RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We were in a Jewish setting and you can only criticize Israel,” Tenenbom said of the Limmud Conference, “for me, that was the worst.” By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

“Yes, all voices are welcome, so long as they are critical of Israel,” is how Tuvia Tenenbom, journalist, dramatist and best-selling author, described the Limmud Conference in Birmingham, England on Dec. 27 – 31, 2015.

Tenenbom, author of “Catch the Jew,” sat through several days, but not all, of the recent conference. Tenenbom was supposed to be there for the entire conference, he was a speaker, but after being disinvited from the fourth session in which he was supposed to appear, and after enduring scathingly hostile verbal attacks from audience members and former Limmud officials, Tenenbom had enough.

That’s what Tenenbom says.

What Keith Kahn-Harris says is quite different and he’s the organizer and leader of the session from which Tenenbom was dropped, and he’s the one who told Tenenbom he was disinvited.

According to Kahn-Harris, it was his decision alone to drop Tenenbom from the final panel and it was “not an ideological decision from someone ideologically opposed to Tuvia Tenenbom.” Instead, Kahn-Harris said he dropped Tenenbom from the session because he had invited four participants but only really wanted three – and he “left it to the [time of the] conference” to decide whom to cut.

Two thirds of Israeli Arabs say that their Knesset representatives are not advancing their interests.
Last October, as the Palestinians began their latest round of terrorist war against Israel, lawmakers from the Joint Arab List participated in mass anti-Israel rallies in major Arab towns. One such rally in Nazareth in mid-October attracted some 2,500 participants. After it ended, some demonstrators started throwing rocks at Jews.

The next day, MK Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List stood on a street in Nazareth and gave a live interview to Channel 2 news.

Just as the camera began filming, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam drove down the street. Seeing Odeh, Salam stopped his car and began bellowing, “Get out of here! Enough of your interviews. Go ruin things somewhere else!” Odeh tried lamely to get the camera to stop filming. But Salam continued shouting.

“The Middle East is imploding in waves of violence whose impact has reached Israel.

To the north, radical Islamists in Syria linked to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are approaching Israel’s border on the Golan Heights and threatening Jordan as well. At the same time, Iran is sending thousands of rockets with increasingly accurate guidance systems to Hizbullah in Lebanon to again attack Israeli cities.

To the east, Israel faces an array of potential threats from hostile forces that include Iranian Revolutionary Guards, pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias, and radical Islamist terror armies.

To the south, the Islamic State is in Sinai, threatening both Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are working feverishly, with Iranian assistance, to rebuild their rocket capabilities to enable renewed attacks on Israel.

Israel must have defensible borders to protect itself against a broad range of current and future threats from radical Islamist forces.”

A compelling video from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in which that doughty student of war and defender of Israel Colonel Richard Kemp features, inter alia:

The next phase in anti-Israel academic indoctrination is already here – at Hebrew schools across the country.

Eucation is important. What shapes our youth shapes the future, and so we need to craft our school curricula carefully. So it is worth carefully deconstructing the troubling new K-12 curriculum, Reframing Israel, produced by Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman. The curriculum was introduced at the beginning of the school year, and Zimmerman claims that more than 10 Hebrew schools have already adopted it. The stated goal of Reframing Israel is “teaching Jewish kids to think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” But is this the actual impact of the curriculum?
The answer is no.
First, it is crucial to note that the main author and the majority of contributors to Reframing Israel are part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. This includes the writer of the curriculum’s “historical overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
This is deeply problematic, because while BDS sells itself as a movement for justice and human rights, its ultimate goal is the elimination of Israel and the violation of Jewish rights to self-determination. According to recent polls, only four percent of American Jews strongly support BDS, and the overwhelming majority see the denial of Israel’s right to exist as racism. Members of the Jewish community are of course free to support anything they choose, but responsible parents and educators should take BDS’s agenda into account when thinking about the goals and biases of Reframing Israel.
At first glance the curriculum appears well-balanced, filled with pride-building activities like learning Hebrew songs and creative exercises aimed at building understanding of both Israeli and Palestinian narratives. The educational method is also well thought out, encouraging students to actively engage with diverse points of view instead of expecting them to “passively accept the information.” These aspects of Reframing Israel could indeed help Jewish kids think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is therefore disturbing that when digging a little deeper into the material, the message becomes overwhelmingly anti-Israel and pro-BDS. This is particularly apparent in the “Historical Overview” and “Key Terms” sections, which guide the majority of the curriculum.

East Carolina University’s new sexual harassment policy declares that even “slight” neck-touching can be considered a form of “sexual battery” and deserving of punishment.

According to the school’s new “Regulation on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Other Forms of Interpersonal Violence” rules, which went into effect on Jan. 1, “sexual battery includes the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person’s clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent,” “however slight” that touching may be.

Of course, no one wants to deal with some creep coming up to her and rubbing on her neck and making grunting sounds and smacking his lips or something. But where is the line drawn? What if someone picks a piece of fuzz off of my turtleneck and I decide that they seemed sexually aroused by it? Does how I say I felt about it determine whether or not it was sexual battery?

Or is it about whether or not the person with the neck looked uncomfortable with it being touched? If so, would what Joe Biden did to Ash Carter’s wife be considered sexual battery? What about when George W. Bush touched Angela Merkel at that G8 summit? Was that really just a funny little awkward moment, or was it in fact a violent, disturbing incident of battery that was caught on tape and should have led to him being punished if not impeached?

The Islamization of America is proceeding at speed as the political and educational elites are desperately playing catch-up with Europe’s looming immigration and refugee disaster. We have just learned that Paul Ryan’s “House-passed omnibus [bill] will bring in nearly 300,000 Muslim migrants in the next 12 months alone, including roughly 170,000 who will be permanently resettled…” The political nomenklatura on both sides of the aisle are hastening the ruination of the country. As Roger Simon remarks, “Europe is in a double-bind situation that we are not. As their domestic populations decline, they have to admit a substantial amount of Muslims to support their welfare states. We do not need this.” However, there are no doubt electoral and fiscal considerations that would profit, on the one hand, the political fortunes of the Democrats (as well as “fundamentally transforming” America according to Obama’s sinister intentions), and on the other, the financial prospects of those involved in migrant resettlement programs and of employers seeking a low wage labor force.

The education establishment is no less complicit. Common Core, which has been enthusiastically embraced by both Brahmin and shudra, effectively mandates the study of Islam, which often takes precedence over the traditional focus on American and Western history. As columnist and author Edward Davenport reports for Freedom Outpost, “An astounding 32 pages of the World history textbook are devoted to Muslim cavitation. Students in two Texas schools–Cross Timbers intermediate and Kenneth Davis–will be required to learn Arabic…thanks to a 1.3 million grant from the Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistantship program.” Much of American political and military history has been airbrushed out of the materials students are expected to master. Qatar has also been lavish in promoting Islamic propaganda at the expense of objective scholarship; indeed, Qatar Foundation International, directed by Islamic apologist Tariq Ramadan, funded the “One World Education” concept from which Common Core originated.

Creeping sharia infiltrates every nook and cranny of America. Including our classrooms. Among other things, the Muslim Brotherhood (as well as the Saudis) wields enormous influence over curriculum that threatens not only public schools, but private and parochial schools as well.

After reporting on Islamic supremacy in our schools a year ago, I thought it worthwhile to see how things have progressed since then, for better or for worse. (Guess which it is.) When last we left off, here’s where things stood. In most cases, information only came to light because parents stumbled upon homework assignments or their child told them something of concern.

Students learned to recite allegiance to Allah along with Muslim prayers and chants. Students were also taught the Five Pillars of Islam, that Muslims pray to the same God as Christians and Jews, that Mohammed was a man with strong moral values, that terrorists are “freedom fighters,” that Muslims treat those they conquer better than America does, along with the taqiyya version of CAIR’s mission. Sharia law was promoted, Qurans were introduced into classrooms, students studied Arabic, female students wore burqas as part of a lesson on Islam, and special courses on Islam prohibited students from wearing a cross or saying the name “Jesus.”

Homework assignments required students to promote the “Golden Age of Islam” while students also had to write about what it would be like to travel to Mecca. All the while, Muslim students were given special privileges that Christian and Jewish students were not afforded, including time off during the day to pray.

Twitter seems to be in partnership with the U.S. House of Representatives in its determination to culturally enrich America with Sharia speech restrictions.

Twitter seems to be in partnership with the U.S. House of Representatives in its determination to culturally enrich America with Sharia speech restrictions. On December 22nd I reported, in my Rule of Reason column, “A Congressional Overture to Censorship,” on House Resolution 569, submitted on December 17th to the House committee process, which in its content and intent, preempted Twitter’s January 1st, 2016, publication of its new rules that prohibit the promotion of hate content, “sensitive” topics, and the advocacy of violence globally. Ostensively, it is a stab at combating terrorists from using Twitter as a means of communication to its allies and its enemies, but it is too coincidental with both the Congressional resolution and the OIC’s Sharia compliance plans. Here is a copy and paste from Twitter’s support page.

What products or services are subject to this policy?

With the flood of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa overwhelming Europe, and with the Obama administration allowing large numbers to come to the United States, there is a justifiable fear that embedded in the ranks of the refugees are trained terrorists.

Until now, identifying embedded terrorists has been nearly an impossible challenge. People have called for better “vetting,” but to “vet” means to look back at people’s history based on their documentation. For most people, certainly for most Syrians, there is no “back” – even a legitimate passport can’t be verified with Passport Control in Damascus. With whom would one check local police, employment or education records?

Then add other, practical, problems. How do you interview a refugee when you have few officials who speak Arabic? And even if some know the language, how can a border control agent or a customs official determine whether the answers are truthful? How can the border control system deal with the extraordinary volume and process people who are disoriented, angry, and pressing to move on to more permanent quarters?

Netanyahu said he appreciated those in the Israeli Arab public who spoke out against the attack, serve in the IDF.

Israel cannot allow pockets of the country to have lax gun law enforcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday evening, visiting the site of Friday’s shooting on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street.
Shortly after police publicized the name of the suspected gunman, 31-year-old Nashat Milhem of Arara, Netanyahu spoke out about the need to fight incitement and increase law enforcement in Israeli-Arab areas.

“There are many among Muslim Israeli citizens who have come out against the violence and are crying out for full law enforcement in their towns. At the same time, we all know that there is wild incitement by radical Islam against the State of Israel in the Arab sector. Incitement in mosques, in the education system, on social media,” he said, vowing to continue efforts to stop the incitement.

The prime minister said he is unwilling to have a state within a state in Israel, in which some citizens live in “enclaves with no law enforcement, with Islamist incitement and an abundance of illegal weapons that are often fired at happy events, weddings, and during endless criminal incidents.”

“That time is over,” Netanyahu declared.