RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Alas….not available in English….rsk
Did Jews recognizably still exist as a people in the late 19th century? Many questioned it. In his packed and vibrant fiction, the great Peretz Smolenskin proved them wrong.

This essay is the third in a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at seminal Hebrew writers and thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first two essays, on the proto-Zionist novelists Joseph Perl and Abraham Mapu, are available here and here.

In Peretz Smolenskin’s first Hebrew novel, Simḥat Ḥanef, a title taken from the book of Job and translatable as “The Humbug’s Happiness,” there is an account, set in the 1850s or 60s, of a stagecoach journey from Berdichev, a heavily Jewish town in central Ukraine, to the Black Sea port of Odessa. (Like other East European writers of Hebrew fiction, Smolenskin gave his Russian or Polish towns and cities imaginary and sometimes comic Hebrew names, generally formed by inverting or rearranging their letters. Thus, the Berdichev of The Humbug’s Happiness is Toshavey-Ba’ar—roughly, “Inhabitants of Ignorance”—while Odessa is Ashadot, “Waterfalls.”) The passage starts with an introductory reflection of the kind that Smolenskin (ca. 1840-1885), a prolific essayist as well as a writer of fiction, was fond of: in this case, a brief discourse on the spread of Russian railroads, the consequent demise of stagecoach travel, and the author’s obligation to memorialize the old means of transportation “so that posterity may recall the cumbersome ways of its ancestors.” Once the technologically transformative 19th century will have succeeded in changing everything, the narrator of The Humbug’s Happiness asks, who will believe that stagecoaches ever existed? “It’s all a figment of your imagination,” future historians who unearth such relics from the darkness of the past will be told.

We are the Tenured Far Leftists on the faculties of Israeli universities. We obediently sign our names to sundry petitions initiated by our colleagues, but those petitions do not really explain fully and clearly what we want. We wish to clarify what that is once and for all.

First of all, while we obsessively recite the mantra about how the “occupation” is the quintessence of all evil in the world and the source of all Middle East violence, we actually understand that any ending of the “occupation” in the West Bank would have exactly the same consequences as the ending of “occupation” in Gaza. These would include tens of thousands of missiles fired into the rump-Israel, into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa, from the “liberated Palestine,” in addition to thousands of incursions of armed terrorists. So if we actually understand this perfectly well, why do we advocate the ending of the “occupation”?

Such advocacy is a form of comfortable political recreation and moral posturing for us, a sort of lounge-chair high and hot-tub mirth, not really an alternative we want to see implemented. It is to allow us to posture righteousness. We know that we represent only the most extreme 2% (or less) of Israelis and so the rest of the public will never agree to any such implementation. We are counting on that.

While American eyes are rightly fixed on ISIS, Palestine’s so-called “Stabbing Intifada” continues. For those unfamiliar with the latest twist in Palestinian terror tactics, Israel is beset by a spate of apparently spontaneous stabbing attacks, where (mostly) young Palestinians grab kitchen knives or other sharp objects and do their best to stab or hack to death as many Jews as possible. The Washington Post has the chilling details:

Young Palestinians with kitchen knives are waging a ceaseless campaign of near-suicidal violence that Israeli leaders are calling “a new kind of terrorism.” There were three attacks on Christmas Eve — two stabbings and one car ramming.

There have been about 120 attacks and attempted assaults by Palestinians against Israelis since early October, an average of more than one a day. At least 20 Israelis have been killed; more than 80 Palestinians have been shot dead by security forces and armed civilians during the assaults.

There is a numbing repetition to the news: knife-wielding Palestinian at a military checkpoint or bus stop shot dead at the scene — or “neutralized,” as the Israeli media call it. Many of the assaults or their aftermaths have been captured on cellphone videos.