RUTHFULLY YOURS

Since last Thursday, when an Israeli soldier shot a subdued terrorist in the head, the issue of the IDF’s Code of Ethics has been debated to death. Arguments about whether the usual rules of engagement should apply to situations like those that have grown so commonplace over the past six months are not at all new in the Jewish state; they are as old as its enemies’ repeated attempts to wipe it off the face of the earth in one way or another.

The current method has taken the form of a “lone-wolf intifada,” the term coined to describe a disorganized war of attrition waged mostly by young, knife-wielding Palestinians on Jew-killing rampages. That it is not deemed an official “uprising” by the Palestinian powers-that-be who encourage it passively while actively egging it on is the only thing that differentiates it from previous waves of terrorism to which Israelis were accustomed.

The soldier who has become the topic of every dinner-table conversation from Metula‎ to Eilat is now serving as a symbol for all sides of the dilemma that our boys and girls must face as soon as they finish high school and don an IDF uniform. It is impossible to know what his parents told him before he got on the bus to go off to basic training. But I admit to telling my own children, each in turn, that I’d rather visit them in a military prison than in a graveyard.

That particular sentiment was born of watching my kids grow up in a society whose underlying message was that it was just as important to be armed with a law book as a gun when forced to fight enemies with no rules of engagement whatsoever. Other than useless slaughter, that is. And backing from an “international community” with extremely high double standards.

Indeed, the first time I allowed my 7-year-old to walk by himself to school, a report on the radio that a terrorist was on the loose in our neighborhood sent me tearing down four flights of stairs, with babies in my arms, to make sure he was safe. As it transpired, my son had made it to his classroom, but an 18-year-old female soldier named Iris Azoulay was not so lucky. After kissing her own mother goodbye before heading to the bus stop to return to her base, a Palestinian laborer — who had worked in the area for years painting houses and the like for Jewish families he knew well — went on a stabbing spree with a 15-inch knife and slashed her to death. Right in front of her home.

His birthday was March 26th just a few days ago. Also known as Abu Mazen….an Arafat in a suit….within days of his election his buddies in the Brigades of Al Aqsa killed six Israelis as another “peace”offering….rsk

Last night the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas appeared on Israelis’ television screens to tell them that peace is still possible. He even conceded that there have been some incidents of incitement in the Palestinian media. As for the relentless wave of stabbings that have plagued Israeli cities in recent months, well that is just a matter of Palestinians losing hope in Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution, Abbas explained.

In some senses Abbas is right. Peace, like many eventualities, is certainly possible. But not while Abbas is around. Because while Abbas might graciously concede that some of his state controlled media outlets may have regrettably dabbled in the occasional anti-Semitic terror incitement, such a lamenting tone would suggest that all this has been going on contrary to his own wishes.

The Palestinian Authority’s mandateless president has always cut a pretty disingenuous figure – the quintessential phoney moderate – but if he expects Israelis to believe that he hasn’t been at the forefront of the incitement that has already got so many of them killed, then he must think Israelis are as gullible as he clearly believes his own people to be.

WASHINGTON — Police have stepped up security for Jewish students at a major state university in upstate New York after graffiti threatened to “kill all kikes,” using a derogatory term to refer to Jewish people.

A picture of the vandalism, scrawled on a men’s bathroom at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was obtained by The Times of Israel.

University police were notified of the incident last week, after a Jewish student noticed the inscription and told the school’s Hillel director, Dan Metchnik, who then informed university officials.

Police ordered university facilities to remove the language from the bathroom stall and opened an investigation. They further specified that they believe it to be an isolated incident.

The university put out a statement condemning the hate crime and confirmed that, in response, university police had increased patrols near the Hillel office and elsewhere on campus where students were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Metchnik, an Israeli, was shocked to learn of what happened. “We’ve had some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expression on this campus in the last few years,” he told The Times of Israel. “But we haven’t seen this kind of vicious and explicit anti-Semitism, not for awhile.”

There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall “Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.

While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.

It doesn’t.

The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.

Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.

Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.

Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.

Vermont, the state that gave us unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is home to another radical liberal breed named Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Along with Sanders, Sen. Leahy represents the left flank of the Democratic Party and often finds himself at loggerheads with its more centrist members.

Not unsurprising, Leahy is also a visceral critic of Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy and stalwart U.S. ally. In 2011, citing alleged human rights violations, he proposed a bill that would have cut funding to three elite Israeli units that conduct counter-terror operations in Judea/Samaria and Gaza, prompting intervention by Israel’s then defense minister, Ehud Barak.

In 2012, Leahy employed veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric to oppose an amendment proposed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that called for the State Department to provide a more accurate accounting of which actual Palestinian refugees were being serviced by U.S. tax dollars. In opposing Kirk, Leahy implied that those who favored the amendment had other interests and not those of the U.S. in mind thereby invoking the blatantly anti-Semitic “Israel firster” canard, which implies divided Jewish loyalties.

Leahy now seems to have set his sights on obtaining “justice” for Arab terrorists neutralized by Israel while conducting terror attacks against Israelis. He recently sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to investigate “gross violations of human rights” alleged to have been committed by Israel’s security forces. The letter, which also names Egypt as an offender, claims that Israel may have engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article lamenting the lack of “diversity” in my discipline. Philosophy, so goes the article, just hasn’t been welcoming toward minorities and women.

Thankfully, such enlightened departments as that found at Penn State University have endeavored to “decolonize the canon.”

Of course, academia isn’t in the least bit interested in promoting the only diversity that can, or should, mean something in an institution of “higher learning.” Its equation of “diversity” with gender and racial representation is part of the problem.

Indeed—and I say this as someone who is an academic who happened to have grown up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Trenton, NJ—there exists far more intellectual diversity at the corner bar than can be found in your average college or university.

Not only does the data confirm the endless anecdotal evidence that legions of academic dissidents like myself have acquired over the years. The data reveals that academics are moving even further to the left.

The most recent study available was conducted by the University of California. Its findings were released a little more than three years ago in the November of 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education.

The study identifies five ideological or political categories: “far left,” “liberal,” “middle of the road,” “conservative,” and, finally, “far right.” What it finds is that faculty of all ranks from both universities and colleges, institutions that are private and public, large and small, religious and non-religious, self-identified as “far left” to a significantly greater extent than they had just three years earlier: In 2008, 8.8% so self-identified. In 2011, that number had risen to 12.4%.

Earlier this month, the Israeli authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation into the conduct of left-wing organization Breaking the Silence for collecting classified military information. This came following an expose on Channel 2 news that showed Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies of reported wrongdoing in the Palestinian territories from IDF soldiers, soliciting operational information. The Israeli NGO claims to be a human rights organization, but it has compelled young people to divulge sensitive information about troop movements and other operational maneuvers.

It is difficult to make a case for how collecting sensitive, classified information about the IDF can possibly help the Palestinian cause, short of planting the illusive hope in the minds of Israel’s enemies that they can defeat the Israeli militarily. And the sooner the Palestinians wake up from that corrosive illusion, the more lives will be saved, on both the Palestinian and the Israeli side of the conflict.

Yet, with a criminal investigation hanging over them, Breaking the Silence still gave a talk at the Brown University-Rhode Island School of Design Hillel and was scheduled to give another at the Columbia/Barnard Hillel on Thursday.

This is not the first time Breaking the Silence has gone on tour to distort and air Israel’s dirty laundry to American Jewish college students. In 2013, Breaking the Silence appeared at the Hillel houses of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. This is, however, the first time that they are on tour while under criminal suspicion.

‘They’re blowing up jet passengers and blasting subway trains, and all he wants to do is dance, dance, dance.”

President Obama resembles the airheaded young lady depicted in Don Henley’s 1984 rock hit. As her surroundings grow increasingly perilous, all she wants to do is dance.

Obama similarly debased himself and humiliated his country via a tango in Buenos Aires, a baseball game with Cuban despot Raul Castro in Havana (including with Obama doing the wave), and an Easter-eve round of golf. All this transpired barely hours after radical Islamic terrorists turned Brussels into a slaughterhouse. Just before Obama partied, ISIS killers wounded 316 and murdered 32 innocents, including four Americans, in a NATO-allied capital.

What, if anything, will make Obama abandon his Ringling Bros.–quality clown routine, display a modicum of maturity, and — at long last — get serious about obliterating jihad in general and ISIS in particular?

Perhaps once ISIS goes radioactive, it finally will dawn on Obama that Islamic terrorism is no laughing matter.

“Recent weeks have brought growing evidence that ISIS is actively seeking weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear material,” Karl Vick wrote in a bone-chilling dispatch in Time magazine’s April 4 edition. “The evidence is piecemeal but alarming to counterterrorism experts who’ve watched ISIS grow increasingly aggressive.”

Aggressive, indeed.

Someone fatally shot Didier Prospero four times inside his home just outside Brussels, just two days after the terror onslaught. His job as a guard at a nuclear medical-research outfit raised eyebrows, as did disputed reports that his access pass was stolen.

Workers at Belgium’s atomic-energy plants at Doel and Tihange were sent home after the Brussels attacks, reportedly for fear that one or more insiders might try something ugly. Eleven such employees at Tihange had their badges stripped in recent weeks, four since the Brussels mayhem.

Belgian officials believe that suicide bombers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui recorded ten hours of surveillance video of a high-level Belgian nuclear scientist after hiding a camera in the bushes across from his home.

Someone obscured a surveillance camera at the Doel nuclear-power station in 2014, then drained 17,200 gallons of turbine lubricant, nearly causing a reactor to overheat.

Beyond sabotaging an atomic-energy plant from inside, terrorists most likely would aim less for building a Hiroshima-style A-bomb, and more for crafting a radioactive-material-filled dirty bomb. While such a weapon’s conventional explosion might kill only dozens, it would irradiate thousands, panic millions, create billions in economic losses, and yield infinite global anxiety.

We hear often that Mahmoud Abbas is keen on having Palestinians vote in a democratic election. Yet Abbas turned 81 last week and appears ready to remain at the helm until his last day — free elections for Palestinians be damned. That makes sense: Hamas could easily best Abbas in such an election.

Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah are still far from achieving any form of reconciliation. This, despite all the talk about “progress” that has been reportedly achieved in talks between the two parties taking place in Doha, Qatar.

Hamas is also cracking down on journalists, academics, unionists and even lawyers in the Gaza Strip.

Yet Abbas’s West Bank rivals Hamas in Gaza, in terms of a lack of human rights and freedom of speech. The idea of free and democratic elections there is a joke. Abbas will leave a legacy of chaos.

Best birthday wishes to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who turned 81 last week. The octogenarian appears ready to remain at the helm until his last day — free elections for Palestinians be damned.

Abbas has inherited a tradition of tyranny. His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was also president for life. Both have plenty of company, joining a long list of African presidents who earned the notorious title of “President for Life” – in Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, Eritrea and Gambia. And let us not forget the Arab dictators in these ranks.

One might hope for at least a deputy — someone to fill the impending and inevitable power vacuum in the PA. Not likely.

Abbas has fiercely resisted demands from leaders of his ruling Fatah faction to name a deputy president or a successor. His reasoning: the time is not “appropriate” for such a move. Palestinians should instead concentrate their energies on rallying international support for a Palestinian state.

Many universities are redoubling their efforts to diversify their faculties in response to last fall’s wave of protests from student groups representing women and minorities. Yale, for example, has announced a $50 million, five-year initiative to enhance faculty diversity. Brown has committed $100 million to hire 60 additional faculty members from historically underrepresented groups over the next five to seven years. America’s institutions of higher education seem committed to faculty diversity. But are they really?

In the more than 20 years that I have been a professor at Georgetown University, I have been involved in many faculty searches. Every one begins with a strong exhortation from the administration to recruit more women and minority professors. We are explicitly reminded that every search is a diversity search. Administrators require submission of a plan to vigorously recruit applications from women and minority candidates.

Before we even begin our selection process, we must receive approval from the provost that our outreach efforts have been vigorous enough. The deans and deputy deans of each school reinforce the message that no expense should be spared to increase the genetic diversity of our faculty.

Yet, in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions. CONTINUE AT SITE