RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week a Palestinian terrorist named Mazen Aribah shot two Israelis, just north of Jerusalem. What made this incident especially noteworthy was that Aribah was also a Palestinian Authority police officer.

How does the PA react to such a terrible event, where one of its own officers commits an act of terror? By honoring him. On Saturday, Saeb Erekat visited the home of Aribah’s family to pay his respects to Aribah, who had been killed by Israeli police at the scene of his attacks.

Erekat is in fact the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel as well as a high PLO official, so one may say the path to peace is in the hands of a man who thinks it appropriate to honor terrorists. The PA and PLO do this all the time, naming parks and schools after killers, but this occasion was especially remarkable. While John Kerry, in Washington, was lecturing Israel about peace in a speech in Washington on Saturday (“But while saying that ‘I understand why Israelis feel besieged,’ Kerry directed most of his cautions toward Israel,” said the Washington Post), there were three more terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israelis on Friday.

Recently, PBS-TV aired a “travel documentary” by travel writer Rick Steves titled “The Holy Land.” For all intents and purposes it appeared to be a political statement slanted to elicit sympathy for the Palestinians, albeit, it was presented with debased moral equivalency, leaving the narratives devoid of substantive facts. The hour-long special, Steves explained, “weaves together both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives. In Israel, we go from the venerable ramparts of Jerusalem to the vibrant modern skyline of Tel Aviv. In Palestine, we harvest olives near Hebron, visit a home in Bethlehem, and pop into a university in Ramallah. We also learn about security walls, disputed settlements, and persistent challenges facing the region.”

While Israel is an existing state, Palestine is not. Steves reveals his sympathies by conferring the attributes of a state to Palestine. Moreover, Steves failed to provide historical background beyond shallow and superficial comments. Had he delved into the history of the Holy Land in the last hundred years, he would have discovered that during the British Mandatory era, (1922-1948) Jews rather than Arabs were called Palestinians.

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

The hucksters, charlatans, communists and rent-seekers gathering in Paris are celebrating:

Negotiators from 195 countries agreed Saturday on a blueprint deal aimed at reducing global carbon emissions and limiting global warming, a significant but far from conclusive step in the multinational effort to keep climate change in check. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) posted on its website a copy of the draft agreement, which officials have been working on intensively for some time.

The document addresses deforestation, food security, poverty and a host of other issues, with chunks of the document focused on what developed countries can do to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a yet to be determined level by 2050. This includes what they can do to help other countries. To this point, one line in the draft states, “Developed countries shall provide developing countries with long-term, scaled-up, predictable, new and additional finance, technology and capability-building.” Officials will now work through next week at the COP21 conference in Paris to craft a complete, final agreement.

Cheating and corruption plague the climate business.

Here are just five examples.

First, we have seen countries and corporations caught cheating — e.g. China understating their emissions, VW overstating their engine performance, Spanish solar speculators selling “solar power” at night (from diesel generators), Indian entrepreneurs building “dirty” factories so they could then close them to earn carbon credits, Russia manipulating the rules to earn credits from the collapse of decrepit Soviet-era factories, anti-industry NGO’s posing as charities, and vested interests like wind, solar, oil and gas secretly bagging competitors like coal.

Spain learns to generate solar power at night, using diesel generators.

There’s big money in Global Warming Alarmism.

Second, we see lazy, incompetent or biased reporters failing to mention that drought, floods, fires, storms, hurricanes, and melting ice are not unusual and have happened many times in the past.

Five Middle Eastern men were apprehended this week by the U.S. Border Patrol in an Arizona town situated about 30 miles from the Mexican border, law enforcement sources told Judicial Watch.

The men were spotted by Border Patrol agents about 35 miles south of Tucson, Arizona, on a ranch property in the vicinity of Amado (pop. 275).

Two of the Middle Eastern men were carrying stainless steel cylinders in backpacks, JW’s sources say, alarming Border Patrol officials enough to call the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for backup. A multitude of federal agents descended on the property and the two men carrying the cylinders were believed to be taken into custody by the FBI.

Only three of the men’s names were entered in the Border Patrol’s E3 reporting system, which is used by the agency to track apprehensions, detention hearings and removals of illegal immigrants. E3 also collects and transmits biographic and biometric data including fingerprints for identification and verification of individuals encountered at the border. The other two men were listed as “unknown subjects,” which is unheard of, according to a JW federal law enforcement source. “In all my years I’ve never seen that before,” a veteran federal law enforcement agent told JW.

The festival of Hanukkah, which starts this weekend, should remind us that translation can sap the ancient power of religious names

The Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which starts this tonight, celebrates the triumph of a small Jewish army over Greek rule in Judea in the second century B.C. The Maccabees, as they are called, were determined to resist Hellenization and worship as they believed.

But the struggle was more than local. The Septuagint, the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible, was under way in Egypt. That rendition into Greek, commissioned by the Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt, helped spark the millennia-long struggle to hold on to the meaning of the Bible, no matter the language. Though the Alexandrians’ goal was to preserve the Bible for future generations of Jews, the Septuagint became a foundational text of Christianity.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/04/when-islamic-refugees-turn-to-terror-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss When Islamic “Refugees” Turn to Terror, shedding disturbing light on the most dangerous “course of action” of the enemy.

[See also Stephen on the two Glazov Gang specials: [1] Muslim Brotherhood: Above the Law in America and [2] How American Leadership is Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.]

As campuses across the country are roiled in paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, groups of black students, perhaps inspired and emboldened by the anarchistic successes at University of Missouri, have formed coalitions and presented elaborate, and breathtakingly audacious, lists of demands which they have nailed to the doors of their respective university administrations.

An ever-growing list of these remarkably outrageous demands is even being archived at a site, The Demands.org, and which, as of this week, comprised the juvenile manifestos of groups on over 60 campuses, including calls for removals of college presidents (as happened at University of Missouri, as the most conspicuous and significant example), the renaming of buildings and schools named for racists and other moral reprobates (as happened at Princeton and indignation over its former president, Woodrow Wilson), and various similar calls for increased recruitment of minority faculty and students, enhanced centers and facilities for minority students, increased financial aid to “students of color” and other underrepresented groups, and a litany of other minority-centric benefits and amenities.

“The power to be found in victimization, like any power,” wrote Shelby Steele in The Content of Our Character, “is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under twenty mattresses.” Apparently, the new victims in the culture of aggrievement that seems to have overtaken our campuses have been irritated by the ‘hard pea’ of racism and want everyone else on campus to know and feel their pain, as well, since almost all the lists of demands from the campus crybullies includes one well-intentioned, but intellectually pernicious, item; namely, mandatory sensitivity training on the details of diversity, oppression, racism, and other maladies purportedly afflicting marginalized student groups on today’s campuses.

Gough Whitlam was PM when the notion of climate change began bubbling — not warming in those days but cooling. The report he commissioned makes sad reading today, not for its conclusions but as a marker of how far and deep the rot has spread.
A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away…

Letter from the Australian Federal Minister for Science, W.L. (Bill) Morrison, to the President of the Academy of Science, Professor Badger, January 9, 1975:

Dear Professor Badger,
I am writing on this occasion to enquire if the Academy could assist the Government by examining, and reporting on, claims recently made in the media, and apparently also by competent scientists that the earth’s climate is changing and that a new ice-age could be on the way.

The Prime Minister [Gough Whitlam] is very interested in this subject and is anxious to obtain the best possible advice about it. As an interim measure towards that end, I sought, and obtained, a short report from Dr Gibbs, Director of Meteorology, and Dr Priestley, Chairman of the CSIRO Environmental Physics Research Laboratories…I am now anxious to have the subject examined in more detail and at greater length…Since the enquiry stems primarily from concern about man and the possible effects of climatic changes on him [I think Bill means ‘him or her’] , it seems to me that it should reflect not only the input of those expert in the physical sciences but also that of those expert in the biological sciences…I would be most grateful to have your views at your earliest convenience.

Hard to get more top-level concern about the possible ‘ice age cometh’ than this letter… Prime Minister Whitlam badgering the Academy President Badger for an answer. Cyclone Tracy had devastated Darwin three weeks earlier; Rex Connor was telexing a Pakistani con man who lived on peanuts and potato crisps, asking him to raise $US4 billion; Jim Cairns was nipping at Gough’s heels as PM-in-waiting. But Gough wanted to know about the global cooling scare.