Thirty years ago, following the large-scale evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in Operation Moses, Menachem Begin launched a follow-up operation to rescue hundreds more languishing in Sudanese refugee camps. A BBC documentary tells the story. (Video, 24 minutes.)
http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/01/saving-ethiopian-jews/
The standard defence of the University of East Anglia’s climate cabal is that its fiddling scientists were “cleared” by two allegedly independent panels. What warmists won’t admit is that those probes were hobbled by their terms of reference and stacked with fellow catastropharians.
Recently Quadrant Online republished an essay by Professor Bob Carter, a tribute following his untimely death. The article included a passing reference to the Climategate scandal and prompted a number of comments, this among them:
Apparently they have nary a thought for the deep scientific malaise and malfeasance that has now been exposed for the whole lay world to see – part of which is being investigated currently in a British parliamentary committee investigation. (extract from Carter’s article)
It might have been a bit more honest if the Quadrant editor had then briefed readers on the results of that parliamentary investigation, just in order to ensure that there could be no misunderstanding on the matter. The Committee reported:
On the much cited phrases in the leaked e-mails-‘trick’ and ‘hiding the decline’-the Committee considers that they were colloquial terms used in private e-mails and the balance of evidence is that they were not part of a systematic attempt to mislead.
Insofar as the Committee was able to consider accusations of dishonesty against CRU, the Committee considers that there is no case to answer.
That Quadrant Online comment reflects a very weak understanding of what transpired post-Climategate and prompted me to set the record straight. Because of the length of my response and what I believe is the significance of Climategate in illustrating the shoddy science that so often characterises warmism and its advocates, I chose to do it here rather than respond in the original comments thread. Following an initial Parliamentary enquiry conducted by the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee, two allegedly independent investigations were commissioned: the Oxburgh enquiry and the Muir Russell enquiry. The former was charged with evaluating the robustness of the science, the second directed to examine the probity of the CRU scientists’ conduct.
http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/21/nonie-darwish-moment-why-is-obama-defending-islam-at-any-cost-2/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.
Nonie focuses on Why is Obama Defending Islam at Any Cost?, unveiling the true reason the Radical-in-Chief positions Muslims as victims in every speech on terror.
Don’t miss it!
Winston Churchill could have been observing the sorry state of academic free speech today when he observed that “Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” As if to confirm Churchill’s prescience, this month a cabal of 55 high-minded but morally incoherent American and Canadian professors formed Open Hillel’s Academic Council, a group comprised of well-known Israel-haters who condemned “Hillel International’s Standards of Partnership [which] narrowly circumscribe discourse about Israel-Palestine” and which, in its view, “only serve to foster estrangement from the organized Jewish community.”
This group of academics and intellectuals, who almost, to a person, promote a one-sided, anti-Israel view of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and whose teaching and so-called scholarship perpetuates a historically false and factually defective narrative in which Israel is the world’s greatest manifestation of malevolence and the Palestinian Arabs are innocent victims of colonial oppression, feel very free to tell Hillel how to achieve its mission: “Hillel’s recent aggressive attempts to police discourse about Israel place it in direct conflict with the spirit of the academy,” the Council bloviated, adding that “Just as our classrooms must be spaces that embrace diversity of experience and opinion, so must Hillel.”
This sentiment is not surprising from these particular academics, given the ideological composition of a group that includes: Peter Beinart, associate professor at the City University of New York, who justifies the BDS campaign because “its recruits are progressives, and that what tips them toward BDS is despair that there seems no other way to end Israel’s immoral, undemocratic control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip;” Berkeley’s feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, who notoriously and who almost surreally commented that it is important to view “Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left;” Stanford’s Joel Beinin, a self-proclaimed Marxist and rabid anti-Zionist who singles out Israel for criticism of its varied and frequent transgressions, all the while excusing the social and political defects of the neighboring Arab states who surround it and blaming the pathologies of the Middle East on Western imperialism and the continuing colonial impact of the U.S.’s proxy in the Levant, Israel; and UC Irvine’s Mark LeVine, associate professor of history, who claims that Israel, like America, essentially receives what it deserves, contending that, “In Israel the violence and terrorism of the latest intifada cannot be understood except as emerging out of decades of occupation, discrimination and dispossession.”
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.”
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