RUTHFULLY YOURS

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).

Pamphlets being issued in Germany to Muslim male refugees that they are not to grope or fondle European women reveal the rank stupidity, ignorance, and sheer indifference of European leaders as they continue down a suicidal trajectory.

Of course these men were going to engage in rape jihad, since sexual abuse is ingrained in their religion and culture. As psychologist Nicolai Sennels explains, “Mohammed, the prime example for Muslims, married Aisha when she was six and had intercourse with her when she was nine. Besides, according to the Quran (4:24), Muslims are allowed to have sex with female slaves[.]” In addition, “uncovered women are in many Muslim cultures seen as a kind of prostitute, and if a man is aroused by such a female, then – partly due to the corrupted logic of responsibility within Muslim psychology – the female is blamed for being raped (and will therefore often face execution).”

In 2010, Andrew C. McCarthy, in his book entitled The Grand Jihad, described rape by Muslim immigrants as the “unspoken epidemic of Western Europe.” Six years later, it continues to expand and sweep across the continent. Ingrid Carlqvist documents how Sweden is now the rape capital of the West, and when “Michael Hess, a local politician from [the] Sweden Democrat Party, tried to warn his nation that ‘it is deeply rooted in Islam’s culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings’ he was charged with ‘denigration of ethnic groups'” – a crime in Sweden.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro did his administration proud on Monday. His boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, couldn’t have done a better job of twisting reality to suit fantasy.

At the annual Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv, Shapiro delivered an address worthy of note in its content and timing.

Earlier that morning, a pregnant woman from Tekoa, a settlement in the Judean Hills, was stabbed and seriously injured by a Palestinian teenager in the local grocery store. The previous evening, a mother of six (four biological children and two adopted ones), was stabbed to death in front of her 17-year-old daughter at their home in the settlement of Otniel.

Dafna Meir’s struggles with the Palestinian assailant, and her daughter’s screams for help, caused the terrorist to flee, but not before he managed to slaughter his victim. (At the time of Shapiro’s address, Israeli security forces were still hunting for the killer; a 16-year-old Palestinian was later apprehended and was being interrogated over the attack.)

Will Banning Muslim Migration Ruin the Anti-ISIS Coalition?We don’t need to become ISIS to fight ISIS.

The most common attack on proposals to end Muslim migration to the United States is that this policy would somehow interfere with the coalition to fight ISIS.

Lindsey Graham asked, “How do you go to any of these countries and build a coalition when your policy is simply because you’re a Muslim you can’t come to America?” “This policy is a policy that makes it impossible to build the coalition necessary to take out ISIS,” Jeb Bush objected.

The White House agreed, “We have an over-60-country coalition fighting with a substantial number of Muslim-majority fighters who are absolutely essential to succeeding in that effort.”

But there are two things wrong with this argument.

First, no Muslim country or faction is fighting ISIS because they like us. They’re not doing us any favors. They’re protecting themselves from the Islamic State.

The insistence of ISIS that it is the supreme authority over all Muslims has even led it into battles with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. No one fighting ISIS is doing it because of our immigration policy. Jeb Bush referenced the Kurds. The Kurds want their own homeland. Those who want to come to America don’t want to fight ISIS. Those who want to fight ISIS aren’t looking to move to Dearborn or Jersey City.

Second, Muslim countries in the anti-ISIS coalition have much harsher immigration policies for Christians than anything that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz have proposed for Muslims.

When Obama gave his speech, the first Muslim country he mentioned in the coalition was Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia bans all religions except Islam. No churches are allowed in Saudi Arabia. Christmas parties are targeted with police raids. Converting to Christianity is punishable by death. Non-Muslims are entirely banned from some Saudi cities and the legal system discriminates against them.

Saudi Arabia also engages in blatant racial discrimination and denies basic civil rights to women. And yet there are no problems with having Saudi Arabia in the anti-ISIS coalition. Certainly the Saudis don’t worry that we’ll drop out of the coalition because they ban Christianity.

In a wide-ranging conversation on the threat posed by political correctness and the “culture of comfort” to the wellbeing of American universities, Lawrence Summers discusses his opposition to the faculty movement pressing for divestment from the Jewish state, along with his fight to return ROTC to campus. (Interview by Bill Kristol; video, 22 minutes.)

CH. 1: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS ON CAMPUS Larry Summers reflects on political correctness and its consequences for our universities.

CH. 2: UNIVERSITIES AND THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH Summers explains why universities must be devoted to the pursuit of truth, even when uncomfortable.

CH. 3: ISRAEL BOYCOTTS AND ROTC Summers discusses several significant controversies from his tenure as president of Harvard.

CH. 4: THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION How might technological developments impact higher education? Summers and Kristol discuss.

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,Is a keen observer of life,The word intellectual suggests right away A man who’s untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden could well have carried his lampoon further by pointing out that any intellectual these days is most likely to be untrue to his country, his compatriots, and their culture. It seems to come naturally to some characters to condemn what they are expected to praise, and praise what they are expected to condemn. Accordingly, the assumption takes root that Western societies are unjust at many a level, and that they do things much better somewhere else.

One approved model used to be the Soviet Union, then it was Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba, and there are even socialists now who look to the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. A small but
vociferous number of academics and littérateurs repeatedly put across some inner vision that possesses them, falsifying reality in the manner ofartists.

The primary explanation of this phenomenon is snobbery. The works of a Gore Vidal, a Norman Mailer, a Harold Pinter, an Edward Said, and alltheir kind are exercises in superiority. To hold opinions about national politics and purposes contrary to those of everyone else seems like flattering evidence of being cleverer than the masses who can’t think
things out for themselves and don’t know they are being hoodwinked. In this mindset, doing harm is progressive and unpopularity is proof of courage.

A particular subsection of intellectuals comprises Jews who are engaged in a very old battle to define their identity. Scattered in many countries and living among Christians or Muslims, they were nonetheless always a nation, with a faith and languages and customs of their own. The obvious strategies for survival were to avoid drawing attention to themselves, to stay apart, to do whatever was asked by the powers that be, and finally to flee if persecution was threatening martyrdom.

Move over, vegetarian; the “climatarian” is now taking the smug seat at the dinner table.

This new term is a convergence of two political crusades: climate change and the food movement. It landed on the New York Times list of the top new food words for 2015. Here’s how the Grey Lady defined the term:

climatarian (n.) A diet whose primary goal is to reverse climate change. This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores, cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste.

Climate activists are ratcheting up their attempt to blame global warming on food production and consumption, targeting the meat industry in particular. As the public tunes out stale climate-change rhetoric, climatarians hope to turn attention away from your SUV and onto your dinner plate.

They have plenty of help to make their case. A dire report released last November by Chatham House at the Royal Institute of International Affairs claims that the livestock sector is responsible for emitting about 15 percent of greenhouse gases, which “is equivalent to tailpipe emissions from all the world’s vehicles.” The United Nations pegs the figure even higher, at about 25 percent. They want us to think that if we cut out meat, we’d dramatically reduce emissions.

A specious report from the cancer agency of the World Health Organization last year warned that processed and red meat are carcinogenic. The group’s goal is to foment public fear about America’s favorite protein, despite a dearth of scientific evidence to back it up