RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

Mae West, the famous philosopher of the boudoir, would hardly believe her fortune today. “So many men,” she once complained, “so little time.” She was the kind of girl who set out to “climb the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.”
Now there’s such an abundance of choices in that even Mae would be overwhelmed. The educationists are taking inventory of what’s available and finding a sexual proclivity to suit every taste. They’re encouraging children to take stock and if they don’t like what they’ve got, not despair. Sex, like global warming, is always changing.

Typical of the search is a school in the English seaside resort of Brighton, a favorite of the politicians, leading the way. The kids at Blatchington Mill School were assigned, as part of their homework, to choose from a list of 23 terms to describe their “gender.” (Even the English, like their American cousins, no longer understand that “gender” is none of your business unless you’re a noun in pursuit of a hot pronoun.)

After years of urging the University of California Board of Regents to take a strong stand against campus antisemitism, the regents will soon be issuing a statement that will hopefully address the problem in a meaningful way.

But, as regent Bonnie Reiss eloquently stated at the board’s November meeting, the hostile climate for Jewish students will not change unless UC chancellors act immediately and respond to threats and intimidation directed against Jewish students in the same way they would — and should — if Muslim, African American, Latino, or gay students were being targeted.

If only UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks would heed this plea.

Last October, Berkeley’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held an anti-Israel demonstration in the center of the campus. After almost an hour of speeches attacking Israel, the SJP leader took the microphone and began chanting, “Intifada, intifada, we support the intifada!” This is the same as chanting, “Violence and murder, violence and murder, we support violence and murder against Jews!” The SJP leader riled up the crowd, encouraging them to repeat his terrorist threat against Jews. The scene was chilling, especially for Jewish students.

One Jewish student named Nathaniel, who had come to support a peaceful pro-Israel rally at the same time and place, was shocked — and afraid — when he heard the SJP’s leader call for violence against Jews. Holding an Israeli flag and a sign supporting Israel, Nathaniel was suddenly confronted by an SJP supporter who told him that he should be ashamed as a Jew to support Israel, and accused Nathaniel of being a “child murderer.”

Aghast at these accusations, Nathaniel was nevertheless determined to reply constructively and peacefully. Before he could, the SJP supporter told him to “f–k off,” stating that Nathaniel “disgusted” him. He demanded that Nathaniel leave the rally.

Hon. Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) in the Hague Parliament is rightfully concerned about the future of the West in this Breitbart Report article, “ Geert Wilders: Stopping Islamic Immigration Is a Matter of Survival.

The massive flood of Muslim flight to Europe from the conflicts in the hotspots of the Ummah in Africa, the Middle and South Asia threatens both the demography and Judeo Christian values that are the foundation of laws of Europe and the West.

Last weekend on The Lisa Benson Show we heard evidence of Wilders’ arguments in the stark figures of how this historic Dar al Hijrah immigration wave has literally swamped Sweden resulting in thousands of instances of lawlessness, sexual assault, and murder by hordes of Muslim young men and unaccompanied minors. The Hon. Kent Ekeroth, deputy of the Sweden Democrat party in the Riksdag, the national parliament, revealed that 35,000 unaccompanied youths now constitute 50 percent of students in the country’s high schools. The upwards of 200,000 migrants and asylees that Sweden received in 2015 and early 2016 as US international affairs commentator Barry Nussbaum indicated is equivalent to receiving the equivalent here of the population of the State of Indiana.

The Swedish tolerance for this wave of Muslim immigration has resulted in the Interior Minister issuing an expulsion order for 80,000 of these unwanted arrivals. Neighboring Finland has issued an expulsion order for 20,000 migrants. Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel once welcomed one million Muslim migrants has reached near rebellion with public opinion polls demanding that she resign. Community leaders in Germany, Norway and other locations in the broken borderless Schengen system have advised young women not to dress provocatively effectively adhering to Sharia demands of domestic Imams.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/02/10/obama-quotes-muhammads-speech-endorsing-the-caliphate-and-beheading-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org and the author of the new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.

The discussion focused on Obama Quotes Muhammad’s Speech Endorsing the Caliphate and Beheading — and Robert unveiled the disturbing context and confronted the media’s silence.

Don’t miss it!

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org.

Activists who genuinely want to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians need to internalize a memorably alliterative warning: plenty of Palestinian passes perpetuate the impasse. The more global opinion ignores or rewards irresponsible behavior by Palestinians, the more likely renewed violence (rather than peace) becomes.

There are enough instances of unfair and counterproductive “Palestinian passes” to fill a tome, but here are some recent examples.

PASSING ON HAMAS BELLICOSITY

Probably the most important pass currently given to the Palestinians is the global silence over news that Hamas is preparing to launch another war against Israel while distressing ordinary Israelis with their ominous tunneling sounds. Such silence by the world’s most important media, international bodies, political leaders, NGOs and academics helps keep Hamas in power, and when Hamas eventually launches new hostilities against Israel, many of the same voices that are now silent will blame Israel for the resulting suffering.

Hamas bellicosity is constant, and constantly ignored. Rather than prepare Palestinians for peace, Hamas glorifies death and promotes viciously hateful ideologies. A Hamas TV broadcast announces, “We have no problem with death. We are not like the children of Israel…we yearn for death and Martyrdom…Every mother…must nurse her children on hatred of the sons of Zion.”

Last April, Iran reportedly sent Hamas tens of millions of dollars to rebuild tunnels and restock missile arsenals destroyed in 2014 by Israel during Operation Protective Edge. Instead of global sanctions or censure over its support for terrorism, Iran was rewarded with a nuclear deal that just unlocked $100 billion in frozen assets, some of which are expected to support more terrorism.

Hamas regularly starts pointless wars with Israel that doom Gaza to inevitable devastation. Then, when international sympathy and donations pour in, Hamas diverts the resources to rebuilding its offensive capabilities/tunnels (rather than destroyed homes in Gaza).

Hamas recently accelerated its tunnel-digging program. Indeed, three collapsing tunnels killed eight Hamas diggers in late January and another two last week.

Such reports establish that Hamas is diverting resources from rehabilitating Gaza to attacking Israel, and yet the world still blames Israel for Gazan misery.

https://www.nas.org/projects/beachbooks

The NAS published Beach Books 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? on February 9, 2016. The main author is David Randall; Ashley Thorne and Peter Wood are contributors. We invite readers to share responses in the comments section or in article submissions via email to contact@nas.org.

Hundreds of American colleges and universities assign a summer reading to entering freshmen—usually one book, which the students are asked to read outside their courses. For many students, this is the only book they will read in common with their classmates. Colleges rarely assign classic texts: the common reading genre is parochial, contemporary, commercial, optimistic, juvenile, obsessed with suffering, and progressive.

Our study of common readings covers more than 350 colleges and universities for the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-16.

Beach Books Report: 20-Page Version

Beach Books Report: 2-Page Media Packet

Palestinian officials met in Doha on Sunday, as part of a Qatar-led initiative to cause rival factions Fatah and Hamas to bury the literal and figurative hatchet. Turkey was also in on the act, ostensibly interested in getting the leaders in Ramallah and Gaza to present a united front for the sake of an agreement with Israel.
This is amusing, to put it mildly, since the only thing on which Fatah and Hamas actually do agree is the ultimate goal of annihilating the Jewish state.
They are at odds about everything else, including the pace at which their shared aim should be carried out. But mainly, they — like the rest of their Islamist brethren throughout the region and the world — are engaged in a deadly power struggle.
So perpetual is this battle that the so-called unity deals the two groups signed in the past, most recently in April 2014, have unraveled before the ink on their contracts was dry. But the signatures did serve an unwitting purpose: to show those who still could not see that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a partner for jihad, not peace with Israel.
In order to hide the egg on their faces, all the leftist Israeli and foreign politicians and pundits who were making a distinction between Hamas, the recognized terrorist organization controlling Gaza, and Fatah, Abbas’ party ruling the PA, came up with a creative way to justify the internal rapprochement. Rather than saying they had been wrong to view Abbas as a moderate, the PA apologists said Abbas would now be able to speak on behalf of the entire Palestinian population when negotiating a two-state solution.
This was a moot point, of course, because Fatah and Hamas have never honored their own agreements with anyone. Furthermore, Abbas was not then, nor is now, interested in Palestinian statehood. So let us all rest assured that no good can come of the talks taking place in Doha right now. Oh, other than a reiteration of enmity on everyone’s part towards Israel.
As was reported in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat ahead of the negotiations, Fatah and Hamas “were set to discuss ways to end divisions and to unite their ranks in the face of ‘Israeli aggression,’ stressing that unity was necessary to rebuild Gaza and end the Israeli blockade on the Strip.”
Where fighting Israel is concerned, consensus already exists, however. The current wave of violence against Jews, through the use of rocks, knives, cars and pipe bombs, is being carried out predominantly by PA Palestinians, not all Hamas loyalists.
For its part, Hamas is not only rebuilding the terror tunnels destroyed during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, but it keeps releasing videos boasting of this endeavor and threatening to kidnap and kill Israelis. Even Egypt is having a hard time flooding and demolishing all the new underground passageways Hamas has been digging to transport ISIS terrorists from the Sinai to Gaza for medical treatment, in exchange for weapons, cash and other contraband.
Hamas’ latest production, released on Sunday (coinciding with the jump-start of negotiations with Fatah in Qatar) is a music video calling on Palestinians to resume suicide bombings on Israeli buses — a practice that was hindered by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Preventing terrorists from infiltrating Israel on a daily basis to blow up innocent people riding to work or dining in restaurants was the whole purpose of closing off the hornet’s nest in the first place. And opening it up to enable a repeat performance is precisely what the parties in Doha, including Turkey, are demanding.

Haven’t had enough “fundamental transformation” yet? Have some more:

The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies. A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”

It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.”

The Pentagon defines resilience to climate change as: “Ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions.”

To four-star generals and admirals, among them the regional combatant commanders who plan and fight the nation’s wars, the directive tells them: “Incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations and integrate DoD guidance and analysis in Combatant Command planning to address climate change-related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning.”