RUTHFULLY YOURS

A fetish for de-honoring objectionable historical figures is sweeping American college campuses. Targets range from unrepentant bastards like Jeffery Amherst to imperfect great men like Thomas Jefferson. I wonder if America’s undergrads realize that imperfection, and bastardy, are surprisingly widespread conditions:

“The white race of South Africa should be the predominating race,” said Mahatma Gandhi. He also said, of himself and his followers, “We believe as much in the purity of race as” white South Africans. He called black South Africans “kaffirs,” which is South Africa’s equivalent of “niggers,” and objected to blacks living among South African Indians: “About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population.” He wrote that “Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized. . . . The reader can easily imagine the plight of the poor Indian thrown into such company!”

There are dozens of such Gandhi quotes. Students at Oxford tried to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes — who endowed Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship — after they found out he held comparable, Gandhi-esque views. Should we expect a “Gandhi Must Fall” campaign targeting the innumerable Gandhi statues worldwide? Like the one standing in London, in front of the Houses of Parliament?

“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink,” said Che Guevara. He added that members of the “African race” had “maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing.” After the Cuban Communists took over, Che promised that they were “going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.”

On Thursday, Iran celebrated the 37th anniversary of its Islamic revolution with great fanfare. To ‎mark the success of the reign of the mullahs, which began in 1979 with the return of Ayatollah ‎Ruhollah Khomeini from exile, Iranians took to the streets to chant “Death to America, Death to ‎Israel,” while waving banners hailing the current despot-cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.‎

Normally, this occasion involves a march to the defunct U.S. Embassy, the site of the hostage-‎taking of American diplomats, to bask in the defeat of the Great Satan at the hands of students ‎loyal to Khomeini.‎

This year, however, the regime in Tehran had additional and more recent reasons to gloat. The ‎first was the lifting of international sanctions, made possible by Iran’s intransigence during ‎nuclear negotiations. Understanding full well that U.S. President Barack Obama would stoop to ‎any low necessary to achieve a deal with the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, the ‎Iranian hegemons got what they didn’t even have to bargain for.‎

The second was the January 12 detaining of U.S. sailors, whose boats had gone off course in the ‎Persian Gulf. Letting Washington grovel and beg to have the 10 Americans released unharmed — ‎and then thank the Iranians for being merciful — merely added honey to the baklava Khamenei ‎was nibbling with his afternoon tea at the time.‎

The latter event has provided much amusement for the supreme leader and his henchmen. It has ‎been the subject of speeches by top brass and the impetus for awards bestowed upon ‎Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval officers. Indeed, it is a story that Iran has been milking for all ‎its worth over the past month. Not a day has gone by without some new piece of “information” ‎about the incident. ‎

Southern Oregon University plastered its campus with posters asking students to check their privileges in various areas — including their “size privilege.”

The posters were placed “all over campus” by the school’s Bias Response Committee, according to an article in The Siskiyou​, the school’s newspaper.

The other privileges listed on the posters are: white, male, class, Christian, neuro-typical, cisgender, able-bodied, and heterosexual.

The school even hosted “public meetings for students to air their feelings” about the posters last week.

“[We wanted] to provide awareness that privilege does exist, and explain that privilege does not just pertain to race but that there are other forms of privilege, we wanted to start a dialogue . . . and I would say we succeeded,” said SOU Associate Director of Student Life – Diversity and Inclusion Marjorie Trueblood-Gamble.

Of course, not all of the “dialogue” has been happy.

“I believe they are segregating and dividing the population by targeting certain groups,” SOU student and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Tim Short told The Siskiyou.

Now, I have a problem with the posters, too, but for a different reason: They are very body negative. Seriously, just what in the hell is “size privilege” supposed to mean, anyway? Are they actually suggesting that some sizes of bodies are better than other sizes of bodies?

Get it together, SOU — it’s 2016, and and we are all supposed to know that bodies of all sizes are equally beautiful and special and deserving of the utmost praise and celebration for being just the way they are.

International bodies such as the European Union (EU), in their infinite wisdom, have decided to call on Israel to “end all settlement activity,” as well as target Israel, economically, through special labeling of Israeli products originating in Judea and Samaria, the “West Bank.” Moreover, U.S. State Department spokesperson, John Kirby has defended Europe’s actions, which is a departure from the Administration’s position from November that said the EU’s labeling guidelines “could be perceived as a step on the way to a boycott.”

The EU claims that goods produced in settlement areas are not “Made in Israel” and that the new labeling guidelines are to ensure accuracy. This decision ignores Israel’s legal right to this land under International Law and reiterated a faulty position that lands Israel has controlled since the 1967 Middle East war are not part of the internationally recognized borders of Israel.

Palestinians have spent decades pushing the narrative that Israel’s activities in this region; in particular, settlements are “illegal” theft of Palestinian lands. For decades, a public relations campaign has been waged to ensure that any mentioning of Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank is proceeded by the phrase “illegal settlements” at every possible opportunity.

Are the Israeli settlements as illegal as the international community says they are? The answer to that is no. With regards to their legal argument, Palestinians and their supporters have been pounding a square peg into the round hole for decades. In doing so, they have bastardized long-understood concepts of international law, to the point of being unrecognizable. However, several key aspects of this issue need to be understood.

First, while over a million Arabs live and own land in Israel, the laws on land ownership under the Palestinian Authority (PA) prohibit Arabs from selling land to Jews. Unless I missed something, there are no international laws on the books saying, “No Jews allowed in the West Bank.” In fact, Jews have lived in that area for thousands of years. The only time Jews haven’t lived there was for the few years, prior to Israel’s acquisition of the territory, when the Arab governments in control of the area forcefully removed these Jews from their homes.

According to a student at California State Polytechnic University–Pomona, trying to give a classmate a ride to their car so you can get their parking spot is rape culture.

In an op-ed for the Poly Post, the school’s official newspaper, Editor-in-Chief Adrian Danganan admits that commuting to the campus “has never been more difficult” because “parking is becoming increasingly sparse.”

She explains that “students are struggling to find suitable methods ” to find a spot to park to attend class, and that some have resorted to offering departing classmates rides in order to take their spots when they leave.

But this method, according to Danganan, is far from “suitable.”

Now, she starts off by explaining that it’s generally a bad idea to get into a stranger’s car — which is a totally fair argument. She quickly goes from reasonable to ridiculous, however, when she writes that “pressuring a pedestrian to enter a vehicle only encourages idiosyncrasies that attribute [sic] to rape culture.”

(Yikes! I guess these students would be better off missing class entirely. They might fail out of school, but at least they wouldn’t be contributing to a culture of sexual assault!)

Now, Danagan does concede that “this seems radical and outlandish,” but explains that she’s actually totally right because “trying to ease someone or even guilt him or her in to [sic] doing so is almost like sweet-talking to get what is desired.”

A student at the University of California–Santa Barbara had to deal with someone threatening to stab him because he dared to write an op-ed with a conservative point of view.

Jason Garshfield wrote a piece in the Daily Nexus, the school’s official newspaper, criticizing the Department of Feminist Studies.

Basically, Garshfield’s piece argued that the department violated the the University of California Regents Policy 3201, which forbids using the classroom “for political indoctrination.” He explained that he himself once took a course in the department, and that it promoted ideas such as gender as a social construct and the “recognition of male privilege,” and that the lessons were taught as fact without giving students the opportunity to contest or debate them.

“How can an academic department which is explicitly named after a political movement possibly claim to be ‘aloof from politics?’” Garshfield asked. “Imagine how you would feel if there was a Department of Objectivist Studies at UCSB. The department was dedicated to promoting Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. All of the professors were Objectivists, and students in the department were taught heavy doses of Objectivism without being exposed to a single dissenting opinion. Would you consider such a department to be ‘an instrument for the advance of partisan interest?’ You probably would.”

Clarity!” has been the battle cry of the EPA over the last year as it put the final touches on its expansive and overreaching definition of “waters of the United States” (or “WOTUS”). And yet, a week after the final rule was published, the only clarity the EPA has provided is its intent to snatch up every piece of land that can channel, pool, or absorb water and include it within its newly minted jurisdiction.

The effects of this rule are both far-reaching and disastrous. Tributaries make up only one aspect of this unconstitutional overhaul of the Clean Water Act, but they provide useful insight into the impractical mind of the EPA.

The amended definition of a “tributary” will expand the EPA’s dominion to ephemeral flows — or, as an ordinary person might know them, dry lands where water sometimes flows after heavy rains — as well as many common drainage ditches. If a tributary contributes any flow at all, regardless of frequency or volume, to a downstream water, it is now within the EPA’s purview.

Practically, this means that the average drainage ditch, the channels between rows of planted crops, and the land beneath the crudely formed streams from the torrential rains that carried away portions of central Texas over the last several weeks are now all subject to federal jurisdiction if water from them can be carried downstream at any point. To build one’s home, to plant crops as a means of livelihood, to erect a fence or build a road, the average person will now need to seek a permit from the Corps of Engineers.

Melbourne’s newspaper “The Age” is part of a stable of Aussie journals that are really down under in their bashing and bias on Israel. The Editor met with a Jewish community group….rsk

More than 100 members of the community, among them Peter Kohn, flocked to the JCCV plenum on Monday night as Age editor Andrew Holden sought to defend his paper’s coverage of Israel.

LIKE a cautious tourist on safari, Andrew Holden, editor-in-chief of The Age, initially kept his distance from the elephant in the room – in a 16-minute address to the Jewish Community Council of Victoria (JCCV) plenum on Monday night, he avoided all mention of Jews and Israel.

Perhaps anticipating his audience’s inevitable questions on a widely perceived anti-Israel bias at The Age, he deliberately focused his speech on social issues important to his readers – same-sex marriage, end-of-life ethics and homelessness.

But then came the questions from members of the community – and the elephant lumbered in for a close-up. For the next 40 minutes, Holden responded to stiff questioning from more than 100 attendees over his newspaper’s treatment of Israel.

The editor batted away an opener by J-Air radio commentator Michael Burd – whether he thought Jews were “naive” enough to believe The Age is objective on Israel while it has, according to Burd, pro-Palestinian activists on its editorial staff. “There is no group-think or mindset within The Age or The Sydney Morning Herald that says we are anti-Israel,” declared Holden. “Let me say categorically The Age has never doubted Israel’s right to exist.”

Eight years ago, the current US president’s supporters were given to describing him as the smartest thing since the microchip, a mind of such insight and acuity all the world’s problems would soon be solved. His inability to read and understand the Koran is further proof to the contrary
The American President’s speech at the Islamic Society of Baltimore mosque on February 3 was yet another exercise in countering the made-up malady of Islamophobia. Credit where credit is due, President Obama puts the case with conviction. Some right-wingers on the fringe think that this comes from him being a covert Muslim. However, it is much more likely – in having a Muslim father and then stepfather – that his view of Islam is drawn from his own personal experiences, which may well have been amiable.

To wit, when it comes to Islam he concocts his own insular narrative. He gives every impression of being blinkered, unread and self-absorbed. Call me a Democrat lackey, if you will, but I like this explanation better than thinking he is practicing taqiyya, like one of those unctuous imams that troll around compliant media outlets. After all, he is the US Commander in Chief. That he would knowingly deceive the American public about his true religious faith during these troubling times is unthinkable. Is it not?

Let me present some evidence of his disengagement from Islam to back my point. First he has no idea what the word ‘Islam’ means.

Last week, I reported on the appearance at Vassar College, co-sponsored by their Jewish Studies program, of Jasbir Puar, a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Rutgers University. As I noted then, Puar accuses Israel of deliberately maiming Palestinians, rather than killing them, out of some combination of cruelty and greed. At that time, I did not have a record of the speech, which took place last Wednesday. But members of Fairness to Israel, a group of Vassar alums and parents organized to counter the propagandizing that passes for academic discourse about Israel at Vassar, were present and recorded and transcribed Puar’s talk. Assuming the accuracy of the transcript, Puar did not disappoint.

Much of it was evidently incomprehensible. Here is a sample, a part of her description of her project “How Palestine Matters”: “How Palestine Matters situates the geopolitical that has been obliviated in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical in emergent fields of new materialisms and anthropocene studies.”