RUTHFULLY YOURS

BACK TO 1933?

How the Academic Boycott Began*

On April 6, 2002, 123 university academics and researchers (their number -would later rise to 250) from across Europe signed an open letter, published in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, calling for a moratorium on all cultural and research links with Israel until the Israeli government abided by (unspecified) UN resolutions and returned yet again to negotiations with Yasser Arafat to be conducted in accordance with the principles laid down in the latest Saudi peace plan. The petition was organized and published at the very time Israelis were being butchered on a daily basis, mainly by brainwashed teenage suicide bombers, Arab versions of the Hitler Youth. It declared, in high Pecksniffian style, that since the Israeli government was “impervious to moral appeals from world leaders” Israel’s cultural and research institutions should be denied further funding from the European Union and the European Science Foundation. It neglected to recommend that the European Union suspend its very generous financing of Yasser Arafat or that Chinese scholars be boycotted until China withdraws from Tibet. The petition was the brainchild of Steven Rose, director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at Gresham College, London, and the great majority of its signatories were British. But it included academics from a host of European countries, a number sufficient to give it the appearance of a pan-European campaign against the Jews. It even had the obligatory display Israeli, one Eva Jablonka of Tel Aviv University. (Nine other Israeli leftists added their names as soon as they found out about this opportunity for international renown.)

In June, Mona Baker, director of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) decided to practice what the all-European petitioners had preached: She dismissed from the boards of the two journals she owns and edits two Israelis, Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University. She also added that she would no longer accept articles from Israeli researchers, and it was later revealed that she would not “allow” books originating from her private publishing house (St. Jerome) to be purchased by Israeli institutions. One paradox of the firing, which would be repeated often in later stages of the boycott, was that Shlesinger was a member in good standing of the Israeli Left, former chairman of Amnesty International’s Israeli chapter, and ever at the ready with “criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank…” Toury, for his part, opposed taking any retaliatory action against Baker — this had been proposed by an American teaching fellow at Leeds named Michael Weingrad — because “a boycott is a boycott is a boycott.” A small contingent of Toury’s (mostly British) friends in linguistics issued a statement objecting to his dismissal because: “We agree with Noam Chomsky’s view that one does not boycott people or their cultural institutions as an expression of political protest.”

Israeli Arab Christian diplomat George Deek made very interesting comments on Israel as the Middle East’s one hopeful island of diversity this past October.
Israeli diplomat George Deek has often described himself as an “orthodox Christian within the Arab minority in the Jewish State in the Muslim Middle East.” During an Oct. 29 Hudson Institute presentation, he explained that although such diversity in Israel may be complex, it offers one of the few hopes in the Middle East for mutually beneficial coexistence among vastly different groups.

Israel is a national home for a Jewish people truly indigenous to the Middle East, Deek said, pointing out that Israel’s Arab neighbors have repeatedly failed to destroy (through various military and political means) what they have wrongly viewed as a foreign colonial entity. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000, particularly the latter, drew inspiration from the idea that “Jews have an alternative; they have a place to go. If we scare them enough, then they will just get up and leave.”

Hear no Islam! See no Islam! Speak no Islam!

A typical modern critic was as likely to grasp or report the substance of a book – good or bad, and whether or not he liked it or approved of it – as it was that a chimpanzee would appreciate a thermometer. He’d worry it, nibble on it, look through it, try to clean his ears with it, or use it to fish for maggots.
Private Detective Chess Hanrahan, in Honors Due (2011)

In October 2014, Mark Tapson published on FrontPage a review of an online document which qualifies as an enemy’s threat doctrine. It was reprinted on The Counter Jihad Report.

In the spring of 2004 a strategist who called himself Abu Bakr Naji published online The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Ummah Will Pass (later translated from the Arabic by William McCants, a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center). The book – what the Washington Post calls the Mein Kampf of jihad – aimed to provide a strategy for al-Qaeda and other jihadists. “The ideal of this movement,” wrote Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, “as its theorists saw it, was the establishment of a caliphate that would lead to the purification of the Muslim world.”

In “Getting Hard to Tell Satire from Reality” News: A group of college kids actually signed a fake petition demanding that the song “White Christmas” be banned from radio stations because it’s racist.

In a how-bad-has-it-gotten experiment, conservative MRCTV reporter Dan Joseph took the seemingly ridiculous petition to a college campus (Joseph doesn’t name which campus in the video, but George Mason University signage can be seen in the background of at least one of the shots) to see how many students would sign it.

“Tell Local Radio Stations to Stop Playing the Song ‘White Christmas’ as it is Insulting to People of Color and Perpetuates the Idea That Being White is Automatically A Positive Attribute in Our Society,” the petition stated.

The fake petition received 18 signatures in about an hour, according to MRCTV.

While students were signing the petition, Joseph made comments such as calling the song a “microaggression” and saying that he preferred “racially ambiguous” Christmases.

FYI: The “white” in the song refers to snow — the preferred color of which is usually white for reasons completely unrelated to race.

“Rosenwald,” a documentary film about the early 20th-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, disappeared from theaters much too quickly after being released in August. An Academy Award nomination next month, when the honorees will be announced, may be a long shot for writer-director Aviva Kempner, but it would give the film the wider audience it deserves. It also would be a public service.

The Chicago-based Rosenwald, a son of German-Jewish immigrants, made his fortune in the early 1900s running Sears, Roebuck & Company when it was the nation’s largest retailer. The film’s main focus, however, is Rosenwald’s largely unsung philanthropic collaboration with Booker T. Washington, the former slave and black educator best known for his self-help philosophy and for training black teachers in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction ended, white backlash resulted in scarce funding for black public education in southern states, where nearly 90% of the black population lived. Washington therefore sought assistance from northern philanthropists like Rosenwald, who graciously obliged.

PARIS—Western security officials are struggling to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports, which could be used to hide operatives planning attacks in Europe or the U.S. among refugees.

Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.

But the near-absence of communication with the Syrian government means Western officials are lacking key information that could be used to identify the passports, according to a confidential analysis by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

If you believe Islam’s well-funded propaganda machine, as our latest PM professes to do, Arab scholars were advancing the frontiers of knowledge long before Newton emerged from his study. From flying machines to theoretical physics, the Koran inspired them all.
Islam is fighting a military and ideological battle that began some 300 years ago. The last decades of the 17th century mark the critical point of divergence of Western and Islamic civilizations, as one began its ascent and the other its decline. Central to this great shift in respective power was a pivotal military defeat and the Scientific Revolution. The implications of these events are still working themselves out in the realms of jihadi terrorism and propaganda about Islamic science, as Islam struggles to find a viable identity and role in the contemporary world.

In 1683 the Muslim Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna, in the very heartland of Europe. The Ottomans were a superpower that had long threatened to engulf the West. It had taken Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453, most of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, and had been seeking to capture Vienna for centuries, launching an earlier siege in 1529, during the height of the chaos in Europe caused by the Reformation. The city was of immense strategic value because of its control of the Danube basin and the trade routes throughout southern and central Europe. It had to be seized if the Ottomans were to fulfil their divine mission, conquer Europe, and bring the entire continent under the flag of Islam. Eventually, the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Holy League marched out to face the invaders, and the two immense armies plunged into battle on the flanks of the Kahlenberg Mountain near the city. Amidst enormous carnage, the battle was won by the Christian forces, preserving Christendom, and signalling the slow but remorseless decline of the Ottoman Empire that culminated with its demise, along with the Caliphate, or spiritual leadership of Islam, in 1922.

Meanwhile, 1250 kilometres away at Cambridge, Isaac Newton had commenced work on what would become his Principia Mathematica, which appeared in 1687. There is no argument that this was one of the most important works in the history of science, and, indeed, human history as a whole. Certainly, it was the creation of an immense intelligence that has possibly never been excelled; as Alexander Pope said of his contemporary:

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light”.

Along with pioneers like Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and Francis Bacon, Newton established the principles of scientific method and penetrated through the misleading realm of everyday experience to identify and codify the underlying laws of nature and give them mathematical expression. Consequently, the Principia Mathematica and other work provided the theoretical basis for the Scientific Revolution and for the titanic technological and scientific advances that drove the Industrial Revolution, and the transformation of Western Civilization into a global power that would shape the modern world.

The Obama administration calls its national security strategy “Countering Violent Extremism.” In the benighted times before January 20, 2009, we used to call it counter-terrorism.

Why does Obama insist on the more fuzzy “extremism”? Because “terror” has its roots in Islamic scripture. This fact ought to be undeniable, but Obama denies it — and in Washington, he’s far from alone in that.

It is not just that the word terror appears several times in the Koran; it is that the word appears in a particular context: The duty of Muslims to act as Allah’s instrument to terrorize non-Muslims is a recurring scriptural theme. In Sura 3:151, to take one of several examples, Muslims are admonished:

Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.

Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” I prosecuted in the mid-’90s after his cell bombed the World Trade Center and planned similar strikes against other New York City landmarks, was a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence. Indeed — and this is worth pausing over — his mastery of our enemy’s ideology was the sole source of his authority to approve jihadist attacks. Think about that: his blindness, and various other maladies, render Abdel Rahman unable to do anything useful for a terrorist network. He can’t build bombs, command forces on the battlefield, execute assassinations, and so on. But his authority is unquestioned because of his scholarship and rhetorical power in the scripture-based doctrine our president pretends is non-Islamic and of marginal importance.

Sheikh Abdel Rahman was adamant that terror is fundamental to Islamic doctrine:

Why do we fear the word terrorist? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. And if the terrorist is the one who struggles for the sake of God, then we are terrorists. We … have been ordered with terrorism because we must prepare what power we can to terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy. The Koran [said] “to strike terror.” Therefore, we don’t fear to be described with “terrorism.” … They may say, “He is a terrorist, he uses violence, he uses force.” Let them say that. We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.

On December 2, 2015, two Muslim terrorists massacred fourteen Americans at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. On December 6, President Obama delivered an Oval Office address. In it, he said, “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam … It is the responsibility of all Americans to reject discrimination.” Many listeners were disappointed that Obama focused so much passion on lecturing Americans.

Media reported that hostility against Muslims increased after the San Bernardino attack. Public figures including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, filmmaker Michael Moore, and Wheaton college professor Larycia Hawkins insisted that Muslims must be protected against the bigotry, stereotyping, and violence of non-Muslim Americans.

President Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore, and Hawkins are acting on their own bigotry. In hostility and ignorance, they stereotype all Americans (except Muslims, of course) as an inherently ignorant lynch mob. That’s not who we Americans are. If Americans had been hearing from their leaders what they need to hear – a passionate defense of Western Civilization and a ringing condemnation of jihad – average Americans would not feel that they themselves must take on both rhetorical tasks. Americans, as YouTube curmudgeon Pat Condell pointed out, are trying to fill a leadership vacuum and to speak and hear unspoken truths.

It is a demonstrable historical fact that Americans have traditionally not held hatred toward or stereotypes of Muslims. A hundred years ago, if Americans thought of Muslims at all, they associated Muslims with romance. Maud Hull’s 1919 softcore novel The Sheik was a blockbuster bestseller. Superstar Rudolph Valentino made two Sheik films, in 1921 and 1926. They were record-breaking international hits.

It is primarily terrorists and Islam-apologists, people like Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore and Hawkins, who are in fact responsible for the current tension. Politically Correct speech codes suppress and demonize necessary conversations about Islam. Priests and rabbis, presidents and judges, journalists and college professors – the very people whose job it is to wield words to address matters of public import – are complicit. These cultural leaders are all covering their own posteriors, timidly mincing words so that no stray syllable can be used against them. Americans are frustrated and outraged at this absence of frank speech.

https://www.nas.org/

Pushed back on APUSH.
NAS sparked a national controversy in summer 2014 when we challenged the College Board’s new AP U.S. History (APUSH) standards as politically biased and intellectually hollow. This year, we worked with a panel of historians who published on the NAS website an open letter that convinced the College Board to remove from the APUSH standards many of the faults we had pointed out. The fight, however, continues.

Sparked debate on sustainability and fossil fuel divestment.
We published two major studies this year. In March we released our book-length study, Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. Launched at an event at the Millennium Hotel, across the street from the UN with Arthur Brooks as the keynote speaker, Sustainability quickly grabbed attention from the Wall Street Journal and from columnist George Will, to become the first widely publicized critique of the way colleges inject the idea of “sustainability” into their curricula and student life. Our sequel, Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels, released in November, portrays the growing national campaign to get colleges and universities to sell off investments in coal, oil, and gas companies.
Dug deep into the Common Core.
NAS president Peter Wood edited and wrote the introduction for a new book, Drilling through the Core: Why Common Core Is Bad for America. The book provides essays from nationally-recognized scholars who critique the Common Core K-12 State Standards.
Resisted racial preferences.
The case of Fisher v. University of Texas, which challenges the use of racial preferences in college admissions, came before the Supreme Court for the second time. NAS signed an amicus brief on behalf of Fisher, and NAS board member Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego, authored a major study that finds racial preferences often hurt the students they were intended to help. NAS mailed copies of Professor Heriot’s study to all our members.
Defended due process.