RUTHFULLY YOURS

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988. A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ’s return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself.

I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian preachers more than irreverent Christian college students, and we couldn’t stop dividing the student body between the saved and the damned.

When the alarm clock rang the morning after the scheduled rapture, I hit snooze, and said, triumphantly, to my roommate, “We’re still here!” There was no response. “Hello?” Still no response. I looked down at his bed, and no one was there. For about nine seconds I was gripped by sheer panic. I’d been left behind. The lake of fire awaits! Then my roommate walked in from the shower, and the crisis passed.

I thought of this story as I watched Rush Limbaugh’s Al Gore “armageddon” clock expire. In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

Benjamin B. Wagner, an Obama appointee, is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, a vast region from Oregon to Los Angeles County. Wagner claims that “preventing acts of terrorism is my top priority” but his recent commentary for the Sacramento Bee leaves room for reasonable doubt.

Wagner refers to “the massacre” at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino but does not call it an act of terrorism. Rather, it is “tragic reminder” of the danger that foreign terrorist organizations, seek to “radicalize” Americans and inspire “violent acts.” Wagner does not name Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, and American-born Syeed Farook, the Muslim perpetrators of the December 2 terrorist attack. Neither does Wagner name a single one of their 14 victims, who included African Americans, Hispanics and immigrants.

Wagner does refer to Nicholas Teausant, who “pleaded guilty to attempting to travel overseas to join the Islamic State.” The U.S. Attorney also mentions “a young man who lived in Sacramento” who lied about his activities abroad. This “young man” is Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, an Iraqi Muslim who came to the United States as a refugee in 2012 but rejoined the struggle in Syria in company with terrorists.

Wagner notes that neither Teausant nor Al-Jayab “was charged with planning violent acts within the United States” but explains that “the threat from overseas terrorist organizations is not my only concern.” The Obama appointee is also concerned about “hostility and violence against our own Muslim American neighbors.” Further, “recent anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign trail and in the media is fraying Muslim Americans’ sense of security.” Wagner does not explain how the San Bernardino attack, along with the Boston Marathon bombing, 9/11 and other terrorist actions might have frayed everyone’s sense of security.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day fell this week on Wednesday. If the day is supposed to serve an educational function, it has largely been a failure.

It was also reported this week that “More than 40% of European Union citizens hold anti-Semitic views and agree with the claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and behaving like the Nazis….” The data come from Israel’s official anti-Semitism report for 2015.

The 40% figure is consistent with earlier findings. A 2011 study by the University of Beilefeld in Germany found 48% of Germans and 63% of Poles agreeing that Israel was carrying out a war of extermination against the Palestinians; the lowest figures were 38% and 39% for Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Polls of Germans in 2013 and 2014 came up with similar numbers.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been marked for about a decade, along with other commemorations and educational efforts. The upshot is that large numbers of citizens of Europe—the continent where the Holocaust occurred—are unable to tell the difference between the deliberate extermination of six million people and an armed conflict whose death tolls, on both sides, are in the thousands.

Even for many of those who seem able to acknowledge the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust, the notion that, seventy years later, Jews have transformed from victims to victimizers appears irresistible.

Over the course of Jewish history, the idea of survival has become essential to understanding the Jewish community. Such understanding has run highest at times when Jews were powerless, such as the end of World War II, and produced at these times a certain amount of world sympathy.

In contrast, when the Zionist enterprise began to lay the foundation for statehood in Mandatory Palestine, Jews began to accumulate power, which caused some to immediately question the enterprise itself. Old anti-Semitic tropes immediately reminded us that such a state would be based on “exploitation” or even Zionist “world domination,” something that generated non-Jewish hostility and, among a Jewish minority, feelings of guilt. Powerlessness was the preferred, even ideal situation.

After the Holocaust we witnessed a trend among many Jews, especially among children of survivors, to distance themselves from the horrors, and the State of Israel, because of the contrast that had emerged between powerlessness and power. This was illustrated in books like The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes by former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering and the writings of critics like the late Tony Judt who categorically rejected Zionism.

https://www.nas.org/

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars.
Recent campus protests and, more importantly, the often anemic responses to those protests by responsible campus officials, have once again put a spotlight on issues of intellectual and academic freedom. In the past, the National Association of Scholars has been quick to point out infringements of these freedoms and to join larger discussions about the underlying principles.
We decided in the episodes that began in September 2015 to take a step back. We did so because the circumstances seemed to have provoked as much confusion among defenders of academic freedom as among its would-be opponents. Responses in the form of vigorous declarations that the university should uphold academic freedom as a cardinal principle seemed to us inadequate in light of the radical denials of that principle in word and deed by the campus activists. Some of these activists claim the mantle of academic freedom even as they violate it in spirit and in substance. And clearly some college officials who purport to uphold the principle of academic freedom have proved feckless when put to the test.

A restatement of principles means little if it fails to engage the minds and imaginations of members of the community who must bring those principles to life. Have academic and intellectual freedom become merely stuffed eagles brought out on ceremonial occasions for display? We think that, though weakened, they are still alive, and that what may help them recover is some good counsel to the people whose job it is to help them thrive.

That counsel takes two parts. The first is this document, which attempts to restore the contexts of academic and intellectual freedom. The second is a separate document that builds on this one to explain how these principles should be applied to liberal arts education.

The argument in this first document is that intellectual freedom is a foundational principle of American higher education, but it is not the only foundational principle. To understand intellectual freedom accurately, it must be considered as part of a complex whole that sustains the university.

From remarks by Brendan O’Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked, at the “What Cannot Be Said” conference at the University of California, Irvine, Jan. 23:

This censorship is more insidious than the old censorships. It is vast and unwieldy and can turn its attention to almost anything: magazines, clothing, monuments, jokes, conversational blunders. It’s as if students feel they deserve their own personal blasphemy law to protect them from scurrilous comments or images or objects. . . .

Campus censors can’t be held entirely responsible for this therapeutic censorship. In fact, in many ways they are the products of a culture that has been growing for decades: a culture of diminished moral autonomy; a culture which sees individuals as fragile and incapable of coping without therapeutic assistance; a culture which treats individual self-esteem as more important than the right to be offensive; a culture that was developed by older generations—in fact by the fortysomethings and fiftysomethings now mocking campus censors as infantile and ridiculous.

Yes, we should mock these little tyrants who fantasize that their feelings should trump other people’s freedom. But we must go further than that. We must remake the case for robust individualism and the virtue of moral autonomy against the fashion for fragility; against the misanthropic view of people as objects shaped and damaged by speech rather than as active subjects who can independently imbibe, judge and make decisions about the speech they hear.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon committed an egregious error a few days
ago. He woke up and got out of bed. He shouldn’t have. Had he remained
in bed, perhaps, perhaps, he might have managed to get through the day
without saying something exceedingly stupid.

Before a meeting of the UN Security Council, Ban Ki-moon justified
terrorism. That’s right, he said it was “human nature.” His exact
words were “It is human nature to react to occupation.”

Human nature to stick a knife in someone’s head or ram a car into a
baby carriage? Honestly, I have no idea what kind of society Ban is
from but I’m thinking it (and he) needs to be reprogrammed.

Human nature?

Student leaders at the University of Oregon considered removing a famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote from a wall on its student center on the grounds that it was just not inclusive enough — because it talked only about racial discrimination and not discrimination based on stuff like gender identity.

The quote has been displayed at the Erb Memorial Union (which is currently being renovated) since 1985. It’s probably something that you’ve heard before — “I have a dream that my four little children that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream . . .” — without even thinking that it might be problematic.

But that’s because you’re just not as smart or culturally aware as these kids.

“Diversity is so much more than race,” sophomore Mia Ashley told the Daily Emerald, the school’s official student newspaper.

“Obviously race still plays a big role,” she continued. “But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that.”

According to the Emerald, the students ultimately decided not to change the quote, but “that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board.”

Oh, and it gets worse: The entire reason that quote was put there in the first place was to replace another quote that students had found offensive — one that called the university “leader in the quest for the good life for all men” — which is obviously, you know, sexist as hell.

Some years ago, I conceived a business idea which I hereby make available free and for nothing to any enterprising soul who wishes to do a bit of good for the community. You know how there are services that store “cord blood” of newborns which, being rich in stem cells, could be used later in life to treat various diseases? My idea is somewhat similar. Here’s how it would work. Whenever an aspiring academic bureaucrat is appointed to the presidency of a college or university, this service would undertake, for a small recurring fee, to receive and safely store his testicles in a secure undisclosed location for the duration of his tenure. Upon proper certification indicating that an individual was no longer overseeing an educational institution, the testicles would be returned, intact, and fully functional. Studies have shown that disuse is injurious to this delicate organ, and since vanishingly few college presidents acknowledge their possession of what the vernacular denominates cojones, this innovative prophylactic approach to healthy living would benefit not only many individuals but also, by reducing the number of future claims on scarce resources, the larger health care network. Other obligations make it impossible for me to pursue this obvious money-maker, but I look forward to seeing it instituted very soon. If a pilot project is deemed advisable, I venture to suggest that a good start might be Yale University, whose ambulatory blancmange, Peter Salovey, is the proud winner of the 2015 Sheldon Award for Worst College President. Boola-boola.

Thus endeth my entrepreneurial spiel. But I am not quite done with awards. For Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College (tuition, room, and board this year: $64,266), deserves a real award for providing a partial counter-example in extremis to my general proposition concerning the eunuch-like nature of the Confraternity of College and University Presidents. The example is only partial because Oberlin , under his watch, has distinguished itself as a poster-child for the weaponized PC-madness that has gripped college campuses with the ferocity of a medieval plague. Back in December, there was a flurry of well-deserved ridicule directed at Oberlin for the 14-page list of “demands” issued by members of the Black Student Union. The document is similar to, but possibly even more insane than, the lists propagated by black students at Yale, Amherst, the University of Missouri, Princeton, and other institutions. The gastronomic elements of the protests — the demand, for example, that fried chicken be made a permanent part of the dining hall menu — elicited the greatest hilarity. But the document was minatory as well as mad. Here’s a bit from the opening:

Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
With immigration matters of all kinds in the news, International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 brings to mind the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, when the world offered too little help. America’s record on this subject is often considered marred by the Roosevelt administration’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the refugees, but some members of the American government stand out for efforts that could have put them in the company of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who saved many innocent lives.

The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.

On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.