RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday I appeared at the US Senate at a hearing called by Senator Ted Cruz’s sub-committee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. Senator Cruz introduced me as “an international bestselling author, a Top Five jazz recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist”. In fact, at that moment, I was America’s Number One jazz vocalist, but I thought it was a bit early in the proceedings to jump up and demand the record be corrected.

You can read various accounts of this event across the Internet from one perspective or another. Among the climate wallahs, there is a lively back-and-forth at Judith Curry’s pad, at Anthony Watts’, Bishop Hill’s, and Junk Science. On the politics of it – ie, Republicans and Democrats – I have a couple of thoughts, one of which has to do with the 2016 election. But that is a separate subject, so I’ll leave it for another day.

There was an altercation underway as I entered the room, when two Greenpeace activists attempted to get in the face of Professor William Happer about something or other. You can see it here. It is, to be legalistic about it, witness-tampering, and a sadly appropriate start to a hearing that at least partly addressed the climate of intimidation in global-warming science.

As for the hours that followed, I’ll let the reports from all sides speak for themselves, and just make a couple of points. On the morning of the event, Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat and Ranking Member, sent a message, warning me that I was obligated to “respect the decorum of the Senate”. I’ve been invited to Buckingham Palace, the White House and parliaments around the world, and nobody has ever felt it necessary to pre-issue such a warning. In the event, the US Senate has no “decorum” worthy of respect, as we’ll get to in a moment.

You can find my written testimony here. A few excerpts. First, the general overview:

Senator Sasse , formerly a college professor ran and won in 2014 on tough policy and principles…this is a man with a future in the Senate and in the country….rsk

Tonight, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) spoke on the Senate floor, criticizing Washington’s lack of urgency and seriousness in confronting the growing threat of militant Islam.
Remarks as prepared for delivery:

I rise today to speak about San Bernardino; about the decades-long fight that our free society now faces; and about our dangerous unwillingness to tell the truth about the nature of this battle – about who our enemy is.

We are at war.

The American people already know this. Our enemies obviously know this. It is only this town – where our so-called leaders dawdle and bicker, pander and misprioritize – it is only this town that seems confused. Washington ignores what it cannot escape.

And that is both a tragedy and a crisis. Because no war is winnable when you pretend that you are not even in one.

As Islamic terrorist attacks increase in the West, so, too, does the obfuscation of Middle East studies academia. By employing the predictable tropes of poverty, alienation, workplace violence, the need for gun control, bullying, “Islamophobia,” and other alleged Western ills, academics avoid assigning responsibility to the actual perpetrators or their Islamist ideology.

Such has been the reaction to the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which authorities were slow to describe as a terrorist attack, despite early evidence that married shooters Syed Rizwan Farooq and Tashfeen Malik had radical sympathies, including with ISIS. This led to speculation that, not coincidentally, omitted the actual culprit.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, immediately jumped on the gun control bandwagon and – echoing President Obama’s recent gaffe following the latest Paris attacks – claimed that mass shootings occur only in the U.S.: “This is everyday [sic], everywhere in America – and no where [sic] else in the world.” He decried America’s “deadly fetish” and “gun obsession,” urging readers to “Stand up to #NRA,” as if the National Rifle Association’s adherence to 2nd Amendment rights were the cause of Islamic terrorism.

Fantasy Islam: A game in which an audience of non-Muslims wish with all their hearts that Islam was a “Religion of Peace,” and a Muslim strives to fulfill that wish by presenting a personal version of Islam that has little foundation in Islamic Doctrine.

In December 2015, a small group of “Muslim reformers” met in Washington DC to discuss the reform of Islam. They stated they were “Muslims who live in the 21st century” who were “in a battle for the soul of Islam.” They proclaimed that they stood for “a respectful, merciful and inclusive interpretation of Islam.” They called their meeting the Summit of Western Muslim Voices of Reform and named themselves the Muslim Reform Movement. On December 4, 2015, fourteen “founding authors” from this movement signed the Declaration for Muslim Reform, laying out their beliefs.

At the conclusion of the event, two participants posted a signed copy of this Declaration on the door of the Islamic Center of Washington DC (a la Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle church in 1517). The document was quickly removed, and so far there has been little, if any, support for this reform movement from the greater Muslim-American community.

Here is the reason for that lack of support: the Preamble and Declaration are only two pages in length. But in those two pages these “founding authors” fundamentally rejected the commands of Allah in the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad in an effort to create their own Fantasy Islam that is more compatible with Western, Judeo-Christian values. Let’s examine some parts of that Declaration for Muslim Reform.

Israel’s relations with Sweden, problematic for some time, took a downward turn last week when something Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, said was interpreted by the Israeli government to mean that Israel was carrying out extrajudicial executions on Palestinians in the latest “Knife Intifada” by Palestinians against random Israelis.

The Swedish prime minister said that Wallstrom’s comments had been misunderstood. “The Minister for Foreign Affairs did not, as alleged, say that extrajudicial executions occur in Israel,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven and Wallstrom said in a statement.

Let’s look back and see what Foreign Minister Wallstrom actually said. Addressing Swedish lawmakers on Friday, Wallstrom denounced the almost daily Palestinian knife, gun, or car-ramming attacks, but urged Israel to avoid excessive force. According to the official English translation of her statement provided by the Swedish Foreign Ministry,

And likewise, the response must not be of the kind — and this is what I say in other situations where the response is such that it results in extrajudicial executions or is disproportionate in that the number of people killed on that side exceeds the original number of deaths many times over.

The student censors at Yale claimed a scalp—pardon the micro-aggression—this week when lecturer Erika Christakis resigned her teaching position on childhood education. She had been pilloried for asking in an email if students weren’t too sensitive if they are offended by politically incorrect Halloween costumes.

Yale’s powers-that-be ducked and covered in response, but the news on campus isn’t all bad, according to a forthcoming report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire). The foundation’s annual survey of 440 colleges—comprising 336 four-year public and 104 private institutions—finds that the share of schools maintaining “severely restrictive” speech codes has dropped to below 50% (49.3%) for the first time in the organization’s history. As many as three-quarters of colleges boasted restrictive speech codes in 2007 and 55% did as of last year.

Another positive sign: The number of schools receiving Fire’s highest “green light” rating has nearly tripled since 2006 to 22, up from 18 last year. These beacons include Purdue University, the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. More than twice as many colleges have received ratings upgrades as downgrades this year.

Two news items over the past two weeks provide timely reminders of why Israel’s willingness to take military action in its own neighborhood makes it an unparalleled strategic asset for the West – including those Westerners who deplore military action and prefer to rely exclusively on diplomacy. At first glance, neither report has anything to do with Israel. Yet both underscore its vital role in Western security.

The first was a New York Times report on the Islamic State’s efforts to obtain red mercury – a material that, “when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives,” is rumored to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” Proliferation experts all say red mercury is a hoax, but it’s a hoax widely believed in many corners of the globe. The terrorist group was therefore willing to pay ‘‘whatever was asked’’ to procure it, as one Islamic State official told the arms dealer he tasked with the mission. Nor was this a passing fancy: The official “kept inquiring about red mercury for more than a year … pressing for results” until he disappeared (presumably because he was killed).

The right-on are always raising concerns, and raising the political heat, over what they refer to as the Siege of Gaza by Israel. But what about the siege of Israel by Europe?

It might not be a military siege – although many a supposedly peacenik European dreams of Israel having its knuckles rapped by external powers – but it’s a siege nonetheless.

What we have today is a moral, intellectual siege of Israel, by the academic and media elites of Europe’s chattering-class citadels. They’ve turned Israel into Global Enemy No1, the source of all the world’s sorrow, a nation to be railed against more than any other on Earth.

My dictionary says a siege is the “surrounding of a place” with the intent of making its inhabitants surrender. Could there be a better description of European progressives’ myopic singling out of Israel for invective, and their shunning of its wares, books and even people via the BDS movement? People in Israel feel this moral siege, this intellectual blockade, very strongly.

When I visited last month, almost everyone I met asked me: “What the hell has happened to Europe? Why do they hate us?” During a dinner debate, a woman whose son was killed by terrorists asked the assembled European hacks why our media is more angry about Israel than any other nation. In soft, wavering tones, she accused us of anti-Israel bias. A spokesman for the Israel Foreign Ministry wrung his hands over Europe’s dodgy double standards on Israel. He was especially exercised by the EC’s recent decree that things made in Israeli settlements must be branded as such, lest some pure PC person in Europe unwittingly eat an olive made in a disputed bit of the Golan Heights and become morally compromised as a result. The EC doesn’t make other nations that are embroiled in conflict over territory – the Ukraine, say – stick such moral warnings on their produce. Just Israel.

Operation Thunderbolt, in which Israeli commandos stormed a Ugandan airport terminal in 1976 to rescue hostages hijacked on an Air France flight, remains what Max Hastings calls “the high water mark of Israel’s standing in the world.” In hisnew book on the rescue mission, Saul David provides a fast-paced, suspenseful account of those tense summer days. While there have been several books (and movies) about the operation, this one draws on new sources and explores the motivations of the terrorists more deeply than earlier efforts.

Each chapter covers a single day over an eight-day period, from hijacking to rescue. Within each chapter the events are organized down to the hour, quarter-hour, and sometimes to the minute.

The rescue itself began when four C-130 Hercules aircraft, crammed with 91 commandos and paratroopers from Sayeret Matkal, otherwise known as “the Unit,” flew a hazardous 2,500 miles from Israel to Entebbe Airport. As the first Hercules landed, the ramp lowered and out drove Israeli commandos. They made their way past the cordon of Ugandan soldiers using a black Mercedes and Land Rovers—the typical vehicles used to shuttle around high-ranking Ugandan government officials. Once they reached the terminal where the hostages were held, they shot the terrorists, freed the hostages, and blew up 11 Russian MiGs.

The Great Pumpkin of Islam was carved out of the hallucinatory imagination of a certified imbecile, illiterate, brigand, rapist, murderer, and tyrant.

A “Peanuts” TV special in 1966 had Linus, the blanket-clinging tot in the cartoon series, concocting a kind of “religion” or “cult” around the Great Pumpkin rising out of a pumpkin patch on Halloween night. Linus spends that night in the pumpkin patch, to witness its appearance. It never manifests itself, neither in form nor in echo-chamber voice. Nor even as a burning pumpkin. Linus falls asleep, clutching his blanket. I guess. I was never a fan of the cartoon strip and I certainly didn’t watch the TV special. Story details can be read here.

In Islam, the Great Pumpkin can be likened to Allah, and Linus to Mohammad. The “prophet” imagined he was getting the Koran directly from Allah (the name of an already existing pagan god) via the angel Gabriel, and rode to Paradise on a horse sporting a woman’s head, but all that and more, if the Koran is to be taken literally as a record of true events, must have been the result of delirium, hallucinations, dehydration, starvation, or sunstroke. He was living in a cave near Mecca, ostensibly to meditate, but actually to escape the ridicule and wrath of his Meccan neighbors. One can imagine him passing his days subsisting on goat jerky and imbibing essence of distilled mimosa, or the local version of Kickapoo juice.

Of course, I don’t take any of it literally, the Koran and its companion texts too likely having been works-in-progress over centuries, cadging from the Christian, Judaic, Zoroastrian, and pagan religions and liturgies. Robert Spencer torpedoes the existence of Mohammad himself in his rigorously researched book, Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origns.

In short, Allah was Mohammad’s Great Pumpkin. Or, if you prefer, his dancing, grand pink elephant, a deity greater than the Hindu Ganesha. Allah, who shares the metaphysical impossibility of all deities, together with the contradictory attributes of omniscience and omnipotence, has never manifested himself to Muslims or infidels, either. He is, to put it tactfully, reality-shy. He exists only in the delusional minds of those who wish to believe in such an entity. A figment of one’s mysticism-inebriated imagination can’t be conjured into spatial existence no matter how earnestly or often one prays, hopes, or wishes.

A Facebook friend of mine, whom I shall refer to for security reasons as “Lois Lane,” conducted a four-year poll and survey of Muslims, largely over the Internet using an avatar or pseudonym to disguise her identity, testing Muslims’ knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith, an anecdotal compilation of Mohammad’s sayings and “exploits.” She compiled about 3,000 responses and reports some revealing information about our “peaceful” Muslim neighbors, friends, and overseas pals. She focused on asking them about whether or not they adhered to or agreed with the abrogating violent verses or with the earlier “peaceful” ones. Here is a handy, short explanation of those verses on YouTube, “Three things you probably don’t know about Islam.” Lois Lane wrote:

Three thousand sounds like a lot, but over four years that’s less than half a Muslim a day. Some days I’d have quite a few conversations, and during vacations, none. Almost all was done online and under screen names, so there was no reason for the Muslims to hide what they really thought. They came from all over the world. They had internet access, meaning access to other ideologies. I have to be careful with my identity as I get a lot of death threats.