RUTHFULLY YOURS

From remarks by Brendan O’Neill, editor of the online magazine Spiked, at the “What Cannot Be Said” conference at the University of California, Irvine, Jan. 23:

This censorship is more insidious than the old censorships. It is vast and unwieldy and can turn its attention to almost anything: magazines, clothing, monuments, jokes, conversational blunders. It’s as if students feel they deserve their own personal blasphemy law to protect them from scurrilous comments or images or objects. . . .

Campus censors can’t be held entirely responsible for this therapeutic censorship. In fact, in many ways they are the products of a culture that has been growing for decades: a culture of diminished moral autonomy; a culture which sees individuals as fragile and incapable of coping without therapeutic assistance; a culture which treats individual self-esteem as more important than the right to be offensive; a culture that was developed by older generations—in fact by the fortysomethings and fiftysomethings now mocking campus censors as infantile and ridiculous.

Yes, we should mock these little tyrants who fantasize that their feelings should trump other people’s freedom. But we must go further than that. We must remake the case for robust individualism and the virtue of moral autonomy against the fashion for fragility; against the misanthropic view of people as objects shaped and damaged by speech rather than as active subjects who can independently imbibe, judge and make decisions about the speech they hear.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon committed an egregious error a few days
ago. He woke up and got out of bed. He shouldn’t have. Had he remained
in bed, perhaps, perhaps, he might have managed to get through the day
without saying something exceedingly stupid.

Before a meeting of the UN Security Council, Ban Ki-moon justified
terrorism. That’s right, he said it was “human nature.” His exact
words were “It is human nature to react to occupation.”

Human nature to stick a knife in someone’s head or ram a car into a
baby carriage? Honestly, I have no idea what kind of society Ban is
from but I’m thinking it (and he) needs to be reprogrammed.

Human nature?

Student leaders at the University of Oregon considered removing a famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote from a wall on its student center on the grounds that it was just not inclusive enough — because it talked only about racial discrimination and not discrimination based on stuff like gender identity.

The quote has been displayed at the Erb Memorial Union (which is currently being renovated) since 1985. It’s probably something that you’ve heard before — “I have a dream that my four little children that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream . . .” — without even thinking that it might be problematic.

But that’s because you’re just not as smart or culturally aware as these kids.

“Diversity is so much more than race,” sophomore Mia Ashley told the Daily Emerald, the school’s official student newspaper.

“Obviously race still plays a big role,” she continued. “But there are people who identify differently in gender and all sorts of things like that.”

According to the Emerald, the students ultimately decided not to change the quote, but “that decision was not made without some hard thought by the Student Union Board.”

Oh, and it gets worse: The entire reason that quote was put there in the first place was to replace another quote that students had found offensive — one that called the university “leader in the quest for the good life for all men” — which is obviously, you know, sexist as hell.

Some years ago, I conceived a business idea which I hereby make available free and for nothing to any enterprising soul who wishes to do a bit of good for the community. You know how there are services that store “cord blood” of newborns which, being rich in stem cells, could be used later in life to treat various diseases? My idea is somewhat similar. Here’s how it would work. Whenever an aspiring academic bureaucrat is appointed to the presidency of a college or university, this service would undertake, for a small recurring fee, to receive and safely store his testicles in a secure undisclosed location for the duration of his tenure. Upon proper certification indicating that an individual was no longer overseeing an educational institution, the testicles would be returned, intact, and fully functional. Studies have shown that disuse is injurious to this delicate organ, and since vanishingly few college presidents acknowledge their possession of what the vernacular denominates cojones, this innovative prophylactic approach to healthy living would benefit not only many individuals but also, by reducing the number of future claims on scarce resources, the larger health care network. Other obligations make it impossible for me to pursue this obvious money-maker, but I look forward to seeing it instituted very soon. If a pilot project is deemed advisable, I venture to suggest that a good start might be Yale University, whose ambulatory blancmange, Peter Salovey, is the proud winner of the 2015 Sheldon Award for Worst College President. Boola-boola.

Thus endeth my entrepreneurial spiel. But I am not quite done with awards. For Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College (tuition, room, and board this year: $64,266), deserves a real award for providing a partial counter-example in extremis to my general proposition concerning the eunuch-like nature of the Confraternity of College and University Presidents. The example is only partial because Oberlin , under his watch, has distinguished itself as a poster-child for the weaponized PC-madness that has gripped college campuses with the ferocity of a medieval plague. Back in December, there was a flurry of well-deserved ridicule directed at Oberlin for the 14-page list of “demands” issued by members of the Black Student Union. The document is similar to, but possibly even more insane than, the lists propagated by black students at Yale, Amherst, the University of Missouri, Princeton, and other institutions. The gastronomic elements of the protests — the demand, for example, that fried chicken be made a permanent part of the dining hall menu — elicited the greatest hilarity. But the document was minatory as well as mad. Here’s a bit from the opening:

Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
With immigration matters of all kinds in the news, International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 brings to mind the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, when the world offered too little help. America’s record on this subject is often considered marred by the Roosevelt administration’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the refugees, but some members of the American government stand out for efforts that could have put them in the company of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who saved many innocent lives.

The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.

On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.

Lawrence J. Haas, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, is author of the forthcoming book Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.
With rising “tensions and violence between Israelis and Palestinians” and “a diplomatic stalemate,” America’s ambassador to Israel said the other day, “we must find ways of preserving the viability of a two-state solution for the future – Israel’s only path to avoid becoming a bi-national state, arrest negative trends that pull us away from the goal and prevent the terrible violence we have recently seen.”

Speaking in Tel Aviv, Dan Shapiro went on to criticize Israel’s settlements and then sharply condemned its West Bank policy: “Too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities, too much vigilantism goes unchecked and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.”

That’s rich. Israel’s not perfect, but the bigger double standard emanates from Washington, where a blind administration applies it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – too critical of Israel, too forgiving of the Palestinian leadership.

Even Shapiro acknowledged the odd timing of his blast, for it came in the aftermath of brutal Palestinian terror. The day before he spoke, a Palestinian terrorist slashed Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old mother of six, to death at the entrance of her home in a West Bank settlement, in front of her children. A day later, as Meir’s funeral convoy was traveling to Jerusalem, another Palestinian terrorist slashed and badly wounded a 30-year-old pregnant woman who was shopping in the West Bank.

This is not only racism, it’s straightforward child abuse.

A first grade teacher in Florida is under investigation for an unapproved, controversial “lesson on racism” that left some students in tears.

Parents are complaining about a “lesson on racism” for first grade students at Minneola Elementary Charter School the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in which the teacher segregated her 7- and 8-year-old student by eye color then discriminated against some for several hours, WESH reports.

The teacher, who was not named in media reports, gave students with blue eyes candy and hugs, and ignored students with brown eyes, according to WFTV.

Minneola principal Sherry Watts told WFTV the lesson was not approved by administrators.

“The experiment shouldn’t have taken place at all,” she said. “It’s not appropriate for first grade.”

It’s not appropriate for any grade. This is Jane Elliot’s vileness filtering all the way down to first grade courtesy of teachers programmed with social justice hate.

Elliot’s technique was to emotionally abuse students in ways reminiscent of fringe cults and Soviet self-criticism sessions which break down an individual’s sense of identity by publicly attacking her sense of self.

Dr. Shmuel KatzDr. Shmuel Katz was born in Hungary and raised in Israel. He served as an IDF officer during the Six Day War (1967). As a doctor, he gained extensive trauma experience serving the IDF in the Yom Kippur War (1973). He is double-boarded in Surgery, a Fellow of the Israeli Surgical Society, a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and a member of multiple medical societies.

It took the Arab propaganda machine decades of persistent, aggressive effort to convince many oblivious individuals – including some world leaders – of the canard that Jews illegally occupy Arab land, having “stolen it from Palestinians.”

The Mideast conflict may be complicated to solve, but is quite easily explained:

The Jewish people have an unbroken 4,000-year national history in the land of Israel.
Never in history has there been an Arab Palestinian State.
The Palestinian movement was founded to annihilate Israel.

Let’s look at some facts:

The Palestinian movement (PLO) was founded with the express purpose of destroying Israel. The PLO Covenant – adopted in 1964, long before Israel held any disputed territories – calls “to move forward on the path of jihad until complete and final victory is achieved,” i.e. the annihilation of Israel.

Fatah refers to Mohammed signing an insincere “peace treaty.”

This view permeates the Palestinian movement: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah’s “Party of God,” and Hamas (acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) all share the goal of destroying Israel. Mahmoud Abbas’ political party – “Fatah” – is the name of chapter 48 of the Koran which describes Mohammed signing a “peace treaty” as a way to gain leverage and launch an attack.

At the root of Palestinian ideology is this “phased plan” to destroy Israel. Palestinian statesman Faisal Husseini described peace agreements with Israel as a Trojan Horse:

“If we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22 percent of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza – our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.”

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.