RUTHFULLY YOURS

World leaders are currently meeting in Paris to discuss the issue of climate change and propose solutions to, well, we aren’t exactly sure what. To keep the world’s climate from changing? To stop “warming,” if indeed that is happening?

Their target, of course, is fossil fuels; the eco-utopian elites claim that their use must be curbed and ultimately stopped. Coal, gas, and oil are all causing the earth to warm and will result in the destruction of the planet, so we are told. So sayeth the prophets of a new religion. The science is settled, the debate closed. Naysayers and doubters and skeptics need not utter a word; in fact, the response of the believers is to silence all “deniers” – indeed, to punish them.

But let’s pull back. In a century that saw tens of millions die as a result of the twin great utopias, Nazism and Communism, the single greatest achievement in the 20th century, outside of defeating those utopian ideologies, was the lifting out of poverty of millions of people around the globe. There is much we take for granted in the West – nothing more so than the simple act of being able to turn on a light. Yes, electricity.

The European Union’s (EU) discriminatory and racist labelling requirements for Jewish goods and products originating from Judea and Samaria has now seen Israel effectively label the EU as “persona non grata” in the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

The EU finds itself in this sorry position following Israel’s decision to reassess the involvement of EU bodies in that diplomatic process and to suspend contacts with the EU and its representatives until that reassessment is completed.

The labelling requirements reflect the EU’s political position that settlement by Jews in Judea and Samaria is illegal in international law. This claim has never been the subject of any binding authoritative legal decision.

The International Court of Justice decision on 9 July 2004 was only an advisory opinion sought by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and not a legally binding precedent.

That opinion was itself deficient since the Court was never asked by the Secretary-General to consider the legal effect of two territory-specific pieces of international law applicable to Judea and Samaria. Those provisions – article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter – vested and preserved the legal right to “close settlement by Jews” in Judea and Samaria for the purposes of reconstituting the Jewish National Home

One hundred and thirty-two people have been slaughtered in Paris and hundreds more wounded, to say nothing of smaller incidents that followed, victims of a well-coordinated, multi-pronged massacre devised by jihadists owing allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). The French government of François Hollande has responded with air strikes and statements about a new war that has actually been in progress in Europe for quite some time.

But old habits die hard: Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström declares that it’s really about the war that entwines the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“To counteract the radicalization we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which not at the least the Palestinians sees that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Her remarks were echoed by Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen, who opined that the terrorists’ behavior “eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” which he described as “the growth medium for such an attack.”

Amid the hoopla of the 2008 election campaign, when much of the world saw candidate Barack Obama as the very incarnation of the messiah, and some even openly proclaimed him so, the Israelis were not buying the narrative. Neither have they since.

Their skepticism was not to be disconfirmed. If Candidate Obama’s embrace of the anti-Israel narrative of Rashid Khalidi or Edward Said was insufficient, there was President Obama’s speech in Cairo, to which he insisted the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood be invited.

In this speech, Obama conveniently ignored the historic Jewish ties to the land of Israel and invoked the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. Even the left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper found this sufficiently objectionable to call for Obama to rectify his misleading statements.

This narrative, fashionable throughout the Islamic world and one that denies there were ever Jews in the land of Judea is now orthodoxy among the mindless, atheistic Left, with whom Obama shares ideological kinship.

The operators of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System were recently surprised by state air quality regulators, who informed them that the $2.2 billion solar energy plant is a carbon polluter.

Solar energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s the whole point of California’s increasingly mandatory and wildly expensive push to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind energy.

But as it turns out, the sun does not shine at night. This is what happens when governors don’t do any research before they sign legislation.

The Ivanpah plant is located on five square miles of the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border. You can see it from Interstate 15 — it’s that alien-looking landscape of shiny circles surrounding three skeletal towers topped with black-and-white capsules.

Foreign observers are somewhat puzzled by the latest twist in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They are used to seeing angry young Palestinian men lashing out in violence. But they are surprised by the fact that young women appear to be the backbone of the “stabling intifada” in which, in addition to shootings, gasoline bomb and rock throwing attacks, individual Palestinian terrorists are going out every day and seeking out Jews on the street to murder with knives.

What drives young girls and women to do murder and to usually sacrifice their own lives when, as has often happened, Israelis defend themselves against attempted butchery with armed force? In its feature on the subject published today, the New York Times attempts to answer the question with the usual explanations about Israel being to blame: “anger over decades of Israeli military occupation, fading hopes of statehood and a rebellion against Palestinian leaders.” But, the piece, written by the paper’s Palestinian stringers, also alludes to the drumbeat of incitement from those same leaders as well as the popular culture of hate that is part of the daily fare of the media controlled by them. When you strip away the usual cant about the conflict, it’s clear that it takes more than political grievances to make young people abandon their own lives in order to shed the blood of strangers. Tired talking points about statehood or borders aren’t a sufficient explanation. Only religious fervor and pure hatred can motivate a person to behave in such an inhuman fashion.

http://www.hoover.org/research/does-woodrow-wilson-belong-princeton

Back in 2008, the Princeton Alumni Weekly published the results of a panel deliberation ranking the university’s most influential alumni. At the top of the list was James Madison (class of 1771) and close behind him, in third place, was Woodrow Wilson (class of 1879), who was Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910. He left the university to enter politics first as governor of New Jersey between 1911 and 1913 and then as President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. By all accounts, his presidency at Princeton transformed the school from a college for playboys into the serious academic institution that it has become today. He openly urged African Americans to apply and also hired the first Jewish and Roman Catholic faculty members.

It is a sign of the times that there is an active movement at Princeton, led by the students of the Black Justice League, to remove his name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from the Wilson House at Princeton. The main charge against Wilson was that he was a racist for overseeing, as President of the United States, the systematic removal of black employees from the federal civil service long after it had been desegregated. He was also a sympathizer of the Klu Klux Klan. His resegregation policy provoked a huge backlash from the NAACP, which had previously endorsed his 1912 presidential campaign given his promises to be “President of the whole nation” and to supply black citizens an “absolute fair dealing.”

Until world leaders can explain their way past two specific graphs, their gathering in Paris this week to combat so-called global warming might as well launch a War on Leprechauns.

It would be bad enough if President Obama and some 150 other heads of state were pursuing destructive solutions to a legitimate problem. Far worse, they are poised to adopt policies that will slow economic growth, spread poverty, and stymie human progress, all in slavish service to an utterly bogus “problem” of their own imagination. They are like madmen frantically swatting brooms at “bats” that flap their brittle wings solely inside these politicians’ febrile skulls.

Those who push this agenda once hollered about pending doom, thanks to “global warming.” A few years ago, they quietly retired that rhetoric and, instead, began shouting about “climate change.”

Why the jumped-up new slogan? “Global warming” stopped happening, and complaining about it increasingly made them look deranged.

As this graph clearly indicates, scientific observations from weather satellites have reported zero warming in global mean temperatures since February 1997, when readings from recent decades peaked. Simply put, despite the warmists’ high-decibel bluster, there has been no global warming for 18 years and nine months.

While world leaders in Paris this month push for sacrifice and austerity to save the planet, one American environmental group is boldly pushing back. A new breed of environmentalists — including many former hard-core greens — is promoting “ecomodernism,” a fresh approach that challenges the dogma of the traditional environmental movement.

Ecomodernists have a more optimistic, capitalistic, and sensible world view than their old-guard counterparts. And if the Paris conference fails to produce results, ecomodernists could represent a new path forward on both environmental and global-growth issues. “Instead of viewing environmental problems as a sign of the coming apocalypse, we instead view them as unintended consequences of development,” says one of the movement’s founders, Michael Shellenberger. “We are not going to solve global warming with all of us trying to live with less.”

Shellenberger is a lifelong liberal activist who once worked for groups such as the Sierra Club and Earthjustice. His environmental cred is stellar: Even as a kid, Shellenberger would cast off paper boats lit with small candles every August to commemorate the Hiroshima bombings. During the anti-nuke 1980s, he was swayed by the documentary The Day After and other films that showed doomsday scenarios about nuclear proliferation. “I was anti-nuclear my whole life.”

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) voted on Nov. 20 to boycott Israel, though the resolution—which would prohibit Israeli academic institutions from any involvement in the organization, such as participation in conferences and hiring events—must still be approved by the group’s full membership in coming months. Ten days later the National Women’s Studies Association voted to call for a boycott of “entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel.” Boycott votes are also scheduled at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association.

The moral myopia and academic perversity of these boycotts have been widely discussed. Less well understood is that in many cases they also are illegal. Under corporate law, an organization, including a nonprofit, can do only what is permitted under the purposes specified in its charter.