RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Jesuit magazine America recently reported that Arab Christians are fleeing in droves from Bethlehem, the hallowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth. In 1990, Christians made up a majority of the city’s residents; today they make up only about 15%. “With thousands more fleeing the city every year,” reports America’s correspondent Jeremy Zipple, “you can’t help but wonder, will there be any Christians left here…in the not too distant future?”

Zipple’s question is rhetorical. He clearly believes that Christianity in Bethlehem may be nearing its end.

But why? Why are Christians fleeing?

At first Zipple says “it’s complicated.” But he goes on to list one reason, and one reason only: “Since 2003 Bethlehem has been circumscribed by a 26-foot military grade wall.”

Zipple is, of course, referring to the separation barrier that was constructed by Israel during the Second Intifada to keep out suicide bombers who tried to cross from the West Bank into Israel. Although the vast majority of the barrier is a chain link fence, in Bethlehem and a few other metropolitan areas it becomes a tremendous gray wall. Since its construction, the barrier has become the international symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israel.

“[T]he separation wall…cuts family from each other. People get humiliated at checkpoints. People do not have many opportunities to improve their living standards. So, therefore, Christians who can afford to, are trying to leave this country,” says interviewee Hanan Nasrallah, a Palestinian employee of Catholic Relief Services.

Nasrallah’s calculation is simple: Israel built a wall; the wall makes life difficult; therefore, Palestinian Christians are leaving.

According to Nasrallah, both Palestinian Christians and Muslims face the same challenges. It is only the Jewish occupation that is causing them both misery.

And yet the Muslim population of Bethlehem is growing. Muslims, in fact, are not fleeing. They are arriving—in large numbers.

A Palestinian terrorist stabbed and killed an American tourist and injured at least 10 others in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, marking the third Palestinian attack within hours of one another.

Israeli police said the terrorist started to stab civilians near the entrance to the Jaffa Port entrance – wounding multiple individuals – before escaping toward Tel Aviv and stabbing motorists idling in their vehicles on the road.

Four of the victims are in serious condition, including a pregnant woman.

The attack occurred about a mile from the Peres Center for Peace, coinciding with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s arrived at the facility to meet with former Israeli President Shimon Peres

“Terrorist acts against children, women, and innocent people are intolerable,” said Biden in a joint press conference with Peres.

Hours earlier, Palestinian terrorists stabbed and injured three Israelis in two separate, nearly simultaneous attacks.

In Petah Tikva, a Palestinian terrorist repeatedly stabbed a 40 year-old ultra-Orthodox Israeli man in a wine store. After fleeing the scene temporarily, the victim returned to the store, pulled the knife out of his own neck and mortally stabbed the terrorist.

Around the same time, a Palestinian terrorist shot two Border Police officers in the head outside Nablus Gate in eastern Jerusalem. The two police officers are in critical and serious condition. Israeli police chased down and neutralized the gun-wielding assailant.

State Dept. condemned three terrorist attacks Tuesday, but never mentioned they happened in Israel or that Arabs were the perpetrators.

The Assistant Secretary and State Department Spokesperson John Kirby issued a statement on Tuesday, March 8, condemning three terrorist attacks in Israel, in one of which an American tourist was killed.

The statement mentioned the American, Taylor Force, by name. Kirby named all three Israeli cities in which the terrorist attacks occurred, but neither mentioned that all three took place in Israel, nor that Palestinian Arabs were the perpetrators of each of the attacks.

The statement reads:

The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms today’s outrageous terrorist attacks in Jaffa, Petah Tikvah, and Jerusalem, which tragically claimed the life of U.S. citizen Taylor Allen Force and left many others severely injured. We offer our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Taylor and all those affected by these senseless attacks, and we wish a speedy recovery for the injured. As we have said many times, there is absolutely no justification for terrorism. We continue to encourage all parties to take affirmative steps to reduce tensions and restore calm.

AMERICAN MURDERED BY PALESTINIAN TERROR:

Taylor Force was murdered today by a Palestinian terrorist in Jaffa – just 1 mile from where VP Joe Biden was meeting with Israeli leaders.
Force was a US Army veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a graduate of West Point and an Eagle scout. Force was currently a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He and his wife were visiting Israel with the school to learn about Israeli tech, His wife was also stabbed and is in critical condition.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones. We pray for the recovery of his wife.
Today, an American tourist was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist – only one mile away from where Vice President Joe Biden was meeting with Israeli leaders.

As Biden’s plane touched down, Israel was in the midst of a horrific terror wave across the country. In four separate attacks, 14 were wounded and one murdered – an America army vet traveling with his wife. An Israeli police officer is still fighting for his life after being shot in the head.

We mourn the loss of Taylor Force and echo the words of Vanderbilt’s chancellor where Force was a student: “This horrific act of violence has robbed our Vanderbilt family of a young hopeful life and all of the bright promise that he held for bettering our greater world,”

Force served America in Iraq and Afghanistan and graduated from West Point. He and his wife were visiting Israel with Vanderbilt to learn about Israeli tech, when he was brutally murdered near the beach in Jaffa. His wife was also stabbed and is in critical condition.

Hezbollah leaderNasrallah vehemently attacked Arab regimes for their decision to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, claiming that “the Lebanese resistance is the only one that regains Arab dignity and fights for the Palestinian people.”

Last week, the Gulf Cooperation Council voted to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization amid the Lebanese Shi’ite group’s involvement in various regional conflicts alongside Iran and the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In a speech he delivered Sunday afternoon to commemorate the martyrdom of a senior Hezbollah commander, Ali Fayyad, Nasrallah mocked the contribution of Arab regimes to the struggle against Israel saying, “If we had waited for the Arabs and their armies, Israel would still be in our lands [South Lebanon].”

Responding to the GCC’s decision to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Nasrallah delivered a belligerent message to Arab states, saying, “We do not need your weapons; leave us alone.”

“Arab regimes led by Saudi Arabia side with Israel against our struggle. They do so because the defense of Israel is the guarantee to their survival,” Hezbollah’s chief further stated.

Hezbollah’s chief criticized the “Arab indifference” toward Israel’s alleged assassination of Omar al-Nayef, a former Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist who died under mysterious circumstances in Sofia, Bulgaria, on February 26.

Nasrallah also provided details about the fighting in Syria, claiming that Hezbollah does not receive orders from Iran instructing it how to operate in the country.

Leave it to the Middle East studies establishment to defend the vilest forms of conspiratorial anti-Semitic rhetoric, provided it’s in service of demonizing Israel. Jasbir Puar, the Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor and Israel-boycott advocate who, in a controversial February 3 lecture at Vassar College, charged the IDF with the organ harvesting, deliberate maiming, and stunting of “Palestinian bodies,” can certainly count on support from its ranks.

Notorious Israel-bashers such as Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), and Steven Salaita (American University of Beirut) are among the signatories to an open letter to Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill defending Puar against an alleged campaign of “vilification and hatred” following her inflammatory lecture. Unlike the vast majority of academic jargon-filled apologias for bigotry that populate the lecture circuit, Puar’s talk was widely covered and rightly condemned by a disgusted public. In evoking “hate mail and other threats” against Puar, the authors allude to the specter of death threats — whether real or imagined — a time-honored tradition among academics unaccustomed to the twin horrors of criticism and accountability.

The letter inveighs against the particular evils of a February 17 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Mark G. Yudof, former University of California president, and Ken Waltzer, professor emeritus of history at Michigan State University, titled, “Majoring in Anti-Semitism at Vassar.” Yudof and Waltzer had the temerity to point out the obvious: by accusing Israel of extracting organs from Palestinians for medical research, Puar was “updating the medieval blood libel against Jews.”

Campus crybullies are frantically outdoing each other to come up with the nastiest and craziest assaults on free speech and sanity. Robby Soave appears to have found a new winner.

Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.

The demands are for a College of Power and Liberation to teach social justice…

No individual student should have to take on the task of monitoring and challenging injustices within the university. The College of Power and Liberation will provide and support students who are trained and educated in recognizing and addressing these injustices.

and lots of paid positions denouncing political incorrectness… because you can’t expect them to hate people for free.

Though many students, staff and faculty members are committed to doing the important yet difficult work of confronting racism, misogyny, trans- and homo-phobia on this campus, the reality is that students have continuously been expected to live in and address these systems of disempowerment while simultaneously being exploited in order to uphold this image of an “active mind changing lives”. This work is often done without recognition or compensation for labor, time, and effort. The College of Power and Liberation demands an annually dedicated revenue of $45,000 for compensation of students and faculty doing de-colonial work on campus.

Earlier this month yet another tunnel Hamas was building in Gaza collapsed, killing at least one Hamas operative. It was the sixth Gaza tunnel collapse in recent months, one of which killed seven of the fighters.

What’s behind it is a matter of public speculation in Israel. Hamas, of course, says Israel is behind the collapses. The latest Israeli media reports claim that the cement Hamas has been importing into Gaza since the summer 2014 war is of poor quality, and that explains the rickety tunnels.

Yet when, after a tunnel collapse in February, the Israeli official responsible for the territories was asked whether Israel was involved in these incidents, he replied: “God knows. I would suggest the residents of the Gaza Strip not to occupy themselves with the tunnels and to get away from them, especially after seeing the results in recent days.”

Israelis living along the Gaza border have indeed been complaining bitterly about hearing tunnel-digging activity at night. The Israeli government has issued what sound like vague assurances. Hamas claims to have seen Israeli combat engineers operating at the border. Some Israeli pundits have suggested that at least some of what the Israeli residents are hearing at night is Israeli digging.

But whatever is causing the tunnel collapses, they’re a metaphor for Gaza’s fate since the war in July and August 2014.

In that war Hamas fired about 4600 rockets at Israel. The great majority were shot down or widely missed their targets. The war did manage to claim the lives of about 70 Israelis, most of them young soldiers—a “glorious” achievement for Hamas.

The following is not an example of academic hijinks, but a serious academic attempt to feminize glaciers.

I bet you didn’t know that glaciers were sexist. Well, maybe they’re not. But they definitely lack the feminist touch as it relates to “epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge.” Or…whatever.

Yes, it’s gender theory meets climate change in a clash of two of the titanic irrelevancies of the age. And the results are as banal as you would expect them to be. The paper was vomited forth by a group of University of Oregon historians — obviously the perfect candidates to write a paper on climate change. And they spared no liberal shibboleth in the making of this mish mash of hash.

Hit and Run:

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money’s worth. From the abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

The striking teachers are exposing the Palestinian Authority (PA) as playing Western donors for suckers.

No one, in fact, knows how many Palestinians are on the Palestinian payroll.

Donors might not be aware, for instance, that they are paying over 50,000 employees from the Gaza Strip to not work. This has been the case since 20007, when Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip. In response, the PA ordered all its employees to boycott Hamas and promised to pay them full salaries for sitting at home.

The Palestinian committee has been tasked to avoid scandal and ensure that donors do not get to the bottom of the case.

Western donors want to see a list of the names of Palestinians who are on the payroll of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the PA is not happy about it.

What is driving this demand? Thousands of Palestinian school teachers in the West Bank are striking for better conditions. The Palestinian leadership, in response, has ordered a security crackdown on the strikers.

To justify the crackdown, PA officials have claimed that the strike was organized by Hamas as part of a conspiracy to embarrass and undermine the regime of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.