RUTHFULLY YOURS

We recently attended a lecture sponsored by AACI Netanya. The lecturer was American-Israeli Hank Citron, who divides his time between Manhattan and Netanya. A former history professor in New Jersey, Hank is a colorful character who, among other things, grew up in a Zionist household, the son of European immigrants; attended Hebrew University in the 1950s on a scholarship, after working his way across the Atlantic on a freighter; and boxed professionally to finance his PhD from New York University.

Hank (he and his wife Rebecca are good friends of ours) gave a 1-hour lecture without the need of notes, accompanied by appropriate photos of the life of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940). One of the first, surprising, things we learned about this great leader, little known today outside of Israel, is that there are more monuments and streets in Israel named for him than for Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, or David Ben-Gurion, all of whom are much better known internationally.

Hank put Jabotinsky’s greatest accomplishment into perspective. He reminded us that the Third Jewish Revolt against the Romans, led by the messianic Simon bar Kochba (132-136 CE), resulted in a horrific defeat for the Jews. As a result, Jews renounced armed revolt or self defense as a nation, losing control their homeland. Jabotinsky, singleminded in his devotion to Zionism, was the one who rekindled the idea of a Jewish army in the first decades of the 20th century, the first step back towards Jewish nationhood.

Born in cosmopolitan Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea, Jabotinsky enjoyed a secular upbringing in what was the fourth largest city in Imperial Russia (now within the borders of Ukraine). While his was not a religious family, Jabotinsky was Hebrew-literate from an early age. His wealthy family rejected socialism, so it isn’t surprising that Jabotinsky wasn’t attracted to Social Zionism, the Zionist stream which later was led by his bitter competitor, David Ben-Gurion.

Jabotinsky was very intelligent, a prodigy in fact, who became a linguist and wrote and orated in eight languages. Initially he was inclined towards journalism and the theatre. At age 17 he went to Rome, quickly learned the language and became a journalist there while earning a law degree. Although he had already become an accomplished author and poet, Jabotinsky soon directed his talents to pursuing his Zionist ideals.

The trigger for this change was the 1903 Kishinev massacre, which aroused universal condemnation and protest, precipitating a major emigration of Jews from Russia. Jabotinsky publicized the pogrom worldwide. By that time, he had already joined the Zionist movement and had become recognized as a powerful speaker and leader. At the Sixth (and last) Zionist Congress in 1903, Jabotinsky met Theodor Herzl, whom he greatly admired.

This new special edition of the Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

The discussion focused on Islamic Prayer as Intimidation, analyzing why a Muslim would scream “Allahu Akbar” on an airplane.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/17/islamic-prayer-as-intimidation-on-the-glazov-gang/

Last month, during a panel discussion at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, I made the unexceptionable observation that Bruce Jenner is just a dude in a dress, and the social justice warriors nearly lost their minds.

Music critic Michael Walsh, author of the recent book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, explained how art, as well as conversation, falls victim to political correctness.

“There is no more humor when you cannot make fun of anybody, and Hollywood comedies suffer from that greatly.” He cited the recent and highly-publicized example of Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner coming out as transgender and recalled how a man dressed in a ball gown was played for laughs in Mel Brooks’ film “The Producers.” “Is that Bruce Jenner or is that Mel Brooks comedy? Well, today, could Mel Brooks make that movie?”

But today half the country lives in a fantasy world in which a short white guy can “self-identify” as a tall Chinese woman and no one will tell him he’s mad as a hatter:

The university campus is becoming ever more increasingly hostile to both Jews and Israel. From what I have witnessed and experienced, I believe it is no side effect, but rather part of a deliberate and well planned strategy. We are witnessing an entryist operation.

In March, in the period around ‘Israeli Apartheid week’, I attended an impressive one-day conference at the London School of Economics. It was jointly organised by ‘Olive’, ‘FOSIS’, and ‘Friends of Al Aqsa’. The event, was titled ‘from Johannesburg to Jerusalem’. One of the speakers at the event was Max Blumenthal, who apparently got on stage to create conspiracy theories, compare Israel to ISIS and to praise Hamas.
The university pull factor

During the day, there were two workshops. One that was of particular interest to me, went about explaining how to create and promote BDS campaigns on campus. The strategy was broken down into 7 parts. The most important was persuading your university to create a scholarship for Palestinians. This is what was said:

“The Best people to lead a group or society on campus are Palestinians. There is no one that can articulate better to you the realities of occupation and who can make that argument better than Palestinians. To get Palestinians on campus, from the Gaza Strip, from the West Bank and from Israel what you need is to convince your university in setting up scholarships. Right, and that requires lobbying, and that requires organising and actually that can also come in the form of fundraising every year.

At Sheffield we get a fee waiver ever year on a Palestinian student. Right, and then we have to fundraise for accommodation and living. Although actually now the university pay for that as well, but originally we had to. But what that actually meant was you could build up long relationships with academics who pay standing orders and other things and you build up a network of individuals for contributing towards your scholarship”

So that is the ‘pull’ factor. I am sure that when they lobby the university for the scholarship, they plead humanitarian concern. They push the necessity of saving the student from the ‘oppressive and brutal occupation’. In reality they are lobbying to persuade the university to finance their political cause. Whichever way you consider this, people on this side are actively seeking new recruits from ‘Palestine’ to promote BDS. Then asking the university to pay for it.
The university push factor

But I wondered at the time about the ‘push’. Who are these students? A Palestinian student from Gaza who makes the application, is he merely a lucky applicant who is given a life changing opportunity? Or is there a ‘push’ factor, where Palestinian movements have created a network carefully selecting potential candidates, assisting them in their application and training them prior to their departure?

It would be an astonishing miss if this is not the reality. The Palestinian cause on this side is desperate to lobby for the scholarship. They have a specific goal in mind. Are they going to do all this work, go to all this trouble, only to find they end up with a Palestinian who isn’t capable of presenting their case? Consider Gaza, given Hamas has control over the propaganda there. Are Hamas selecting or filtering the applicants? Are our university funds being used to further the Hamas cause?

http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/John-Kerry-Joe-Biden-to-speak-at-J-Street-conference-451435

US Secretary of State John Kerry will deliver remarks at the J Street 2016 National Gala on Monday at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.
Additionally, Vice President Joe Biden will also deliver remarks. This year’s honorees include Ambassador Samuel Kaplan, Ambassador Louis Susman, and Ambassador Alan Solomont.

The diplojerks are:
Samuel Louis Kaplan was United States Ambassador to Morocco. He was appointed ambassador in 2009 by President Barack Obama

Alan D. Solomont is the former United States Ambassador to Spain and Andorra. He was selected for the post by President Barack Obama. Solomont serves on the boards of numerous leftist organizations including The Jewish Fund for Justice, The New Israel Fund, Israel Policy Forum

Louis B. Susman is an American lawyer, retired investment banker, and the former United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Appointed by Obama after the statue of Churchill was returned.

Blood cancer treatment success. Israel’s Gamida Cell reported good results from Duke University trials of its NiCord blood cancer treatment. Compared with 101 patients receiving ordinary umbilical cord blood, the 18 patients using NiCord had a lower mortality rate, less infections and less time in hospital post-transplantation.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-gamida-cell-further-positive-blood-cancer-trial-results-1001115578

More cancer tests. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Rosetta Genomics has made three major additions to its unique molecular diagnostic testing service. They are for hematologic cancers (e.g. leukemia, lymphomas and myeloma), BRAF mutation analysis for lung cancer and NRAS mutation analysis for colon cancer.
http://rosettagx.com/files/press-releases/14564250011421300c412dce1317893ec2b26133cc.PDF

Preventing hospital infections. Two Israeli companies have partnered to cut the risk of patient infections dramatically in 10 hospitals in the US, Switzerland and Israel. Hyginex wristbands, sensors and beacons use Atomation’s IoT platform to capture data on staff hand washing and vibrate to remind them before and after patient contact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-22cKRceYHo
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-atomation-hyginex-to-cut-hospital-infection-rates-1001115705

Curing Russian children of bone disease. (TY Hazel) Doctors at Hadassah University Medical Centre in Jerusalem successfully treated 15 children from Russia who suffer from osteopetrosis, a rare and fatal genetic bone disease. In the northern Russian Republic of Chuvash, one of every 4,000 newborns has this condition.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-Human-Spirit-Osteopetrosis-and-our-little-Israel-446757

World’s first nuclear imaging machine. Israeli patients will be the first in the world to enjoy a first-of-its-kind hybrid nuclear imaging scanner, at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. Doctors can map tissues and bones and identify diseases including cancer, heart and kidney diseases, broken bones, and infections.
http://www.jns.org/news-briefs/2016/4/7/first-of-its-kind-nuclear-imaging-machine-installed-at-israels-rambam-hospital#.VwZcOvkrLIU=

A mechanical pacemaker beats them all. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute have trained cardiac cells to beat using mechanical stimuli that do not come into contact with the cells. The cardiac cells continued to beat over an hour after the mechanical stimulus ceased. It could lead to development of more effective pacemakers.
http://www.israel21c.org/building-a-better-pacemaker-by-training-cardiac-cells-to-beat/
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3619.html

Cancer victim gets new 3D printed jaw. Doctors at the Poriya hospital near Tiberias treated a patient suffering from a large tumor in the back of his jaw by replacing the damaged part with a titanium copy that they made using a 3-D printer. The patient started to eat normally only a few hours after his surgery.
http://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-doctors-implant-3-d-printed-jaw-in-cancer-patient/

“Climate change” is all about us. Nearly everybody believes in it. Who could not? Sometimes a sunny day changes to rain, sometimes snow changes to sleet. The wind blows on Tuesday but changes on Wednesday, from knocking down trees to barely putting a ripple on the surface of the lake. Mark Twain, noticing that some things lie beyond the meddling of man, observed that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”

Now someone has. The attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands thinks he has found the way to silence, once and for all, the debate over global warming, or climate change, or whatever the radicals-that-be are calling the scheme this week. Global-warming jeremiahs are determined to intimidate, frighten and eventually fine or put in prison anyone who says the wrong thing about this best laid scheme of government. They’re determined to eliminate traditional sources of energy and replace them with politically correct but unreliable sources of energy, such as wind and solar power. That’s the beginning.

Claude Walker, the Blackstone of the Caribbean who leads the assault of the attorneys general, presented a subpoena this week to compel the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington skeptical of the climate scam, to turn over all its documents relating to the Institute’s research.

James Fenimore Cooper disliked Yankees. They streamed out of New England in the early decades of the 19th century, invading the staid farming communities of Cooper’s beloved upstate New York. In his novels, Cooper portrayed these descendants of the Puritans as restless, grasping, and mercenary, sharp traders out for a quick buck. Theirs was an alien culture to the Dutch gentry of the Hudson River Valley and thereabouts, and their arrival changed that region forever.

History is one long progression of cultural invasions. England was home to the Celtic Britons. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Norsemen, and then the Normans. Each time, the new arrivals intermixed with the people already there, giving birth in the process to a new, hybrid culture.

Probably most cultural invasions throughout history occurred violently. But liberalism-and I use the term in its original sense to mean “freedom”-makes it possible for such invasions to take place peacefully. A liberal world is characterized by the free movement of ideas, of goods, and of persons. And all three can be hard on the cultures they come into contact with.

In a free country, to protect a local or regional culture against ideas or goods or persons that originated elsewhere within the country, there are things one may do and things one may not. One may argue against ideas, or choose not to buy the books or newspapers that propagate them. But one may not burn down the buildings where those books or newspapers are produced, nor induce the government to censor the offending ideas. One may refuse to buy goods produced elsewhere, but one may not cause the government to restrict their importation. And as for persons relocating to one’s neighborhood from elsewhere, one may (or should be free to) refuse to rent or sell them living accommodations, or refuse to serve them or hire them at one’s place of business. But one may not ride about at night in white hoods terrorizing them, and one certainly may not induce the government to prohibit their moving into one’s neighborhood.

In other words, a citizen of a liberal country like the United States should be free to use any non-violent means to protect his culture from ideas, goods, or persons that originated elsewhere. But he may not use physical force to that end, either his own or his government’s. To employ force would violate the rights of individual Americans.

So we, who value individual liberty, are willing to see our local and regional cultures subjected to all manner of assaults emanating from elsewhere within our country, rather than forcibly to restrict the freedom of Americans to traffic in ideas and goods, or to move about freely. This exposing of our cultures to harmful outside influences is an unavoidable cost of living in a free country.

Note that if one is happy living where one lives, among people who share one’s culture, it is not necessarily irrational or immoral to disapprove of new arrivals possessing a different culture who threaten to change what one loves. Liberalism is hard enough on local and regional cultures as it is. To suggest, as the Left do today, that it is racist or bigoted to resist-by non-violent means-the cultural invasion of one’s neighborhood is to add insult to injury.

Many sincere liberals see the free movement of ideas, goods, and persons that prevails within the borders of the U.S. as an ideal, which they aspire to recreate on an international scale. The free movement of ideas across our international borders is well established. The free movement of goods is less well established and is under assault today. To restrict the importation of ideas or of goods would, as I have said, violate the rights-or what should be the rights-of American citizens.

A free country must welcome as many immigrants as want to enter it, no matter the effect they have on its culture or its political institutions. This is the liberal immigration premise. It is sincerely held by Americans all across the political spectrum. And, as I argued in my last piece, it is false.

Another premise underlying the current push toward open borders in the U.S., this one held mostly by the Left, is the idea that a multicultural society is superior to a culturally homogeneous one. It implies that America would be a better country if its once-unified, English-speaking culture were transformed into a polyglot mosaic by the mass infusion of immigrants. This premise is false for the same reason that the liberal immigration premise is false.

In the history of the world, very few cultures have proven capable of sustaining the kind of freedom we enjoy in the United States. We cannot possibly strengthen, or even hope to maintain, the support that our free political institutions enjoy by continually adding to the voting population large numbers of persons from cultures that afford them little or no knowledge of the ideas necessary to sustain those institutions. This is especially true when multiculturalists urge immigrants not to assimilate, which means that they should not shed their old ideas, ideas which, in many cases, issued in poverty, corruption, and tyranny in their countries of origin.

America is the land of individual rights. Immigrants from tribal cultures, from cultures that place the welfare of the family or the clan above that of the individual, cultures that are socially or economically static, that value the pronouncements of religious leaders over those of secular leaders, or that view women as inferior to men-all must learn new values upon arriving in the U.S. Otherwise, if the immigrants come in sufficient numbers, we must resign themselves to seeing our rights eroded and our free political institutions degraded.

No society ever failed because it was too culturally unified. But a great many have dissolved into violence because they were not. Today Basques want to secede from Spain, Kurds from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Serbs, Armenians, Albanians, and many other cultural minorities seek to establish their own, monocultural countries because the multicultural societies of which they are a part do not work. To transform a culturally unified society into a multicultural one is to introduce a potential for conflict that did not exist before. Imagine a completely Catholic Northern Ireland deciding to improve their country by importing Protestants.

Editor’s note: Peter Wood gave a version of this talk at the Claremont Institute on April 7, 2016, at the event “Safe Spaces or Free Speech?” with Charles Kesler.

A long time ago—in 1994—the ever-provocative Stanley Fish published a book with the memorable title, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Fish wasn’t then thinking about the censorious left—Melissa Click at the University of Missouri, asking for some muscle over here; or Jerelyn Luther, the Yale undergraduate caught on video shrieking profanities at sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, because his wife had the audacity to suggest that students should feel free to wear Halloween costumes of their own choice. Nor was he thinking about sociology professor Patty Adler at the University of Colorado-Boulder threatened with forfeiture of her retirement benefits after students in her course, “Deviance in US Society,” filed a sexual harassment complaint because Adler staged role-playing exercises in which teaching assistants acted out the parts of characters in the global sex trade. Nor did he have in mind film professor Laura Kipnis, who became subject to a Kafka-esque inquisition at Northwestern University after student activists complained that an article she published in the Chronicle of Higher Education constituted sexual harassment. Kipnis had criticized “students’ sense of vulnerability” as “sexual paranoia.”

No such thing as free speech? As an empirical proposition, Fish’s declaration today could be substantiated at nearly all American colleges and universities. The freedom to say things, even manifestly true things, has been curtailed. And the freedom to argue things—to present claims backed by reason and scrupulous use of evidence—has been even more drastically limited.

Free Speech Hypocrisy

I don’t want to spend too much time establishing that these curtailments have, in fact, occurred. Across the political spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that “free speech” is in a kind of free-fall on campus. I cited the Adler and Kipnis cases because they play prominently in the AAUP’s new report, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, which is largely about how the feminist-inspired rule-making of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has somehow come back as a tool for more-radical-than-thou feminists to attack their not-radical-enough sisters. But as the AAUP report has garnered headlines in The New York Times and elsewhere in the liberal media, another story is playing out about the students at Emory University who were made to feel unsafe because someone had chalked “Trump 2016” on steps and sidewalks. Some 40 to 50 students assembled in the quad to protest the chalkings, chanting “You are not listening! Come speak to us; we are in pain!” The president of Emory, James Wagner, however, was listening and issued a sympathetic response about the protesters’ “expression of feelings and concern” rooted in “values regarding diversity and respect.” President Wagner attempted to thread the needle, speaking for “free speech” and anti-free speech in one go.