 3 C off a record warm. In other words, Fort Mac had a winter this year.

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: “climate refugees.” It’s the new Green racket.

U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on “carbon’s casualties” by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft.

Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $48 million grant to Native-Americans who live in the flood-ravaged coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles. About 60 residents, the majority of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, will be resettled to drier land.

That’s a whopping $800,000 per “climate refugee!”

Never mind that the Times’ propagandists themselves admit that erosion on the island began in 1955 as a result of land-use and land-management factors that had nothing to do with climate change.

“Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island,” the paper reported, “and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments.”

A hate crime aimed at black students at Maryland’s Salisbury University has been revealed as just the latest high-profile race-related hoax to hit the groves of academe in the race-obsessed Obama era.

Except for acknowledging that the two perpetrators are African-American students at the school that is located on the Delmarva Peninsula in eastern Maryland, the university is engaged in a cover-up. If the perpetrators were white, a cynic might say that the school would find a way to leak out the pertinent details in order to make a political statement.

Of course, there certainly are racist incidents on university campuses, but blacks are rarely the targets or the victims. Blacks are more likely to be the instigators or beneficiaries of racist acts. Racially discriminatory admissions policies are a kind of reverse apartheid and part of what David Horowitz has termed “black privilege.” Such policies help unqualified African-Americans get into some institutions of higher learning, while keeping academically qualified Caucasians and Asians out.

As Americans have seen in the Obama era, the cultish, Democrat-endorsed Black Lives Matter movement, whose members openly urge the murder of cops, is built on the Big Lie that police routinely use black Americans for target practice. This evil movement draws many of its activists from college and university campuses.

This makes sense. The academy is a logical enough home for modern-day racists, especially those with dark skin, a condition that makes them more or less immune to serious scrutiny. In the professorate there is no shortage of supporters of racist cop-killing black radicals like Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur.

The universities are filled with pseudo-intellectual black academics like Kwanzaa inventor Maulana Karenga, Marc Lamont Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West, as well as malevolent radicals like Angela Davis, Julianne Malveaux, black liberation theology creator James Cone, and Obama’s late legal mentor and critical race theory originator Derrick Bell. They, along with plenty of pseudo-intellectual radical white academics, consider it their life’s mission to indoctrinate students in order to eventually force unwanted change on American society.

The troubles of this carbon-plagued world weigh heavily on Leonardo DiCaprio, who uses every tool at his disposal to save the planet from global warming — tools that mostly consist of CO2-spewing private jets, jumbo yachts, energy-gobbling private palaces and his own hot air.
Don’t tell my wife but I’ve had a man-crush on Leonardo DiCaprio. At this bit in Titanic, I just couldn’t take my eyes off him:

Kate: Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls. Wearing this…
Leo: All right.
Kate: Wearing only this….

But now my man-crush for Leo is over. If I could live my life again, I’d be kinder to my mother, but I wouldn’t see Titanic.

My about-turn came after reading DiCaprio’s speech to the UN gabfest on April 22 pledging more gabfests. He doesn’t just talk about warming’s armageddon. He wants you and me to catch a bus, while he gets around on his private jets and mega-yachts. And the media reports his frothings in a reverential way, as if he were the Dalai Lama or Gillian Triggs.

At the UN he conflated 19th century slavery in the US with current global warming (under 1degC in the past 100 years) as “the defining crisis of our time… a runaway freight train bringing with it an impending disaster for all living things.” Quoting Abraham Lincoln, he concluded:

“The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation… We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. That is our charge now – you are the last best hope of Earth. We ask you to protect it. Or we – and all living things we cherish – are history.”

Two years ago, Ban Ki-Moon appointed DiCaprio as the UN’s climate-change Messenger for Peace, saying, “Mr. DiCaprio is a credible voice in the environmental movement. I am pleased he has chosen to add his voice to UN efforts to raise awareness of the urgency and benefits of acting now to combat climate change.”

Six months later, DiCaprio was paparazzi’d lounging between parties at Cannes on his 140-metre superyacht, Rising Sun, borrowed from Dreamworks Studio co-founder David Geffen. It’s the 11th largest yacht in the world, cost $US200m, takes a crew of 45 and runs on 48,000 horsepower-worth of diesels.

As events of recent days make clear, an ideological cancer continues to grow on the political left across the West: an obsession with Israel that morphs into anti-Zionism and, yes, at times even anti-Semitism.

The cancer is particularly acute within Great Britain’s Labour Party. But it’s infecting America’s left as well, with Bernie Sanders downplaying Israel’s security challenges and exaggerating Palestinian suffering while a top aide lashes out at Israel in vile terms.

Depending on the prospects of progressive parties across the West in the coming years, this cancer has profound implications for the foreign policy of the U.S. and its allies as well as for the global standing of Israel – which, as its critics often ignore, remains the lone democracy in the world’s most turbulent region.

U.S. or European governments under certain leftist elements could revisit longstanding Western ties to Israel, feel less compelled to protect the Jewish state at the United Nations and other global bodies and prove less helpful as Israel’s supporters fight efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.

To be sure, anti-Israeli hostility is not confined to the left. The extreme right, which is making political inroads particularly in Europe, has long offered its own ugly mix of Israel-bashing, Jew-hating or both.

There’s a cancer growing at the World Health Organization (WHO), and it happens to be their very own cancer agency.

IARC — the International Agency for Research on Cancer — is under the purview of WHO and tasked with classifying whether certain foods, chemicals, and lifestyle choices cause cancer. Of the nearly 1,000 hazards IARC has reviewed, only one (caprolactam) has been deemed non-carcinogenic. But one recent decision is raising suspicions that the agency is more of an activist group than a scientific one.

In March 2015, IARC surprised the international regulatory and scientific community by classifying the widely used herbicide glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic.” Because it is extensively used with crops that have been genetically modified, anti-GMO and environmental groups have long had glyphosate in their crosshairs (mostly because the herbicide is sold by their bête noire, Monsanto, and marketed here as Roundup), and they cheered IARC’s decision. Over the past year, the glyphosate-causes-cancer story has been repeated by the media, environmental NGOs, and pro-GMO labeling groups to promote the false narrative that GMOs are unsafe (although glyphosate is also used in non-GM farming).

The ruling contradicted most analyses of glyphosate, which is widely viewed as the aspirin of weed killers, hugely beneficial with few risks. It massively improves crop yields while largely eliminating the need for tillage, thereby slashing carbon dioxide emissions and soil erosion. Thousands of highly regarded studies demonstrate its lack of cancer-causing potential, and official reviews by government regulatory agencies around the world and in the U.S. have universally determined that it is safe for humans.

(In an interesting twist, over the weekend, the EPA posted a report labeled “final” from its own cancer-review committee that found glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” The report, dated October 2015, strongly questioned IARC’s flawed process. Late Monday, the agency pulled the report from its website, saying it had been inadvertently posted. “The documents are still in development,” the EPA told us. “Our assessment will be peer-reviewed and completed by the end of 2016.”)

Across the pond, some agencies are challenging IARC head-on. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), a scientific review body of the European Union, also examined IARC’s claims and determined that glyphosate was probably not carcinogenic. EFSA charged that IARC had ignored the vast number of higher-quality studies that issued glyphosate a clean bill of health, and that it had focused on a handful of cherry-picked studies.

Then details about the IARC’s process started to come to light. A key person behind IARC’s move was an American environmental activist, Christopher Portier. IARC insiders quietly inserted him as the technical adviser to the agency’s glyphosate-review panel (he also served on the advisory panel that recommended a review of glyphosate the year prior). The agency did not reveal that Portier had a massive conflict of interest: His employer is the Environmental Defense Fund, a group well known for its opposition to GMOs and pesticides.

Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi, who held the April UN Security Council presidency, announced last week that the status of the Golan Heights “remains unchanged.” That is, of course, true — like the old “Saturday Night Live” running gag, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

He meant it belongs to Syria, and he was responding to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told a meeting of the Israeli Cabinet on the Golan, “The Golan Heights have been an integral part of the land of Israel since ancient times; the dozens of ancient synagogues in the area around us attest to that. And the Golan is an integral part of the state of Israel in the new era. I told [Secretary of State John Kerry] that I doubt that Syria will ever return to what it was.”

That is, of course, also true and entirely unremarkable. But thus begins another round of UN condemnation of Israel resting on silly propositions. In this case:

That Syria — ruled by a war criminal in the midst of a civil war with other groups that include war criminals — has a valid claim to anything; and
That Israel is wrong because the UN is miffed.

A bit of relatively recent history is useful here.

An Israeli was raised in the Galilee sleeping every night in a bunker to avoid Syrian shelling from the Golan Heights — Hamas and Hizb’allah are latecomers to the war crime of indiscriminately firing at civilians. As a child, he helped on the family farm. While riding the tractor, his father couldn’t hear the mortars fired by the Syrians down into the fields. The child’s job was to be within eyesight of the tractor along the edge of the field near some trees. When the mortars began, he would wave a large red flag to catch his father’s attention, at which his father would slip off the tractor and hasten for shelter. Not exactly milking the cow.

The internecine strife in Fatah no longer appears restricted to the loyalists of Dahlan and Abbas. It is threatening to erupt into an all-out war between contesting camps. Some Palestinians see the internal strife as the most serious challenge to Abbas’s rule over Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, especially in wake of growing criticism among Palestinians against Abbas’s policies and autocratic regime.

The criticism has escalated following last week’s humiliating defeat of Fatah to Hamas at the student council election of Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah.

Hamas is thriving on the mayhem among the top brass of Fatah and disgust with Abbas and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. Rather than striving to improve the lives of Palestinians, Fatah leaders spend their time playing at being gangsters, settling scores. Meanwhile Abbas continues his charade of lies with the international community that he and his Fatah faction are ready for a sovereign state.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction is supposed to be preparing its people for statehood. But it seems to be busy with other business.

According to sources in the Gaza Strip, Hamas security forces recently uncovered a scheme to assassinate a number of senior Fatah officials living there.

The sources claimed that ousted Fatah operative Mohamed Dahlan, who has been living in the United Arab Emirates for the past five years, was the mastermind of the alleged scheme. Dahlan’s men in the Gaza Strip were planning to assassinate Fatah officials closely associated with his rival, Abbas, the sources revealed.

Dahlan’s hit list included Ahmed Abu Nasr, Jamal Kayed, Emad al-Agha and Mamoun Sweidan.

After the alleged plot was uncovered, Hamas summoned a number of top Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip and asked them to take precautionary measures to ensure their safety.

Abbas and Dahlan have, for the past five years, been at each other’s throats. The two were once close allies and had worked together to undermine the former Palestinian Authority president, Yasser Arafat.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 elicited euphoria among world Zionists. It was to be short lived as a chain of betrayals truncated the land promised to the Jews and limited their immigration.

The 1922 White Paper (also known as the Churchill White Paper) averred that Jews were in Palestine by right, but bowing to Arab pressure, ceded 76 percent –all the land East of the Jordan River–to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah. It was renamed Transjordan, and closed to Jewish settlement. In explanation the British stated:

“England…does not want Palestine to become ‘as Jewish as England is English’, but, rather, should become ‘a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’” (Ironically today Israel is poised to become more Jewish than England is English given the very real prospect that Muslims will become a majority in that nation.)

The Jews of Palestine had no choice but to accept the partition of 1922, but Arab thirst for all of Palestine resulted in murders and terrorist attacks, the Hebron massacre of 1929 and later the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt.” The British responded with the White Paper of 1939 all but eliminating Jewish immigration to Palestine. This occurred after the infamous Evian conference of July 1938. With the exception of the Dominican Republic, all the participants refused to alter their immigration policies, thereby trapping Europe’s Jews. The Nazis were to kill one of every three Jews in the world.

In 1982, Sir Harold Wilson, who had been a member of Clement Attlee’s Cabinet when Israel became independent in 1948 and served as Prime Minister during the Six-Day War, wrote The Chariot of Israel-Britain, America and the State of Israel in which he described the British actions in 1939 as shameful and inexcusable.

After World War II the British continued their appalling anti-Jewish immigration policies, seizing and firing upon the vessels taking traumatized Holocaust survivors to Palestine.

However, the Jews of Palestine began a sustained effort to push the British out of Palestine and in February 1947 Britain announced its intent to terminate the Mandate, referring the matter of Palestine to the United Nations.

In May of that year the United Nations Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP) began deliberations on a “solution” to the Palestine “problem.”

These deliberations included an UNSCOP mission to examine the state of surviving Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe. The members were horrified by the conditions, but cynical enough to exploit the desperation of the refugees by deciding on a further partition of Palestine.

On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions) to implement the new partition as Resolution 181. Absent in all the media hailing of the “compromise” was any mention that the Jews of Palestine had already relinquished 75 percent of the area promised in the Balfour Declaration. Media and diplomats alike would declare that the Jews were gaining 53% of “Palestine” when in fact they were left with roughly 12 percent.

Thus, the 25 percent of Palestine left to the Jews for a homeland in 1922 was now to be divided as follows:

What is perhaps most conspicuous about the growth of anti-Semitism on the European Left, as exemplified by the current crisis in the British Labour Party, is that it is rising at a time when Europe should be busy with much more pressing issues, such as national security — particularly in London, where the terrorist threat keeps growing and security officials can barely keep up.

It has been less than two months since Islamic terrorists successfully targeted the Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station, killing 32 people and wounding many more. And it has been only half a year since the Paris attacks, in which Islamic terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 400. These were groundbreaking, shocking events in the history of Islamic terrorism on European soil, so one would naturally assume that Israel and Jews in general, who make up such a marginal demographic group, constituting less than half a percent of the population of the EU, would be the last thing on European politicians’ minds. Another enormous immigration crisis looms, as 800,000 migrants, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Europe will most likely be facing even more chaos than it did last summer.

However, European politicians, instead of busying themselves with protecting their citizens from future terrorist attacks — as well as preventing another chaotic summer of migration chaos — incredibly find time to get mired in sordid squabbles about insane ideas of transferring Israeli Jews to the United States and claiming Hitler was a Zionist — as we saw in the U.K. — or composing elaborate peace conference initiatives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — as we saw in France. If I were a European citizen, I would wonder why my government was occupying itself with these issues, which have no vital meaning to any Europeans, at a time when Europe is facing unprecedented security threats.