RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rehearse the story of liberty gained and be humble—honor what has gone before.

I associate conservatism with optimism and its synonyms—hopefulness, sanguinity, positivity and confidence. American Jews are often associated with a gutted liberalism, but that is a caricature. A more intimate understanding of the Jewish experience connects it to an optimistic conservatism that could help secure America’s future.

I’m particularly reminded of that connection as Jews celebrate the eight days of Passover beginning Friday at sundown. Passover is the festival of freedom when Jews commemorate and re-experience the biblical story of their passage from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to freedom, first in the desert, then in the Land of Israel.
Emphasizing the importance of decentralized authority and individual responsibility, the escape from Egypt is celebrated not in the synagogue but in the home, among family and invited guests who join for the ceremony of the Seder, which means order. Following a ritual text called the Haggada, families retell the story as recounted in the Book of Exodus, and eat the unleavened bread that the Children of Israel took with them when they fled in the middle of the night.

When I took over from my mother the organization of Passover for our family what I felt most keenly was the paradox—the incongruity of it all. The cleaning and cooking preparations for Passover are so demanding that in the weeks leading up to it, obsessive-compulsive personalities come into their own. I could not get beyond these questions: If we were breaking for freedom, why these weeks of preparation? If we were recalling harsh conditions, which was it—the dry matzo and bitter herbs, or the chicken soup with matzo balls and the best meal of the year?

And that is how the association of conservatism with hopefulness began for me, and how it is further reinforced every year. Freedom was not decamping to Hawaii to become a surfer, not experimenting with drugs or with sexual conquests—not getting away from, but readying oneself for, the enjoyment of freedom. The Passover ritual of re-experiencing the Exodus helped me figure out the constituent elements of freedom that were crafted over many centuries:

First, a people is not defined by its experience of slavery, but neither does self-liberation happen once and for all. The temptation of slavery is always there, the part of us that wants to return to a stage of dependency, to the relative security of having the overseers regulating life. Those who do not reinforce the responsibilities of freedom will be returned to the house of bondage.

Second, the Passover ritual calls for humility—not to reduce our self-confidence, but rather to harness our capacities to the larger civic purpose of a free society. Friedrich Nietzsche was concerned that the Judeo-Christian tradition squelched the greatness of the emergent individual. The constitutional civilization that Passover celebrates is wary of the hubris of individuals who think themselves too good to “merely” reinforce what others have achieved before us.

One other item of Passover consolidated my conservative hope for change—the section about the relation of optimism to evil. It’s one that makes liberals queasy. “Pour Out Thy Wrath!” is a collection of verses from Psalms and Lamentations that calls on God to punish not the Jews who obey his laws but—for a change!—the evildoers who want to destroy them.

Needless to say, this section about confronting the enemy was the first part of the Passover Haggada that was eliminated by self-styled Jewish progressives, by the Bernie Sanders constituency of the Jewish people. That constituency gets very angry—but it pours out its wrath on its own people instead of on its destroyers. And let’s acknowledge that when you have no incentive for aggression, it is hard even to voice aggression.CONTINUE AT SITE

Under the heel of suffocating tyranny, we became a nation of survivors who will not give up our faith, our religion and our right to live.

When the sun sets and the first stars appear on Friday evening, more than 6 million Jews in Israel will gather around their Passover Seder tables.

Sitting at beautifully set tables in cities, villages, kibbutzim and outposts, we will tell the story of our Exodus from Egypt. We will describe how persecuted, oppressed, exhausted slaves decided that they were a nation, woke up at midnight, and began the longest journey in the history of mankind, a journey that is still ongoing and will never end. The children of slaves turned overnight into the children of kings, ready and willing to pay the price of freedom.

It has been thousands of years since the Exodus. The call to “Let my people go” moved hearts and nurtured the yearning for freedom. Freedom fighters adopted the songs of the liberated slaves, adding a new dimension to human dignity, equality and basic humanity.

For 2,000 years, the Jews wandered around the world without resting. Tyrants and villains made every effort to wipe the Jews out of existence. No other nation could have survived the pressure, the horrors, the destruction and the genocide.

Under the heel of suffocating tyranny, we became a nation of survivors who will never give up our faith, our religion and our right to live. The Jewish ability to survive finds its source in the same feeling of freedom that has beat in the heart of every Jew since the Exodus. It is impossible to defeat the children of kings, whose spirit rises up even if their bodies are downtrodden. The Jews spoke of the Exodus each day, and their prayers expressed hope to return to Jerusalem, the eternal city.

Top universities in Britain are threatening to break ties with the country’s National Union of Students (NUS) following its recent election of a new controversial president accused of making antisemitic, anti-Israel and terror-sympathizing comments, the UK’s Daily Mail reported.

Students at Cambridge and Oxford announced on Thursday that they would be holding referendums on whether to split from the NUS following the election of Malia Bouattia, the report said. In 2014, while speaking at a “pro-resistance” event celebrating “Gaza and the Palestinian revolution,” Bouattia asserted that it is “problematic” to consider that “Palestine will be free” only by means of “non-violent protest.” In 2011, while attending the University of Birmingham, she called the school “a Zionist outpost” with the “largest [Jewish Society] in the country.” Bouattia has also previously attacked what she called “Zionist-led media outlets,” the report said, and more recently, voted against a NUS motion condemning ISIS because it would be “blatant Islamophobia.”

Prior to her election, Bouattia’s candidacy caused an uproar across many universities in Britain. Fifty-seven Jewish student leaders penned an open letter to the would-be president, asking her to clarify her positions. In response, Bouattia claimed she was not an antisemite, rather an anti-Zionist. “I want to be clear that for me to take issue with Zionist politics, is not me taking issue with being Jewish,” she wrote.

NUS members have now launched a campaign to disaffiliate from the student organization, the Daily Mail reported, following Bouattia’s election. Students from the universities of Durham, York, Westminster, Birmingham, Edinburgh, King’s College of London and the London School of Economics have offered their support for the disassociation campaign. On social media, Facebook pages are encouraging students to cancel their memberships with NUS.

Last December, President Obama and his environmental-activist political appointees traveled to Paris to persuade other nations to sign up for his radical climate-change agenda. This administration doesn’t care that many Americans believe climate change is exaggerated, that the scientific justification used for his regulations are flimsy, or that the models he uses to predict climate-change impacts are often biased. Instead, the administration recently launched investigations to intimidate anyone who disagrees with them.

If climate change is the real threat the Obama administration says it is, and the science is as “settled” as we are told by the liberal national media, why does the administration need to use tactics often reserved for the mafia to try to protect its own interests? What is the administration afraid of?

A few days ago, the president signed the United Nation’s Paris climate-change agreement, knowingly entering America into a contract that puts us at an economic disadvantage. Hardworking American taxpayers don’t want their government to work against their economic interests. And the president’s promises will do little to impact climate change.

The former head of the Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy Office, Charles McConnell, testified before the House Science Committee that the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of the president’s climate agenda, will reduce sea-level rise by the thickness of three sheets of paper. The same regulation would also reduce global temperatures by a measly 0.03 degrees Celsius, yet the plan, if implemented, would cost billions of dollars annually. That is all pain and no gain.

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