RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the past few months, almost every day, Arab terrorists have ‎committed attacks on Israelis — mostly knife assaults, but also cars ‎plowing into Israeli soldiers or civilians, and some shootings. Two dozen ‎Israelis have been killed, and a far greater number have been wounded.

The ‎attacks followed a vicious incitement campaign by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, ‎and other radicalized groups among Israeli and West Bank Arabs blasting out ‎repeated warnings that Israel and the Jews were mounting an assault on the ‎Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa mosque, with a design to change the character of ‎the arrangement that has existed there for nearly 50 years.‎

The warnings are false, of course, but also malicious, since the PA and its allies in ‎the slander campaign fully understand the power of the warnings about the alleged ‎threats to Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, given the history of the conflict. No propaganda ‎campaign is more likely to incite attacks on Israel and Jews in Israel or elsewhere ‎than one focused on protecting Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa from the infidels ‎threatening it.

The campus moonbatocracy in the US has become obsessed with “micro-aggressions.” These are supposed to be seemingly harmless words or forms of behavior that make fashionable minorities feel oppressed. Things like wearing a sombrero on Halloween or telling a black women that you are proud that she graduated cum laude. I guess a macro-aggression would be to ask her if she’d like some watermelon. You can see a collection of alleged micro-aggressions here.

Well, it occurred to me that the jihad against micro-aggressions (and using the word jihad of course is a macro-aggression against Moslems) just invites us to balance the scales of sanity be defining a new concept.

Comrades, it is time we define micro-treasons and begin to take serious action against them.

Micro-treasons are acts that are far less blatant than macro-treasons. The latter would include joining ISIS or a Marxist group or Students for Justice in Palestine or Peace Now. Micro-treasons are far less obvious. They come in various forms. Here are a few examples:

– Referring to terrorists as militants or activists;

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.

Despite the substantial funds that have been devoted to fighting anti-Israel forces on campuses, they have not been diminished.
The foundations of American Jewish life are under assault today in ways that were unimaginable a generation ago. Academia is ground zero of the onslaught. The protest movements on campuses are first and foremost anti-Jewish movements.

For the past decade or so, Jewish communal leaders and activists have focused on just one aspect of this anti-Jewish campaign. Jewish leaders have devoted themselves to helping Jewish students combat the direct anti-Semitism inherent to the anti-Israel student movements.

Despite the substantial funds that have been devoted to fighting anti-Israel forces on campuses, they have not been diminished. To the contrary, with each passing year they have grown more powerful and menacing.

Consider a sampling of the anti-Jewish incidents that took place over the past two weeks.

Two weeks ago, Daniel Bernstein, a Jewish student at University of California Santa Cruz and a member of the university’s student government was ordered not to vote on a resolution calling for the university to divest from four companies which do business with Israel.

Progressive Jews leverage their political power and funding outside of Israel in order to change Israeli policies, but they ignore the consequences.Cheers for US vice president Joe Biden’s criticism of settlements at the Reform movement’s recent convention reflect a long-standing position of the organization and a controversy that has divided Jewish communities and undermines support for Israel and Zionism: Are Jewish communities built beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines – the “settlements” – legal, legitimate, and part of the Zionist vision? Unfortunately, Israeli administrations and leaders have not addressed this question.

Recently, two American professors who claim to be Zionists wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting campaigns to boycott Israel because of “Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.”

Although criticism of Israel by Jews and Israelis is not unusual, few have crossed the red line of what is considered legitimate criticism.

Poor Paris. Less than three weeks ago, the scene of carnage; this week, the venue for saving the planet. Because of security after the Isil atrocities, the City of Light was spared a planned climate change march, but London had one on Sunday, attended by what the ever-Green BBC optimistically described as “tens of thousands”. One of the march’s leaders, the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, said: “Global warming is at a tipping point. If we go past it we can’t stop it. We are there right now.”
In this view, Dame Vivienne accords with the Prince of Wales, who predicted in Rio de Janeiro in March 2009, that there were “less than 100 months to act” to prevent “catastrophic climate change”. In other words, it’s all over by July 2017.

The Hijab is not a choice. It’s something Muslim men enforce on women. While Obama has done a great deal to force employers to accommodate Hijabs even where inappropriate, he has done nothing to protect Muslim girls from being abused for not wearing a Hijab. Just as he has done nothing about honor killings or any of the real civil rights issues facing Muslim women in America.

This story is another reminder of the reality that goes on, mostly out of public view, while the administration and its media allies blather on about Islamophobia.

An assistant professor at the University of Missouri was arrested after allegedly pulling a young girl out of school for not wearing a Muslim headscarf according to the Columbia Tribune.

Youssif Z. Omar, 53, noticed his 14-year-old relative was not wearing the traditional hijab as he drove by Hickman High School in Columbia on Tuesday.

While the western world expressed its solidarity with France following the November 13, 2015 Paris terror attack by Islamic State local affiliates, few expressed similar sympathy and support for what Israelis have had to endure from Palestinian-Islamist terror in recent weeks, and for almost a century. It began with the anti-Jewish Palestinian-Arab terrorist riots of the 1920’s, and continued with the Arab Revolt (1936-1939), which was typified by terror attacks of Palestinian-Arabs against Palestinian-Jews (the Yeshuv, the Jews of Palestine were commonly called Palestinians). Following Israel’s war of independence in 1948, and Israel’s absorption of over a million refugees from Europe’s Holocaust and the Arab world, terror resumed in the 1950’s by Palestinian-Fedayeen from Gaza trained by Nasser’s Egypt.

The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), founded in 1964, began its terror attacks against the Jewish state from Jordan first, then from Lebanon and Tunisia, with a platform that sought to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a “secular, democratic Palestinian state.” The Oslo Accords of 1993 committed the Palestinians to forgo terrorism and incitement. Lasting less than a year, Palestinian terror resumed using the latest terrorist weapon introduced by the Palestinians to the world: suicide-bombers. In September, 2000, Yasser Arafat launched the Second Intifada, which was far more violent than the first. Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Authority president and PLO chairman, like Arafat, never stopped the incitement and the resulting terror against Israeli-Jews. In October, 2015, yet a new weapon in the Palestinian terror arsenal was introduced…knifing and car ramming.

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.