RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Oh sweet irony….will they also demand that the incompetent Attorney General Loretta Lynch who shares all their “sensitivity” change her name?????rsk

Students at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania are demanding that administrators change the name of a building on campus that they find offensive. Lynch Memorial Hall, which bears the name of the institution’s Depression era president, should have a name change because of “racial connotations” associated with the term “lynching.”

The students, most of home belong to the campus Black Student Union, wish to expunge the name of Dr. Clyde A. Lynch who served through the Great Depression and the Second World War. He raised $55,000 to build a physical education facility that was later made into classrooms. Adjusting for inflation, the money Lynch raised would now surpass $725,000. Lynch died in 1950.

Lebanon Valley College is a private institution. Among the demands on the part of the Black Student Union are racial sensitivity training for faculty and staff, as well as diversity workshops. Other demands include: surveys of the racial climate on campus, facilities for different gender identities and disabilities, in addition to protocols for officials in responding to allegations and acts of bias. The demands were made on December 4 at the predominantly white institution.

Today the US Supreme Court hears a constitutional challenge to racial preferences in college admissions. These preferences obviously hurt whites and Asians turned down to make room for less qualified minorities, but ironically, the preferences also harm many Hispanics and African-Americans — the very students they’re supposed to help.

No wonder campuses are roiled with racial tension. It’s high time the court put a stop to racial preferences entirely.

Abigail Fisher, a white woman who sued the University of Texas for rejecting her in 2008, claims the university’s admissions process unconstitutionally favored minority applicants, violating her right to equality under the law. Like affirmative-action programs everywhere, the school claims it judges each applicant “holistically.” Don’t buy it.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/09/stephen-coughlin-moment-the-countering-violent-extremism-deception/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Stephen Coughlin Moment with Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

Stephen discussed The “Countering Violent Extremism” Deception, unveiling how the CVE narrative was fostered by the Muslim Brotherhood -– and how it negates countering terror.

Don’t miss it!

The seven weeks of war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014 occasioned the greatest outpouring of raw anti-Semitism since the demise of Nazism. Ironically, relatively little of this, or at least less than usual, occurred in the Arab world: Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad were quieter than during any earlier wars between Israel and its neighbors. But across Europe and here and there in Latin America, Africa, and even in the U.S. and Canada, incident followed upon incident of vicious Jew-baiting and occasional violence.

By odd coincidence, my 2014 book, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel, had been released on the very day that Israeli forces moved into Gaza in response to a wave of Hamas rockets. In it, I wrote much about anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism but little about anti-Semitism, a point on which I was repeatedly challenged when I spoke before Jewish audiences. Given that the world’s current hostility to Israel is manifestly unreasonable, many assume that its source must lie in the world’s most ancient hatred. So why did I neglect it?

The main reason is that I was aiming to explain change. No nation other than Israel has ever experienced such a dramatic reversal in the way it is perceived and treated by the rest of the world. On the eve of the Six-Day War, polls showed French and British publics favoring Israel over the Arabs by near-unanimous ratios (28 to 1). In recent years, in contrast, those same publics have registered intense hostility to Israel. But surely the world was not devoid of anti-Semitism in 1967. If “Israel” is a stand-in for the real target—Jews—would that not have been manifest back in 1967 as well?

On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum.

Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects.

To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty over areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, Kerry raised a series of questions about what a one-state policy would look like.

I answered all of his questions, as well as many others, in great detail in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. I will do so again here, albeit with the requisite brevity.

But before discussing the specific questions Kerry raised with regard to the one-state model, it is important to discuss the nature of the policies Kerry described in his speech.

Kerry argued Israel should deny civil and property rights to Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and ignore the building and planning laws of both Israel and the military government in Judea and Samaria in order to allow unrestricted Arab construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Such steps, he argued, will advance the cause of peace because they will pave the way for an Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of these areas. Such a withdrawal in turn will bring about the desired two-state solution.

Remember the lecturer at Yale — formerly, a distinguished institution of higher learning and now a playpen for demented children — who warned students not to take Halloween costumes too seriously? Right. She’s gone:

A Yale lecturer who came under attack for challenging students to stand up for their right to decide what Halloween costumes to wear, even to the point of being offensive, has resigned from teaching at the college, the university said Monday.

The lecturer, Erika Christakis, an expert in early childhood education, wrote an email in October suggesting that there could be negative consequences to students ceding “implied control” over Halloween costumes to institutional forces. “I wonder, and I am not trying to be provocative: Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious,” she wrote, “a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”

Diversity: The Invention of a Concept February 25, 2003
by Peter Wood (Author)
Peter Wood traces the birth and evolution of diversity, illuminating how it came to sprawl across politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion and the arts as an encompassing claim about human identity.

The issue of affirmative action is now being revisited by the Supreme Court after evaluating the pros and cons of renewing it after 25 years. Read this book to see how it was conceived, legislated and implemented and what happened to some of the prominent challenges such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, case decided in 1978 by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court held in a closely divided decision that race could be one of the factors considered in choosing a diverse student body in university admissions decisions. The Court also held, however, that the use of quotas in such affirmative action programs was not permissible; thus the Univ. of California, Davis, medical school had, by maintaining a 16% minority quota, discriminated against Allan Bakke, 1940–, a white applicant. The legal implications of the decision were clouded by the Court’s division. Bakke had twice been rejected by the medical school, even though he had a higher grade point average than a number of minority candidates who were admitted. As a result of the decision, Bakke was admitted to the medical school and graduated in 1982.