RUTHFULLY YOURS

Professor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He recently wrote an article titled “The hypocrisy behind the student renaming craze.” Students, often with the blessing of faculty, have discovered that names for campus buildings and holidays do not always fit politically correct standards for race, class and sex.

Stanford students have demanded the renaming of buildings, malls and streets bearing the name of the recently canonized Junipero Serra, an 18th-century Franciscan priest who was often unkind to American Indians. Harvard Law School is getting rid of its seal because it bears the coat of arms of the Royalls, a slave-owning family. This renaming craze is widespread and includes dozens of colleges and universities, including Amherst, Georgetown, Princeton, Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. The students have decided that some politically incorrect people from centuries ago are bad. Other politically incorrect people are not quite so bad if they were at least sometimes liberal; their names can stay.

San Diego State University students are not demanding that the school eliminate its nickname, “Aztecs,” even though the Aztecs enslaved and slaughtered tens of thousands of people from tribes they conquered — often ripping out the hearts of living victims. Should UC Berkeley students and faculty demand the renaming of Warren Hall, named after California Attorney General Earl Warren, who instigated the wartime internment of tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens? UC Berkeley students and faculty might consider renaming their Cesar E. Chavez Student Center. Chavez sent his thug lieutenants down to California’s southern border to use violence to prevent job-seeking Mexican immigrants from entering the United States. President Woodrow Wilson was a racist who, among other racist acts, segregated civil service jobs. Should Princeton University rename its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs plus rename its Woodrow Wilson fellowship program?

A Palestinian state has never existed during any period in human history. Let’s change that.

The United States has spent billions of dollars trying to create a Palestinian state. It’s time that we finally got our money’s worth. We’ve been putting money in the broken Palestinian slot machine in the metaphorical Palestinian casino (the real one was shot up when terrorists turned it into a base) for decades. It’s time to finally get our Palestinian jackpot. But to make it happen, we need to be realistic.

Forget the peace process. Forget negotiations. They’ve never worked before. They’re not going to now.

And there’s nothing to negotiate anyway.

There are almost a million Jews living on territory claimed by the PLO. Removing them would be the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing against an indigenous population today. It would also be impossible. But the same people who insist that the United States, a country of 318 million, can’t deport 11 million illegal aliens, think that Israel will somehow deport 1/8th of its own population if they just chant loudly enough about “occupation” outside Jewish businesses in London or San Francisco.

Ethnically cleansing 8,000 Jews from Gaza/Gush Katif led to nationwide civil disobedience, riots and, eventually, the fall of a political party and three straight terms for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Now imagine trying to deport 800,000 people from their homes simply because they’re Jewish.

And it wouldn’t just be the Jews alone being rounded up into trucks, buses and maybe boxcars.

52 percent of Arabs in East Jerusalem would rather be Israeli citizens than live under the PLO. Are we supposed to deport 100,000 Arabs from Jerusalem to make way for this imaginary “Palestinian” state?

How much ethnic cleansing do we have to do to make the Islamic colonial fantasy of Palestine real?

A student sit-in at Ohio State University was shut down last week when a senior administrator informed the participants that they would be arrested and expelled if they didn’t retreat from their “occupied space” in the area outside of President Michael V. Drake’s second-floor office.

The incident happened at Bricker Hall, Ohio State’s main administration building, which the students planned to occupy until school officials capitulated to a set of “demands.” According to the Columbus Dispatch, the site became an “open mic” situation for about eight hours last Wednesday night, with dozens of students, faculty, and several advocacy groups participating.

They complained that university officials don’t listen to them and have silenced them; officials say they have talked many times with the leaders of the groups, and that the protesters just don’t like the answer.

University officials say the occupation began with about 80 people at around 3:30 p.m.; a statement from one of the organizers said it was about 150.

Their list of demands included:

We demand complete, comprehensive and detailed access to the Ohio State budget and investments immediately, as well as personnel to aid students in understanding this information.

OSU Divest: Divest from Caterpillar Inc., Hewlett Packard and G4S due to their involvement in well-documented human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and across the globe. . .

Real Food OSU: Sign the Real Food Campus Commitment. Ensure the administration work with Real Food OSU through the entire implementation of the Real Food Campus Commitment, in place of, or as a means of attaining, the university sustainability goal of increased “production and purchase of locally and sustainably sourced food to 40% by 2025.”

Ohio State Vice President Jay Kasey paid the protesters a visit shortly after the occupation began, with a message from the president.

A Harvard student penned an op-ed for the school’s newspaper explaining that if you’ve ever said, “Don’t make this about race,” you were automatically wrong — because “everything is about race.”

“Of course it’s about race — everything is,” Ted G. Waechter writes in a piece in the Harvard Crimson. “Our country was built on oppression, and race is everywhere, at every moment on my standard trip back to Harvard.”

That’s right. Not just most of the moments, but “every moment.” Every. Single. One.

“The view from my airplane window is about race,” Waechter writes. “Colonizers killed Indigenous people for those tidy plots of farmland.”

“It is impossible to separate the wealth that paid for my plane ticket from structural oppression,” he continues. “When I land at Logan, it’s about race.”

Other things that Waechter insists are “about race” include the Central Artery (a section of freeway in Massachusetts), “luxury high-rise developments,” Boston’s Silver Line bus system, and the benches at Jamaica Pond and Trinity Church.

“In a country built on oppression, everything is about race,” Waechter writes. “Including the benches.”

Now, to be honest, I have not once looked at a bench and thought it might be about race — but Waechter has an explanation for that, too:

An Oregon judge ruled in favor of a group of children last week. Twenty-one kids between the ages of 8 and 19 sued the federal government and the fossil fuel industry for violating their rights and those of “future generations.” The judge, rather than dismissing these petulant children, found that they have a substantive complaint on legal grounds, and dismissed the government’s call to drop the case.

No, this is not The Onion. Taking climate alarmism to an absurd conclusion, the 21 kids — along with Dr. James Hansen, who participated as a guardian for the plaintiff “future generations” — said that the gridlock in the federal government which has stopped massive economic regulations against the allegedly disastrous effects of carbon emissions was a direct assault on their rights to life and liberty, and a substantial breach of their due process rights when compared with prior generations. It is as convoluted as it sounds.

Yes, this judge accepted the argument that the federal government is harming future generations by not acting against a huge chunk of the energy sector.

“This is purely political — a liberal judge putting his personal opinions on climate change above the law he is supposed to uphold and defend,” H. Sterling Burnett, a Ph.D in environmental ethics and research fellow at the Heartland Institute, told PJ Media in an email statement. “The Obama administration has gone around our elected representatives to enact draconian restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, yet for these kids that’s not enough.”

Burnett conceded that it is almost impossible to halt the use of fossil fuels across the world. “It is true that the actions taken by the administration and by world leaders in the Paris climate agreements will not stem the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, but nothing they can realistically do would.” He estimated that “you would have to shut down all of industrial civilization to stop rising greenhouse gas emissions, condemning [both present and future generations] to poverty and early death.”

The Heartland scholar argued that this case “should have been thrown out of court based on lack of standing,” since the children “can’t show they have or are or will be harmed by human caused climate change, and because burning fossil fuels does not violate any portion of the Constitution or the bill of rights,” as they claim it does (emphasis added). Rather, burning oil and gas “contributes greatly to life, the pursuit of happiness, and the general welfare.”

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy warned that climate change is affecting the physical and “mental health status” of humans, “probably impacting how happy you are every day.”

“Frankly, it is a wake-up call because there are a number of impacts we are seeing here that we are already feeling, and a number of impacts so that you can virtually see that every human being in every part of the United States is impacted now by climate and will get increasingly impacted if we do not take action now to try to reduce those impacts,” McCarthy said at the White House during an event announcing the Obama administration’s latest climate change report, “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment.”

“So we are talking about everything from impacting our food, our water, our air and our weather and if that’s not enough it’s probably impacting how happy you are every day and what your mental health status is,” she added.

McCarthy said it is time to reduce carbon emissions resulting from human activity right away for the sake of public health.

“You’re seeing an actual increase in deaths and illnesses resulting from increasing challenges to meet our ozone standards, because as the weather gets warmer we see significant challenges in meeting the health-based standards we have set for ourselves,” she said, adding that wildfires have also become more of a challenge due to climate change.

John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor, said global climate change is causing longer and “more intense” allergy seasons as well as increased heat-related illnesses and deaths.

Boycott efforts did not deter 250 British researchers from 33 institutions across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland from attending BIRAX Conference with their Israeli counterparts.Some 350 leading British and Israeli medical researchers are currently meeting in Oxford for the third annual BIRAX Conference organized by the UK-Israel Science Council. The large event is taking place as bilateral science cooperation thrives despite calls to boycott Israel.

BIRAX, a joint UK-Israel research initiative tackling some of the world’s most debilitating diseases, has invested over £7 million in bilateral research since it was founded in 2011. The 15 joint research projects funded by BIRAX so far include the use of heart cells to restore damaged heart muscle; and the use of breath tests for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. BIRAX was initiated by the British Council and the British Embassy in Israel, the Pears Foundation and UJIA.

The conference will showcase the latest developments in regenerative medicine, including joint research by UK and Israeli researchers to fight diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart conditions, and other global health challenges. The conference is also aimed at creating more opportunities for scientists from both countries to collaborate.

The Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union on Monday voted to move to expel the Knesset from the international IPU due to the “racist laws”’ it allegedly legislates.

The IPU is an international organization for parliaments from all over the world, which works in collaboration with the UN.

The Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union is a regional organization composed of Arab lawmakers as well as members of Shura councils in the Arab world. It was established in June 1974 to promote Arab collaboration through political institutions.

The anti-Israel resolution, submitted by Kuwait’s National Assembly speaker Marzouq al-Ghanim, was adopted during the 23rd conference of the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union in Cairo on Monday, with the participation of lawmakers from all over the Arab world.

The closing statement of the conference included Ghanim’s proposal as well as a recommendation to form a parliamentary committee chaired by Ghanim to support the steadfastness of the Palestinian people.

The conference, attended by 15 delegations of Arab parliaments, called on all Arab parliaments to support Palestinian efforts to hold an international peace conference to end the “Israeli occupation.”

When I entered college in 1972, the ’60s generation of activists had eliminated all but two requirements to graduate: one semester of a physical science and two semesters of Western civilization. Fortunately for me, the science requirement was dropped my sophomore year, leaving Western civ as the only course mandated by the school.

Even the left realized the value of studying our roots as a civilization – at least the left of 45 years ago. But the creatures who call themselves leftists today carry no such intellectual baggage. It has been drummed into their tiny brains that Western civilization – a civilization that created the modern world with all its grevious faults and stupendous successes – isn’t worth examining.

So say the overwhelming majority of students at Stanford University, who voted down a proposal to require two semesters studying our roots by a 6-1 margin.

Daily Caller:

The ballot initiative was promoted by members of the school’s conservative-leaning Stanford Review. If passed, it would have called for Stanford to require that all freshmen complete a two-quarter course covering “the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” Stanford once possessed a similar requirement, but eliminated it after a student campaign in the 1980s that denounced it as fostering racism, sexism, and other perfidious -isms.

Supporters managed to collect 370 signatures on their petition, enough to include it as a ballot measure for Stanford’s spring student government election.

But it turns out Stanford has no enthusiasm for requiring the study of Western civilization. In election results released Monday, the proposal failed by an overwhelming margin, with 342 votes in favor and a whopping 1992 votes against.

In contrast, over 90 percent of students voted in favor of an initiative requiring the school to administer a new campus climate survey designed to find the rate of sexual assault on campus. The school already administered such a survey in 2015, but it outraged activists by finding a sexual assault rate of just 1.9%, which they deemed far too low.

The Hoax of “Countering Violent Extremism” — on The Glazov Gang This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure. Stephen discussed The Hoax of “Countering Violent Extremism”, revealing how the Muslim Brotherhood is directing our foreign policy and […]