RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

When it comes to anti-Semitic incidents on college and university campuses, denial is the first refuge of university administrators. These incidents are often glossed over as isolated and not warranting any meaningful administrative response.

There are a number of obvious reasons for this – obvious, at least, to anyone who has spent any time in the groves of the academy. Campus politics, like American politics generally, is a clash of competing interest groups.

Student politics is dominated by ethnic, gender, and racial divisions and alliances. Students of color are inculcated with the notion that they share a bond in the face of white oppression. They form alliances and voting pacts for campus issues.

Because campus issues are generally issues that affect the larger society, the external groups affected by these same issues will augment and assist their campus proxies. A campus administration dealing with political issues weighs not only the strength of the campus interest group but also that of the community group that might come to its assistance.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda infamously said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” He told foul lies about the hapless Jews and millions of Germans and other Europeans believed them and willingly participated in the Holocaust.

Another such miscreant, the late and unlamented arch terrorist, Yasser Arafat, told an enormous whopper, which has been repeated relentlessly by his fellow Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians; namely that there were no Jewish Temples on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount; thus impudently denying both Jewish and Christian history.

But now the outrageous propaganda spewed by the PLO and the so-called Palestinian Authority, wherein they try to deny millennial Jewish history in the ancestral Jewish and biblical homeland and substitute it with a fraudulent and fictitious “ancient Palestinian history” – even to the ludicrous extent of claiming Jewish biblical characters were Palestinians – has come back to bite them.

They have been served a taste of their own noxious medicine. In other words; “hoisted by their own petard.”

Meanwhile, Jewish archaeological remains dating back thousands of years continue to be discovered throughout Israel thus totally obliterating the ceaseless and baseless propaganda spewed by the so-called Palestinian Authority desperately denying Jewish biblical and post biblical history.

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the most sacred site of the Jewish people, the very place that the Jewish King David built the sanctuary for the Ark of the Covenant and made his capital some 3,000 years ago. It is where his son, King Solomon, built the first Temple destroyed by the Babylonians and Herod later built the Second Temple destroyed by the Romans.

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Reports of anti-Semitic acts on American campuses suggest that the nation’s universities and colleges are likely today the chief institutional repository of anti-Semitism in the United States.

As one recent study notes: “A survey of U.S. Jewish college students by Trinity College and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law revealed that 54% of surveyed students reported experiencing or witnessing instances of anti-Semitism on campus during the first six months of the 2013-2014 academic year. Another survey by Brandeis University in the spring of 2015 found that three-quarters of North American Jewish college student respondents had been exposed to anti-Semitic rhetoric…”

The same study also notes that, in addition to encountering anti-Semitic rhetoric, Jewish students have been the targets of “physical assault, harassment, destruction of property, discrimination and suppression of speech.” The Brandeis University survey found that “one-third of students… reported having been harassed because they were Jewish.”

The study citing these data was conducted by the AMCHA Initiative, and AMCHA Initiative’s own findings appear in the organization’s “Report on Anti-Semitic Activity in 2015 at U.S. Colleges and Universities With the Largest Jewish Undergraduate Populations.” The AMCHA Initiative report looks more particularly at the strong correlation between the presence of anti-Israel groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) on campuses, as well as anti-Israel activity such as that of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and campus anti-Semitism.

The correlation is hardly surprising, since much of SJP’s activities on campus – including the agenda of SJP guest speakers at events underwritten by colleges and universities – consists of demonizing Israel, denying Jewish history and Jews’ right to national self-determination, and advocating for anti-Israel entities such as HAMAS, which explicitly calls not only for the annihilation of Israel but for the murder of all Jews. The BDS movement likewise seeks to delegitimize and undermine Israel’s existence and grossly distorts the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and leading BDS supporters have acknowledged that the movement’s ultimate goal is the dissolution of the Jewish state.

Nor is that goal particularly hidden, nor for that matter in need of being hidden, in much of American academia. Indeed, in March, 2012, Harvard University hosted a “One State Conference” at the Kennedy School where speaker after speaker called for dismantling Israel and attacked those promoting its continued existence. According to the Harvard Crimson, the conference was organized by campus groups Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, the Progressive Caucus and the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East.

Why are colleges and universities tolerating an epidemic of anti-Semitic acts on their campuses, and the activities of groups that directly or indirectly promote such acts? At a time when there is so much campus sensitivity about so-called micro-aggressions and the need to render campuses safe spaces for those students who feel victimized, when even seemingly innocuous statements or actions by fellow students or faculty members can lead to punitive measures against them should someone respond by feeling aggrieved, why are the macro-aggressions against Jews on campus allowed to continue with little consequence for the perpetrators?

The obsession with settlements is certain to divert attention from core issues, such as Palestinian recognition of a Jewish Israel. Many Palestinians continue to regard Israel as one big settlement that needs to be removed from the Middle East.

Even those who say they have accepted the two-state solution are not prepared to recognize any Jewish link to or history in the land.

In the view of Al-Husseini, Palestinians refuse to acknowledge a Jewish state because they believe this would grant legitimacy to “Jews’ rights to the land of Palestine” and undermine the Palestinian demand for the “right of return” for millions of refugees into Israel.

Israeli Arab leaders are betraying their constituencies by privileging the perceived interests of Palestinian Arabs, while Palestinian Arab leaders are betraying their constituencies by denying any link between Jews and the land. This stance makes peace a non-starter.

Israel as a Jewish state remains anathema to the Palestinian community. This is a top-down attitude, communicated on a constant basis by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

The Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is based on the argument that such a move would mean giving up the “right of return” for millions of “refugees” into Israel. This refusal is also based on the continued denial of any historic Jewish connection to the land.

In recent weeks, the PA president has once again reiterated his strong opposition to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

The Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is one of the main obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Settlement construction complaints are nothing more than a Palestinian Authority smokescreen.

There is much talk these days about the Palestinian Authority’s intention to ask the United Nations Security Council to issue a resolution condemning Israel for construction in the settlements. It is not yet clear whether the PA will carry out its threat. What is clear, however, is that this obsession with the settlements is certain to divert attention from core issues, such as Palestinian recognition of a Jewish Israel. Many Palestinians continue to regard Israel as one big settlement that needs to be removed from the Middle East.

Why, in fact, do the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a Jewish state?

Abbas has consistently failed to state his reasons for his total rejection of Israel as a Jewish state. In January 2014, the PA president declared:

“The Palestinians won’t recognize the Jewishness of the State of Israel and won’t accept it. The Israelis say that if we don’t recognize the Jewishness of Israel there would be no solution. And we say that we won’t recognize or accept the Jewishness of Israel and we have many reasons for this rejection.”

On another occasion that same year, Abbas stated: “No one can force us to recognize Israel as Jewish state. If they [Israel] want, they can go to the UN and ask to change their name to whatever they want — even if they want to be called The Jewish Zionist State.” Again, Abbas failed to explain the vehement Palestinian opposition to this demand.

On three, everyone point a finger and laugh.

Daily Caller:

This year’s “Million Student March” — scheduled for Wednesday, April 13 on college campuses across America — appears to have failed miserably because hardly anyone bothered to show up.

Organizers had hoped for a huge turnout.

“A new wave of activism against student debt is on the move again this week,” The Huffington Post giddily promised on Monday. “The students taking the lead represent the advance guard of an even more massive army which is mobilizing around the idea that higher education should be an investment we make as a society.”

Kind of a small “advance guard,” don’t you think?

On the campus of the recently-troubled University of Missouri, for example, a sparse gathering of about 15 students protested as part of the “Million Student March,” according to the Columbia Missourian.

Campus police warned the protesters that any disruptive demonstrators could be arrested or suspended from school.

On Wednesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party paid homage to a young woman who killed six people and wounded dozens more, when she detonated the homemade bomb in her handbag at the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem 14 years ago.

As was reported by Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah posted this tribute to the suicide terrorist on its official Facebook page.

The post reads: “Today is the anniversary of the death as a shahida [martyr] of the istish’hadiya [martyrdom-seeker], the hero Andalib Takatka from the town of Beit Fajjar, daughter of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades [Fatah’s military wing] in Bethlehem, who carried out a martyrdom-seeking operation in Jerusalem in which six Zionists were killed, and dozens injured. Glory and eternity to our righteous martyrs. We remain loyal to the path.”

As it happens, two of the “Zionists” Takatka slaughtered were actually Chinese construction workers.

In a video produced by her handlers in Fatah’s Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades prior to her final hurrah, Takatka was seen holding a Koran and stating that she was about to die as part of the Palestinian women’s fight against “Israeli occupation.” She also said she was going to finish the job that her cousins, Iman and Samia had started. (Their own plan to blow themselves up in Mahane Yehuda had been foiled by Israeli security forces.)

While Fatah was celebrating Takatka’s “martyrdom,” Abbas headed for a multi-country trip to Europe and the United States. Along with his fancy suits, he packed a draft of an anti-Israel resolution he intends to bring before the U.N. Security Council when he arrives in New York. Even the fact that his younger brother is critically ill did not prevent him from embarking on his “peace-seeking” journey. That is how serious he is about international relations.

One thing we can be sure he will not mention when he meets with foreign officials in Turkey, France, Russia, Germany and the U.S. is where his Qatar-based sibling is currently being treated for cancer, and not for the first time. Yes, Abu Lawi, as he is called, is lying in a hospital bed in the Assuta Medical Center in Tel Aviv.

The upscale hospital comes highly recommended by other members of Abbas’ family, as well. His wife, Amina, underwent surgery there in the summer of 2014. This was just after the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens at the hands of Palestinian terrorists — an event that precipitated Operation Protective Edge, otherwise known as the war in Gaza. And six months ago, Abbas’ brother-in-law received lifesaving heart surgery there.