RUTHFULLY YOURS

Brandeis University, near Boston, has a booming business school, new science buildings that generate patents and medicines, and a small cadre of Humanities professors dedicated to ‘”social justice”, whatever that is.

For 12 days in late November, members of “Brandeis Students of Color” and “Concerned Students 2015” squatted in the corridor outside the president’s office, demanding that the university hire more black faculty and admit more black students. On a Facebook page detailing their “activism” was guff about the “intersectionality” of race, class and gender oppression, mixed with requests for vegan food, accusations of “white supremacy”, and encouraging comments from various faculty members. “This is a revolution,” one student opined, before falling silent, stupefied by his own vacuity.

True to Sixties precedent, the Humanities faculty suddenly noticed that they were jailers at a racial gulag, and issued messages of support. Helpfully, several departments offered to undo academic apartheid by expanding their budgets for faculty hiring. Interim president Lisa Lynch surrendered immediately.

I took my doctorate at Brandeis. I could feel my degree devaluing as I read Lynch’s email. To foster a “more diverse, inclusive, and academically excellent community”, Brandeis will hire a Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion, to issue an annual “report card” on the university’s moral failings. More “faculty of colour” will be hired, more “students of colour” admitted; degree requirements may be lowered accordingly. Still, many of Brandeis’s non-academic staff are already cleaners and gardeners of colour, so full marks to Brandeis on that front.

In a year marred by campus strife, at least one bright spot emerged in American higher education: the comeback of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, known as ROTC, at leading universities.

This year, Columbia University commissioned its first Marine officer, Patrick Poorbaugh, since 1970. Yale graduated two Naval ROTC officers— Sam Cohen and Andrew Heymann—for the first time since Richard Nixon was in the White House. Yale, with 41 midshipmen, boasts the largest NROTC unit in the Ivy League. Harvard senior Charlotte Falletta was recognized as one of the top 10 Army cadets in the nation.

Even Brown University, the last Ivy League school to move beyond the Vietnam-era politics that yanked ROTC programs from campus, is changing. In 2012 Brown established a center for students interested in military careers, and this year the school signed deals allowing students to participate in Naval and Air Force ROTC programs off campus.

A recent report by, of all places, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, found that the Syrian rebels were mostly Islamic Jihadists and that even if ISIS were defeated there were 15 other groups sharing its worldview that were ready to take its place.

And that’s just in Syria.

The official ISIS story, the one that we read in the newspapers, watch on television and hear on the radio, is that it’s a unique group whose brand of extremism is so extreme that there is no comparing it to anything else. ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. Or with anything else. It’s a complete aberration.

Except for the 15 other Jihadist groups ready to step into its shoes in just one country.

Islamic Supremacist organizations like ISIS can be graded on the “Caliphate curve”. The Caliphate curve is based on how quickly an Islamic organization wants to achieve the Caliphate. What we describe as “extreme” or “moderate” is really the speed at which an Islamic group seeks to recreate the Caliphate.

Last month, a group of student protesters led by an organization called the Black Justice League occupied Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber’s office for 32 hours and refused to leave until he had signed a watered-down version of their demands. These demands included instituting a “safe space” on campus, renaming the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Wilson residential college because of President Wilson’s racist beliefs, mandating “cultural competency” training for faculty, instituting a distribution requirement that would force students to take a course on “marginalized peoples,” and providing de facto racially segregated “affinity housing” (disguised as housing for students interested in black culture).

There has been lots of controversy on campus about whether the protesters can be credited with promoting dialogue or stifling it. While the group stated publicly that it supports free speech, some members’ words and actions contradict this claim. Protesters purport to seek diversity, but what they really want is conformity.

For example, some protesters publicly shame and stigmatize those who question their demands and methods, thus promoting a campus culture of intimidation. Many non-black students who opposed the protest refrained from voicing their criticism out of fear of being labeled as racists and subjected to ad hominem attacks. Some students resorted to an anonymous forum called Yik-Yak to post statements like, “It’s alarming how few people publicly oppose BJL [protesters] even though I’ve gotten the impression that most people don’t support them,” to which another person replied, “If you publicly speak out against BJL people fear being labeled as a racist.”

It is a rare sign of realism among the faithful of the global warming cult that they acknowledged, even before it had begun, that COP21, the climate change conference in Paris, would fail to deliver concrete results. Their pious hope was that a policy framework would emerge to allow a coalition of the willing to create enormous capital flows from rich nations to enable the poor to decarbonise their economies while continuing to climb out of poverty. This hope is surely a vain one.

More than 40,000 delegates, politicians, scientists, green lobbyists, self-publicists and journalists (10 per cent of the total) crammed into a purpose-built complex at Le Bourget, the old aerodrome outside Paris now used, ironically, for private aircraft only. The French government, which hosted COP21, is coy about the cost of this monstrous boondoggle: one estimate puts it at $1.1 billion, and that is without factoring in the carbon bigfoot-print of all those air flights.

A leading imam has told refugees heading to Europe and America to use the refugee crisis to “conquer” the West. They don’t have to do so with guns, he says, but by simply outbreeding the native population. Sheikh Muhammad Ayed made the statements in a speech in the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the Daily Mail reports.

The sheikh told Muslims to intermarry with Europeans and Americans, and urged them to have children so they can “trample them underfoot, Allah willing.”

He continued:

Throughout Europe, all the hearts are enthused with hatred toward Muslims. They wish that we were dead, but they have lost their fertility, so they look for fertility in our midst. We will give them fertility. We will breed children with them, because we shall conquer their countries.

Ayed also said that European countries and America are only allowing refugees to come in because they see them as cheap labor, not because they’re compassionate and altruistic.

Pundits, analysts, and self-proclaimed “experts” refuse to acknowledge that the Oslo paradigm has been an abysmal failure
There is a complete industry that has grown up around the Oslo Accords that has kept many people employed for two decades now, inside the Beltway, far removed from the daily reality of the knifings and vehicular deaths that the people in Israel have to endure on a daily basis. Pundits, analysts, and self-proclaimed “experts” refuse to acknowledge that the Oslo paradigm has been an abysmal failure, and has only served to empower a group whose leaders daily inculcate their people towards hatred of Israelis and Jews and who harbor and encourage maximalist fantasies of what a final solution will look like.

A prominent Washington think tank held a seminar last week with former Labor Party Member of the Knesset, Einat Wilf, and Ghaith Al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and the former Executive Director of the American Task Force on Palestine. Al-Omari previously held various positions within the Palestinian Authority, including advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team during the 1999-2001 permanent-status talks.

Ms. Wilf candidly opened up her remarks with this statement: “I want to start by saying, often, when I am asked by diplomats, ‘How can I help? What can I do for peace?’ Actually my answer is always, ‘If we were left alone it would be best. Because we do not benefit by having this conflict constantly played out on the world’s stage.’”

Israeli lawyer Akiva Laxer might be the most star-crossed traveler since the invention of the airplane. In May 1972, he was at Israel’s international airport, roughly a dozen miles outside of Tel Aviv, when members of a leftist terror group allied with the Palestine Liberation Organization staged a mass shooting that killed 26 people. A few months later, he was in Munich for the Olympic Games when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes. And then, on June 27, 1976, he found himself a hostage on an Air France plane in the midst of perhaps the most storied terror attack and rescue in the 20th century: the hijacking in Entebbe, Uganda.

Dozens of books and movies have tried to capture the menace and the romance of the operation, most famously “Raid on Entebbe,” the 1977 TV movie starring Peter Finch and Charles Bronson. It’s no wonder. The event sports a colorful cast of heroes and villains. In “Operation Thunderbolt,” British historian Saul David relies on extensive interviews with the captors, kidnapped and rescuers to retell the story in a tick-tock trek from Tel Aviv bunkers to the airport in Entebbe. The effect is heart-racing.

The tale began when Air France announced that Flight 139, departing from Israel, would make an unscheduled layover in Athens. The news rattled 12-year-old passenger Olivier Cojot, who told his father, Michel: “If I were a terrorist I would get on at the stopover.” In 1976, there were roughly three plane hijackings each month. Even young Olivier knew that a flight carrying Israelis through Athens, an airport with lax security, presented a prime target.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/28/10-things-america-must-do-to-defend-itself-from-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Michael Finch, the president and Chief Operating Officer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Michael interviewed Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org and the author of the new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.

The two discussed 10 Things America Must Do To Defend Itself From Jihad, with Robert crystallizing the crucial steps the U.S. must take to reverse the tide.

Don’t miss it!

Lifting the veil

Today, as Daesh/ISIS — a sub-sect of Sunni Islam — murders and encourages murdering Americans, our foreign policy establishment argues that doubling down on efforts to “gain the confidence” of Sunni states, potentates, and peoples will lead them to turn against the jihadis among themselves and to fight Daesh with “boots on the ground.”

For more than a quarter century, as Americans have suffered trouble from the Muslim world’s Sunni and Shia components and as the perennial quarrel between them has intensified, the US government has taken the side of the Sunni. This has not worked out well for us. It is past time for our government to sort out our own business, and to mind it aggressively.
President George W. Bush doing sword dance with then prince (now Saudi king) Salman bin Abdul Aziz in 2008.

President George W. Bush doing sword dance with then prince (now Saudi king) Salman bin Abdul Aziz in 2008.

To understand why hopes for help from the Sunni side are forlorn, we must be clear that jihadism in general and Daesh in particular are logical outgrowths of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s (and the Gulf monarchies’) official religion, about how they fit in the broader conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as about how the US occupation of Iraq exposed America to the vagaries of intra-Muslim conflicts.