RUTHFULLY YOURS

This is really happening.

A mandatory online course at the University of Southern California (USC) asks students to disclose the number of sexual encounters they have had over the past three months and teaches students to ask for consent by saying “how far would you be comfortable going?” and “would you like to try this with me?”

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, students were told they must complete the Title IX training in order to register for courses in the spring.

“This course is mandatory, and you must complete it by February 9, 2016. If you do not complete the training by this date you will receive a registration hold until the training is complete,” the email stated.

Well, scratch that off the list of places I would like my daughter to go to school (kidding, it’s in downtown L.A., I never wanted her to go there).

Worry not, incoming students, the old creepers who created the curriculum assure us it’s like totally groovy and stuff:

Despite some students being uncomfortable with the content of the course, the campus-wide email assured students they would “enjoy the assignment.”

“We believe you’ll enjoy the assignment, and that this training is in line with our shared belief that Trojans care for Trojans. It is an innovative, engaging, and informative online course, created with students for students,” the email stated.

One in six American men will develop prostate cancer. It is the most common cancer after skin cancer, and the second biggest cancer killer for men. Two Israeli scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Israel promise an almost miraculous cure, now in clinical trials at New York’s Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. It is the culmination of 20 years of basic research by plant scientist Avigdor Scherz and cancer researcher Yoram Saloman.

Professor Scherz took a naturally occurring form of chlorophyll from aquatic bacteria:

…chemically modified by Prof. Scherz’s lab at Weizmann to fit the team’s pharmaceutical needs. Once the photosensitized drug is injected, it meets up with the second crucial element in this therapy—light—at the targeted tumor site… from highly focused fiber-optic lasers that have been inserted near the tumor. As the chlorophyll absorbs the light, it can then interact with the third component in the process—oxygen—to produce oxygen radicals. This interaction initiates a fast cascade of pathophysiological events that cause instantaneous closing of the blood vessels leading to the tumor, followed by oxygen and nutrient deprivation at the tumor site, as well as other active processes that kill tumor cells. In 24 to 48 hours, the tumor undergoes complete necrosis.

The treatment, called vascular-targeted photodynamic therapy or VTP is a one-time 20 to 30-minute procedure. There have been no side effects in urination or sexual function.

The Israeli team foresees applications for breast, ovary, lung and pancreas tumors. The latter has no effective treatment to date and has been a tragic death sentence.

The United Methodist Church has approved a motion to divest its pension interests from Israel.

The pension board of the United Methodist Church — one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States, with more than seven million members — has placed five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it will not invest in for human rights reasons, the board said in a statement on Tuesday.

It appeared to be the first time that a pension fund of a large American church had taken such a step regarding the Israeli banks, which help finance settlement construction in what most of the world considers illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

There are no illegally occupied Palestinian territories, because the area in question was once part of Jordan, never part of an independent nation. Jews have lived there since biblical times, though there were fewer before 1948 because the “Palestinians” kept massacring them in pogroms.

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).