RUTHFULLY YOURS

Alex Chalmers was co-Chair of Oxford University Labour Club until he resigned in February, alleging that a ‘large proportion’ of club members had ‘some kind of problem with Jews’, while many used the slur ‘Zio’ and voiced support for Hamas. A controversy erupted and the Labour Party is now conducting an enquiry into antisemitism at the club. Chalmers argues here that the root problem is the poisonous ideology of antisemitic anti-Zionism which is bad for Diaspora Jews, bad for the Left, bad for Israelis and bad for Palestinians.

At the Labour Party Conference back in September 2015, the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn addressed receptions held by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East (LFPME) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). At both events he delivered relatively similar speeches in which he talked about the psychological toll that the conflict takes on both Israeli and Palestinian children and the need for both sides to compromise and negotiate. LFI received the speech enthusiastically, but at the LFPME event there was outrage. One attendee shouted ‘this isn’t about peace; this is about justice’, to enthusiastic applause from a large proportion of the room. When Benn tried to respond, he was heckled by people calling him a ‘disgrace’ and saying that he should not be Shadow Foreign Secretary.

This attitude of ‘justice’ over ‘peace’ is a damaging trend that has come to characterise much pro-Palestinian activism. That is to say, the demands of Western activists living in relative comfort have become progressively more detached from the aspirations of the actual people whom they claim to be defending. Whilst support for a two-state solution amongst Palestinians is lower than it has been historically, in the last 12 months, polling conducted by the Palestine Survey and Research Group has found that it is still the preferred outcome of between 45 and 51 per cent of Palestinians. Contrast this with the logo of the UK’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign which features the entirety of ‘historic’ Palestine with no mention of Israel.

Leftist students with an authoritarian streak have repeatedly gotten their way on college campuses during the Obama years — shutting down free speech at the University of California in Berkeley to the University of Missouri to Yale University.

But not at the University of Texas in Austin. Recently, one of the campus’ leftist mobs was defeated. The bullies were defeated and apparently now face disciplinary action – all thanks to professors and administrators who stood up to the mob. By following the rule of law, university officials demonstrated how to defeat leftist bullies claiming to promote social justice.

As usual, social media made the incident go viral at Texas’ flagship university. Four months ago, members of a pro-Palestinian group at the school falsely accused Israeli-born professor Ami Pedahzur of defamation and assault – all after they had disrupted a conference he was hosting that brought together a small gathering of scholars. The incident occurred just as Stanford University historian Gil-li Vardi was introduced. Suddenly, the boisterous students stood up and unfurled a Palestinian flag. They spewed the usual venomous statements regarding the state of Israel; and went on to exchange heated words with Pedahzur and other attendees who were unwilling to meekly let the students take over the event. Pedahzur, for his part, repeatedly asked told the students to “Sit down and listen, sit down and learn” – but to no avail. They quickly began to chant: “Free, free Palestinian!” and “Long Live the Intifada!” And perhaps most venomous of all, they chanted: “We want the 48; we don’t want 2 states!” – with 48 being a reference to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Safe Schools advocates shriek ‘Homophobia!’ at the suggestion their crusade to introduce young minds to cross-dressing and the like is anything other the ‘anti-bullying campaign’ they claim it to be. Let us hope there are still some politicians prepared to wear such abuse as a badge of honour.
As expected, the so-called independent review of the Safe Schools Coalition program has proved to be a whitewash that opens the way for the compulsory application of the program in schools around Australia. The academic chosen to conduct the two-week review, University of Western Australia Emeritus Professor Bill Louden, has confirmed that only schools in moderate Melbourne suburbs were reviewed, leaving unexplored the mass of highly controversial material both contained in, and associated with, the program that drew widespread criticism in the first place. The only ray of hope, it seems, is that a remnant of the conservative and responsible wing of the Coalition will intervene at the last moment to defund the program before any further damage is done.

Meanwhile, it has been alleged in federal Parliament that Gary Dowsett, the deputy director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at LaTrobe University, where the Safe Schools program originated, advocated a favourable view of paedophilia in an article published in 1982, when Dowsett was a school teacher (“Irate MPs plan Safe Schools rumble”, The Australian, 17/3). The article, published in Gay Information, identified three principal political objectives for paedophiles: winning custody rights over children for gay men and lesbians; ensuring the legal “rights” of paedophiles and their young lovers; and establishing the sexual rights of children. It sought to draw a comparison between the “sexual responses” of parents for their children and “the love of a paedophile and his/her [young] lover”. The article declared that

the current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement; paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms.

It appears to be little doubt that the Safe Schools program has succeeded in doing just that, presenting a radical LGBTI propaganda campaign as an innocuous ‘anti-bullying’ initiative. In doing so, they have achieved an objective first articulated nearly 40 years ago.

In the mid-1970s, the infamous North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was established (provoking Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Children’ campaign). At its height it attracted many supporters in Australia, especially on the far-left. NAMBLA denounced “the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” and its chief objective was to abolish age-of-consent laws that criminalized adult sexual involvement with minors. It sought to align itself with the gay and lesbian movement and waged a vigorous propaganda campaign to associate paedophilia with leftist notions of liberation.

NAMBLA’s co-founder was David Thorstad, a self-described bisexual pederast and atheist. An historian and far-left American political activist, Thorstad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and president of New York’s Gay Activists Alliance. He played a major role in convincing the far-left that advocacy for homosexuality and paedophilia was a legitimate area of political activism. He was the author or translator of many works promoting gay rights and revolutionary politics. These include Man/Boy Love and the American Gay Movement; Gay Liberation and Socialism; Pederasty and Homosexuality; Homosexuality and the American Left; The Early Homosexual Rights Movement; and The Leninist Theory of Organization.

Thorstad saw himself as a member of an oppressed minority and compared his experience as a pederast in America to being “a Jew in Nazi Germany”. He also denounced “child-

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262169/raymond-ibrahim-isis-and-hydra-jihad-frontpagemagcom

Raymond Ibrahim was recently interviewed by the Hoover Institution’s Strategika Podcast. Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Center, discussed his article “ISIS: The Latest Phase of the Jihad,” and explained how his original analysis concerning the resilient nature of the jihad from over a decade ago has proven equally resilient, especially in the context of the Hydra of Jihad. The 15-minute interview follows:

CLICK HERE.https://soundcloud.com/hoover-institution/isis-and-islam-with-raymond

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.