RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joining John Kerry and Bernie Sanders, Prince Charles became the latest to blame the Syrian civil war on global warming.

In a half-hour interview that aired tonight on Sky News, Prince Charles said man’s impact on the climate spurs violence and conflict, specifically the civil war in Syria.

“There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land because water ran out, their crops failed,” Prince Charles said. “Increasingly, they came into the cities already full of Iraqi refugees from that horrible crisis. This combined created a very difficult situation.”

“It is bad enough now with refugees, but think what it will be like if we do not deal with the problem which is actually helping to cause it because the conflict often comes from movement of people as a result of not being able to survive,” he continued.

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics. Those who see themselves as perennial victims also feel very comfortable, when they express their feelings of being oppressed, in projecting that same victimization outward on their oppressors.

Of course, the issue that most regularly energizes the moral narcissism of campus ideologues is the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and recent events have confirmed that, if anything, activists have been emboldened by the fact that their misbehavior is rarely addressed by administrations in the same way, for instance, that university officials are so quick to do when minority students feel “unsafe” on the University of Minnesota campus in a drive-by racist rant by an anonymous sociopath.

The rumpus over perceived racism at American universities, with its demands for “trigger warnings” against possibly hurtful statements, “safe spaces” to protect minority students against felt hostility, and “speech codes” which forbid statements that might offend self-styled victims, has turned into something of a circus. A black female official at Yale provoked demonstrations when she refused to intervene against possibly offensive Halloween costumes, even though no such offensive costume yet had appeared. A University of Kansas professor is suspended after simply using the “n-word” to characterize racism.

Prof. Andrea Quenette merely said, ““As a white woman I just never have seen the racism. It’s not like I see ‘n****r’ spray painted on walls.” Every student in her class signed a petition demanding her termination. It began last month at the University of Missouri, where racial slurs yelled at a black student leader from an unidentified man in a pickup truck led to a strike by the football team, campus demonstrations, and the resignations of the university’s two top officials–for insufficient deal in suppressing racism. The targets are university administrators and faculty who without exception are commited liberals and professed enemies of racism, but who are insufficiently vigilant against “casual, everyday slights and insensitivities,” as a US News commentary noted. It is one thing to revile the student protesters as “college crybullies,” as my friend Roger Kimball did recently at the Wall Street Journal, and another to talk about rope in the house of the hanged

Global warming and Keynesian theory are natural bedmates, each built on the notion that only harm can come of trusting market forces. As both aim to suppress individual freedom, those who fancy themselves best equipped to regulate the world’s affairs tolerate neither naysayers nor contradictory evidence.
Let me state at the start where this is heading, since it may not be apparent from the way it begins. Two of the great intellectual disasters of our age are Keynesian economics and anthropogenic global warming (AGW). For both there is a theory which most of the specialists in each area take to be an unshakeable truth. For Keynesians, it is the belief that aggregate demand is the single most important factor determining the level of output and employment. For those who accept AGW, there is the so-called “settled science” that greenhouse gases will over the next half-century lead to an upwards movement in global temperatures with a series of ecological calamities to follow.

Both theories have had a single diagram that has provided the conceptual framework on which millions have built their understanding of what’s involved. In economics, it has been what is known as the Keynesian-cross diagram that relates aggregate demand to the level of current production. For AGW it has been what has become known as “the hockey stick”, which shows temperatures more or less flat for the past thousand years until the beginning of the twentieth century, after which they rise dramatically with no peak in sight.

More “Syrian doctors” showing up on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Five more “Syrians” have showed up at the border crossing at Laredo:

Five more Syrians have been stopped at a Laredo port of entry on Friday. This brings the total number of Syrians seeking to enter the US through our city this week up to 13.

According to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, five Syrian nationals presented themselves at the Gateway to the Americas Bridge. A family consisting of a man, woman and child, and two other men were taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection — a standard procedure.

The statement reads that CBP “checked their identities against numerous law enforcement and national security related databases. Records checks revealed no derogatory information about the individuals. CBP turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further processing and placement in an ICE facility.”

As you may recall, a group of eight Syrians were also taken by CBP at a Laredo port of entry on Tuesday.

I didn’t recall, but hey — when the president of the United States throws open the country’s borders, leaving it essentially defenseless in the face of a growing Islamic threat — who’s counting?

Further — last time I checked a map it showed a wide ocean between “Syria” and America, which means these “migrants” didn’t walk, unless they can walk on water. So who’s paying for this?

Sometimes a mother has to take control.

When your kids are coming home on the bus from school every day accompanied by the blaring of emergency vehicle sirens, when stabbings, rammings and shootings have become a regular occurrence in the one quarter mile stretch of highway directly outside your community, when a majority of the children are suffering from some version of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and your neighbors have become numb to the grotesque situation, a mother has to act.

And that is why a mild-mannered, piano lesson-giving mother of five from the suburb of Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion neighborhood of southern Jerusalem, acted.

Rivka Epstein Hattin decided it was time for the mothers to unite.

Hattin began calling, emailing and texting friends and neighbors, many of whom have been struggling to find an answer which will stop the terrorism making their children’s lives miserable.

Kay Wilson Kay Wilson is a British-born Israeli tour guide, jazz musician and cartoonist. She is the survivor of a brutal terror attack that occurred while she was guiding in December 2010. Since the attack, she is in a demand as a motivational speaker and also speaks to audiences on issues of human rights and justice for victims of terrorism. She is a lecturer for StandWithUs, OneFamily Together, MDA and is registered at the Israel Speakers’ Agency.

“While the blood of innocents was being mopped up off a theater floor in France, a video titled, “A father and son have the most precious conversation,” goes viral. In the clip the boy tells his father, “We should leave Paris because Les Mechants (the villains) have guns and they will come to shoot us.” The father reassures his son that although the villains have guns, they (the French) have flowers and candles. “Do the flowers and candles protect us?” asks the son. When the father answers in the affirmative, the boy protests, “but flowers don’t do anything!” He is given a reassuring hug by his father and the clip is concluded by the interviewer asking the child if he “feels better,” to which the boy nods and breaks into a smile.

This video was “shared” and “liked” millions of times. Indeed, who can fail to be moved by Western virtues of life over death, culture over barbarity and goodness over evil? In an act of defiance, civilized people who refuse to hate, expel the stench of murder and savagery with fragrant flowers and scented candles, because civilized people believe that hate “will give the terrorists what they want.”

I had always looked upon my six-year-old son as a blessing. But now I realize that he is a disease. My wife, my parents, my grandparents, and every member of my family, both living and deceased, are likewise a disease.

But if you are reading this right now, and you are white, you should know that your children and all of your loved ones are also a disease.So implies a University of Colorado education professor, Cherly E. Matias, in the most recent edition of Teaching Education, a peer-reviewed journal.

In “‘Why Do You Make Me Hate Myself?’: Re-teaching Whiteness, Abuse, and Love in Urban Teaching Education,” the author insists that “the racial achievement gap” and other racial disparities are “symptoms” of “the underlying diseases of racism and Whiteness” (italics added).

The University of California has an anti-Semitism problem. Its name is Students for Justice in Palestine.

Co-founded by Hatem Bazian, a notorious bigot who was described by Rabbi Kahn of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council as being, “more responsible than any other student on campus for trying to make life miserable for Jewish students,” the SJP hate group has lived up to his hateful legacy.

As the University of California faces a debate over anti-Semitism between Jewish civil rights groups, concerned by the atmosphere of hate on campus, and Students for Justice in Palestine, which is responsible for much of the hate, one Jewish civil rights group reports that 70 testimonials have been collected from UC Jewish students describing intimidation by SJP and other BDS hate groups.

Jewish students describe being told, “Hitler was right” by a Students for Justice in Palestine member and being called “Kike” and “Dirty Jew” by SJP bigots.

A Jewish student government member at UC Santa Cruz was recently told to abstain from voting on a pro-BDS hate measure because of his “Jewish agenda.”

Now the ACLU of Southern California has taken a stand, not on behalf of the Jewish students, but is instead engaging in legal intimidation of the student government in support of the SJP BDS hate group.

Jewish history spanning 3000 years is set to trump the European Union’s (EU) unprecedented action requiring the way goods are labelled originating from four areas of territory disputed between Arabs and Jews – the West Bank, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Similar labelling requirements have not been stipulated by the EU for products emanating from 150 other disputed territories around the world – inviting the charge of Jew-hatred against the EU for introducing this territory-specific policy smacking of double standards and blatant racial discrimination. The aims of the new labelling requirements as set out in the European Commission’s Interpretative Notice (the Notice) – indicate they are not limited to consumer protection – as America’s State Department falsely claims – but also extend to advancing the EU political stance adopted on these four territories following their loss to Israel by Jordan, Egypt and Syria in the 1967 Six Day War:

“There is indeed a demand for clarity from consumers, economic operators and national authorities about existing Union legislation on origin information of products from Israeli-occupied territories. The aim is also to ensure the respect of Union positions and commitments in conformity with international law on the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”