RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/majoring-in-anti-semitism-at-vassar-1455751940

Anti-Israel sentiment mixed with age-old anti-Semitism has reached a fever pitch at Vassar College. It is time that faculty and administrators take a stand against this toxic brew on behalf of academic values.

The campus of this private liberal-arts college in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., has experienced more than its share of anti-Israel activity. In the spring of 2014, the boycott of a course in the International Studies Program—because it involved a trip to Israel—included heckling students and picketing the class. During the fall of 2015, attempts were made to boycott Sabra hummus because the maker of this popular food is partly owned by an Israeli food company.

The most recent incident was a talk on Feb. 3 by Jasbir Puar, a Rutgers associate professor of women’s and gender studies. The address, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” was sponsored by eight Vassar departments and programs, including Jewish Studies and American Studies. READ MORE AT SITE

In a move uncharacteristic of U.S. policy as it has been carried out for decades, the Obama administration recently endorsed Europe’s version of a soft Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) campaign targeting Israeli merchandise.

In late January, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency changed its policy on imports from the West Bank, imposing, in effect, a sanction on such goods.

The penalty states that products must no longer be labeled “Made in Israel,” because the United States views the West Bank as territory illegitimately controlled by Israel.

Europe adopted such a labeling policy in November. Since then, the United States has chartered a zigzag course through the product demarcation debate. When asked in November if labeling constitutes a boycott, Mark C. Toner, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman, said: “It’s a—it could be—it could be perceived as a step on the way.”

Just last month, however, Toner’s boss, spokesman John Kirby, announced: “We do not view labeling the origin of products as being from the settlements a boycott of Israel. We also do not believe that labeling the origin of products is equivalent to a boycott.”

The United States, like the European Union, goes to great lengths to insist that demarcating Israeli products from the settlements is not a boycott.

For much of the second half of the 20th century, Abba Eban was one of the world’s most famous Jews. As the first representative of the fledgling state of Israel to the United Nations in 1948, and then as its ambassador to the UN and Washington, Eban shot to prominence through his eloquent defenses of the Jewish state in some of its most perilous early hours. For two decades after 1960, serving as Israel’s on-again, off-again foreign minister, he remained in the eyes of the world the indispensable “voice of Israel,” as David Ben-Gurion had dubbed him. His books on Jewish and Israeli history and a hefty autobiography were best-sellers, and Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, a 1984 public-television series in which he served as both writer and presenter, drew more than 50 million viewers.

Counting on posthumous recognition is a hazardous business. Still, it has been surprising how fast Eban has fallen out of memory since his death in 2002. This is too bad. Despite his fair share of personal flaws, most notably a pride that often slipped into vanity, Eban was one of the most interesting and impressive statesmen of the last century, and both his successes and perhaps especially his disappointments tell us much about the state of Israel.

That is reason enough to welcome the appearance of Asaf Siniver’s Abba Eban: A Biography. (An early, mainly hagiographical treatment by the journalist Robert St. John appeared in 1972.) An Israeli historian teaching in Britain, Siniver has produced an informative and well-researched if also somewhat boring account mainly of Eban’s political career. Although not so engaging as Eban’s own Autobiography, where the emphasis falls on thoughts and ideas as well as on politics, Siniver’s book does permit reflection on the central puzzle of Eban’s career.

The co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement gave a speech at Cornell University’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture earlier this month, where they taught students important lessons like the fact that climate change is racist.

According to an article in the Cornell Review, one of the co-founders, Opal Tometi, referred to climate change as “global anti-blackness” because six out of the ten countries on the top of the “climate change vulnerability index” are in Africa.

Co-founder Alicia Garza hit some other topics, such as how she would like to “retire” the phrase “black-on-black crime” and instead, as the Review put it, “focus instead on the violence of the state.”

Activist Janaya Kahn also participated in the talk, which, according to the Review, was filled to the school’s Sage Chapel’s 750-seat capacity so quickly that ushers had to turn people away at the door.

The Cornell Review describes itself as a “conservative, libertarian, contrarian, anti-establishment” publication.

The speech was originally covered in an article in the College Fix.

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has shown itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship.

On February 3rd, for example, Jasbir K. Puar, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University delivered a lecture at Vassar College, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” sponsored, shamefully, not by radical student groups but by the school’s American Studies Department and departments of Political Science, Religion, and English, and the programs of Africana Studies, International Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Jewish Studies.

The lecture examined “the use of technologies of measure to manufacture a ‘remote control’ occupation, one that produces a different version of Israeli ‘home invasions’ through the maiming and stunting of population. If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest ‘open air prison’ and an experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses. . , what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project?” In other words, Professor Puar’s central thesis was that Israeli military tactics involve the deliberate the “stunting, “maiming,” physical disabling, and scientific experimenting with Palestinian lives, an outrageous resurrection of the classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews purposely, and sadistically, harm and kill non-Jews.

A new study published Monday explains why sea levels have not been rising as much as predicted — “thirsty continents” are absorbing extra water. Perhaps this discovery will encourage humility among climate scientists.

Tom Hartsfield, a scientist and writer with a PhD in physics from the University of Texas, explained that this isn’t a failing of science so much as a call for nuance in a politicized field.

Our global system of air currents, ocean currents, cloud patterns, resonant temperature cycles, energy storage and release mechanisms, and further processes is mind-bogglingly complex.

Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s not a failure of science; it’s just the reality of how tough the problem is.

But there is a failure of science occurring as well, Hartsfield notes.

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.

We’re getting to the point where “the dog ate my homework” is going to look better than what the warmists are coming up with to explain why doomsday is a bit late in arriving. But trust them, it will arrive. Err, pretty soon…

You will remember that global warming isn’t absent; it is just in hiding, deep underneath the world’s oceans, just waiting to emerge. And now, to explain the downright embarrassing fact that that the sea level rise isn’t flooding poor island nations the way it was supposed to, we now have – ta-da! – “thirsty continents.” Why, those tricky continents, it turns out, actually absorb water in their soil. Who knew?

Sean Greene explains in the Los Angeles Times:

Despite the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels aren’t rising quite as quickly as scientists anticipated. The reason: Continents are absorbing more of the water before it flows into the seas, according to a new study.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory figured this out by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity with twin satellites orbiting the Earth in tandem. Over the past decade, thirsty continents have slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20%, or about 1 millimeter per year, according to the study published in Science.

Okay, it’s not “the dog ate my global warming,” but it is an attempt to explain away yet another failure of a doomsday scenario that was used to panic the public into uncritically accepting economy-killing measures that would, just coincidentally, vastly increase the power of governments over all economic activity.

It may be difficult for many to relate to the rarefied air of Oxford University’s student clubs, but nearly everyone will understand the gravity of the decision made by one leader of such a group who, in his resignation notice, called the club on its hideous anti-Semitism.

Perhaps more shocking, sadly, than that the anti-Semitism was so thinly veiled is that the student who resigned from the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, was willing to go public with his denunciation, which he delivered on Facebook on Monday, Feb. 15.

Chalmers, a second year student in Oriel College, Oxford, explained that the trigger for his resignation was the decision earlier the same evening by the OULC to endorse Israel Apartheid Week, which begins next week.

The Oxford student was horrified that the Club chose to endorse Israel Apartheid Week. IAW typically includes the harassment of Jewish students and provides a forum for bringing anti-Semitic speakers to campus. This decision, Chalmers explained, belied the claims some had made that the OULC was interested in improving an increasingly intolerant atmosphere.

Even prior to the vote to endorse the famously distorted annual attack week targeted against Israel were numerous incidents of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel expressions by members of the OULC, including members in leadership positions, cited by Chalmers.

Daniel Greenfield, in his Sultan Knish columns, writes about Islam from a perspective that is 100% objective and rational, a perspective I wish more people were capable of grasping. They don’t need to emulate his writing style or acquire as in-depth knowledge of Islam as his to appreciate the value he offers readers, indeed, offers the nation. Grasping the unchanging and unchangeable nature of Islam is a simple exercise in non-contradictory identification. A is A. Islam is Islam.

“Bad” Islam is just “Good” Islam in a bad mood, he writes. “Bad” Islam has nothing to do with Islam. It’s as though “Bad” Islam were not quoting from the Koran, but from the Peanuts cartoons and the translation always gets skewed in the process.

Greenfield is not an Islam-basher for the sake of bashing Islam. With his unbeatable gift for irony, he unleashes the same no-holds-barred passion as he bashes phony politicians (is there a difference?), and phony technologies (like solar and wind power), and phony humanitarians who profit from phony charities and leave chump change for the alleged beneficiaries (re Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the Clintons, George Clooney, and two or three dozen more extraordinarily rich people who want to “do good”). The private organizations “resettling” Muslim “refugees” in American cities, and which are paid and subsidized by the U.S. government, are a case in point.

You remember Melissa Click, right? The University of Missouri unlovely who called for “muscle” to 86 a student journalist just trying to do his job. Turns out it’s not the first time the assistant professor of communication has, er, communicated on behalf of the radical Left:

The University of Missouri assistant professor who attracted nationwide attention and faced suspension from her teaching job for a November confrontation with a student journalist is in more hot water.

The Columbia Police Department released video from an October protest on campus in which assistant professor Melissa Click can be seen cursing at a cop who is trying to clear a roadway on campus after Click and a group of student demonstrators locked arms to block a road during the university’s homecoming parade in October.

In the police video footage, first published by the Columbia Missourian, Click can be seen screaming profanities at an officer who placed an arm on her as he told her to get back on the sidewalk. Less than two weeks later, the assistant communication professor was captured on video calling for “some muscle” to help her eject a student journalist at a protest site on the university’s quad.

Click is in the midst of applying for tenure at the university. Hank Foley, the university’s interim chancellor, previously resisted calls for her dismissal, saying her future with the university should play out through the tenure process. But after the release of the police video footage, Foley in a statement on Sunday said “he will address these new revelations with the Board of Curators as they work to complete their own review of the matter.”