RUTHFULLY YOURS

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!

Sergeant Schultz Knows Everything

“I know nothing!”

That was Sergeant Hans Schultz’s favorite and well-known refrain in Hogan’s Heroes, which ran on CBS from 1965 to 1971. In the linked clip, he adds, “I was not here! I did not even get up this morning!”

Suppose you had a chance to chat with the real-life Sgt. Schultz’s in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. The “interfaith” dialogue would go something like this, after you’ve reported a crime committed by a Muslim.

Sgt. Schultz will claim that he knows everything, he was there, and that you should go back to sleep and pretend nothing ever happened. You were not raped by a Muslim or a gang of Muslims. You did not have your head kicked in by a gang of Muslims. You were not robbed by a Muslim. Or stabbed, or groped, or spit on by a Muslim on a train or on the street. Or even raped and then disfigured by a Muslim. Or by a “refugee,” or by an “immigrant.”

All right, Sgt. Schultz would concede. All or one of those things happened to you. There’s no denying the facts, is there? But if you fought back, and used illegal means such as pepper spray to deter your assailant, then you must be punished. Your fighting back is evidence of bigotry, or racism, of being anti-Muslim or anti-Islam or anti-immigrant. Of your lack of patriotism! Those states of mind are illegal, as well, and must be corrected.

You must allow yourself to be raped, robbed, and spit on. It’s your duty to submit to the diktats of Islam. You must submit to Sharia. Horridly primitive system, yes. But, who are we to judge? You may not survive the experience, but it’s an issue of sacrifice. Of self-sacrifice for the greater good. For the nation. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Germany, even Italy – all of our lily-white societies, have a duty to be invaded and assaulted by Muslims and others. We have a duty to relieve the suffering they endured in the countries from which they came. We have no right to assert that our morals and our society are superior to the cultures of the immigrants. We have no right to impose them on immigrants, even here. That is the height of cultural hubris and civilizational imperialism. Okay, so the perpetrator was Somalian. And he hates whites, even though Sweden was not a party to the downfall of Somalia. Or Ethiopia. I’m a little foggy on the history of that part of the world. So what?

The University of Kentucky is offering a course titled “Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the U.S. South ” where students will examine the social and racial issues surrounding tacos.

Or, as the course’s website puts it, “how food literacies situate different spaces, identities, and forms of knowledge.”

“This class allows our students to explore the issues of immigration, inequality, workers, intercultural communication, and literacy through the prism of food,” the course’s professor, Steven Alvarez, told Vice.

This existence of such a course isn’t surprising; tacos are a very controversial subject these days — and plenty of people have gotten into trouble for handling the (apparently) sensitive issue in an (apparently) insensitive way.

A few examples:

In 2013, Northwestern University’s Hispanic/Latino Alliance wrote a letter warning students not to eat tacos on Cinco de Mayo because that could make some students feel “unsafe.”

In 2014, California State University – Fullerton’s chapter of Alpha Delta Pi sorority faced “serious sanctions” from the school for hosting a Taco Tuesday event where students wore sombreros because that’s “culturally insensitive attire.”

The University of Southern California hosted a “Consent Carnival” where it taught students that there’s a five-step process they must follow before kissing someone in order for it to not be considered sexual assault

In fact, the checklist also states that following these steps just once is not enough. No, you have to follow them every time you kiss someone, even if you’ve kissed them before.

The exhibit, called “Kissing Booth,” offered students Hershey’s kisses glued on to little white pieces of paper with the words “what exactly does it mean to . . . ‘consent’ to a kiss?” and the following five steps:

Affirmative: We’re really excited to share this kiss with you and we’re letting you know!

Coherent: We’re present and able to recognize exactly what’s happening when we give this kiss to you.

Willing: We made the decision to give you this kiss ourselves, without pressure or manipulation from you or anybody else.

Ongoing: Should you come back for another kiss, check in to see if we’d still like to give you one.

Mutual: Sure, we offered you a kiss, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Coming over to our table doesn’t forfeit your right to say no.

So, in other words: If you are kissing someone, but stop for a half a millisecond to breathe, you have to step back and say “can I kiss you again?” before continuing.

How reasonable and normal and romantic!

It makes little sense to squander a $250,000 missile on a simple truck, but that is how the US and its allies have been conducting their war against ISIS. There is a better and cheaper to rid the world of jihadis, plus a simple strategy to make sure they turn up for their execution.
In HG Wells’The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, the Air Police of the World State establish an air base in Basra, the city in southern Iraq, in 1979 and set about eliminating the Moslem religion by aerial bombardment. About 40 years behind schedule, something like that has been instituted. A number of countries now have aircraft based in the region and are bombarding the world’s most hardcore Islamists, the immolators of Islamic State.

Until Russia joined the effort in 2015, that effort was ineffectual by design. The United States has been spending US$11 million per day in wearing out their fighter aircraft and depleting war stocks of precision guided munitions. Australia has been doing the same, with expenditure appropriately at one-tenth the US level. Islamic State is aware that they are doing their bit to help bankrupt the United States, with one of their videos noting that Maverick missiles cost US$250,000 each while Islamic State uses bullets costing US$0.50 each.

The US rules of engagement are hampered by a desire to not kill civilians. As Dave Deptula, a former US Air Force deputy chief of staff for Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance and who served as the principal attack planner for the Operation Desert Storm air campaign, notes,

“There is little morality inherent in a campaign approach that limits the use of airpower to avoid the possibility of collateral damage when it ensures the certainty of continued Islamic State crimes against humanity. Today’s coalition leaders should factor into their casualty-avoidance calculus how many of the Islamic State’s intentional murders of innocents would be avoided by rapidly collapsing the structural elements of the Islamic State that the coalition now allows to operate out of excessive concern of inadvertent civilian deaths.”

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK) introduced legislation on Monday, Feb. 1, that would undo a regulation recently re-issued by the Obama administration that would ban the right to label any goods produced beyond the 1940 Armistice Line (the “Green Line”) as made in Israel.

The JewishPress.com reported last week that U.S. Custom and Border Protection re-issued a 1997 regulation – written at a very different time, under very different circumstances – which the State Department insisted it will now “strictly enforce.”

The original regulation was issued in 1997.

Prior to that time, the only acceptable designation for anything produced in the area west of Jordan, west of Syria, south of Lebanon and to the east and north east of Egypt was Israel, according to U.S. Customs. But after the Oslo Accords were signed, the State Department directed the Treasury Department to ban the label “made in Israel” for anything made in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”).

But in the intervening nearly 20 years, the Oslo Accords have failed, acting Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announced to the United Nations that his people are no longer bound by the Accords, there is no viable Palestinian Arab leadership and there is no unity between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the Arab governing party in Gaza.

The world is facing a public-health emergency. According to the World Health Organization, the Zika virus, a horrific disease that causes malformation of infants, is now “spreading explosively.” If decisive action is not taken quickly, Zika will proliferate to every continent, become widely and deeply embedded in populations, and cause millions of babies to be born brain-damaged every year for generations to come.

​A cure for Zika is not known, and it could take decades to find one. But there is something that can be done now to stop the epidemic. Zika is spread by mosquitoes, which can be exterminated by pesticides. The most effective pesticide is DDT. If the Zika catastrophe is to be prevented in time, we need to use it.

Some history is in order. DDT was first employed by the U.S. Army to stop a typhus epidemic in Naples that had been created by the retreating Germans through their destruction of that city’s sanitation system. Subsequently, Allied forces used it in all theaters to save millions of disease-ravaged victims of Axis tyranny, and after the war employed it to wipe out malaria in the American south, southern Europe, and much of south Asia and Latin America. The benefits of these campaigns were unprecedented. As the National Academy of Sciences put it in a 1970 report:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.

The role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone, however. On the contrary, many environmentalist leaders were quite upset. As Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome, put it in 1990, “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Of course, such reasoning would carry little appeal to the American public.

The Thomas More Law Center, which is a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has filed (1/27/16) a federal lawsuit on behalf of former Marine, John Kevin Wood, and his wife, Melissa, who refused to allow their teenage daughter to be subjected to Islamic “indoctrination and propaganda” in her high school World History class. The lawsuit was filed against the Charles County Public Schools, the Board of Education, and the Principal and Vice-Principal of La Plata High School located in La Plata, Maryland.

The Woods’ daughter was forced to profess and to write out the Shahada in worksheets and quizzes. The Shahada is the Islamic Creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” For non-Muslims, reciting the statement is sufficient to convert one to Islam. Moreover, the second part of the statement, “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” signifies the person has accepted Muhammad as their spiritual leader. The teenager was also required to memorize and recite the Five Pillars of Islam.

Among the “facts” that the students had to learn are the following:

Islam, at heart, is a peaceful religion

To Muslims, Allah is the same God that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism.

Radical Islamist fundamentalists are opposed to Western civilization’s way of life and imperialist pursuits

Jihad: a holy war waged on the behalf of Islam as a religious duty; a personal struggle in devotion to Islam, especially involving spiritual discipline

No where (sic) in the Koran does it say you will go to paradise if you martyr yourself with a suicide bomb.