RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘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

Western Civilization Heritage Israel Program (C.H.I.P) provides mainly non-Jewish middle-school-age children in the community the opportunity to gain direct knowledge of their heritage through tours to the State of Israel, affording them a deeper understanding of the origin of the monotheistic faiths, solidifying for them an ever-lasting impression of the Holy Land, and creating a special bond between them and the modern State of Israel.

Website: http://chipeducationaltours.org/

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CHIP4Israel

Fundraising Campaign link: https://www.gofundme.com/C-H-I-P

Whitwell Middle School students & teachers: WHY any young person should go on C.H.I.P Program to Israel (3:00 minutes)

https://youtu.be/ZHYXpCYy9sY

It’s a problem. With so many anti-Israel events, professors and organizations on campuses, even American students who want to stand up for Israel far too often find themselves unable to do it.

Part of the problem is that the anti-Israel forces are buttressed by the mainstream media. Plus, the few professors who are not on the anti-Israel side are often unwilling or unable to devote the kind of energy spent by the other side.

And sadly, it is perceived as more hip to attack Israel and instead support the Palestinian Arabs who are always portrayed, willingly, as victims. All of this has led to misinformation replacing the truth as the primary narrative about the Middle East conflict. It seems overwhelming.

But the truth is that every single concerned student, parent and grandparent can make a huge difference in the current anti-Israel campus climate. And that difference can and should start by utilizing a special tool when the students are in high school and middle school, or even earlier.

Plus, that tool is absolutely free and completely accessible.

It’s called the Jewish Virtual Library. It’s vast, it’s constantly updating and expanding, and it has just about everything you could possibly want to know about – and know well – waiting right there for your fingertips to guide you.

Before getting into the details and background, here’s a real-life example of the way in which the JVL makes all the difference.

Is the “knife intifada” beginning to run out of steam? Some observers say so. Yet this Friday, April 1, marks an impressive half-year since the launch of the current wave of Palestinian violence. Characterized largely by stabbings carried out by youngsters, generally acting alone or in pairs, this round of attacks has already claimed the lives of 29 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean asylum seeker, and a Palestinian bystander, and caused more than 400 injuries.

During this time, according to official Israeli sources, there have been over 200 stabbings or attempted stabbings at an average pace greater than one per day, as well as 40 car-ramming assaults and 80 shootings. Though perpetrated almost exclusively by Palestinians living in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and focused largely on these areas, the attacks have also reached Israel’s coastal cities, most notably Tel Aviv. And though not yet nearly so long-running as the first (1987-1991) or second (2000-2004) intifadas, the current wave, given that it appears to be driven by individual initiative rather than by organized militant groups like Hamas or Fatah, has shown remarkable staying power.

What explains its endurance? One reason may be that the perpetrators both reflect and are largely motivated by Palestinian public opinion—a subject to which I devoted a comprehensive essayin Mosaic last November. Here I want to explore what has changed over the last six months in how Palestinians see their conflict with Israel, and especially the desirability and efficacy of resorting to violence. In doing so, I’ll rely principally on polls conducted during this period by three of the leading Palestinian polling institutes whose published results reliably indicate what Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza think.

K.C.JOHNSONhttps://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/new-dark-ages-campus/

As last fall’s wave of student protests arrived in Durham, North Carolina, a self-described “group of unaffiliated and concerned students” presented the “Demands of Black Voices.” The Duke University activists wanted “bias and diversity training” for many segments of the Duke community, a new university policy “concerning hate speech” toward “students of color,” a new administrator to address the complaints of students of color only, and permission for students of color to miss classes by citing “mental health trauma” from “racial incidents on campus.”

One demand stood out. “Professors,” the students wrote, “will be in danger of losing their jobs, and non-tenure track [sic] faculty will lose tenure status if they perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color. They will also be liable if the discriminatory attitudes behind the speech could potentially harm the academic achievements of students of color.”

A university that dismisses professors whose “attitudes” could “potentially harm” the exam performance of preferred undergraduates has abandoned all pretense of academic freedom. Given how zealously professors normally defend the concept, one might have expected that Duke faculty members would have unanimously condemned the proposal. Instead, the only public reaction came via a statement signed by 23 Duke professors that hailed the students for “forcing us all to learn out loud.” The protesters’ incivility had overcome the “muting of sharply articulated criticism of white supremacy.” And the professors had a message for the students who recommended the dismissal of an unspecified number of their colleagues: “Thank you.”

Little in the professional experiences of the faculty signatories suggested a culture of “white supremacy” at Duke (or, for that matter, at any other contemporary college campus). The faculty statement was hosted on the website of Professor Mark Anthony Neal—who, in a fawning 2006 interview in the university’s official magazine, described his “intellectual alter ego” as “thugniggaintellectual,” who “comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing,” producing “some real kind of ‘gangster’ scholarship…hard-core intellectual thuggery.” Signatures for the statement were solicited by Professor Wahneema Lubiano—who came to Duke, with a lifetime position, more than 15 years ago, touting two allegedly “forthcoming” books. To date, neither of these books, nor any other Lubiano manuscript, has appeared in print.

As it turns out, the students could have stayed home. In the name of promoting appropriate thinking on matters related to “diversity,” Duke had effectively implemented the protesters’ plan. Dean Valerie Ashby announced at a November 2015 forum that department chairs would be held “accountable” for inculcating the administration’s “values” among faculty in their departments. And “at every stage of their evaluation,” Ashby revealed, untenured professors learned “how we feel” on questions of race and gender. The message these faculty members received: “You can’t be a great scholar and be intolerant. You have to go.”

An activist group at Stanford University is demanding that white people — as well as men of any race who are not transgender — be forbidden from being appointed as the school’s next president or provost.

“We demand that the next appointment to the position of president and provost of the University break both the legacy of white leadership and cisgender male leadership,” states a document that the group, called the “Who’s Teaching Us Coalition,” released on Tuesday.

Note that the students are demanding that “both” of these leadership legacies be dismantled — which means that neither a cis, black gay man nor a transgender white person would technically be “diverse” enough to qualify.

Among the other demands? “The development of recurring and comprehensive identity and cultural humility training to be instated as a requirement for all faculty in all departments by September 21st, 2017,” a “dedicated, responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty” and “the hiring of at least 10 additional tenure-track ethnic studies professors and a commitment to the retention of these professors, prioritizing underrepresented groups within the ethnic studies programs.”

Oh, and of course, “adequate staffing and funding to achieve all of the aforementioned demands.”

According to an article in Campus Reform, the group released its demands after a draft of them was leaked by The Stanford Review, the school’s conservative newspaper.

In any case, it’s certainly a good thing that WTU released them sooner rather than later, because the document also demands “that the Administration immediately accept the aforementioned demands and that a statement of acceptance, a timetable of implementation of each demand, and an administrative point person for each demand, be presented to WTU at 3 pm on Friday April, 8th in open forum at the Native American Cultural Center.”

That’s next week, folks!

Welp. I guess they’d better get crackin!

Sixteen attorneys general have banded together to go after oil companies and utilities who they claim have committed fraud by downplaying the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. They are going to investigate claims that ExxonMobile and other fossile fuel companies knew about the dangerous effects of global warming and hid the facts from the public.

The urge by Democrats to criminalize certain political opinions is nothing new, as we’ve seen in the abortion debate and gay marriage laws.

Washington Times:

Standing beside former Vice President Al Gore, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the state officials are committed to “working together on key climate-related initiatives,” including queries into whether fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil have committed fraud by deceiving the public and shareholders about the impact of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Two states — California and New York — already have launched probes into ExxonMobil, while attorneys general from Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands indicated Tuesday that they would follow suit. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, an independent, is the only non-Democrat involved in the campaign, called AGs United for Clean Power.

“The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real; it is a threat to all the people we represent,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “If there are companies, whether they’re utilities, whether they’re fossil fuel companies, committing fraud in an effort to maximize their short-term profits at the expense of the people we represent, we want to find out about it. We want to expose it and want to pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mr. Schneiderman also announced that 20 attorneys general representing 18 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands filed a brief Tuesday in support of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan rule, which has been challenged by attorneys general in 25 mostly red states.

The campaign was spurred by articles last year alleging Exxon hid research conducted by its own scientists linking fossil fuel emissions and global warming. Exxon officials have denied the claims and countered that the investigation was conducted by journalism entities that receive funding from foundations known for their climate change activism.

Suzanne McCarron, Exxon’s vice president for public and government affairs, said Tuesday in a statement that the accusations are meritless.

Until they are stopped, the Greens will use regulatory stealth to stymie growth and throttle industries they want to see brought down. The Illegal Logging Prohibition Act is one of their nastiest and handiest tools, so why hasn’t the Coalition done away with it?
While there has probably never been a stronger sentiment in the Liberal National Party (LNP) government that environmental policy is off the rails, little has been done in its two years in office to repeal or amend the raft of legal constraints which now purport to protect the environment. Reversal of excessive restrictions on agricultural chemicals levels is about all the LNP Government has achieved.

On the policy front, provisions to promote renewable energy were introduced and justified as a less costly way – than imposition of a carbon tax – to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. There was no international legal obligation to do this. Restrictions imposed by Labor on access to water in the Murray Darling basin, where agricultural production has shrunk, also remain unaddressed.

Following LNP backbench agitation, a parliamentary enquiry into tax exemption privileges of environmental groups is underway. While backers think it will help curb green rorts (why should Greenpeace have that privilege when part of its modus operandi is to damage property and assets?) it does not strike at the heart of the problem. The activists have a far more formidable strategy. That has to be tackled.

They and the Greens have perceived something which parliamentarians in the mainstream parties disregard, some wilfully, but most by default. The formal duty of parliamentarians is to legislate. Under the Constitution the Senate is supposed to be a house of review. In practice it isn’t. Regulations are rarely scrutinized. It’s a Greens hunting ground.

As well, wily politicians can and do slip new laws into Parliament and delay the tabling of regulations. Sometimes regulations are never produced. Both sides of politics have done this. The regulations are all-important. They define how laws are to be interpreted. The Greens know this.

They love regulation. It can be used to create legal hurdles to delay and increase the costs of projects to which they object. They also understand the most powerful environmental tool is to arm a regulator with the widest discretion to rule compliance. It sits alongside vague law. The looser its terms, the wider is the scope for the regulator to rule.

They work relentlessly to put this broad scope into law where they can. The Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, for example, gives the Environment Minister very wide discretion. This is little understood. Policies can be rejected if the Minister considers there is a “risk” for which no criteria are set. No wonder WWF rate it the best environmental regulation in the world.

Yet even that looks half reasonable when set against what is possibly the most ridiculous piece of supposedly environmental legislation ever adopted by Parliament. This is the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act. It makes it an offence to import a timber product unless the importer has records demonstrating laborious and costly efforts to ascertain in the country of origin if the product is not or does not contain illegally logged timber. Yet there is no record illegal timber has ever entered Australia.