RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am rather troubled by recent developments at my alma mater, the Fairest College.
In dismaying news for a troubled alumnus, America’s politically correct student revolutionaries have not bypassed Amherst College, as shown by a November 12-13 sit-in at the college’s Frost Library. Amherst events provide a case study of modern academia’s leftist domination with grave implications for academic freedom.

The student protesters issued a statement befitting the Maoist demands for self-criticism of China’s Cultural Revolution Red Guards, although no cannibalism has yet occurred at Amherst. The protestors decried Amherst being “complicit in oppressive organizations” against the “systematically oppressed” and demanded statements of apologies from Amherst’s Board of Trustees Chairman and President Biddy Martin. Although “only a part of short-term healing,” this apology would address Amherst staff, students, and alumni who had suffered the modern lament of lacking a “safe space for them to thrive while at Amherst College.”

Unbeknownst to many at the “Fairest College,” these individuals endured a catalogue of horrors of several injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latin racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism.

While no institution is perfect, such sins and any corresponding inability of the Amherst College community to thrive are not immediately apparent. A campus statue commemorates Amherst alumnus and abolitionistHenry Ward Beecher while a captured Confederate cannon in a college building recalls Amherst students who fought in the Civil War. Amherst’s Charles Drew Memorial Culture House carries the name of another alumnus who was a medical pioneer and, like civil rights legal pioneer Charles Hamilton Houston, is among Amherst’s distinguished African-American graduates. The first Japanese graduate of a Western institution of higher learning, Joseph Hardy Neesima (Amherst Class of 1870), initiated Amherst’s longstanding relationship with Japan.

With free speech under attack at campuses across the nation from the University of Missouri to Yale to Wesleyan to Claremont McKenna, it may come as no surprise that a recent effort to educate students about terrorism-promoting propaganda on campus have been derided as hate speech and “Islamophobia.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center launched a new campus campaign this fall, titled “Stop the Jihad on Campus,” to confront the agents and supporters of Islamic and anti-Israel terrorism on American campuses.

As the campaign’s website, www.StoptheJihadonCampus.org explains, American campuses are the first front in the war of infiltration and propaganda that Islamists are waging against our country to advance the agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist army, Hamas.

These terrorist adversaries have two main agendas. Firstly, to limit free speech and stifle opposition to the Islamic holy war by stigmatizing critics as “Islamophobes” and by pushing university resolutions to ban open debate about Islamic terror and oppression as “Islamophobia.” And secondly, to destroy the State of Israel and the Jews who live in it.

The fight against racism began with calling for an end to segregation. Then somehow it became about bringing back racial quotas for minorities by calling them affirmative action. Except the quotas were bigger so it was a “good thing” even though it was blatantly against the call for equality.

Now we’re bringing back actual racial segregation on college campuses under the name “safe spaces”.

In the wake of last week’s protests and resignations at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), “safe spaces” for students of marginalized identities are popping up all over the campuses of the Claremont Colleges. After protestors called for action, CMC President Hiram Chodosh stated his commitment to providing a permanent safe space for students of color in the near future…

What many Muslims (and leftists) believe
In the light of the Paris attacks many people have been bemused at multiple contradictions in what many Muslims (and leftists) have been saying. For example, on one hand many believe Mossad carried out the attacks, but on the other hand they also believe the attacks are the inevitable result of Muslims being ‘persecuted’ by Israel and other Western countries. So, here is a reminder of a simple chart which clearly shows how rational many Muslims (and leftists) really are about politics.

It seems that Israel’s tax cuts under Prime Minister Netanyahu provide a real world example of how to increase investment and wealth. Paradoxical as it may sound, phasing out U.S. economic aid may also have made Israelis better off.
Since I’m a big fan of the Laffer Curve, I’m always interested in real-world examples showing good results when governments reduce marginal tax rates on productive activity.

Heck, I’m equally interested in real-world results when governments do the wrong thing and increase tax burdens on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship (and, sadly, these examples are more common).

My goal, to be sure, isn’t to maximize revenue for politicians. Instead, I prefer the growth-maximizing point on the Laffer Curve.

In any event, my modest hope is that politicians will learn that higher tax rates lead to less taxable income. Whether taxable income falls by a lot or a little obviously depends on the specific circumstance. But in either case, I want policy makers to understand that there are negative economic effects.

Writing for Forbes, Jeremy Scott of Tax Notes analyzes the supply-side policies of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Islamic State attacks in Paris have reopened the debate over antiterror surveillance, and a good thing too. President Obama’s CIA director John Brennan said this week that it has become more difficult to identify terrorists and break up their plots “because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role.”

Mr. Brennan mentioned no names, but by “unauthorized disclosures” he surely meant Edward Snowden, the spook who stole and absconded to Russia with details of the National Security Agency’s most highly classified antiterror surveillance programs. Jihadists responded by changing their communications habits, making them harder to detect.

We’ll learn more about why the French failed to prevent the Paris massacre, but it’s already obvious that it was in part an intelligence failure. French security had at least one, and maybe more, of the jihadists on their watch lists. But they either lost track of their movements, or failed to find or properly read clues about their intentions. The French are good at local surveillance—and you can bet they aren’t following the U.S. Army Field Manual in their interrogations—but the West needs global intelligence collection to fight global jihad.

Academic entrepreneurs have tapped and exploited funding opportunities to study Islamic radicalisation, but their failure at all but obtaining grants is rooted in a basic error of perception: youthful recruits to the black flag aren’t radicals, they’re revivalists
Islamic State and its media units release over 90,000 social media posts per day. That’s nearly 33 million posts a year. As the head of MI5 stated, social media is the command and control network of radical Islamism. The appeal of social media is evident. There are no gatekeepers. Messages posted from one remote or hidden location are immediately transmitted to the hip pocket of anyone with a SmartPhone.

After 9/11 a new wave of global Salafist jihadism turned to social media. Abu Musab al Suri developed the strategy of lone-wolf attacks and leaderless resistance online via his Global Call to Resistance. The Yemeni-born, but American-educated Anwar al Awlaki repackaged the message for Western youth and made jihad cooler than hip hop. Awlaki was killed in Yemen in 2011, but by then he had created the Jihadi John phenomenon in the West.

Awlaki and his successors, like the former West Sydney male stripper and boxer turned zealot, Feiz Mohammad, or failed Melbourne rapper, Neil Prakash aka Abu Khalid al Cambodi, use social media to brand the IS product. IS considers this aspect of their movement so important that in August they formed the Anwar al Awlaki Brigade, a special unit that includes at least ten Australians, to promulgate the message and recruit online. The brigade’s media awareness is attuned to Western sensibilities. Segueing off a L’Oreal ad, for instance, a recent recruitment message targeting young Western women runs, “Cover girl, no; covered girl, yes. Because you’re worth it.”

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/19/the-top-ten-quran-verses-to-understand-isis-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

As the world confronts the horror of the Jihad massacre in Paris, and as the Islamic State claims responsibility for it, we continue to witness the denial within the West’s leadership, media and culture about the Islamic nature of the Jihadist terrorist attack.

In response to this mass denial, and to shed light on the true nature of Islamic Jihad and the huge price the West is paying in denying its true foundation, we are running The Glazov Gang’s feature interviews with two of the world’s leading scholars on Islam: David Wood and Raymond Ibrahim.

The two discussions unveil the true roots of Jihadi terrorist groups such as ISIS and reveal the lie behind the denial about the Islamic role in Islamic terror. Both Wood and Ibrahim issue a dire warning about the hazardous danger our society faces if it continues to deceive itself about the real enemy we face.

See both interviews below:

David Wood on “The Top Ten Qur’an Verses to Understand ISIS.”

According to legend, if not actual historians, Harold Macmillan was once asked what he most feared could derail his agenda. The British prime minister allegedly said, “Events, my dear boy, events.”

Macmillan may never have actually said it, but the quote endures because it gets at a fundamental truth of politics (and life). Facts on the ground can deliver a fatal blow to one’s most cherished plans.

The line kept coming to mind as I listened to President Obama’s remarkable news conference Monday from the G-20 meeting in Turkey. Asked again and again whether he underestimated the threat from Islamic State, a group he once dismissed as a “JV team,” the president said, in effect, “no.”

Of course, he used a lot more words, but that was the gist: “It’s important for us to get the strategy right, and the strategy that we are pursuing is the right one.” He added that “the terrible events in Paris were obviously a terrible and sickening setback.”

Critics who disagree, he said, shouldn’t “pop off” with their half-baked and ill-considered opinions. He’s “not interested” in what he sees as mere sloganeering about “American leadership or America winning” that distract him from his strategy.

As I listened to French president Francois Hollande over the weekend, I was struck by the familiarity of the ritual phrases he used to signal the French response to the well-orchestrated terror attacks that swept through my old neighborhood in Paris on Friday the 13th like a moveable feast of impotence and death.

“France will be merciless toward the Daesh barbarians,” the president declaimed, referring to the Islamic State by its Arabic-language sobriquet. “France will act with all the legal means at its disposal.”

As I recall, that’s the same thing Hollande said in January after another group of jihadi Muslim terrorists assaulted the editorial offices of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, murdering journalists, cartoonists, and a security guard.

And it was the same language he used a few days later when yet another group of jihadi Muslims hit a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Ten months later, what “merciless” steps have the French government taken against Daesh. Have they done anything to staunch the flow of young French Muslims traveling to Syria who plan to continue their jihad against the “infidel” West after they return to Europe?