RUTHFULLY YOURS

Infantile college kids all over the country are protesting human-right violations like Halloween costumes and free speech, the honoring of Woodrow Wilson and the placidity of students studying in libraries. A few years ago, an early member of the new wave of student disobedience gave me a look inside the protesters’ scattered brains.

In February 2009, President Obama had just taken his oath of office, and I was a freshman at NYU. On the evening of February 18, a group of about 60 NYU students, and a few students from other schools, assembled in the NYU student-center cafeteria. They said that they were a group called Take Back NYU, and that they were occupying our cafeteria until a grab-bag of eleven non-sequitur demands were met.

Their first, courageous demand was that none of them be punished. Their second was that “all employees whose jobs were disrupted during the course of the occupation” receive “full compensation.”

Third, they demanded that NYU’s budget and endowment be made public. Fourth, that “student workers” and teaching assistants be allowed to bargain collectively. Fifth, “a fair labor contract for all NYU employees at home and abroad.” Sixth, they demanded “a Socially Responsible Finance Committee that will immediately investigate war profiteers and lifting of the Coke ban.” (NYU had recently overturned a silly “All University Senate” decision to ban Coke from our vending machines and cafeterias; rumors about abusive labor practices by the Coca-Cola Company turned out to be lies. But I’m not sure which war profiteers they had in mind.)

A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at Yale a few weeks earlier). The entire student body — around 450 students, from grades 9-12 — were in the auditorium. There was plenty of laughter at all the right spots, and a lot of applause at the end, so I thought the talk was well received.

But then the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?” Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

Islamist terrorism is not a consequence of the West’s failure to accommodate ‘cultural differences’. As Christian and Yazidi women raped by captors who simultaneously recite the Koran can attest, the problem is Islam itself
The continual attempts of the Islamic State (IS) to systematically annihilate the non-Islamic world have striking similarities. Texts such as the Koran and Hadith boast close to two hundred verses advocating jihad, and lay out specific guidelines for waging this “holy war”. Beheadings and suicide bombings are commonplace, and Westerners are primed by the media to see these atrocities as the defining features of Islamic radicalism. However, a recent development in the IS terror trend that remains distinct is the newly reinstated practice of sex slavery.

Regardless of the constant professing of IS that they act in the name of Allah and the Islamic faith, there is a strong tendency of Western left-wing ideologues to deny the religiosity of the agenda. Such vehement refusal to criticise the religion itself continues to be as baffling as it is frustrating—augmented by the paranoia of the Left that any criticism of Islam amounts to bigotry. More to the point, the lofty attitude of these self-deprecating Westerners does nothing to support the cause of the “unbelievers” enslaved and violated by IS.

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion proclaimed: “History did not spoil us with power, wealth, nor with broad territories or an enormous community: however, it did grant us uncommon intellectual and moral virtue, and thus it is both a privilege and an obligation to be a light unto the nations.”

These are hollow words from Ben Gurion who ordered the June 20, 1948, attack on the Irgun ship Altalena where sixteen Zionist patriots were killed and scores of other injured. But that’s another story for another time .

The self-righteous notion that it is Israel’s “privilege and obligation to be a light unto the nations” inspired Israel’s early stifling socialism and a pathetic and decidedly immoral policy of self-criticism, appeasement, and abrogation of its religious and historic patrimony.It also contributed to Israel’s blindness to Islamic jihad. For it was easy to reason that the “enlightened” people who had been persecuted for their own religion could not possibly impugn another religion.

Nonetheless, while refusing to blame Islam for the unrelenting vitriol and hatred of Arab/Moslem nations, Israelis blandly accepted descriptions of patriotic and observant settlers as “ultra-orthodox messianic fanatics.”

In spite of the fact that Israel has been the frontline of Islam’s thirst for a world caliphate, Israel’s pundits, like those in the West, avoid blaming, even naming, Islam.

As Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, the essential text in the study of Islamic hatred of Jews, commented:

“This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world…If our political, journalistic, and scholarly ‘elites’ ever arrive at this understanding, perhaps they will grasp the accompanying vocabulary of the Muslim combatants and their spokespersons, in the context of the jihad against Israel. ‘Resistance’ means a genocidal jihad, whose ‘justice’ amounts to the violent restoration and forcible maintenance of dhimmitude for those surviving Jews (and Christians) in a vanquished Israel.”

Thousands of Israeli Arabs marched in Umm al-Fahm on Saturday in solidarity with the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch. They rallied against the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet’s decision to ban its activities. This was also a show of support for the branch’s leader, Raed Salah, who was convicted of incitement to violence and is about to enter prison. The protesters observed a minute of silence at the start of the rally, in memory of the “shuhada” (martyrs) whose untimely deaths occurred as they were carrying out ramming and stabbing attacks. This moment of silence was their way of showing how ungrateful they are toward the state. It was also a means for undercutting the delicate coexistence between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens.

The burden of proof for Anthropogenic Climate Change falls on alarmists. Climate Change (CC) has been ongoing for millions of years – long before humans existed on this planet.

Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin, and not anthropogenic.

There is no reason to believe that these natural causes have suddenly stopped; for example, volcanic eruptions, various types of solar influences, and (internal) atmosphere-ocean oscillations all continue today. (Note that these natural factors cannot be modeled precisely.)

Let’s call this the “Null Hypothesis.” Logically therefore, the burden of proof is on alarmists to demonstrate that the Null Hypothesis is not adequate to account for empirical climate data; alarmists must provide convincing observational evidence for Anthropogenic CC (ACC)
– by detailed comparison of empirical data with GH models.

I am not aware of such proofs, only of anecdotal info – although I admit that ACC is plausible; after all, CO2 is a GH gas, and its level has been rising, mainly because of burning of fossil fuels.

However, ACC appears to be much smaller than predicted by GH models; there is even believed to be a period of no warming [“hiatus”] during the past 19 years – in spite of rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 levels [1].

The single most important benchmark underpinning this week’s talks in Paris on climate change—two degrees Celsius—has guided climate-treaty discussions for decades, but scientists are at odds on the relevance of that target.

Many researchers have argued that a rise in the planet’s average global air temperature of two degrees or more above preindustrial levels would usher in catastrophic climate change. But many others, while convinced the planet is warming, say two degrees is a somewhat arbitrary threshold based on tenuous research, and therefore an impractical spur to policy action.

“It emerged from a political agenda, not a scientific analysis,” said Mark Maslin, professor of climatology at University College London. “It’s not a sensible, rational target because the models give you a range of possibilities, not a single answer.”
Policy makers tend to assume the two-degree target expresses a solid scientific view, but it doesn’t. The exhaustive reports published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are considered to be the most comprehensive analysis of the science of global warming. Yet the two-degree limit isn’t mentioned in a single IPCC report.

A new Brandeis University study shows that over half of all Birthright candidates do not know how to answer even ‎the most basic questions about the Jewish state, making them functionally illiterate concerning Israel. The ‎study seeks to understand and assess Israel literacy and is a continuing project with participation of ‎researchers from the university’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and Cohen Center for ‎Modern Jewish Studies. ‎

The study found that regardless of the students’ background — for example, whether they had attended Jewish ‎day school or not — and the ranking of their university, relatively few Jewish students were Israel literate. ‎This is among students who are interested enough in Israel to apply to go on a Birthright trip; results would most likely be even more depressing among those who were not ‎Birthright candidates.‎

The results are truly disconcerting at a time when anti-Israel motions and boycott, divestment, and sanctions activity are rampant on U.S. college ‎campuses and Jewish students are met by an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. As the authors of ‎the study say, Israel literacy is “the requisite knowledge to participate in productive conversations about ‎Israel.” Without knowledge, it is going to be near impossible to participate in any kind of meaningful ‎conversation about Israel. The authors go on to say that “we were surprised that Jewish graduate ‎students, including some who were training to become Jewish professional leaders, lacked some of the ‎foundational knowledge that would equip them to engage in Israel-related activity and education.”‎

This was an interesting briefing by the Endowment for Middle East Truth.

“There is something wrong with Islam as a faith itself,” stated human rights activist Reverend Majed El Shafie at a videoed November 16 Washington, DC, Endowment for Middle East Truth presentation on Capitol Hill. Addressing over 25 people, mostly congressional and think tank staff, the Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity Shafie provided personal insight into the Middle East’s various Islamic threats.

Shafie began his presentation by describing his Christian conversion as an 18-year old in a prominent Egyptian Muslim family and subsequent life-changing persecution. Imprisoned in Egypt for his Christian profession, he endured torture that resulted in recurrent nightmares and an abiding aversion to lemons, once rubbed along with salt by jailors into his wounds. After his dramatic escape from Egypt to Israel and asylum in Canada, he became a religious freedom advocate by founding One Free World International (OFWI) in his newfound home. “I decided I would not be a victim and I would be a victor,” Shafie stated. “I decided that I would fight, not fighting back by machine guns or weapons, but fight back with the truth, fight back with forgiveness and love and helping others who used to be in the same position as myself.”

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/11/18/college-professors-remarkable-speech-in-view-of-the-spoiled-brats-tantrums-on-campus-it-is-worth-reading/
“This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!