RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recent campus debates teach us an important lesson about bigotry and how to deal with it
Is anti-Zionism any different from anti-Semitism? The question is probably the most accurate seismograph we’ve got to measure where one stands on the ever-tremorous political grounds we all walk when we talk about Israel. Not that there’s necessarily any right or wrong answer; civil, well-meaning people can make arguments on both ends. Yes, because Jews and Jewish life cannot be reduced to the national aspirations of the Jewish state. No, because anyone denying Jews, alone of all the world’s nations, their right of self-determination is by definition a hater. It’s not an altogether useless debate to have, but it’s not the debate we’re having.

The debate we’re having, true to our times, is both dumber and more malicious, and it was on display this month as at least two of our finest institutions of higher learning, Stanford and Oberlin, treated us to the intellectual equivalent of watching a tightrope walker trip and go splat on the asphalt. Out west, a member of the school’s student senate argued that it was not anti-Semitic to argue that Jews control the media, the banks, the government, and all other social institutions. And in the Ohio enclave of righteousness, several Jewish students published a letter in a student newspaper defending a disgraced professor who had posted similar allegations on her Facebook page about the Jews’ malevolent omnipotence.

Both pronouncements are worthy of consideration. Like any good work of modern art, they’re one part parody, peenging poseurship at its most delightful, and one part dirge, announcing the death of good, rational thought. At Stanford, the portentously named Gabriel Knight, a junior on the school’s student governing body, claimed that it was, like, totally cool to talk about how the Jews control the world. “Questioning these potential power dynamics, I think, is not anti-Semitism,” sprach Knight. “I think it’s a very valid discussion.”

For their anti Israel bias the Senators get good grades from the Arab American Institute: rsk

Patrick Leahy on the Issues Rated +3 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record.Bernie Sanders on the Issues Rated +2 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record.

Vermont was the state that gave President Barack Obama his largest margin of victory in the 2012 election — 36%. While Gallup poll rates it the second most liberal state after Massachusetts, that rating seems erroneous, given that Massachusetts delivered Obama only a 23% margin despite having a significantly more diverse population than Vermont, which usually equates to higher vote support for Democrats (Vermont is 94% white, Massachusetts 76%). Massachusetts even elected a Republican governor in 2014, as it has done frequently in recent decades.

Today, Vermont seems to be the center of a new political development, testing the waters for how far the Left can go in the Democratic Party in advancing an anti-Zionist agenda. The push to separate Democrats from the traditional support for Israel is currently led by Vermont senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, and a self-proclaimed socialist, is of course one of the two contenders for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination. He has had a string of successes in both caucuses and primaries, and has so far won 15 states and a few territories, and earned over 7 million votes. In 2008, Hillary Clinton lost the nomination to the younger, far more charismatic African-American newcomer, Obama. To lose state after state to a 74-year-old avowed socialist who calls for a revolution in politics is in some ways much more shocking than Clinton’s previous defeat. Assuming Clinton wins the nomination, still very likely due to her huge lead among Democratic super-delegates, and her far greater appeal than Sanders to minority votes, especially African-Americans, Sanders will have demonstrated either Clinton’s weakness as a candidate, particularly among younger voters, or demonstrated the power and appeal of his hard left message.

The New York primary is to be held on April 19. New York is the state with the largest number of Jews and the highest percentage Jewish population. Most Jewish New Yorkers, apart from Orthodox Jews, will cast their votes for Democrats.

One might expect that, like most politicians, Sanders would use the time before the primary to stroke that base of Jewish voters who will be a major component if he can pull off an upset in New York. Given his weakness in prior state contests among African-Americans and Hispanics, the traditionally liberal Jewish vote might seem made to order for Sanders. A fair number of liberal Jews (although probably a declining number each year) are pro-Israel.

On this new special edition of The Unknown, Anni Cyrus discusses Islam’s 25 Scars On My Body, sharing the nightmare she experienced as a young girl in the Islamic Gulag.

Don’t miss it.http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/15/the-unknown-islams-25-scars-on-my-body/

And make sure to watch one of the most powerful episodes of The Unknown: To Be Raped Under Islam, in which Anni revealed the horror she endured under the Islamic Republic — and how she prevailed and is fighting back:

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.