RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today, Earth Day, President Obama will attach America’s name to the Paris Climate Agreement. Greatly affected, according to gushing accounts in the press, will be the president’s “legacy.” Unaffected, according to math, will be the threat of climate change. And left holding the bill, as seems to happen with each new acquisition for the Obama presidential library, will be the American people.

The agreement’s uselessness stems from its negotiating structure. Each country submitted a pledge of climate action, each pledge was accepted without question, and the sum of those pledges became the deal. Doe-eyed diplomats at the United Nations envisioned this process creating an “upward spiral of ambition,” as they phrased it during the 2014 Bonn Climate Conference. But the major developing countries, whose rapidly rising greenhouse-gas emissions are the driving force behind fears of climate change, care more about economic growth for their impoverished populations. So, as I wrote at National Review Online in December, they submitted pledges to continue with business as usual.

China pledged that its emissions would peak “around 2030,” precisely when the U.S. government’s national laboratory had already estimated the peak would occur. India’s pledge amounted to a slowdown from its current rate of progress. Pakistan said simply that it would “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible,” which offers nothing beyond a definition of the word “peak.”

Unsurprisingly, the sum of many pledges to do nothing is: nothing. When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compiled the pledges and compared them with its own preexisting projection, it found a temperature reduction by 2100 of only 0.2°C. When the analysts compared the pledges with the projection created by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000, they found no improvement at all.

The announcement by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault that France will host a meeting of ministers from 20 countries in Paris on May 30 to try and relaunch the Israel-Palestinian peace process seems to be yet another flight of fancy that is destined to end up where the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap presently find themselves after decades of fruitless negotiations.

Who those 20 countries are that will attend such a meeting will make fascinating reading.

The other 173 member States of the United Nations should be miffed at not being invited to enjoy the sights, sounds, food and wine of Paris as it seeks to put behind it:

1. The devastating Islamic terrorist attack on 13 November last that claimed the lives of 130 people and wounded 352 others.

2. The assault on a police station on 7 January last by a jihadist wearing a fake explosive belt attacking police officers with a meat cleaver while shouting “Allahu Akbar”. He was shot dead and one policeman was injured. The ISIS flag and a clearly written claim in Arabic, were found on the attacker.

Ayrault said the conference aimed to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016 which would include the Israeli and Palestinian leaders – acknowledging that:

“The two sides are further apart than ever”

On April 8, the FDA announced it was launching legal action to remove Carbadox from the marketplace. Carbadox is an antibiotic that has been safely used by veterinarians and pig producers for more than 40 years and is very effective for controlling bacterial diseases, including salmonella and swine dysentery. By helping pigs stay healthier, Carbadox also helps improve feed efficiency and weight gain. In fact, according to a 2012 USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service report, this antibiotic is used by more than 40 percent of pig nurseries in the United States. It is one of the few antibiotics considered by swine veterinarians to be critically essential for the health and welfare of growing pigs.

Sadly, the FDA’s move is another example of a growing stream of executive actions by federal agencies succumbing to political and ideological agendas, including animal-rights activism, and turning against the longstanding tradition of sound, evidence-based science. Scientific and agricultural professionals are left to speak out and give the public factual information they can trust.

The FDA’s action is not about safety or protecting the health of people or pigs, and these growing attacks on the agricultural industry and food producers will have devastating costs to people and to our food supply.

The FDA press release revealed that the agency has been harassing the maker of Carbadox to prove that there is no potential risk to people who eat pork from pigs that have been given its antibiotic. The FDA says it is taking this latest action in response to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization and its Codex Alimentarius Commission, which recently determined that “there is no safe level of residues of Carbadox in food that represents an acceptable risk to consumers.”

Those who understand science will immediately identify the fallacy at work here. The instant we hear that “there is no safe level of exposure” to something, it’s a baloney alert that we’re being given junk science. Virtually everything can cause tumors in laboratory rats when administered in toxic doses. In fact, everything in life — from salt to sunlight — can be harmful in excessive amounts. But, that doesn’t mean we cannot safely enjoy them; they might even be essential for our survival. There is no such thing as “no safe level of exposure.” Remember, the dose makes the poison. Even water is deadly in excessive amounts. Medicine and poisons are just opposite ends of the spectrum of the science of toxicology (the Greek word pharmakon means both “remedy” and “poison”).

This Friday (Earth Day and Lenin’s Birthday) President Obama will sign the Paris Agreement, supposedly to control global climate. Last week, the attorney general of a tax shelter – the US Virgin Islands — subpoenaed the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This was part of a campaign to intimidate climate realists and to shake down, and possibly shut down, the energy industry. The campaign was launched by a number of Democrat Attorneys General and Al Gore, colluding with trial lawyers and other special interests, under the guise of investigating ExxonMobil. As bizarre as these moves are, they are just an escalation of 30 years of persecuting distinguished scientists who disagreed with Al Gore’s climate change fantasies.

Scientific research is supported by private industry, governments, universities (largely government dependent) or some combination of the three. Before Gore’s tenure as vice president, the majority of scientists with some knowledge of the subject firmly rejected climate alarmism. During his two terms almost in the White House, Al Gore and the academic liberals executed a quiet purge. They packed the scientific establishment with environmentalists, defunded inconvenient research fields, removed distinguished scientists, and bullied others into silence or equivocation. Huge budgets allocated to climate studies (even before Gore) produced hordes of worthless PhDs, incapable of making a living outside of climate alarmism. But a large segment of scientists and professionals versed in science are independent in a free society, deriving their income from private business. Al Gore and other climate alarmists had a problem.

“Saleh bin Humaid is considered a relative moderate within the kingdom’s religious establishment. But some of the messages even he has articulated are deeply intolerant by U.S. standards. He has, for example, proclaimed that it is the Jewish people’s “nature” to “plot against the peoples of the world, permit usury, promote immorality and unlawfully eat people’s wealth.” In March, he called for a judgment-day reckoning that would “break the cross” of Christianity and reimpose the jizya, a tax that subordinates non-Muslims as second-class citizens.

The day President Obama arrived in Saudi Arabia on a 2014 trip, Saleh bin Humaid delivered a sermon at the Grand Mosque–printed by the official state newswire–with pronouncements including that homosexuality “strips man of his humanity” and makes human beings “lower than beasts.” Last week he ended his Friday sermon at the Grand Mosque with a prayer for divine intervention against the “usurper, occupier Jews.”

President Barack Obama’s meeting Wednesday with King Salman of Saudi Arabia is to be followed by a summit Thursday with the Arab Gulf monarchs to discuss cooperation against terrorism and other regional threats. Central to these efforts is a pledge the Saudis and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council made in 2014 to help combat Islamic State by repudiating the ideology underpinning violent extremist groups. U.S. officials have reason to question Riyadh’s commitment.

Under King Salman, Saudi Arabia has announced some restrictions on its religious police, who enforce–sometimes with brutal force–morality laws such as dress codes and gender segregation. Yet the government in Riyadh continues to embrace and promote clerics who espouse views that would disturb many in the U.S.

King Salman personally handed a prominent foundation’s award for “service to Islam” last month to Saleh bin Humaid, a member of the top state council of religious preachers. A former head of the top Saudi judicial body, the cleric is an imam at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam.

Mr. Shields is an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Mr. Dunn is an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. They are the authors of “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University” (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Everyone knows that academia is predominantly liberal: Only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences are Republicans, according to a 2007 study. But what is life like for the pioneering conservatives who slip through the ivory tower’s gates? We decided to find out by interviewing 153 of them.

Many conservative professors said they felt socially isolated. A political scientist told us that he became a local pariah for defending the Iraq war in his New England college town, which he called “Cuba with bad weather.” One sociologist stated the problem well: “To say a strong conservative political opinion with conviction in an academic gathering is analogous to uttering an obscenity.” A prominent social scientist at a major research university spoke of the strain of concealing his political views from his colleagues—of “lying to people all the time.”

Some even said that bias had complicated their career advancement. A historian of Latin America told us that he suffered professionally after writing a dissertation on “middle-class white guys” when it was fashionable to focus on the “agency of subaltern peoples.” Though he doesn’t think the work branded him as a conservative, it certainly didn’t excite the intellectual interest of his peers.

A similarly retrograde literature professor sought advice from a colleague after struggling to land a tenure-track job. He was told that he had “a nice resume for 1940.” As Neil Gross has shown, liberal professors often believe that conservatives are closed-minded. If you got to choose your colleagues, would you hire someone you thought fit that description?

Yet the professors we spoke to were surprisingly sympathetic toward their liberal colleagues. “The majority always thinks it’s treating the minority well,” said the tormented social scientist mentioned above. “That’s a basic psychological trick we all play on ourselves.” Reflecting on bias in the peer-review process, a sociologist told us: “I don’t think there is conscious bad faith going on. I think when people read things they wish to politically sympathize with, it adds brightness points.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Last month, UNESCO’s director general Irina Bokova issued a statement congratulating Russian- backed Syrian forces for liberating the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State (ISIS).

Bokova said Palmyra “carries the memory of the Syrian people, and the values of cultural diversity, tolerance and openness that have made this region a cradle of civilization.”

Bokova added, “The deliberate destruction of heritage is a war crime, and UNESCO will do everything in its power to document the damage so that these crimes do not go unpunished. I wish to remind all parties present of the absolute necessity to preserve this unique heritage as an essential condition for peace and the future of the region.”

Last week, UNESCO’s executive board passed a resolution unanimously outlining the steps the organization would take to rebuild the devastated site, whose major monuments were destroyed or damaged during the city’s 10 months under ISIS rule.

All of this, is all very well and nice.

The problem is that UNESCO commits the very crimes for which it condemns ISIS. Indeed, it committed the crime of seeking to wipe out history, whose preservation is “an essential condition for peace and the future of the region,” the day it passed its resolution on Palmyra.

Right after UNESCO’s board unanimously passed its resolution on Palmyra, it also passed a resolution whose goal is to erase Jewish history in the land of Israel.

The resolution, titled merely “Occupied Palestine,” (a country that doesn’t even exist), defined the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, as an exclusively Muslim site. Jews who visit it were referred to derisively as “right wing extremists.”

The Western Wall, Judaism’s second holiest site, was similarly referred to as an exclusively Islamic site.

The resolution reinstated a previous resolution’s false claim that the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people in Hebron and Bethlehem are mosques. The resolution, like the one from last week, was also a war crime, where UNESCO acted with malice to destroy the historical record.

In another act of cultural aggression, whose goal is to destroy the historical record, in last week’s resolution UNESCO falsely and maliciously referred to Jewish cemeteries as “fake graves,” in “Muslim cemeteries.”

And if that weren’t enough, UNESCO denounced Israel for the “conversion of many Islamic and Byzantine remains into so-called Jewish ritual baths or into Jewish prayer places.”

UNESCO’s acts are not the ravings of lunatic extremists or genocidal imperialists shouting about caliphates, crucifying and enslaving innocents. The latest resolution was sponsored by supposedly moderate Islamic countries, two of which – Jordan and Egypt – have peace treaties with Israel.

Support for the resolution wasn’t limited to Islamic countries voting as a bloc. France, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia, India, Russia and Argentina were among the nations who voted in favor of a decision that referred to the Western Wall in scare quotes.

The US sits on UNESCO’s executive board despite its open anti-Semitism. By doing so, the US grants legitimacy to a body which is waging a culture war against Israel no less determined – and arguably no less criminal– than ISIS’s war against all vestiges of non-jihadist culture in Syria, Iraq and throughout the world.

In the first-ever visit by a Singaporean prime minister to Israel, the city-state’s current premier thanked Israel for “[helping] us and [standing] by us at our time of great need,” The Jerusalem Post reported on Monday.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made his remarks as he received an honorary doctorate at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The specific reference was to Israel’s assistance in the creation of the Singapore Armed Forces after the island nation unexpectedly achieved independence in August 1965. “We asked a number of countries, but only Israel responded to us, and it did so very promptly,” Lee explained. “Without the IDF, the SAF could not have grown its capabilities, deterred threats, defended our island, and reassured Singaporeans and investors that Singapore was secure and had a future.”

Lee was accompanied by his wife Ho Ching and a 60-person delegation, which included two government ministers.

Israel and Singapore established diplomatic ties in 1969, and the two have become significant trading partners since. Trade between the two nations reached $1.35 billion in 2015, which was greater than trade between Israel and most European Union nations individually.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel has discovered the first Hamas-built tunnel into Israel from the Gaza strip since the end of the 2014 Operation Protective Edge where Israel conducted in incursion into the Strip in order to capture and destroy the tunnel network. Soon after its discovery, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) destroyed the tunnel.

Hamas has constructed a series of tunnels linking the Gaza Strip with the Sinai Peninsula, but there have been few found leading into Israel. This discovery may signify a potential coming conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The discovery of the tunnels should come as no surprise, as Israeli citizens and officialsreported in February that they could hear digging going on under their homes. Israeli military chief of staff reported in February that, “Hamas was investing considerable resources in rebuilding tunnel structures.”

As previously mentioned, this is not the first time Hamas has attempted to enter Israel through the ground. During the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist organization had reportedly able to get eight-tenths of a mile into Israel.

During the 2014 war, Hamas was able to construct up to 31 tunnels. Israel was able to destroy all of them by the end of the war, but this tactic allowed some Hamas fighters to enter the country, killing multiple Israeli soldiers.

Hamas’s military wing, Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, warned of future attacks against Israel, and stated, “This is nothing compared with what we have been preparing for the enemy.” Hamas has been able to launch several attacks since the 2014 war, but their effect has been minimal on Israeli security. If the terrorist organization were to succeeed in reestablishing its tunnel network into Israel, there could force an Israel response similar to the one in 2014.

This column was written nine years ago…..and today a kingdom united in anti-Semitsm in the academies, the media and the popular culture….rsk

ANTI-RACISM is supposed to be one of the guiding principles of our society, preventing discrimination on the grounds of ethnic origin or nationality.

Yet it is a bizarre paradox of modern Britain that there is now a climate of increasing hostility towards Jews, particularly in those Left-wing intellectual circles which otherwise make a fetish of their concern for racial sensitivities. 

Dressed up as criticism of the state of Israel, anti-Semitism is becoming not just tolerated but even fashionable in some of our civic institutions, including the universities and parts of the media.

Thanks to the Left’s neurotic hatred of Israel, we now have the extraordinary sight of self-styled liberal campaigners launching McCarthyite witch-hunts against anyone deemed to have Israeli connections, as in this week’s debate at the University and College Union’s annual conference at Bourne­mouth calling for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. 

It has led to a rise in anti-Semitism in Britain.

Respect for democracy, individual rights and freedom of speech are being crushed beneath the juggernaut of shrill indignation. 

What is particularly disturbing is the way opposition to the Jewish state descends into vicious antagonism against Jews themselves, as shown by this sickening recent outburst from writer Pamela Hardyment, a member of the National Union of Journalists, which in April voted to boycott Israeli goods.

Explaining her support for the NUJ’s stance, Ms Hardyment described Israel as “a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews”. 

Then, like some lunatic from the far-Right, she referred to the “so-called Holocaust” before concluding: “Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.” 

Such words could have come straight from Hitler or the most fervent supporter of Osama Bin Laden.