RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It seems that almost every year since the middle 1970s,” wrote Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, “we have awaited with hope or anxiety the determination of some major case by the Supreme Court, which would tell us that affirmative action transgressed the ‘equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment . . . or, on the contrary, determine that this was a legitimate approach to overcoming the heritage of discrimination and segregation and raising the position of American blacks.”

Mr. Glazer wrote that in 1987 and couldn’t possibly have imagined it would hold true some 26 years later. Yet on Wednesday the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in this year’s major affirmative-action case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. It will be the high court’s second go-round with the case, which concerns a plaintiff named Abigail Fisher who says the university discriminated against her as a white woman in rejecting her application.

In 2013 the justices voted 7-1 to send the case back to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals without ruling directly on the constitutionality of Texas’ affirmative-action program. Instead, the appeals court was instructed to re-evaluate whether a race-based admissions policy was really essential to the university meeting its diversity goals. The Fifth Circuit issued a second ruling last year, once again siding with the university, and now the case is back before the Supreme Court.

From a March 28, 1786, letter written by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who were American diplomats at the time, to U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay reporting on their conversation in London with the ambassador from Tripoli regarding piracy by the Barbary States:

We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet; that it was written in their Koran; that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners; and that every Mussulman [Muslim] who was slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Could the Holocaust have a humanizing effect upon Arabs – Palestinians in particular – and aid Israel in its quest to establish peaceful regional relations? Washington Institute for Near East Policy experts Mohammed S. Dajani and Robert Satloff sure think so, as indicated by their vision of Arab-Israeli peace rising from the Auschwitz ashes.

Dajani, a Palestinian sociologist and peace activist, and Satloff, a Jewish-American historian, recently spoke about the unlikely topic that brought Arabs and Jews together: the Nazi genocide and its legacy. Dajani, who was once a radical nationalist, related hispersonal journey “out of the cave of ignorance” from the taboo- and hate-filled Palestinian society. His Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking quest as a former professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds University prompted him to lead a Palestinian study tour of Auschwitz as an act of Israeli-Palestinian historical reflection.

While the Arab and wider Muslim world is rife with Holocaust denial, Arab historical memory emphasizes Israel’s 1948 creation as a catastrophe (“Nakba” in Arabic) for Palestinians. Dajani rejected the common Palestinian comparison between the Holocaust – a singular act of genocide – and this Palestinian suffering. As he and Satloff wrote in aMarch 2011 editorial, Israeli-Palestinian would benefit from a rejection of the “facile equation that ‘the Jews have the Holocaust and the Palestinians have the Nakba.’”

The slowly metastasizing assault on free speech that has played out on American college campuses since the 1960s has reached a crisis point. What’s needed is a concrete plan to restore liberty of thought and discussion to the American academy — a plan capable of focusing the support of sympathetic students, faculty, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and citizens, and their elected representatives. I offer here the outlines of such a program.

The greatest difficulty faced by those who support the ideal of intellectual freedom is locating levers for change on campuses where the greater part of the faculty and administrators have either abandoned classic liberal ideals or forsaken their defense. The actual mechanics of restoring freedom of speech are not mysterious. Campuses need to forthrightly identify liberty of thought and discussion as their central value, educate students in this principle, and energetically guard against its violation. But how can we restore freedom of speech when so many of those charged with its defense on campus have either turned against it or subordinated it to other ideals?

While it is true that a great many faculty members have rejected classic liberal values, other faculty — and especially many students — have not. To a considerable extent, a willful faction of students and allied faculty has succeeded in intimidating the larger number of students who continue to adhere to classic liberalism. Our goal must be to marshal support from the broader public for this weakened and wavering yet potentially powerful majority of students. We need a program that can simultaneously energize a movement of students on campus and marshal concrete support from the broader public.

The don’t-ask-don’t-tell era of racial preferences in college admissions may soon be at an end, as Abigail Fisher’s challenge to the University of Texas’s affirmative-action program makes its second appearance before the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this Wednesday.

Significantly, Ms. Fisher isn’t asking the Court to ban affirmative action. Instead, her case seeks to hold schools to the general rule that the government may employ race-based measures only as a last resort. And even then, such measures must be almost perfectly calibrated to serve a compelling interest — in this instance, achieving the educational benefits of diversity.

In the admissions context, those principles have too often been honored in the breach. And for that, blame the Court. Its 2003 decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative-action program combined the tough language typical of decisions reviewing race-conscious government policies with a loose and open-ended analysis of the way the program actually worked and the way it was justified.

Climate Hysteria: the fastest growing religion on the American left.

I’d call this hyperbole but they’re serious.

At the U.N. climate talks — called COP21 — everyone’s attention is focused on a 48-page document that could determine the very fate of the planet.

Its name?

FCCC/ADP/2015/L.6/Rev.1.

Say that three times fast.

That’s a (bad) joke, of course, but high-ranking officials here actually are struggling to say the always-changing name of this all-important text aloud.

Most seem to be interpreting “/” mark as “stroke.”

“FCCC-stroke-ADP-stroke-2015-stroke-L6-stroke-Rev1-stroke-Ad1,” Daniel Reifsnyder, who had been helping to oversee the negotiation process here, said in front of a room of hundreds Saturday, his image broadcast onto four local screens and his words translated live into several languages.

“Oof,” he added.

In a Monday visit to a Northern Virginia mosque, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson declared “anyone who does not understand” that Muslims want peace “does not understand Islam.”

Johnson dropped in on at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling, Va., the day after President Obama said Americans have a responsibility to respect their Muslim neighbors.

Johnson said the “new phase” of the terror war — with “terrorist-directed and terrorist-inspired attacks” — requires “a whole new approach to counterterrorism and homeland security,” including Muslim outreach as he’s done over the past couple of years.

One of the “most meaningful discussions” on his “tour,” he called it, was in June with the ADAMS Center imam, which began with a Boy Scout Troop leading meeting participants in the Pledge of Allegiance. That imam, Mohamed Magid, is a past president of the Islamic Society of North America, an organization linked to the Holy Land Foundation in its terror-financing trial and to the Muslim Brotherhood.

“In responding to this new environment, we must not vilify American Muslims. We must not throw a net of suspicion over American Muslims and an entire religion. We must not force American Muslims to run and hide, and retreat to the shadows,” Johnson said. “This would be counter to our homeland security efforts, and it is un-American. Now, more than ever, is the time to work together, to protect and defend our communities, our families, and our homeland.”

The November 28, 2015 issue of The Economist magazine has a 14 page special report on climate change. It is a pathetic example of how the media intellectual elite can get science wrong. It is apparently very easy for the self-interested and crony capitalist driven global warming establishment to fool the media elite. When The Economist does get a few important things right, it fails to draw the obvious conclusions. I don’t think it is just a matter of economics majors not understanding science. The problem is that the economics majors are listening to special interests without a proper degree of skepticism. They should have consulted with and listened to some of the many distinguished scientists that are protesting the climate scare. (See, for example, here, here, here and here.)

The promoters of the climate scare are loud and very positive that they are right. They accuse the skeptics of being tools of the fossil fuel companies, an outright lie. This crude approach seems to work, at least with The Economist or The New York Times.

One thing the Economist gets right is that wind and solar are ruinously expensive and create ancillary costs borne by other parts of the electric grid. Wind and solar are not the answer to reducing CO2 emissions. But, The Economist fails to draw the obvious conclusion that nuclear power is the solution. Nuclear power is proven and does not emit CO2. (The discussion is academic because there is little reason to undertake CO2 limitation. The science that predicts global warming doom is flimsy and global warming has been absent for a long time.)

Incredibly, The Economist does not bother mentioning the massive benefits of having more CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere and create plant bodies from the carbon in CO2 and the hydrogen in water. It is an observed fact that plants grow faster when the atmosphere is enriched with CO2. Greenhouse operators often place CO2 generators in their greenhouses to promote growth. Enriching the air with CO2 makes plants more drought resistant. In one experiment soybean yield was increased by 68% when CO2 levels were doubled. There is no doubt that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere during the 20th century greatly benefited agriculture, creating billions or even trillions of dollars of increased production.

From “Universities Must Defend Free Speech” in the May 6, 1991, Journal, adapted from remarks by Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who was at the time president of Yale University:

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U.S. today exist on our campuses. Freedom of thought is in danger from well-intentioned but misguided efforts to give values of community and harmony a higher place than freedom. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce “correct” opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.

On many campuses, perhaps most, there is little resistance to growing pressure to suppress and to punish, rather than to answer, speech that offends notions of civility and community. These campuses are heedless of the oldest lesson in the history of freedom, which is that offensive, erroneous and obnoxious speech is the price of liberty. Values of civility, mutual respect and harmony are rightly prized within the university. But these values must be fostered by teaching and by example, and defended by expression. When the goals of harmony collide with freedom of expression, freedom must be the paramount obligation of an academic community.

Much expression that is free may deserve our contempt. We may well be moved to exercise our own freedom to counter it or to ignore it. But universities cannot censor or suppress speech, no matter how obnoxious in content, without violating their justification for existence. Liberal education presupposes that a liberated mind will strive for the courage and composure to face ideas that are fraught with evil, and to answer them. To stifle expression because it is obnoxious, erroneous, embarrassing, not instrumental to some political or ideological end is—quite apart from the invasion of the rights of others—a disastrous reflection on the idea of the university. It is to elevate fear over the capacity for a liberated and humane mind. . . .

If you aren’t inspired to go fight alongside the Islamic State, perhaps hearing their personal accounts will make you change your mind. That’s what the newest ISIS-linked Telegram Messenger account is hoping.

“Diary of a Mujahid,” is a new channel showcasing “inspiring narratives” from ISIS fighters in English, directed toward recruiting others abroad to join.

“May this channel be a source of guidance, enlightenment, inspiration and motivation,” the account manager posted upon its launch last week, followed by daily posts from individuals sharing their experiences, pushing back on the notion that life under the Caliphate is anything less than utopian.

The Telegram Messenger app has been the Islamic State’s go-to messaging platform for communication and propaganda.

Several ISIS accounts frequently post updates showing everyday life under the Caliphate, the sunrises, the supermarkets, the food, the good life as well as the battles, martyrs and public punishments.