RUTHFULLY YOURS

From Israel’s rag Al Ha’aretz courtesy of Daphne Anson http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

As infrequently happens, a great article in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that actually supports Israel rather than denigrating it.

This one is by a freshman at Ivy League institution Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who observes:

The movement is successfully convincing activists that one cannot fight for women’s rights, academic freedom or against racism without acknowledging Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. This poses a problem for liberal American Jews more than anyone else.

‘…. Anti-Israel circles understand that their cause isn’t even on the radar of the average college student. By hitching their wagon to issues with greater popular appeal, pro-Palestinian activists seek to expand their tent and build a coalition larger than the handful of students fanatic enough to spend their college years slandering Israel.

Ironically, this disturbing phenomenon is hardest not on conservative-leaning Jewish students, but on left-wing Jewish activists who don’t support BDS. Social justice work is increasingly seen as a “package,” and one cannot be for racial justice, gender equality or humanitarianism without also swearing allegiance to the cult of Israel-despisers.

Left-wing Jews hew to the same social vision as the progressive community – but Israel and BDS are thorns for those who still believe in Zionism….

This discomfort is particularly dangerous because left-leaning young Jews are a weak link in the American-Jewish community’s relationship with Israel. As any exit poll can tell you, American-Jews do not, on the whole, vote based on Israel. American Jews vote for candidates who share their liberal social values. Thus, liberalism trumps pro-Israelism for most secular Jews. What will be when liberal Jewish students are forced to choose between their allegiance to Israel and their commitment to social justice? What will happen when not supporting BDS is seen as a fatal tribal weakness? The answer should frighten anybody concerned with the future of the Diaspora’s relationship with Israel.’

Except that any fashioner or overseer of military and civilian threat analysis could never swear to anything in a court of law or during a Congressional committee hearing, because he would invariably perjure himself. So he would hedge behind a well-rehearsed litany of presuppositions and assumptions.

Continuing a column on “Our Ignorance” from Stephen Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad (pp. 443-484), from Institutionalized Ignorance of Islam, I will focus here on the rendering of language and words to meaninglessness by Army writing guides discussed by Stephen Coughlin in “Our Ignorance.” I thought a Socratic exposition of the subject would better drive home the point over a straight narrative.
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In a fictive, imaginary setting, a House or Senate committee hearing member, identified here as the Interrogator, in full possession of his faculty of reason, might challenge the “expert witness” about what he knows and what he claims he knows – or doesn’t know. The hearing has been convened to examine the reason why the nation’s “War on Terror” has not prevented the commission of terrorist acts in the U.S., and is in general ineffectual.
The Witness, a captain in a U.S. Army counter-intelligence unit, has just finished delivering an opening statement about how his unit conducts threat analyses and contributes to the government’s ability to fight the “War on Terror.” He reads the conclusion of his statement:
Witness: Our recommendations and conclusions are then forwarded to the next echelon of threat assessment evaluation with the best assumptions and presuppositions underscored and emphasized, which subsume all possible likelihoods and scenarios concerning the enemy’s next activity. Our highly combed assumptions and presuppositions have played no little role in projecting anticipated enemy activity, and enabled us to counter hypothetical but very significant threats. Often, facts play a role in the final assessment.

It seems like 2015 has just been so full of examples of extreme political correctness on college campuses that it might be easy to forget just how full of them it’s been.

Here, in no particular order, are the 13 stories of 2015 that made me most want to bash my head into a wall:
1. Hating pumpkin-spice lattes was declared sexist.

If you say bad things about pumpkin-spice lattes, what you’re really saying is that “girls don’t get to have valid emotions” — at least according to Min Cheng’s op-ed in the Phoenix, Swarthmore College’s student newspaper.

According to Cheng, girls generally like pumpkin-spice lattes, therefore, saying that you don’t like them is saying that none of girls’ opinions ever matter. She said the same applies to making fun of leggings, Uggs, and Grey’s Anatomy — which, as I’ve said before, is probably the worst show ever created . . . perhaps second only to Gilmore Girls.
2. A university language guide stated that the word “American” was “problematic.”

According to a “Bias-Free Language Guide” that was used by the University of New Hampshire, the word “American” is offensive and should not be used. Why? Because it “fails to recognize South America” and “assumes the U.S. is the only country inside these two continents” of course! It recommends using “resident of the U.S.” instead, but I kind of feel like “I’m proud to be a resident of the U.S./Where at least I know I’m free” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Now, the school ultimately removed the guide after media scrutiny — but the fact that it ever existed at all is pretty head-bashing-worthy if you ask me.
3. A university study declared that we have to accept people who “identify as real vampires.”

Look — we have to stop discriminating against people who think they are actual real vampires by thinking that that’s kind of weird — at least according to researchers from Idaho State University and College of the Canyons and the Center for Positive Sexuality in Los Angeles. After all, according to the researchers, “they are born with it, somewhat akin to sexual orientation.”

Sorry, but if you think you are a vampire, I’m going to call you weird. Oh, and by “sorry,” I mean that I’m actually not at all.
4. The word “skinny” was deemed “violent.”

The “Language Awareness Campaign” at Western University in London declared a bunch of words and phrases to be “violent” — including “skinny” and “get over it.” Oh, and “whitewashed,” “because it is used to insult those who do not conform to negative stereotypes of a community or culture” — yes, despite the fact that it can also be used to describe a freshly painted fence.

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.’”