RUTHFULLY YOURS

Historians this Saturday, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, resoundingly rejected an anti-Israel resolution. The final vote was 111-51 against the resolution which, among other things, would have committed the AHA to “monitoring Israeli actions restricting the right to education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

The proposal that an association of American academics devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking would monitor the actions of a sovereign state in the Middle East gives one an idea of the arrogance of the crafters of the resolution. What next? Shall they constitute themselves as a peacekeeping force? Another piece of the resolution, a call for the “reversal of Israeli policies that restrict the freedom of movement,” without any regard for Israeli security needs, gives one an idea of the moral and intellectual seriousness of the resolution. But I will not dwell on the resolution’s defects because they have been so well covered by the Alliance for Academic Freedom, by the historian Jeffrey Herf and by the blogger William Jacobson.

Instead, let me focus on what can be learned from this important win.

First, there is still an audience for the view that the integrity of scholarly organizations demands that they avoid becoming vehicles for political activism. As Herf put it last year, after a similar resolution failed a crucial procedural vote:

To health and martyrdom

On Sunday, I reported for The Algemeiner on the Palestinian Authority’s honoring of the Tel Aviv pub terrorist.

The story, more precisely, was that the PA Health Ministry initially placed Nashat Milhem — who was killed Friday during a gun battle with Israeli security forces after a weeklong manhunt — on its official list of “martyrs” and shortly thereafter removed his name.

Jerusalem Post Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh, who broke the story, told me that the probable reason for the deletion was that the PA figured paying such respect to the infamous shooter would not look good in the international arena.

This was merely an assessment. But what followed was fact.

Outrage promptly erupted on Arabic social media, with the Facebook pages and Twitter feeds of Palestinians calling the PA to task for not giving Milhem his proper due. Hashtags were created; Hamas and Fatah supporters alike chimed in on behalf of the 29-year-old from northern Israel who went on a shooting spree against innocent people and then escaped, leaving the residents of Tel Aviv fearing he might turn up at any moment to pull a repeat performance.

This month, to relatively little outrage or public notice, Oregon State University is holding segregated “diversity” sessions for students, staff, and faculty. At “retreats,” students and faculty will learn about identity and micro-agressions (for example: expressing a belief in merit, wearing an offensive Halloween costume, or having someone feel like she does not belong).

The Daily Caller reports that a total of four workshops will be held: one for non-white students, another for white students (to educate them about their “white privilege”), one for multi-racial students, and one for white faculty and staff called “Examining White Identity.”

The testimonials at the university’s website indicate that the sessions are sure to foster more “cry-bullies,” as we saw on campuses across the country in 2015. And it seems that among Oregon State’s 30,000 students, none raised significant objections to funding being spent on segregated sessions.

This same outrage almost happened in 2013 at Hamilton College, too. But that proposed segregated “dialogue” never went forward, thanks to students affiliated with the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI).

In 2013, from the lavishly funded on-campus Days-Massolo Center (ironically founded “to embrace the importance of supporting a diverse and inclusive community”), an email was sent inviting students to participate in a “dialogue about internalized racism.” The “dialogue,” however, was for “people of color” only. Another dialogue for white students and faculty was promised for the following semester, and the program would have culminated in a non-segregated session.

AHI students, led by senior Dean Ball, got the administration to back down.

In the video produced by the pro-ISIS Palestinian Islamic Army (PIA), Hamas leaders are denounced for aligning themselves with moderate Arab leaders in the Gulf, who are described as “criminals and enemies of Islam.”

Apparently, Hamas has been too kind to Christians living in the Gaza Strip. The narrator blasts Hamas leaders for offering greetings to Christians on their holidays.

It seems that there may be valid reasons for Egypt’s reluctance to reopen the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, as well as to Israel’s opposition to lifting the naval blockade on Gaza — initiated to prevent weapons from being imported to Hamas and other extremists in Gaza. The PIA video provides proof that the Gaza Strip has become a hub for jihadi groups posing a murderous threat not only to Israel and “the West,” but also to Muslims who are deemed by the terrorists as lacking in religious standards.

A new group calling itself the Palestinian Islamic Army (PIA) has popped up in the Gaza Strip, signaling incontrovertibly the growing influence of the Islamic State (ISIS) among Palestinians.

A thirty-minute video put out by the PIA shows its followers pledging allegiance to ISIS “Caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, and paints Hamas leaders as “apostates” and “infidels” for failing to implement Islamic sharia law in the Gaza Strip. The video constitutes proof positive that the ISIS ideology has infiltrated Gaza — a truth that Hamas has unsuccessfully been trying to conceal for the past year.

Israel has been rocked by sort of a Middle Eastern Bizarro version of the Dred Scott decision. In that famous American Supreme Court case from1857, it was decided to send black escaped slave Dred Scott back to slavery in the South. This triggered enormous public outrage and paved the way for Lincoln’s election. In the Israeli analogue, Jewish leftists are collaborating with the Palestinian Authority of the PLO and turning over to it innocent Arab Dred Scotts, who have done business with Jews, so that the PLO will torture and murder them.

The “star” of the story is a leftist extremist named Ezra Nawi, who has become something of a poster boy for the radical Left. “Nawi” is a well-known and ordinarily distinguished surname among Jews who came from Iraq. Most of these are patriotic Zionists, but a small minority of them were communists back in Iraq in the 1940s/1950s and have remained such. A few of these Iraqi Jews continue to embrace communism, like the radical anti-Zionist sociologist from Tel Aviv University, Yehouda Shenhav.

Nawi famously was convicted of pedophilia and rape of a minor boy some years ago. Later he was also convicted of violently attacking police as part of a riot of violent Palestinians he helped lead. He speaks Arabic and likes to dress as an Arab. He is active in small far-leftist anti-Israel NGOs operating in Israel that pretend to be “human rights groups,” including B’tselem and Taayoush. These are foreign-funded subversive groups that have never heard of any human right for Jews worthy of being defended and certainly not the right of self-defense against genocidal terror and Islamofascist aggression. They are also notoriously indifferent to violations of free speech rights of anyone not from the far Left.

California has put the green lobby elite ahead of the normal human need for water, building no new reservoirs in decades and diverting the water of the Central Valley to flow to sea in order to protect a locally endangered smelt. Now an Israeli company is coming to the rescue of San Diego County, soon to be providing 10% of their water and creating 2,500 jobs through state-of-the-art reverse-osmosis technology.

IDE Technologies dedicated the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere on Monday … quenching the thirst of roughly 10 percent of San Diego County… The plant, which will be operated by IDE, has created some 2,500 jobs and generated about $350 million for the local economy, the statement added.

Wonder if the anti-Semitic BDS crew allowed to run rampant on UC campuses will call to boycott this technology…

We rail on Trump’s temporary immigration proposals while ignoring the vilest anti-Semitic hate speech and Muslim supremacism of the PA, which receives over $500 million annually from the US tax-payer.

A major uproar exploded across the political scene recently when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Conversely, there has been a remarkable, deafening silence on the official position proclaimed by Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas: “If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it.”

“Israeli,” of course, means “Jew.” Abbas has no problem with Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship living in a Palestinian state. This is purely a racist policy aimed at ensuring the absence of Jews, because they are Jews. And Abbas is in power; Trump is not, so Abbas’s statement has real meaning.

This Palestinian policy has been reiterated by senior figures like PA top negotiator Saeb Erakat (who recently refused to address a New York conference unless the flag of Israel, the country he claims to recognize and with which he asserts in English a desire to live in peace, was removed).

Former envoy to Israel emailed proposal to then-US secretary of state that Palestinian, Israeli women should spark Tahrir-style protests to push sides into talks.

WASHINGTON — A former top US diplomat suggested Washington foment Arab Spring-style Palestinian protests as a method of pushing the Israeli leadership into making moves, a new batch of emails from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton shows.

On December 18, 2011, Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to Israel who also served as undersecretary of state for political affairs under former president Bill Clinton, emailed Clinton a recommendation to spark Palestinian demonstrations, led by female protesters, to push Jerusalem into talks.

Upon receiving the message, Clinton asked an aide to print it out.

Without detailing how the US would spark these protests, Pickering noted that the US could not be seen to have had a hand in fomenting the rallies, instead suggesting that Washington employ non-governmental groups and third parties to “help.”

Pickering’s proposal, which included parallel protests by Israeli Jews and Arabs, called for the rallies to be female-only as a way to keep the demonstrations from becoming too violent.

This was a longer research project for the Capital Research Center on the Red-Green alliance of leftist and Islamist groups supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel. It first appeared in print and is now available online.

Summary: Across American campuses, college radicals are fighting hard as they try to harm Israel and celebrate Palestinians. Though they call themselves nonviolent leftists opposed to racism, they actually have no problem with anti-Semites and violent terrorists. This report shines a spotlight on the outrageous deeds and words of numerous leaders in the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions” movement.

The deck has long been stacked against Israel on America’s college campuses. The Left’s BDS movement—the subject of this report—aims at Israel and Israel alone. BDS seeks to cripple the Jewish state whose creation gave refuge for the world’s Jews after Nazi Germany’s Holocaust incinerated six million of them. The B, D, and S are the non-military weapons—boycotts, divestments, and sanctions—that Israel-haters use to undermine America’s strongest Middle East ally.

The movement’s activists mostly live on university campuses, dress themselves in moral garments, and self-righteously denounce Israel as racist, even genocidal, because it defends itself vigorously and refuses to die. No other country gets scolded by the nations of the world for protecting itself from aggression or for using “disproportionate” force—itself, a dubious concept—against its enemies. Those who abhor Israel ignore the fact that it is surrounded on all sides by Muslim nations, many of which would drive the Jews “into the sea” if they could.

College students are returning to school after the winter break, and administrators must be bracing for another semester like the tumultuous one just passed. That trivial circumstances like those at Yale University in November could provoke such unrest indicates how fraught race relations remain at schools striving to promote diversity.

Ironically, an incident caught on video at Yale—one that for many Americans seemed to epitomize how badly American higher education has gone off the rails—also offers an explanation for this spasm of protests and points toward a more productive way of addressing students’ concerns.
A demonstration by Yale University students and faculty, Nov. 9. ENLARGE
A demonstration by Yale University students and faculty, Nov. 9. Photo: Arnold Gold/New Haven Register/Associated Press

The incident involved a Yale professor named Nicholas Christakis, who was waylaid on campus by angry students. They were livid about a letter written by his wife, Erika, also a Yale teacher, who had suggested that the university’s recent admonishments about Halloween costumes, cultural appropriation and racial insensitivity perhaps were unnecessary, since young adults are capable of deciding for themselves what to wear for Halloween and might even learn from being “a little bit obnoxious.” Mr. Christakis was caught in an ugly scene, with one student in particular roundly cursing him.

Eventually the campus settled when Yale’s president reassured the students that he understood their feelings and would take measures to protect them from insult. Some distance will be put between the students and the Christakises. The school reports that Ms. Christakis, a lecturer in early-childhood education, has chosen not to teach this spring, and her husband is on what Yale called a “scheduled leave.”