RUTHFULLY YOURS

WHAT will it take for many in the Left to openly condemn the Islamic State? Why this silence in the face of evil?

In January, the Islamic State threw two men off a tall building in Iraq for the “crime” of being gay.

In February, they threw another gay man off a building, this time in Syria and, when he somehow survived, had a crowd stone him to death.

IS is in a war against gays — not just against Jews, Christians and any Muslim thought insufficiently devout.

But what have our main gay representatives — largely Left-leaning — said in response to such savagery against gays?

The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Silent.

Victoria’s Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Not one press release.

Labor frontbencher Penny Wong, openly lesbian? Nothing.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown, our first openly gay senator?Also nothing.

Members of the Balad faction of the Joint Arab List – Haneen Zoabi, Jamal Zahalka, and Basel Ghattas – met the families a day before Palestinian President Abbas did the same. They attempted to hide the fact that the meeting took place.
Ynet reporters

A day before Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met the families of terrorists in his Ramallah office, three Knesset members of the Joint Arab List met terrorists’ family members, among them those who have perpetrated deadly attacks as part of the current terror wave.

The three MKs in question are Haneen Zoabi, Jamal Zahalka, and Basel Ghattas. Among the relatives of what the MK’s called “shaheeds” (martyrs) was the father of Baha Aliyan, the terrorist who murdered three in a combined stabbing and shooting attack on a Jerusalem bus, along with his collaborator Bilal Ranem.

Aliyan’s father said in a video that the meeting was “warm and productive.” According to him, “The Palestinian Knesset member brothers listened to the suffering and pain of the shaheed’s families, whose bodies are held in Israel.”

According to the terrorist’s father, “The Knesset members’ hearts were open and they listened to every word we said. They emphasized that they would make every effort to return the bodies by pressuring the government in the Knesset and conducting talks with the security and diplomatic officials in the Israeli government. It was settled that we would continue to meet in order to keep track of the matter in the near future.”

The phrase encapsulates the common notion that Islam “shares” the same humanistic values as Christianity and Judaism.

“Islam is Just Christianity Misspelled”

Daniel Greenfield, writing in his Sultan Knish column on February 2nd, “Will Banning Muslim Migration Ruin the Anti-ISIS Coalition?” noted:

The Muslim world wants to know what to expect from us. It hates Obama because of his unreliability. To them, his political ideology resembles some species of mysticism which they do not share. It much prefers an arrangement based on mutual interests over our misguided mystical attempts to discover shared values by pretending that Islam is just Christianity misspelled. (Italics mine.)

I couldn’t resist using that last part – “Islam is just Christianity misspelled” – as the thematic title for this column. But it is true. The phrase encapsulates the common notion that Islam “shares” the same humanistic values as Christianity and Judaism. The three faiths are alleged to be interchangeable, distinguished only by their traditions and rituals, with no significant or worrisome doctrinal differences. Christian and Jewish clerics who engage in “interfaith dialogue” with Muslims act under the assumption that Islam is just another religion, basically benign, not out to threaten or hurt anyone or force people to act against their religious beliefs by converting “peacefully” to Islam.

But there is no “peaceful” conversion to Islam. Islam tolerates no other religion. It is fundamentally “anti-coexistence.” To paraphrase Henry Ford’s 1909 dictum, Islam’s philosophy of coexistence is, “You can have any religion you want as long as it’s Islam.”*

I discuss the futility of “interfaith dialogue” in my January 2nd Rule of Reason column, “Interfaith Bridges to Islam,” which is based on Stephen Coughlin’s vital critique of our current and absolutely anemic and counter-productive “War on Terror” policies, Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Coughlin offers a brutal, thorough, but necessary vivisection of the pretentions and fallacies of interfaith dialogue. I noted that:

Postmodernism has allowed Islam unopposed and unparalleled entrée into the minds and values of Westerners. Coughlin discusses how this entrée works and the consequences of Christian and Jewish religionists compromising their own beliefs by agreeing to form a “united front” for peace and coexistence and multi-beliefs with Islam. He correctly identifies the chief culprit and enabler of Muslim Brotherhood-dominated interfaith dialogue as postmodernism. Postmodernism is not incidental to the inroads being made by Islam in the West. It is a key factor.

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes, and censorship have to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

Colleges still wear the ancient clothes of higher learning. Latin mottos, caps and gowns, ivy-covered spires, and high talk of liberal education reflect a hallowed intellectual tradition.

In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas. Environmental-studies classes are not very open to debating the “settled science” of man-caused, carbon-induced global warming – or the need for immediate and massive government intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and indebted students make the necessary ideological adjustments.

Few sociology courses celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class, and gender agenda courses – along with thousands of “studies” courses – have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge – apparently unknown for 2,500 years – to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled fact and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions.

Two unfortunate results have predictably followed.

Roberta Flack, years earlier, sang what has become the Europeans theme song, “Killing Me Softly.” Despite the reported wilding spree of at least a thousand North African refugees who groped women at the New Year celebration in Cologne, Germany, despite allegations of two rapes, despite condemnation by Prime Minister Merkel, the mayor of the city has requested that women monitor their “code of conduct.” Apparently German authorities will contest to their last breath that tolerance dedication will not yield. This is the tolerance that kills, softly at first and violently in time.

What Germany represents is a continental death knell in which tolerance trumps personal safety and even survival. Compassion is the sentiment of the day. Yet it is hard to imagine inviting one million citizens into the country who are not assimilable with many on the public dole. This is one of those rare moments in history when people are paid for bad behavior.

Much of the chaos Germany now endures was predictable. After all, many Muslim men treat woman as inferior, mere objects for their sexual delectation. The Koran endorses the proposition that a woman has half the rights of a man in any legal proceeding. Nonetheless, the compassion crusade goes on.

A German “education expert” proposed Wednesday that Arabic becomes a mandatory subject in German schools to enable refugees and Germans to coexist.

Thomas Strothotte, president of Kühne Logistics University and a renowned voice in education issues, told Die Zeit that society as a whole would benefit and “keep up” with a new reality from becoming increasingly multicultural. Strothotte has served as president at several German universities and founded two private schools in the city of Magdeburg.

“We would appreciate being a country of immigration and multiple languages,” Strothotte said. “Refugee children need to learn German and German children Arabic.”

Strothotte believes increased understanding of Arabic will have positive effects on Germany culturally, economically and politically.

Strothotte is not the first to call for Arabic classes in the German curriculum. Christian Wiesenhütter, deputy chief executive for the Berlin Camber of Commerce, called Arabic a new “world language” back in 2013, long before the Syrian refugee crisis was on the horizon. Strothotte primarily wanted to boost German business with the idea.

“We must finally acknowledge that Arabic is a world language,” he said. “We have to stay on pace.”

In face of intense criticism from alarmist scientists, Dr. John Christy went to great lengths in a Tuesday congressional hearing to detail why satellite-derived temperatures are much more reliable indicators of warming than surface thermometers.

“That’s where the real mass of the climate system exists in terms of the atmosphere,” Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama and Alabama’s state climatologist, said in a Wednesday hearing before the House science committee.

“When a theory contradicts the facts” you need to change the theory, Christy said. “The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board.”

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, the committee’s chairman, convened a hearing on the implications of President Barack Obama’s recent United Nations deal in Paris, which agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Christy doesn’t think signing onto a U.N. deal is good for Americans, and challenges the very data politicians and environmentalists rely on to push green energy policies.

To understand just how depraved today’s college campuses are, compare the treatment of two professors – one defending a Western, pro-American democracy (Israel) and the other suspected of supporting this century’s most gruesome Islamist terror organization, the Islamic State (“ISIS”).

Julio Pino, an associate history professor at Kent State University, is currently under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for potential ties to ISIS.

Pino’s jihadist leanings include possible threats against the U.S. government and virulently anti-Israel rants. In 2002, he praised a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had killed two people in Jerusalem, saying that the teen had “died a martyr’s death in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.”

In a 2014 open letter to “academic friends of Israel,” Pino published an unhinged and anti-Semitic invective: “I hold you directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians over the past month…[w]hile The Chosen drain the blood of innocents without apologies you hide behind the mask of academic objectivity, nobility of research and the reward of teaching to foreign youth – in a segregated university, of course.” Pino closed the letter with: “Jihad until victory!”

Despite decades of hateful and extremist statements, Kent State reportedly gave Pino multiple awards, including the Faculty Excellence Award in 2010, 2003, 2000 and 1996, along with the Professional Excellence Award in 1999 and 1997.

Schoolchildren as young as 13 in Brighton, England were told to fill out a government survey that asked them to pick out their gender (or genders) from a list of 25 options.

Yes — gender or genders.

Among the options were “tri-gender” (having exactly three genders,) “gender fluid” (having your gender change over time,) “demi-boy/demi-girl” (someone who is only partially male/female,) and “all genders” (which would be an infinite number because gender is obviously a spectrum.)

Below is the complete list, from which instructed students to “choose as many as [they] want:”

Male

Female

Girl

Boy

Tomboy

(Young) woman

(Young) man

There are a number of significant challenges in higher education today, including rising costs, diminishing returns, and the stifling effects of runaway political correctness on academic inquiry. That being said, it’s not all bad news. In fact, there are a number of hopeful, emerging trends that promise to create new and expanded opportunities for students while fostering a healthier campus intellectual climate:

1. Declining Number of Applicants – The number of college applicants peaked in 2009… around the same time the number of jobs for graduates bottomed out. What a disaster! Since then, due to demographic realities, the number of graduating high school seniors has declined and, with it, we have a smaller applicant pool in higher education. It is now becoming a buyer’s market for college applicants, and colleges are struggling to fill their freshman classes. This increases the applicants’ admission chances as well as their negotiating power for financial and merit aid awards.

2. Increasing Number of Jobs for Graduates After the worst job market for young adults since the Great Depression, graduates finally have reason for optimism. Thanks to the aging of the Baby Boomers and their shift into retirement, the labor market is starting to open up for young people. According to The Wall Street Journal, incomes for the newest batch of graduates are now the highest in over a decade, while unemployment rates are falling quickly. Also, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that employers plan to hire 11% more college graduates this year than last.

3. Tuition Discounting. After years of runaway tuition price inflation, completely disconnected from the rest of the economy and supported by mushrooming levels of student debt, market forces are finally starting to exert some influence at some schools. Institutions are offering all-time-high tuition discounts to encourage students to enroll and, for the first time in recent memory, we’re starting to see good old-fashioned price competition breaking out among some consumer-minded schools. Now, that’s refreshing!