RUTHFULLY YOURS

When feminists fought to de-segregate all-male schools and allow women entry to the privileged world of the Ivy League, the argument was that girls were just as bright and ambitious as boys and deserved the opportunity to compete fairly in the most elite arenas. This was an argument based on women’s strength. Now we have colleges and universities acceding to feminist demands that women need special protection. Even though they have freedom to engage in sex, to visit boys’ rooms, to spend the night – they must be protected against the trauma (and alleged stigma) of facing the person they are accusing of forced sex. So the American right of the accused to challenge his accuser is subsumed under the rubric of shielding “victims of rape.” It will be interesting to see whether this rule applies in accusations of same-sex rape as well.

In the current case of Jack Montague, expelled from Yale during his senior year, the woman in question whose privacy is protected, had sex with him several times consensually but claims that on their fourth go-round, she did not give consent. After leaving his room subsequent to this “rape,” she returned and spent the night with him in his bed. A year later, she decided to report this non-consensual episode to the Title IX committee at Yale and the wheels of academic investigation and adjudication were set in motion. Each person was interrogated separately by the Yale Committee and a decision was reached based on the “preponderance of evidence,” which differs from the evidence needed for criminal convictions. A strong argument could be made that by expelling Jack Montague, he received a life sentence, losing both his place as captain of the Yale Basketball Team and his diploma from a university whose tuition now amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars without a graduation degree.

Furthermore, Jack Montague’s name is plastered all over the media while his consenting sex partner for 3 out of 4 encounters is treated by archaic standards – as if her reputation would be ruined by divulgence of her name, her complicity or her non-consent. Or equally old-fashioned in the age of social media, that she would be further traumatized by the public gaze added to her non-consensual rape. We know of course that there have been other instances of accusations by women that have turned out to be false – the most famous being the Duke Lacrosse team affair. What does a woman have to lose by lying if her name and background are never revealed? And if the committee had found Jack Montague’s story more believable than hers, would she have been expelled for lying and/or false accusation? Or is expulsion only the burden to be borne by male students on their wider shoulders. How easily and conveniently we slip back into stereotypes of the damsel in distress when a political agenda is at stake.

The stabbing spree in Israel by Palestinian terrorists continues unabated. Even when an American citizen visiting Israel is killed “What me worry? President Obama” is unfazed. At this point in his presidency Obama has only one goal: burnishing his legacy.

To augment the chapters of a future history I believe he intends to accomplish what none of his predecessors could – a Middle East settlement. And he intends to achieve this lofty goal through imposition. This president will not wander through the tall weeds of negotiation and give and take. Nor is he obliged to adhere to 242, the international law that requires an exchange between Israel and the Palestinian Authority before any settlement. He intends to propose a “two state solution” to the U.N. Security Council, a body already predisposed to accept the idea.

President Obama is not likely to call on his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate before he engages in this initiative. This is his call, yet another example of his imperial presidency. He is also likely to face almost no resistance in the United Nations where many Arab states have recognized the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a legitimate state. The irony, of course, is that the PA is to a state what a meal is to a morsel of food.

Were it not for Israeli largess, international aid and U.S. support the PA could not exist. The West Bank’s so called leader, Abu Abbas, has been serving as president for 12 years after a four year term. Corruption is rampant in every area controlled by Arab leadership. The police function – to maintain a semblance of order – is underwritten by the United States. Hamas and ISIS have penetrated underground cells in Ramallah and other areas. While a tenuous relationship exists between Jews and Arabs in the region, Israeli businesses provide many of the job opportunities for Arabs, even the most disenchanted.

Into this morass enters President Obama, or so I believe. Recognizing the futility of attempting to secure Congressional support, the president is a lone ranger using the agency of the United Nations for his agenda. Since the P5+1 deal over the Iranian nuclear program, it is clear the president has channeled foreign policy through the United Nations. It is also clear he assumes his status as commander and chief gives him, ipso facto, authority for unilateral foreign policy decisions.

Since he has already alienated Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and, considering his lame duck status, cannot experience any further political fall-out from his UN posturing, this action will be widely admired in the Arab world, perhaps even altering a widely shared negative opinion of the president. And who knows, maybe it results in deals and post-presidential speaking fees ala Bill Clinton.

Last week, the deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Brigadier General Hossein Salami boasted that Iran has ten times as many missiles as its Hezbollah proxy and threatened that those missiles “are ready to hit enemies and targets from different parts of the country.” By conservative estimates, Hezbollah has accumulated a stockpile of roughly 100,000 missiles. If Salami’s boasts are to be believed, that means that the Iranians have accumulated a staggering missile arsenal of 1,000,000 or roughly one missile for every 8.5 Israelis.

The antagonistic comments followed two Iranian missile launches fired from Iran’s eastern Alborz mountain range. The missiles are said to have a range of 2,000 kilometers and are believed to be capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Written in both Hebrew and Farsi and emblazoned on the missiles was the phrase, “Israel must be wiped out from the face of the earth.”

If the threats written on the missiles were not clear enough, the head of the IRGC’s aerospace division, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, emphasized that the missile tests were designed to demonstrate that Israel was well within range of Iran’s missiles. He noted that the missiles were intended to “confront the Zionist regime” and that “Israel is surrounded by Islamic countries and it will not last long in a war. It will collapse even before being hit by these missiles.” Not to be outdone, other Iranian political and military officials weighed in with similar threats and bombast.

It appears that the launches were timed to coincide with Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Israel. In response to the launches, Biden stated that “A nuclear-armed Iran is an absolutely unacceptable threat to Israel, to the region and the United States. And I want to reiterate which I know people still doubt here: If in fact they break the deal, we will act.” Biden however, qualified his remarks by stating, “And all their conventional activity outside of the deal is still beyond the deal, and we will and are attempting to act wherever we can find it.” The latter comment was deliberately designed to provide the administration with some wiggle room to argue that the Iranian missile launches constitute conventional weapons tests and therefore fall beyond the scope of the provisions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Last week, I discovered Frank Schnell when he wrote a comment on formaldehyde and said it was not a cancer-causing agent and that the EPA had lied about it. His comment was on an American Council on Science and Health posting by Josh Bloom, Ph.D. (organic chemistry), with a 20-year history of pharmaceutical research. Bloom busied himself in the post eviscerating a scare-monger on formaldehyde from the enviro-fanatic group National Resources Defense Council, and did a good job, but in the third or fourth comment, I saw a gem – a brief but insightful discussion by a man who described himself as a Ph.D. toxicologist retired from the Communicable Disease Center – Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for 20 years.

Katy, bar the door.

In his comment on the formaldehyde issues, Schnell displayed his expertise and his knowledge of EPA misconduct as a view from the belly of the beast. He outlined the science misconduct directed by the EPA and its agency allies, supported by fanatic environmentalists inside and outside the government.

I thought, This is like Whittaker Chambers exposing the ugly underbelly of commie infiltration of the American government, because not only was Schnell a Ph.D. toxicologist, but he knew how to explain how the EPA and other federal agencies promulgate junk science. I told Bloom I needed more from this man, and he asked for a more fleshed out discussion from Dr. Schnell on EPA misconduct. I was not disappointed.

I have a modest archive here at American Thinker that includes essays on EPA misconduct. Steve Milloy, proprietor of JunkScience.com, and I have written some articles on the same subject together for AT. We focus on EPA cheating on air pollution research but also human experimentation with air pollutants.

All of our efforts are intended to show that EPA sponsors scare-monger scientists who promote the idea that small particle and other air pollutants are deadly when they are not. We have written a number of essays about how the EPA cheats on science and creates false scares. Here is a guy who can confirm the nature of the deceit that we saw and understood from the outside, and he knows the how and why and even the motives. What a find.

Read this wonderful man’s explanation in multiple articles that I admire and applaud from his ACSH archive, but also look at his archive at Science 2.0. For those who are interested in the politics, he is lucid; for those who are interested in getting into the scientific weeds, he is plenty smart and easy to understand.

Student activists at Iowa State University are up in arms after researchers offered to pay them almost a thousand bucks to eat some genetically modified banana. The bananas, created by an Australian scientist, contain high levels of beta carotene, which converts to vitamin A when eaten.

Vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, stunting and even death, is a devastating problem throughout the developing world. In Uganda roughly 40% of children under age 5 are vitamin-A deficient, according to a 2011 health survey.

The hope is that fortified superbananas could help prevent such malnutrition. To test their efficacy, Iowa State students were offered $900 to eat the bananas for four days during three trial periods, then have their blood tested to measure vitamin absorption. The research is led by ISU professor Wendy White, an expert on vitamin A-enriched crops.

But some of the healthy, well-fed college students in America’s heartland were outraged. In February they delivered a petition with more than 57,000 signatures to the university to oppose the so-called human feeding trials. The petition was also delivered to the Seattle headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is investing more than $2 billion to improve agriculture in the developing world, including through the banana project.

“While we can all support the rights of Ugandans to have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food, Ugandans have expressed increasing concern that genetically-modifying bananas are not meant to serve that purpose,” a group of students wrote in the Ames Tribune. “Instead, many suspect the GM bananas to be an attempt to corporately capture the domestic seed market.”

They sound like they’re trying to save an organic garden in Berkeley. “Those students are acting out of ignorance,” Jerome Kubiriba, the head of the National Banana Research Program in Uganda, tells me. “It’s one thing to read about malnutrition; it’s another to have a child who is constantly falling sick yet, due to limited resources, the child cannot get immediate and constant medical care. If they knew the truth about the need for vitamin A and other nutrients for children in Uganda and Africa, they’d get a change of heart.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Perthaps you read about the recent academic paper which examined glaciers from a feminist perspective, an exercise that cost US taxpayers some $413,000. Well, the paper itself should prompt not laughter but outrage, not least because Australian “social scientists” are on the same gravy train
Feminist glacier studies, an expanding field of academic climate-science rigor, sometimes needs an R-rating. Like this new feminist glacier research from a team led by Professor Mark Carey at the University of Oregon. Carey scored a $US413,000 grant in 2013 for his glacier research, with the paper being one output from it. It is titled “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.”

The epic, 15,000-word monograph cites Sheryl St Germain’s obscure, 2001 novel, To Drink a Glacier, where the author is in the throes of her midlife sexual awakening. She “interprets her experiences with Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier as sexual and intimate.[i] When she drinks the glacier’s water, she reflects:

That drink is like a kiss, a kiss that takes in the entire body of the other … like some wondrous omnipotent liquid tongue, touching our own tongues all over, the roofs and sides of our mouths, then moving in us and through to where it knows … I swallow, trying to make the spiritual, sexual sweetness of it last.

Continuing in the tradition of 50 Shades of Ice, the paper further cites Uzma Aslam Khan’s (2010) short story ‘Ice, Mating’. The story

explores religious, nationalistic, and colonial themes in Pakistan, while also featuring intense sexual symbolism of glaciers acting upon a landscape. Khan writes: ‘It was Farhana who told me that Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere outside the poles. And I’ve seen them! I’ve even seen them fuck!’ (emphasis in original)

Icy conditions normally inhibit tumescence, but the paper’s four authors (two of them men, but writing through “the feminist lens”) seem to be in a state of sustained arousal. To them, even ice core drilling evokes coital imagery:

Structures of power and domination also stimulated the first large-scale ice core drilling projects – these archetypal masculinist projects to literally penetrate glaciers and extract for measurement and exploitation the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.

The U.S. State Department is facing a congressionally mandated deadline to make a choice: Will the U.S. follow in the footsteps of the European parliament and a growing global consensus on telling the truth about the genocide of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria?

L. Martin Nussbaum is a religious-liberty attorney in Colorado Springs. He serves as legal counsel for the Knights of Columbus and In Defense of Christians, which Thursday released a report of the evidence that what is happening is, in fact, a genocide. The report entitled Genocide against Christians in the Mideast is available here. Nussbaum is one of the lawyers who worked on the report’s legal brief and talks about it here. – KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: How clear is the genocide case?

L. Martin Nussbaum: It’s clear. ISIS has systematically targeted Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, killing or abducting thousands of Christians in those countries. In Iraq alone, 200,000 Christians have been displaced from their historic homeland on the Nineveh Plain. ISIS and its affiliates have wiped out almost every trace of Christian civilization there, destroying hundreds of churches and other holy sites, some dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. And ISIS is explicit about its goal: the total annihilation or subjugation of Christian people. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” they have said. In light of the atrocities they’ve committed in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere, we should take them at their word.

This ongoing genocide has been recognized by 28 European countries, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, major world leaders (including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Pope Francis), and U.S. presidential candidates of both parties. The United States government stands virtually alone in refusing to acknowledge the genocide.

Lopez: Why is naming it as genocide so important, when the policy implications aren’t clear at all?

Nussbaum: First, it’s the truth. ISIS’s stated goal is the establishment of a “caliphate” and the eradication of all who refuse to submit to its warped vision, including Christians. Hence the genocidal atrocities we’ve seen in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Second, the word “genocide” actually means something — morally, politically, and legally. The United States, like all signatories to the 1948 Genocide Convention, has an obligation to prevent and punish genocide. But, as our government’s own U.N. ambassador Samantha Power lays out in her groundbreaking book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, the United States has historically dithered about genocide, refusing to acknowledge it even when it’s unfolding before our eyes. Why? Because to call it genocide means we have to do something about it. Critically, though, it doesn’t necessarily mean “boots on the ground.” As our report lays out, we’re asking for the State Department to recognize the ongoing genocide and to immediately take concrete — though at this point, relatively moderate — steps, including investigation and collection of evidence of genocide, referral to the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations Security Council for investigation and possible criminal indictments, and exploration of whether to set up a hybrid international criminal court to bring ISIS and other perpetrators to justice.

How does a person decide to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel? As someone who understands the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supporting Israel seems to be the natural position to take. Shared values of democracy, freedom, and tolerance make backing Israel an easy decision. And yet, we now see ostensibly freedom-loving movements throughout the West turn their backs on the only state in the Middle East where the existence of these very movements is tolerated.

It is true that there are issues of democracy and freedom between Israel and the Arabs. It is possible to argue that refugees exist in squalor, that Palestinian children have died, that the conflict seems endless, and that Israel is the stronger party. But none of these suggest that Israel is the cause of the conflict, nor that it is in Israel’s hands to provide a solution. In fact, as a democratic state with a market economy that seeks foreign investment, Israel has strong motivation to avoid conflict and war. History has taught us that such nations tend to seek peace at almost any cost.
But this means nothing to supporters of BDS, because the movement is entirely based on the manipulation and distortion of the truth. If you engage with BDS supporters and directly challenge them, their response is usually little more than an illogical pack of lies. If someone you know is thinking about supporting BDS, why is it so hard to “show them the truth”?

The simple answer is that BDS is a movement that has reached its verdict beforehand. It does not ask if Israel is guilty. Instead, it seeks to determine the correct punishment for a “criminal” that is already condemned. So when you respond to a potential BDS supporter with facts, you are simply irrelevant to them. It is like bringing evidence to a sentencing hearing that should have been presented during the trial itself. You are simply too late.
Recently, I have heard more than my fair share of lies about Jews and lies about Israel. However, what is different about the recent events I have witnessed is that I have seen how these lies are created.
I witnessed the first step at a meeting of the Arab Organization for Human Rights in the UK (AOHR-UK). The group swung into action after the latest wave of anti-Israel terrorism erupted. For pro-Palestinian groups, the attacks are deeply troubling because they strike at the very foundation of their argument. These acts of terror, such as the stabbing of innocent Israeli civilians, are classic examples of anti-Semitic violence that would occur if no national conflict between Israel and the Arabs existed. Motivated by religious incitement, they represent the same types of attacks that have been regularly committed against Jews by both Muslims and Christians over the last 2,000 years.
If you remove all of the suggested causes of the tension—the “occupation,” the settlements, the checkpoints, the situation in Gaza, the refugees, and even Israel itself—you would find that identical racist violence against Jews has occurred throughout history. Even the forces behind this specific wave of terrorism, false claims that Jews are interfering with Arab religious sites in Jerusalem, have been used to incite anti-Semitic violence in the past.

This week we learned that Lebanon is no more. It has been replaced by Hezbollah’s Iranian colony in Lebanon.

Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organization and canceled its $3 billion aid package to the Lebanese military. The Gulf Cooperation Council followed suit. Rather than support the move by his sponsors and allies, Saad Hariri, the head of the anti-Hezbollah March 14 movement, flew to Syria to meet with Hezbollah leaders.

Saudi Arabia’s decision to end its support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia is making peace with Hezbollah.

It means that the Saudis are no longer willing to maintain the fiction that with enough support, the LAF will one day challenge Hezbollah’s effective control of Lebanon.

Hezbollah and its bosses in Tehran don’t seem too upset about the Sunnis’ decision to acknowledge that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. And they are right not to care. In essence, the Saudi move is simply an admission that they have won. Lebanon is theirs.

Hezbollah’s isn’t the dominant force in Lebanon because it has better weapons than the LAF.

Unlike the LAF, Hezbollah has no air force. It has no armored divisions.

Hezbollah is able to dominate Lebanon because unlike the LAF and the March 14 movement, Hezbollah is willing to destroy Lebanon if doing so advances its strategic goals.

This has all been fairly clear for more than a decade. But it took the war in Syria to force the truth above the surface.

Taylor Force had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, he had served at Fort Hood in the year of the infamous Islamic terrorist attack on the base, but a Jihadist finally caught up to the veteran, whose father and grandfather had also served their country, in civilian life during a visit to Israel.

Bashar Masalha, the Islamic terrorist who murdered Force, was shot dead by Israeli police around the time that Biden was hanging out a mile away at the Peres Center for Peace. But Biden and his boss signed the checks to Iran and the Palestinian Authority that motivated and rewarded Force’s killer.

Masalha came from Qalqilya which is under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority. Its mayor, Othman Dawood, is a member of Fatah, the core political organization behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. Fatah celebrated the murder of Taylor Force and other victims of the attack, praising Masalha as a “heroic martyr”. It named him and two other terrorist attackers as “the pride of all of the young Palestinians” and urged future terrorists to go on killing in their name.

Palestinian Authority television called the terrorist who murdered an American, a Shaheed, a martyr for Islam. And the Palestinian Authority’s support for the murder of Taylor Force doesn’t just end there.

The Palestinian Authority pays terrorists based on the amount of harm they caused and the resulting jail sentence. Had Masalha survived his attack on Taylor Force and the other victims, he would have likely been paid $2,000 a month for his act of terror. That’s pretty good money in a place where $2,000 is more like an annual income. It’s so good that that there’s no shortage of terrorists eager to kill for cash.