RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The police were called to the Strand campus of King’s College London last night after an Israel Society event was protested by pro-Palestine student activists. Fire alarms were pulled and a window was smashed after student group KCL Action Palestine (KCLAP) attempted to disrupt the meeting, providing further proof, if it was ever needed, that anti-Israel student politics has taken an ugly and illiberal turn.

Ami Ayalon, politician and former head of the Israeli secret service, was giving a talk on Israeli security, as part of a tour organised by the group Yachad, which advocates the two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a statement, KCLAP called Ayalon a ‘war criminal’ and suggested his support for a two-state solution was only a cover for his desire for Israeli racial purity. The group said it was ‘unacceptable’ that KCL Israel Society had invited Ayalon. ‘To whitewash apartheid is not academic freedom’, it went on, ‘it is complicity with oppression’.

Footage from the event shows KCLAP banging on the windows of the room in which the talk was taking place, chanting ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and holding Palestinian flags and banners up against the glass. Meanwhile, footage taken inside the building shows Ayalon persisting with his talk, to a packed room of about 50 students, as chanting and fire alarms blare in the background.

There are some reports of chairs being thrown outside the meeting, and around 20 police officers were said to have appeared at Norfolk House after the three KCL security officers brought in to guard the event were overwhelmed. While one KCLAP activist seemed to suggest the group intended to enter the meeting only to ‘ask the questions that need to be asked’, the group’s denunciations of KCL Israel Society’s decision to hold the event at all seemed to suggest otherwise.

Oberlin College holds a position at or near the apex of a universe populated by the leftist and the further leftist American colleges and universities. But Jewish students are finding that Oberlin’s liberalism does not extend to any discussion that is not unequivocally scathing about the Jewish State.

In a place where every people’s right to self-determination is revered as an ideological imperative, that same right for the Jewish people is deemed not only unworthy, but as evidence of racism itself.

This month Oberlin reappeared center stage largely for a list of demands issued by its Black Student Union, a list which is notorious for several reasons. It is: very long (14 pages), wide-ranging (hiring, firing, health, prisoners given free tuition, the list goes on) and unequivocal.

Oberlin BSU’s demands are not requests, they are non-negotiable and backed by the force of threat: “these are not polite requests, but concrete and unmalleable [sic] demands. Failure to meet them will result in a full and forceful response from the community you fail to support.”

The Demand Document – which was unsigned – was sent to Oberlin President Marvin Krislov earlier this month. On Wednesday, Jan. 20, Krislov responded with an invitation to dialogue, something already scorned in the initial move.

This Oberlin exchange arose in the context of the 2015 Revolution on American Universities. That RAU began in the fall semester, initially triggered by the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, followed by the melee at Missou, and the shrieking girl outburst at Yale. Princeton followed and eventually Oberlin joined in, with the biggest and most brazen set of demands of all.

I’ve been writing for Emunah Magazine for years. Emunah runs a network of residential homes and educational facilities for disadvantaged kids that change lives.

Dafna Meir, the mother of 6 murdered earlier this week by a 15 year-old Arab terror-teen, came from a difficult home background and was raised in Emunah’s Achuzat Sara Children’s Home in Bnei Brak.

Achuzat Sara is an oasis of order and stability in a rundown neighborhood peopled almost exclusively by poor, ultra-orthodox families. What’s most striking about Achuzat Sara is not its fancy building–it was built in the early 1960s–but the quiet dedication of its leadership and staff. Shmuel Ron, director of the home, moved his wife Ita and their four kids into the grounds when he started working there, back in the 1980s.

I interviewed Shmuel several years ago, and he told me, “My first job is to make the children feel comfortable here, to be a better place than the homes they came from. We give them a home that looks a lot like a house, not an institution,” he explained as he proudly showed me around the tidy, cluster-style accommodations, each headed by a Torah observant young couple.

“Our next goal is to take them as they are, and to help them go as far as possible,” Shmuel added.