RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our deepest condolences for the death of humanity in the State Dept.’s alleged condolence note about a random attack on a random American in a random place.

Why is it that this U.S. Administration, including its leader, President Barack Obama, refers to the intentional murder of Jews in the most remote and passive of terms? No one murders Jews: an attack happens and later the unfortunate Jew dies.

No Jews are targeted because they are Jews: the victims – random ones, of course – just happen to be Jews.

And it’s gotten worse. Now the Israeli Jews, when they happen to die of some random attack, are not even Jews, but Israelis, unless they happen to live beyond the 1949 Armistice Line (the invisible Green Line) in which case they are neither Jew nor Israeli, but simply the maligned “settler” or, sometimes, only referred to as the other half of their dual nationality, such as American – as if they have no connection at all to the Jewish people or Israel, and as if those connections had nothing to do with their random death.

Take, just as the latest example, yesterday’s stabbing and murder.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s position on this is well known ever since he stated as much last year, in the run-up to the Israeli elections.In a recent Knesset debate, despite the customary efforts of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor opposition leader Isaac Herzog to differentiate their political positions, it emerged that actually both oppose creating a Palestinian state under prevailing conditions.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s position on this is wellknown ever since he stated as much last year, in the run-up to the Israeli elections that confirmed him in office, but Herzog’s statement was new. Herzog said, “The vision of two states is not dead, but it won’t happen tomorrow, surely not as long as you and [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] are afraid to make a move.”

Two aspects of this statement are noteworthy.

First, Palestinians are not reconciled to the idea that a Jewish state can and will exist alongside a Palestinian one. This is reflected in Palestinian polling. A June 2015 Palestine Center for Public Opinion poll found that 49 percent of Palestinians seek a Palestine in place of Israel, while only 29% seek one alongside Israel – and even many of those who seek a neighboring state do not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state: 88% of Palestinians say Jews have no rights to the land at all.

Conservative author David Horowitz has long written about the “Unholy Alliance” that exists between Islamic extremists and the American Left. Now, a new series of photographs of campus propaganda posters reveals how this unholy alliance plays out on American campuses where students are incited to join the Islamic war against the Jews of Israel with appeals to their sense of “social justice” and desire to address historic wrongs such as racism, colonialism and the mistreatment of women.

Many naïve Jewish students are seduced into joining these anti-Israel coalitions out of a desire to help the oppressed but find themselves ensnared in a Hamas-directed campaign to commit genocide against the Jews themselves.

Campus leaders of the Hamas campaign are two groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as well as its less outwardly political counterpart, the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Both were created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi has called on Muslims to finish the job that Hitler started. The Brotherhood is godfather to the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, whose charter calls for the extermination of the Jews. SJP and MSA conduct annual anti-Israel hate-fests known as “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” during which they erect mock “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda, including claims that Israel is an “apartheid” state which seeks to shed the blood of Palestinian children. A near-omnipresent image on these walls is a series of four false and genocidal maps purporting to show the Jewish infiltration and colonization of the Arab nation of “Palestine” from 1947 to the present.

If there is anything more predictable than the sun rising of a morning it is Big Chalk’s immediate response to any and all discussions of standards. ‘Give us more money,’ unions and lobbyists demand, thereby demonstrating either a gross failure of comprehension or a willingness to mislead
The Australian Education Union and the Labor Party, when justifying the additional billions of dollars needed to fully fund the Gonski Report’s school funding model, argue that Australia’s education system is inequitable. Government school advocate Trevor Cobbold from Save Our Schools is also in no doubt that Australia’s education system is inequitable when he argues, “Clearly, Australia is at the bottom end of OECD countries in terms of equality in education outcomes”. Alan Reid, from the University of South Australia, in a report commissioned by the Australian Government Primary Principals Association argues in a similar vein when he says, “Australia is near the bottom of OECD countries in terms of equity and education”.

All argue that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, the majority of whom are in government schools, consistently underperform as a result of being disadvantaged and only increased funding will improve outcomes and raise standards. Based on their belief that Australia’s education system is unfair and that government school students are the most adversely affected, both Cobbold and Reid go on to argue that governments must redirect funding from so-called privileged Catholic and Independent schools to government schools.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that Australian schools do not reinforce disadvantage and, based on research carried out by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, our education system is ‘high-equity’.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/02/19/the-case-of-mohammed-and-aisha-on-the-glazov-gang-3/

A recent bill in Pakistan sought to ban child marriage, but it miserably failed — after a prominent religious body declared the legislation “un-Islamic.” The UN also recently voiced alarm at the growing number of forced child marriages in Iran. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child denounced laws permitting sexual intercourse with girls as young as nine — and it urged Iran to “repeal all legal provisions that authorize, condone or lead to child sexual abuse.”

In response to these developments, The Glazov Gang is running its special episode with Louis Lionheart, a scholar of Islam who came on the show to discuss The Case of Mohammed and Aisha, dealing with the prophet of Islam’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl, and his “consummation” of that marriage when she was 9. Louis discusses the Islamic theology and texts that describe this marriage and how the Islamic and non-Islamic world has dealt, and not dealt, with the Islamic reality of this case.

Don’t miss it!

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.