RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The United Methodist Church is following in the footsteps of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the United Church of Canada, who all passed resolutions boycotting and divesting from the State of Israel.

In a sort of blundering naiveté, the United Methodist Church is ignoring what is surely inevitable: the very divestment they ostensibly imagine will stop the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians may actually serve to exacerbate it.

“Not all is lost. Many of the delegates to the General Conference come from Africa. They have witnessed jihad up close and personal and will likely have a much more sympathetic view of Israel’s predicament than many of the delegates who live in the relative safety of the United States.” — Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst.

“The BDS Movement has already fulfilled part of its potential – as a stalking horse for those seeking to destroy Israel by other means. … It’s committed not to peace but to a piecemeal elimination of Israel.” — Dr. Harold Brackman, Simon Wiesenthal Center.

On May 10, 2016, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC) will gather at the Oregon Convention Center, hosting thousands of Methodist leaders, delegates and visitors.

This leading policy-making event meets once every four years to revise church law and adopt resolutions on current moral, social, public policy and economic issues. The conference also approves plans and budgets for church-wide programs.

A major Jewish group is gathering signatures for a petition against ABC to cancel the series Quantico, amid allegations of anti-Israel and antisemitic content.

The Zionist Organization of America has been protesting what it considers the “blatant, vicious defamation of Jews, Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), promoting ugly lies against the Jewish people and the Jewish state” on the TV thriller about a group of FBI recruits training to become special agents.

In a statement released on Friday, ZOA President Morton A. Klein and Director of Special Projects Liz Berney referred to a previous complaint they had lodged with ABC – on October 30 – and what they considered an “unhelpful letter” from the network, which “failed to address Quantico’s factual anti-Semitic errors.”

Since then, they wrote, rather than doing something to rectify the situation,

Quantico intensified its anti-Semitism and its vicious portrayals of the IDF as “war criminals” when in fact, the IDF is the world’s most moral army.

Quantico also escalated its practice of mocking and portraying Jews as sniveling, untrustworthy, duplicitous, disloyal, war criminals, violent, unable to see the “greater good,” people who “follow orders” that are wrong; terrorism-plotters and ugly bomb-makers. Quantico also makes absurd “Islamaphobia” claims; portrays Muslims as moral and beautiful; glorifies a Muslim Imam who defies the FBI; and glorifies Arab terrorists and Palestinian-Arab “resistance” (a euphemism for Palestinian-Arab attacks on Jews).

The people selling global warming have been at it for more than 20 years. For the last 18 years, on good authority, the Earth hasn’t warmed. It doesn’t seem to matter. The promoters of global warming are defending their turf, economic and ideological. They dismiss or deny the lack of warming, making up science as they go.

President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, put his finger on part of the problem. When science is funded by the government, it becomes less scientific and more political. Around 1970, scientists as incorruptible seekers of truth gave way to scientists as political bosses collecting grants from the government. Scientific organizations, such as the National Academies of Science, vigorously defend the financial interest of the science establishment while posing as high-minded seekers of truth. For an insider’s view, read Professor Lindzen’s essay on the corruption of climate science.

It is not practicable to power the country with windmills and solar energy. But the manufacturers of these things eagerly support global warming alarmism. A substantial part of the corn crop is wasted by mandating the production of ethanol, for global warming reasons. The ethanol industry draws political support from the corn belt.

In California, politically powerful eco-romantics are putting thousands of people out of work and bankrupting farmers in order to dump millions of acre-feet of water into the ocean for the benefit of a fish.

The romantic eco-left consists of upper-middle-class people who can’t put two and two together when it comes to economics or science. They just assume that water will come out of their faucets and electricity out of their outlets. These people love global warming because it provides a story that allows them to pursue their bizarre, anti-modern goals under the guise of saving the world.

Since science is no longer scientific, but political, global warming belief breaks down along political lines. The Democrats believe, and the Republicans are skeptical. Neither party pays much attention to the scientific facts. The facts can be hard to ascertain amid the barrage of propaganda. The president’s science adviser, John Holdren, is not a scientist, but a longtime operator in the business of promoting eco-scares. His job is to rally support from allies of the Democratic Party that work the eco-scare sector.

LAME DUCK EFFORT TO WEAKEN ISRAEL RSK
The White House is working on plans for reviving long-stalled Middle East negotiations before President Barack Obama leaves office, including a possible United Nations Security Council resolution that would outline steps toward a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to senior U.S. officials.

The internal discussions are aimed at offering a blueprint for future Israeli-Palestinian talks in a bid to advance a critical foreign-policy initiative that has made little progress during Mr. Obama’s two terms in the White House, the officials said.

The strongest element on the list of options under consideration would be U.S. support for a Security Council resolution calling on both sides to compromise on key issues, something Israel had opposed and Washington has repeatedly vetoed in the past.

Other initiatives could include a presidential speech and a joint statement from the Middle East Quartet, an international group comprising the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

A senior administration official said no final decisions have been made and that Mr. Obama is considering a range of possibilities. The timing of any new White House move hasn’t been determined, but officials said it would be later this year.

The White House offered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a meeting with Mr. Obama later this month, but Mr. Netanyahu declined, administration officials said Monday.

By wading into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the final months of his presidency, Mr. Obama would be following a path some of his predecessors have taken. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both pushed for an agreement late in their second terms, but neither was able to bridge longtime divisions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

The largest Evangelical communities remain solidly supportive of Israel, and their size dwarfs that of the rising forces of replacement theology and its concomitant hatred of Israel.

Monday the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’s hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, will run through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last? One of the more surprising aspects of the 2016 elections is Evangelical support for businessman Donald Trump. Trump in many ways personifies everything that people who take the Bible seriously are supposed to oppose. He owns casinos. He curses and uses profanity in his public appearances. He has donated to Planned Parenthood and forcefully supported abortions on demand.

Trump has also insisted repeatedly that he will be neutral toward Israel.

From the Stanford Review editorial board’s “The Case for a Western Civilization Requirement at Stanford,” Feb. 21:

National debates erupted over Stanford’s decision to remove Western Culture requirements during the 1980s. We believe the University must reignite a national debate and reinstate a Western Civilization requirement. Therefore, the Stanford Review is petitioning to place an initiative on the undergraduate spring ballot urging the Faculty Senate to instate a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement, replacing Thinking Matters. The initiative text reads:
“In accordance with Stanford’s commitment to educating its students, and in recognition of the unique role Western culture has had in shaping our political, economic, and social institutions, Stanford University should mandate that freshmen complete a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” . . .

Western civilization, more so than any other, unleashes disruptive technology on the world; and Western history brims with examples of technological revolutions and their effects on warfare, politics, culture, economics, and poverty. Technologists and policymakers working on driverless cars, for example, would surely benefit from knowledge of how transportation innovations impacted urbanization patterns, employment, and culture.

But these future business and government leaders will not have this insight. 59% of Stanford’s Class of 2019 intends to major in engineering. These students will not know the history that society needs them to grasp. Stanford must equip these students with the knowledge necessary to attain “direct usefulness in life,” as our Founding Grant requires.