RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over a long teaching career, I have seen a lot of change in our colleges and universities—some of it good, but much of it not. In the not-good category I would put the decline of our commitment to educate our young people for American citizenship.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s recall the crisis higher education was then facing. The stupendous growth of colleges and universities in the post-World War II-era was coming to an end and the future looked grim.

But American higher education did not curl up and die. It didn’t even shrink. Instead, it maintained and added to its bulk, including a steadily growing flow of foreign students (more on them later).

It did what businesses always do when supply outstrips demand: it found, exploited, and even created new markets for its goods, meaning new students.

The resulting gains in access to higher education and genuine diversity in the student body have on balance been a real advance. But our redefinition of higher education has also presented us with certain dilemmas, and these must be faced up to.

For example, we need to pay more attention to the internationalization of the American academy, including the steadily growing number of foreign students in our universities. Those students represent a source of much-needed enrollment and tuition revenues. Their presence gives enlivening variety to our campuses, exposing the American-born to a taste of the larger world. What is not to like about that?

Bob Carter’s defence of truth came with consequences. In 2010, The Drum solicited his thoughts on James Hansen, one of warmism’s original fabulists. The piece was spiked, demonstrating yet again that authorised lies corrupt all that they touch, even down to mere journalism. As a tribute to Carter, Quadrant Online today republishes that piece
Bob Carter was a geologist and environmental scientist who studied ancient climate change. It was his curse to be a man of integrity in a field colonised by careerists and charlatans.

Editor’s note: Yesterday, just as Warmist Inc was poised to announce that — surprise! surprise! — 2015 was the latest “hottest year on record” and why the oceans will soon be cursed with drunken fish as a consequence, news broke that a genuine man of science, a sceptic and dear friend of Quadrant, Bob Carter (left), had died. Had Quadrant Online’s publishing system not been on the fritz (please subscribe so we can afford a new one) , we would have re-posted the piece below immediately. Written in 2010, it was solicited by The Drum, then summarily rejected. Then as now, the national broadcaster knows what the little people need to know, should know and will be told.

Carter was not surprised. How could he have been? He had watched with dismay and disgust as science was prostituted in the cause of a political cause, so the related corruption of journalism was mere collateral damage. Yet he never lost his good humour. As Mark Steyn observes, Carter was “no caricature of a wild-eyed denier, but in almost any discussion invariably the most sane and sensible man on the panel.”
“On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that

“the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders”.

Hansen’s testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that

“Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

When I was in college back in the 1980s, a couple of new degree programs, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, were starting to gain in popularity. The purpose of these programs, everyone knew perfectly well, was to advance the cause of political activism for these two demographic groups. Activism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Without a doubt, there really had been barriers to women’s advancement, more social than legal, but by the 1980s these were clearly fading — more as the result of the huge number of women advancing themselves than as the result of the efforts of radical feminists. Similarly, there had also been genuinely oppressive Jim Crow laws constraining black Americans, but those laws had been almost entirely knocked down in the 1950s and 60s. America of the 1980s was not a perfectly gender-blind or color-blind society, but we were clearly on the right track. True sexism and racism were well on the decline. But along with the real progress there came a class of professional progressive activists. Their more courageous predecessors having all but won the war, this new generation of reformers established permanent institutions in academia to refight it. Never mind the notable lack of sexist or racist stalwarts in authority to oppose. If an activist runs out of enemies, it is no great challenge to reinvent them.

An institution of reform has the same core priority as any other institution. That priority is to survive and grow. Institutions provide good jobs for the people who make the decisions, promote the cause, and shuffle the paper. I have often suspected that if a scientist arrived in the lobby of the American Cancer Society with a cure for all forms of cancer, the managing director’s first impulse would be to jump for joy – but a moment’s reflection would reveal the need to take the wretched troublemaker to the basement and beat him to death. What’s the American Cancer Society without cancer? And what’s an activist without a cause?

TEL AVIV—Israeli authorities said they had foiled a suicide-bomb plot allegedly led by the son of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Lebanese militia and political movement Hezbollah.

Jawad Nasrallah used social media to recruit and form a cell of would-be Palestinian attackers, Israeli security officials said on Wednesday. Another Hezbollah operative then instructed the recruits to carry out suicide bombings and shootings against Israeli civilians, they said.

An Israeli military court in the occupied West Bank indicted five Palestinians after an investigation into the cell’s activities, charging them with crimes including conspiracy to manslaughter and contact with an enemy organization.

A senior Hezbollah operative was killed in Syria in December, allegedly by an Israeli airstrike, raising tensions between the longtime foes. Hezbollah retaliated by bombing an Israeli convoy on the Lebanese border this month.

Israeli officials said Hezbollah was “working diligently to stir up trouble” in Israel and take advantage of a four-month wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Jawad Nasrallah is a member of the Shiite Muslim group, which is backed by Iran.

“This incident was highly unusual in that a mature terrorist cell was directed by Hezbollah and planned to carry out an attack,” the Israeli statement said, adding that the militant group was “exploiting the Palestinian population and seducing young people to carry out attacks.”

Foreign journalists based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have for years refused to report on the financial corruption and human rights violations that are rife under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas regimes. Palestinian “suffering” and the “evil” of the Israeli “occupation” are the only admissible topics.

Another Ramallah-based colleague shared that a few years ago he received a request from a cub correspondent to help arrange an interview with Yasser Arafat. Except at that point, Arafat had been dead for several years. Fresh out of journalism school and unknowledgeable about the Middle East, the journalist was apparently considered by his editors a fine candidate for covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Western reporters would do well to remember that journalism in this region is not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, it is about being “pro” the truth, even when the truth runs straight up against what they would prefer to believe.

Two Western journalists recently asked to be accompanied to the Gaza Strip to interview Jewish settlers living there.

No, this is not the opening line of a joke. These journalists were in Israel at the end of 2015, and they were deadly serious.

Imagine their embarrassment when it was pointed out to them that Israel had completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip ten years ago.

You have to have some pity for them. These foreign colleagues were rookies who aimed to make an impression by traveling to a “dangerous” place such as the Gaza Strip to report on the “settlers” living there. Their request, however, did not take anyone, even my local colleagues, by surprise.

The enemies of Israel neither slumber nor sleep. They include not only the technically competent barbarians of Iran, exuberantly aggressive with the prospect of nuclear weapons and the $150 billion “signing bonus” paid them for signing a sham agreement with America; not only Iran’s proxies to the north (Hezbollah) and the south (Hamas); not only most of the surrounding Arab nations, including at least two Palestinian states; not only its own Arab citizens waging a third intifada; and not only those Europeans whose main regret over the Holocaust is that, for a time, it gave anti-Semitism a bad name.

Isn’t this enough? Not in the opinion of numerous Jewish academics of the ostensibly “progressive” persuasion, imbued with the conviction that the litmus test of contemporary liberalism is dedication to “the Palestinian cause.” In actuality, this has come to mean turning the pariah people into a pariah state, and replacing the old question “Can Jews take the right to live as a natural right?” with the newer one: “Does Israel have the right to exist?”

The latest “target of opportunity” for these Jewish academics, a great many of them employed in Jewish Studies programs, is the Hillel Foundation, which in this country and others serves the same function for Jewish university students that the Newman Center does for Catholic ones. They are parochial institutions, not academic ones; they exist to complement universities, not imitate them. Rabbi Hillel’s best-known utterance is: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Cardinal Newman’s “Idea of a University” is the vade mecum on its subject; but he insisted that a liberal education can give “no guarantee of sanctity or even conscientiousness.”

One of Hillel’s primary tasks has long been to nourish in Jewish students a sense of shared destiny with the constantly beleaguered state of Israel. To ask Hillel to open welcoming arms to ideologues of politicide for Israel would be akin to asking all chapters of the Newman Center to start inviting lecturers who endorse the old Protestant view that “the Mass is of the Devil,” or “the Pope is the Antichrist.”

Students campaigning to get universities to divest from fossil fuels are in two minds about free speech. They want it for themselves, but don’t seem keen on free speech for their opponents.

The divestment movement didn’t invent free-speech hypocrisy, but divestment activists offer a range of old and new reasons as to why opposing views should not be tolerated.
The debate is over

The divestment movement claims to like debate. It is convinced that anyone with an open mind can’t help but agree that divesting is a good thing to do.

‘Colleges would already be divesting if it were just about the arguments, because there are plenty out there’, says full-time campaigner Jess Grady-Benson, leader of an ardent student divestment campaign at Pitzer College in California. Bill McKibben, founder of the activist group 350.org and the international divestment movement, declared at a recent rally: ‘We won the argument. Twenty years ago we lost the fight and that’s because the fight was never about data.’

If, in your own mind, you have won the substantive argument, but your opponent continues to persuade the audience to his side, what can you do? Declare the debate to be over? Yank the microphone away from the moderator? Refuse to share a platform with anyone who so wrongheadedly persists in thinking the debate is not over? These might sound like exaggerated metaphors, but they are actual examples of what divestarians have done in the past. The commandeering of the microphone, for example, took place when a group of divestment activists, calling themselves Mountain Justice, took over a debate on divestment with Swarthmore College’s board of trustees. The rowdy group then went on a 90-minute screed about the need for ‘radical emancipatory action’ and cancelled the question-and-answer section where students and faculty could weigh in. When two students in the audience dared to ask if the meeting could be returned to order, divestment activists clapped them down in unison and told them to leave.

lIt isn’t the Israelis who are paranoid – it’s anti-Israel Europeans. They’re the ones who madly look upon one nation, one people, as toxic, destabilising, destructive, out to get us all and do over world peace. Such swirling paranoia often means that anti-Zionism crosses the lines into antisemitism.

Some Israelis I spoke to [recently] seemed more upset about the turn against Europe in Israel than they were about the more immediate threat posed by Islamists in the Middle East.

It wasn’t hard to work out why. As one said, “We considered Europe a friend”; “We thought Europe and Israel had a lot in common, being Western and democratic.”

This cuts to the heart of the Euro-elites’ paranoia about Israel, their turn against it; it is really European values, the ideals of modernity and democracy that they’ve given up on.

The thing that riles them most about Israel is that it reminds them of what they used to be like, of the values they once espoused, before they lost the moral plot and sank into the cesspit of relativism and post-Enlightenment self-loathing.

Plucky, keen to protect its sovereignty, considering itself an outpost of liberalism … Israel is a painful reminder to today’s anchorless European thinkers and agitators of what their nations once were.

They hate Israel because they hate themselves.

Israel has become the whipping boy of guilt-ridden Western liberals who’ve given up on the very idea of the West.” [Emphasis added]

So wrote the Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked Online, in an admirably perceptive article in the London Jewish News late last year that was picked up by the Australian Jewish News.

This video, in which the Canadian writer/commentator Mark Steyn (how wonderful it used to be to read his regular columns in the UK Daily Telegraph back in the days when Conrad Black owned that newspaper) declares Multiculturalism as “the slipperiest of all isms,” illuminates the loss of direction and purpose that’s befallen and bedevils the West.

A tenured associate professor of history at Kent State University in Ohio is under investigation for potential ties to ISIS. From KentWired:

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating Julio Pino, a Kent State associate history professor, for alleged involvement with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIl.

A joint terrorism task force has been investigating Pino for the last year and a half, said an FBI special agent who did not wish to be named for safety reasons…

…The agent said they interviewed several faculty members and more than 20 of Pino’s students Tuesday about his alleged involvement. He is also being investigated for allegedly recruiting students to join ISIS.

The agent said there is “no direct threat” to the university.

Pino, who is teaching two classes this semester at Kent, told KentWired on Tuesday that he has not been notified of an investigation by either the FBI or Homeland Security, nor has he been contacted by them.

It takes a global village to kill a Israelis. The recipe is well known. Begin with the lie that Islam is the religion of peace. Take U.N. (that is, U.S.) money and hire jihadis to teach small children Jews should all be killed. (First taught to the Moslem Brotherhood by Eichmann himself, sent by Hitler to launch the modern jihadi movement — read here, and here). Take Saudi money and staff every mosque with Wahhabi imams. Use oil wealth to brainwash vulnerable teenagers with Islamic supremacist idealism and promise endless sex in heaven if they kill a Jew. Flood the P.A. territories with billions of dollars in international aid, turning the entire place into one giant welfare state of entitlement and rage.

And then give the jihadis Facebook, to spread the message: go out and kill a Jew today. With detailed instructions on how to do it.

The wave of stabbings in Israel are a Facebook-fueled intifada. And once it is tested in Israel, it will be coming to an American street near you.

Israelis are fed up. They can’t stop the U.N. from supporting jihad. They can’t stop the Saudis. They can’t stop Europe and America from sucking up to the Arab world by throwing money at the Palestinians with no strings attached (like: drop the anti-Semitic BS or no cash).