RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lawrence J. Haas, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is author of the forthcoming book Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.
With rising “tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians” and “a diplomatic stalemate,” America’s ambassador to Israel said the other day, “we must find ways of preserving the viability of a two-state solution for the future – Israel’s only path to avoid becoming a bi-national state, arrest negative trends that pull us away from the goal and prevent the terrible violence we have recently seen.”

Speaking in Tel Aviv, Dan Shapiro went on to criticize Israel’s settlements and then sharply condemned its West Bank policy: “Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities, too much vigilantism goes unchecked and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.”

That’s rich. Israel’s not perfect, but the bigger double standard emanates from Washington, where a blind administration applies it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – too critical of Israel, too forgiving of the Palestinian leadership.

Even Shapiro acknowledged the odd timing of his blast, for it came in the aftermath of brutal Palestinian terror. The day before he spoke, a Palestinian terrorist slashed Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother of six, to death at the entrance of her home in a West Bank settlement, in front of her children. A day later, as Meir’s funeral convoy was traveling to Jerusalem, another Palestinian terrorist slashed and badly wounded a 30-year-old pregnant woman who was shopping in the West Bank.

This is not only racism, it’s straightforward child abuse.

A first grade teacher in Florida is under investigation for an unapproved, controversial “lesson on racism” that left some students in tears.

Parents are complaining about a “lesson on racism” for first grade students at Minneola Elementary Charter School the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in which the teacher segregated her 7- and 8-year-old student by eye color then discriminated against some for several hours, WESH reports.

The teacher, who was not named in media reports, gave students with blue eyes candy and hugs, and ignored students with brown eyes, according to WFTV.

Minneola principal Sherry Watts told WFTV the lesson was not approved by administrators.

“The experiment shouldn’t have taken place at all,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for first grade.”

It’s not appropriate for any grade. This is Jane Elliot’s vileness filtering all the way down to first grade courtesy of teachers programmed with social justice hate.

Elliot’s technique was to emotionally abuse students in ways reminiscent of fringe cults and Soviet self-criticism sessions which break down an individual’s sense of identity by publicly attacking her sense of self.

Dr. Shmuel KatzDr. Shmuel Katz was born in Hungary and raised in Israel. He served as an IDF officer during the Six Day War (1967). As a doctor, he gained extensive trauma experience serving the IDF in the Yom Kippur War (1973). He is double-boarded in Surgery, a Fellow of the Israeli Surgical Society, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and a member of multiple medical societies.

It took the Arab propaganda machine decades of persistent, aggressive effort to convince many oblivious individuals – including some world leaders – of the canard that Jews illegally occupy Arab land, having “stolen it from Palestinians.”

The Mideast conflict may be complicated to solve, but is quite easily explained:

The Jewish people have an unbroken 4,000-year national history in the land of Israel.
Never in history has there been an Arab Palestinian State.
The Palestinian movement was founded to annihilate Israel.

Let’s look at some facts:

The Palestinian movement (PLO) was founded with the express purpose of destroying Israel. The PLO Covenant – adopted in 1964, long before Israel held any disputed territories – calls “to move forward on the path of jihad until complete and final victory is achieved,” i.e. the annihilation of Israel.

Fatah refers to Mohammed signing an insincere “peace treaty.”

This view permeates the Palestinian movement: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah’s “Party of God,” and Hamas (acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) all share the goal of destroying Israel. Mahmoud Abbas’ political party – “Fatah” – is the name of chapter 48 of the Koran which describes Mohammed signing a “peace treaty” as a way to gain leverage and launch an attack.

At the root of Palestinian ideology is this “phased plan” to destroy Israel. Palestinian statesman Faisal Husseini described peace agreements with Israel as a Trojan Horse:

“If we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22 percent of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza – our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.”

Ms. Hotovely is the deputy foreign minister of Israel.

One often-cited key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is economic development. To that end, there seems to be broad agreement about the importance of extending development aid to help the Palestinians build the physical and social infrastructure that will enable the emergence of a sustainable, prosperous society. But few have seriously questioned how much money is sent and how it is used.

Such assistance will only promote peace if it is spent to foster tolerance and coexistence. If it is used to strengthen intransigence it does more harm than good—and the more aid that comes in, the worse the outcome. This is exactly what has been transpiring over the past few decades. Large amounts of foreign aid to the Palestinians are spent to support terrorists and deepen hostility.

For years the most senior figures in the Palestinian Authority have supported, condoned and glorified terror. “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem,” President Mahmoud Abbas said last September on Palestinian television, “is holy blood as long as it was for Allah.” Countless Palestinian officials and state-run television have repeatedly hailed the murder of Jews.

Mr. Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School.

In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

When an administrative agency makes rules and regulations—which are a form of law every bit as binding as those passed by Congress—it must follow the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, the bible of the bureaucracy. The process most often used involves “notice and comment”: The agency must publish the proposed regulation and respond to comments before issuing the final rule. This can take months or years, and at the end of the process parties affected by the new rule can challenge it in court.

There’s a point to making the government jump through these hoops: By demanding transparency and facilitating public participation and judicial review, we can be more confident that the bureaucracy is up to good rather than ill.

More than a man of science, the man whose testimony helped persuade a British court that Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a fusion of error, lies and propaganda was that genuinely rare specimen, a good-natured crusader with the gift for leading the benighted into the light
Bob Carter’s passing is a great loss to those on the side of the angels — and to the noble cause pure, non-politicised science — in the debate on climate change. In contrast to the rent-seekers and opportunists aboard the global warming gravy train, he was a real scientist dedicated to truth. In his tribute, former radio host and one-time global warming believer Michael Smith highlighted his approach:

I’d made the error of asking Bob for his opinion after my perfect opening monologue. Bob said, “I don’t have an opinion. I am a scientist. I don’t deal in opinion. I deal in facts. Observable, proven facts. I deal with the scientific method, making observations, doing experiments and arriving at conclusions. Your starting point seems to be an unproven hypothesis based on computer projections. Do you have any facts to back up your claims about global warming?

Carter’s book, Climate: the Counter Consensus, which came out in 2011, demonstrated this approach, as did his many presentations on climate issues over the years. Days before the mainstream media got around to reporting his passing, the internet was alive with tributes from around the world.
Bob Carter: Lysenkoism and Climate Science

Here are just a few that I found most striking. The first is from the great slayer of Michael Mann’s fabricated hockey stick graph, Steve McIntyre, who wrote:

He was one of the few people in this field that I regarded as a friend. He was only a few years older than me and we got along well personally.

I will not attempt to comment on his work as that is covered elsewhere, but do wish to mention something personal. In 2003, when I was unknown to anyone other than my friends and family, I had been posting comments on climate reconstructions at a chatline. Bob emailed me out of the blue with encouragement, saying that I was looking at the data differently than anyone else and that I should definitely follow it through. Without his specific encouragement, it is not for sure that I ever would have bothered trying to write up what became McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) or anything else.

A British jihadist well-known for writing missives about rude Arabs and bossy Chechens in the Islamic State warns would-be jihadis that it’s “catastrophic” to let on one’s intentions too early out of love for one’s parents.

Omar Hussain, a 27-year-old former grocery store security guard from southern England, goes by Abu Sa’eed Al-Britani since running off to join ISIS. He frequently writes PR, including an appeal for doctors to come to the Islamic State, and also answers Q&A.

One segment from his “Message of a Mujahid” video has been circulating anew on social media this month: how to tell one’s family that you’ve run off to jihad.

It comes as ISIS recruitment efforts are trying to bulk up numbers in the Islamic State, including fighters, civil servants, jihadi wives and kids trained as ISIS “cubs.”

“One thing which every Muhājir will eventually face will be informing one’s parents about one’s hijrah,” Hussain said. “Depending on how close you are with your parents will affect how hard this will be, both for you and for them. Generally speaking the father-daughter relationship is the strongest bond as every father sees his daughter as his little angel, so sisters need to pay heed to how to go about in informing their parents of their whereabouts.”

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers are becoming increasingly frustrated over the federal government’s failure to implement a biometric exit tracking system to determine whether foreign nationals entering the country on a visa have departed on schedule.

The percentage of those remaining in the United States beyond the expiration of their visas remains relatively small. The Department of Homeland Security issued a report this week showing that of the nation’s nearly 45 million non-immigrant visitors in fiscal year 2015, only 1.17 percent, or 527,127 individuals, overstayed their visas.

So 98.83 percent of those holding visas left the U. S. on time and abided by the terms of their admission, according to DHS. But some members of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which conducted a hearing on the issue this week, maintain the current system doesn’t go far enough in assuring compliance.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the subcommittee chairman and a strong critic of the Obama administration’s immigration policies, asserted that that the figures released by DHS prove that visa expiration dates under the current system “have become optional.”

“The administration does not believe that violating the terms of your visa should result in deportation,” Sessions said. “What we are witnessing is tantamount to an open border. Millions are free to come on temporary visas and no one is required to leave.”

[In the days just before the Messiah] a man’s enemies will be the members of his household …. —Sotah 49b (quoting Micah 7.6)

Among the many difficulties confronting Jews who are comfortable calling themselves Zionists is the phenomenon of Jew-washing.[1] Inspired by expressions such as “whitewashing” and “pinkwashing,” the idea is that if someone can count Jews among those endorsing his beliefs or behavior then his beliefs or behavior cannot be deemed antisemitic. Indeed if he can count Jews among his personal friends, if some of his “best friends” are Jews, then he cannot be deemed an antisemite. The problem for Zionists is clear: the fact that so many Jews are comfortable calling themselves anti-Zionists means that the underlying antisemitic nature of most forms of anti-Zionism is easily obscured.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate what has sorely needed demonstrating for a long time: that Jew-washing simply doesn’t work. In fact it obviously doesn’t work, once you think about it even a little.

It’s commonly assumed that racism has a general nature: to be a racist is to display a certain negative attitude or behaviors toward all members of the targeted group. This assumption is reasonably grounded in the paradigmatic manifestations of racism throughout history. When medieval Christians hated Jews on the basis of religion, for example, they hated all Jews (we usually think), until they converted. When the Nazis hated Jews on the basis of race, they hated all Jews (we think) no matter what their creed, even those Jews who had converted and assimilated.

It makes sense: if you’re a Jew-hater, then you hate all Jews.

Except that it simply isn’t true.

Neither empirically, nor theoretically.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi’s S.S., famously complained that the Nazis’ fatal efficiency was often compromised because everyone had his favorite “A-1 Jew.”[2] There were very dedicated Nazis, filled with Jew-hatred, who still found room in their hearts not to hate some particular Jew or another, for whatever the reason. Those exceptions didn’t mean they weren’t Jew-haters, of course. But sometimes other considerations overrode their general hatred.

A pro-Israel professor won’t be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.

Andrew Pessin “requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel studies,” Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an email last week. “He has been and continues to be a valued member of the Connecticut College faculty.”

The vague and misleading response glosses over the intensity of the campaign against Pessin — he first took a medical leave last spring as a smear campaign against him was at full throat. The controversy exposed an administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.