RUTHFULLY YOURS

The contemptible reaction of Middle East studies professors to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market massacres in Paris earlier this year was repeated with the brutal ISIS attacks on Paris in November. The deaths of 130 people resulted not in unequivocal condemnation, but in apologias for Islam, dire warnings of “Islamophobia,” and anti-Western equivocation.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, complained about Western media coverage, given numerous ISIS attacks throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and asked inanely, “What about my pain?” While it’s hardly unusual for the Western media to focus on the West, it is Safi and his academic cohorts who routinely omit or downplay ISIS’s misdeeds so as to avoid addressing its theological underpinnings. Indeed, his hackneyed comments on that front were true to form:

Yes, the members of ISIS come from Muslim backgrounds. No, their actions cannot be justified on the basis of the 1400 years of Islamic tradition. Every serious scholar of Islam has confirmed this clearly, and unambiguously. ISIS is about as Muslim as the KKK is Christian.

This week’s Supreme Court arguments cast a harsh light on the confused jurisprudence of using race as a factor in college admissions. Forty years of compromises have created a gigantic mess.

Everything you think you know about affirmative action is wrong.

But don’t worry, no one else is clear about it either. The fact is, affirmative action is a mess, and the case the Supreme Court heard this week, Fisher v. University of Texas, put the whole hot mess on vivid display. In fact, the oral argument—which ran overlong and featured numerous outrageous statements, mostly from Justice Scalia—turned out to be the perfect mirror for the court’s jurisprudence on the subject: long, sloppy, and unlikely to get better soon.

Affirmative action, as most of us know it, seems pretty straightforward. The best illustration of it is a cartoon that’s been making the rounds lately of three people—one short, one tall, and one in-between—trying to watch a baseball game from behind the outfield fence. In one frame, labeled “equality,” each stands on a crate. That means the tall person can see clearly, the medium-height one not as well, and the short one is blocked.

In the second frame, labeled “justice,” the tall person’s crate has been given to the short person, who now stands on two. Now everyone can see.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama declared with almost classical hubris that his ascent to higher office marked the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” So naturally he went into the Paris global-warming talks with appropriate fanfare and theatricality. In reality, President Obama’s approach to global warming is like his approach to health-care reform: He is willing to put his name to any agreement that lets him declare victory without bothering too much about the details.

The accord reached in Paris fails in three key ways: It cannot satisfy an elementary cost-benefit analysis; it does not serve the national interests of the United States; and the Obama administration is seeking to bind the United States to a treaty while insisting that it is not a treaty and thereby shutting Congress out of its proper role in ratifying such accords. For these reasons, the Paris agreement should be considered dead on arrival, and Congress should make it clear that the United States will not consider itself legally bound by it for the simple reason that it has not been legally adopted.

Sentiment in the West remains opposed to putting ‘boots on the ground’, which is understandable. Much harder to comprehend is the civilized world’s tardiness in supporting the forces that have beaten ISIS and continue to do so
The Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine of sending a heavy American army (then backed by Australia) to drive Saddam out of Iraq is now widely seen as a mistake. But more than that, it has become a convenient straw man for the isolationists who support passivity in the Middle East. Opposition to ‘boots on the ground’ is the catch cry of both those on the isolationist right and what might be termed the Mike Carlton/John Pilger left, which leverages the West’s understandable weariness of military involvement in the Middle East.

But the question is not ‘boots on the ground’. The real question is, ‘whose boots on the ground?’

In the last few weeks Turkey has supposedly sealed its borders against ISIS infiltrators going backwards and forwards. Ankara’s Islamist leadership has a lot to answer for the backing of fundamentalists in Syria and Iraq, the resultant disasters, and concomitant refugee outflows of millions of desperate Sunni Muslims.

The National Women’s Studies Association has voted by a huge majority to join the worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Their annual conference passed the measure by a 653-86 vote, and their full membership of 12,000 will vote on it in the next two months.

That means the NWSA is on the verge of becoming the fifth American academic association to boycott Israel since April 2013. It began then with the Association for Asian American Studies, and since that time the American Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, and now the NWSA have joined in.

The BDS movement is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other radical and terror-supporting groups. Its aim is to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting an end to Israel. Its leader are quite explicit about that.

For example, As’ad Abu Khalil: “Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the State of Israel.” Or Ahmed Moor: “OK, fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state…. In other words, BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown.”

None of this, of course, deterred the women’s-studies scholars from signing-on to the movement. Considering that the vote was initiated by a group called Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine, the nature of BDS was undoubtedly an added attraction for many.

Apparently standing with fellow Christians being slaughtered in the Middle East is less important

Larycia Hawkins is a political science professor at Wheaton College, a Christian college in Illinois. On Thursday, she announced on her Facebook page that she will wear a hijab throughout Advent as a symbol of solidarity with Muslims. She plans to wear it everywhere: to work, to class, to church, and on the plane ride home for the Christmas holiday. The Christian Post reports:

“I don’t love my Muslim neighbor because s/he is American. I love my Muslim neighbor because s/he deserves love by virtue of her/his human dignity…I stand in human solidarity with my Muslim neighbor because we are formed of the same primordial clay, descendants of the same cradle of humankind — a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa that I had the privilege to descend into to plumb the depths of our common humanity in 2014.”

Hawkins…further asserted that not only are Muslims her neighbors but they also “worship the same God.”

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God”….

“As part of my Advent Worship, I will wear the hijab to work at Wheaton College, to play in Chi-town, in the airport and on the airplane to my home state that initiated one of the first anti-Sharia laws (read: unconstitutional and Islamophobic), and at church.”….

BDS lies when they call our brave soldiers “war criminals” and accuse the IDF of “war crimes.” So let me introduce non-Israel, non-Jewish neutral experts to give their opinion.

The High Level Military Group, 14 international former chiefs of staff and senior military officers reviewed the 2014 Gaza conflict from both the IDF and Hamas operations.

They visited Israel both during and after the conflict. They interviewed soldiers from the regular foot soldiers to unit commanders all the way up to the highest ranks of the IDF. In their fact finding missions they also spoke with military intelligence personnel.

While conducting in-depth analysis into Operation Protective Edge they received unprecedented access to the IDF and to government officials up to the Prime Minister that, together with their impeccable military expertise, enabled them to produce a fair and factual report, which they released in early December 2015.

They began by admitting that Israel’s military efforts were entirely necessary and justified in the defense of Israel’s national security as a result of the aggressive and offensive operations conducted against Israeli civilian centers by Hamas and their other terror affiliates in support of Palestinian Hamas actions initiated against Israel.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/15/herb-london-moment-obamas-isis-strategy-and-the-urgency-for-additional-measures/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Herb London Moment with Herb London, the president of the London Center for Policy Research. He discusses Obama’s ISIS Strategy and the Urgency for Additional Measures, unveiling how the president doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with ISIS, but how there is a powerful one available to America and the West.

Don’t miss it!

Secretary of State John Kerry is out selling the Paris COP21 climate agreement on the Sunday morning talk shows. If the agreement were a pharmaceutical, his misrepresentations would get it pulled off the market. Elizabeth Wasserman of Bloomberg:

U.S. voters won’t elect a leader who denies the damage that climate change incurs upon the planet and fails to commit to curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told ABC News.

“I don’t think they’re going to accept as a genuine leader, someone who doesn’t understand the science of climate change and isn’t willing to do something about it,” Kerry said in an interview broadcast Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopolous.”

Ahem.

The Associated Press (11/3/15):

Americans are hot but not too bothered by global warming.

Most Americans know the climate is changing, but they say they are just not that worried about it, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. And that is keeping the American public from demanding and getting the changes that are necessary to prevent global warming from reaching a crisis, according to climate and social scientists. (snip)

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Missing protein causes hearing loss in elderly. (TY Nevet) Joint Israeli-US research has discovered that the absence of protein RFX in many elderly people causes hearing loss. The protein is responsible for maintaining tiny hairs (cilia) in the inner ear. When these hairs die off, the person becomes deaf. The team believe their discovery will help develop treatments to restore hearing in patients. http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/Breakthrough-find-may-lead-to-restoring-hearing-in-elderly-431761

Self-healing artificial skin. Israeli researchers at Israel’s Technion have created a new, flexible material that is sensitive to touch and can heal itself automatically if there is damage within 10-30 minutes, according to research published in the Advanced Materials journal.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/11/24/israeli-researchers-create-self-healing-material/

Protein link to aggression. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute investigating the protein tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) found in the brains of humans and animals, have discovered that low TH levels increase aggression in males. High TH levels reduce aggression in males but increase motherly instincts in females.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-to-tame-a-male-weizmann-researchers-may-have-the-answer/

US approves leukemia treatment. The US FDA has approved BENDEKA, (bendamustine hydrochloride) injection from Israel’s Teva for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and for indolent B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). BENDEKA is expected to be commercially available by 1st Quarter 2016.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/teva-eagle-pharma-report-fda-approval-of-bendeka-injection-20151208-00240

Smart enzymes. Israel’s SmartZyme is developing new proteins and enzymes for medical and industrial uses. One enzyme has improved bio-electrochemical glucose catalysis, to be used on glucose test strips for the Self Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) market. SmartZyme has just received $4 million of funding.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-biologics-co-smartzyme-raises-4m-from-orbimed-1001076726

Infrared imaging checks quality of sealed treatments. Israel’s DIR Technologies has invented a system that checks every package of medicine using thermal imaging. Operators can then find and fix problems causing faulty seals whenever they occur, without destroying a sample or holding up the production line.
http://www.thetower.org/2585oc-israeli-company-develops-revolutionary-drug-safety-system/

Kids kicking cancer in Israel. Kids Kicking Cancer, founded by Detroit Rabbi Elimelech Goldberg, has now expanded to five Israeli hospitals. Children who have life-threatening diseases are taught martial arts in order to help them cope with the aftermath of the disease. The pool of instructors includes both Jews and Arabs.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-martial-arts-help-kids-with-cancer-kick-the-pain/

Identifying your “Sleep DNA”. Israeli crowdsourcing platform Sleep ASAP (see Jun 2015 newsletter) offers insomniacs a solution to their sleeping problems. In a recent study, Sleep ASAP analyzed personality traits and sleep habits of 2500 participants. It successfully determined the reason for the insomnia in 99% of cases.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-cracks-sleep-dna-to-beat-insomnia/