RUTHFULLY YOURS

I know we Israelis are supposed to endure whatever we suffer in guilty silence. Apparently, we deserve the violence in our streets and against our kids because of “the occupation,” which justifies any Palestinian crime, no matter how tangential, evil, counterproductive, or aimed at destroying us rather than at solving our problems. I know that after years of Israelis negating the exile (shlilat hagolah), we now have shlilat zion, negating Zion, with many American Jewish liberals bashing Israel while resenting the slightest Zionist critique offered the supposedly perfect, thriving, untouchable, American Jewish community.

And yes, I know that Benjamin Netanyahu stumbled when blaming the Palestinian hero, the pro-Hitler Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, for Hitler’s Final Solution, and shouldn’t have appointed the undiplomatic Ran Baratz to head public diplomacy. But wandering Jerusalem with a can of pepper spray in my left pocket, an extra pair of eyes in the back of my head and numerous new holes in my heart, for all the innocents killed, wounded and traumatized, I wonder: were Netanyahu’s missteps really the last month’s biggest outrages? This isn’t aimed at you if you tweeted or emailed about Bibi’s boo-boos while also objecting to Mahmoud Abbas’s inflammatory lies, to the murdering of Israelis, to stabbing a 13-year-old Jerusalemite in the neck forcing him to fight for his life instead of preparing for his bar mitzvah, to Gideon Levy’s absurd claim in Haaretz that “even Gandhi” would turn violent if he were a Palestinian, or to any of the misleading headlines obscuring Palestinian violence yet blaming Israel.

Get Out of My Class and Leave America Mike Adams From August 28,2015

Mike Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington is not your stereotypical left-wing teacher. On the heels of a report that showed that liberal arts professors overwhelmingly support Democrats, Adams’ semester-opening statement to his students, first printed in Townhall in late August has gone viral.

Author’s Note: The following column is comprised of excerpts taken from my first lectures on the first day of classes this semester at UNC-Wilmington. I reproduced these remarks with the hope that they would be useful to other professors teaching at public universities all across America. Feel free to use this material if you already have tenure.

Welcome back to class, students! I am Mike Adams your criminology professor here at UNC-Wilmington. Before we get started with the course I need to address an issue that is causing problems here at UNCW and in higher education all across the country. I am talking about the growing minority of students who believe they have a right to be free from being offended. If we don’t reverse this dangerous trend in our society there will soon be a majority of young people who will need to walk around in plastic bubble suits to protect them in the event that they come into contact with a dissenting viewpoint. That mentality is unworthy of an American. It’s hardly worthy of a Frenchman.

Let’s get something straight right now. You have no right to be unoffended. You have a right to be offended with regularity. It is the price you pay for living in a free society. If you don’t understand that you are confused and dangerously so. In part, I blame your high school teachers for failing to teach you basic civics before you got your diploma. Most of you went to the public high schools, which are a disaster. Don’t tell me that offended you. I went to a public high school.

Jewish people need an organization to stand up for them. They should create one called the Anti-Anti-Defamation League, which can start by fighting the Anti-Defamation League, which ostensibly is supposed to speak up for the survival of the Jewish people but is actually advocating for their destruction.

The Anti-Defamation League said Monday that it is “deeply disappointed” with a slew of governors moving to block Syrian refugees from resettling in their states.

“This country must not give into fear or bias by turning its back on our nation’s fundamental commitment to refugee protection and human rights,” the group’s chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.

“Now is precisely the time to stand up for our core values, including that we are a proud nation of immigrants. To do otherwise signals to the terrorists that they are winning the battle against democracy and freedom,” he added.

The problem is that many of these refugees do not believe in democracy or freedom. Many of them believe in repressive sharia law, which calls for subjugating all non-Muslims to Islam. And a subset of those are terrorists who will try to kill Americans, especially Jews. Greenblatt is strongly advocating bringing in people, many of whom want to oppress and kill Jews, as they are doing in France right now.

It’s time to take a close look at an often ignored subject: what ordinary Palestinians think about Israel, Jews, and terrorist attacks on civilians.

he most recent wave of Palestinian terror attacks, now entering its second month, has been mainly the work of “lone wolf” operators running over Israeli civilians, soldiers, and policemen with cars or stabbing them with knives. The perpetrators, many in or just beyond their teenage years, are not, for the most part, activists in the leading militant organizations. They have been setting forth to find targets with the expectation, generally fulfilled, that after scoring a casualty or two they will be killed or badly wounded. What drives these young Palestinians, experts say, is a viral social-media campaign centered on claims that the Jews are endangering the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and that Israel is executing Palestinian children.

Pundits and analysts in Israel and the West, struck by the elements that make this round of violence different from its predecessors over the past decade-and-a-half—which typically featured well-orchestrated shootings, suicide bombings, or rocket fire—have focused on the motivations of individual attackers, on how and why the Palestinian political and religious leadership has been engaging in incitement, and on what Israeli officials or American mediators might do to quell the violence.

Absent almost entirely from this discussion has been any attempt to understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians. Yet it is precisely the climate of public opinion that shapes and in turn is shaped by the declarations of Palestinian leaders, and that creates the atmosphere in which young people choose whether to wake up in the morning, pull a knife from the family kitchen, and go out in search of martyrdom. Whether commentators are ignoring the views of mainstream Palestinians out of a mistaken belief that public opinion does not matter in dictatorships, or out of a dismissive sense that they are powerless pawns whose fate is decided by their leaders, Israel, or regional and world powers, the omission is both patronizing and likely to lead to significant misunderstandings of what is happening. In this essay I aim to fill the lacuna by addressing what Palestinians think both about violence against Israelis and about the core issues that supply its context and justification.

Despite what he termed the “setback” of last Friday’s jihad massacre in Paris, Barack Obama announced Monday that he was pressing forward with his scheme to flood the U.S. with at least 10,000 refugees from Syria, terming opposition to his plan “shameful.” Obama seems intent on recreating in the U.S. the circumstances that led to the jihad attacks in Paris – which were perpetrated by at least two “refugees” who had just recently arrived in Europe.

“We have to, each of us, do our part, and the United States has to step up and do its part,” Obama said. He didn’t explain why Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar don’t have to do their part, and have taken no refugees at all, citing the risk of terrorism. Repeat that concern in the U.S., as have the Governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Texas, and you’ll be charged with “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia.”

One problem for anyone trying to offer a defence of Israel in the face of the determined intellectual assault on the country in recent years is that while the assault is simple and easily understood – conducted in an adolescent emoji language of epithets and images – the defence is harder to explain. To defame the country one merely needs to say ‘colonialism’ or ‘apartheid’, and add a photo of a soldier manhandling a child. To defend Israel requires an understanding of at least 100 years of history in both Europe and the Middle East, of how we reached this moment, and of what Israel’s choices really are right now. Anyone trying to explain Israel’s case needs to be worldly enough to make sense to people outside the bubble of those who are reflexively sympathetic to Israel anyway, and it helps not to be ideologically rigid or so angry you can’t speak calmly.

Not many people can do this well. The confrontational and clumsy government currently in power in Israel, for example, doesn’t have much luck. One of the most skilful Israeli advocates right now is Einat Wilf, the scholar, Cambridge and Harvard graduate and former Knesset member who has become something of an unofficial roving ambassador for Israel in recent years. (Originally a Labour Party lawmaker, she joined a group of MKs who left the party along with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for a brief stint in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government, after which she left politics in 2013.)

The university, long exempted from social norms and rules, has gone wild in the 21st century — or rather, regressed to pre-puberty.

The University of Missouri campus police now request that students — a group not known for polite vocabulary — call law enforcement if someone disparages them with hurtful names.

On the same campus, a media professor shouts for students in the vicinity to strong-arm a student photographer to stop him from taking pictures in a way that she does not approve. Other staff members try to block and push away a journalist they find bothersome. Since when do thuggish faculty, in Michael Corleone fashion, call in muscle to intimidate students who are exercising their First Amendment rights?

Since when do quite privileged Yale students — in mini–Cultural Revolution style — surround and, teary-eyed, shout obscenities at their professor? Their target was declared to be guilty of some infraction against the people by an ad hoc court of whiny elites, poorly acting the role of the Committee of Public Safety. Apparently his offense was to suggest that students should not become hysterical when they see Halloween costumes they don’t like. Shouting down guest speakers, disrupting events, and mobbing individuals would not be tolerated at Disney World, so why on campus?

The assumed impoverished black student at the University of Missouri who went on a hunger strike to protest “white privilege” was raised in plentitude as the son of a multimillionaire corporate executive. The young woman who yelled obscenities at Yale over Halloween costumes is likewise a child of privilege. Campus outbursts reveal more about the anxieties and neuroses of the adolescent and pampered than about existential issues of hunger, violence, or bias.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4725789,00.html

Despite Paris attack, Eagles of Death Metal to return to Israel

US rock band, whose concert was targeted by ISIS in a horrendous massacre Friday night, performed in Tel Aviv last July after defying BDS pressure and has promised to come back again this summer. During the Israel concert, frontman Jesse Hughes told the audience that the band had got a letter from former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, asking them not to perform in the country. “And you wanna know what I wrote back? Two words: ‘F**k you. Ain’t nobody gonna keep me from my people here in Tel Aviv,” Hughes said.

Earlier this month a Palestinian tried to run over an Israeli soldier at a roadblock near Hebron in the West Bank. Other soldiers fired at the driver, who was wounded, taken to hospital, and died there.

It turns out that the Palestinian, Tharwat Ibrahim al-Sha’rawi, was a 72-year-old woman. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), in a report on the incident, says she was a mother of five, and it can safely be assumed that she was a grandmother as well.

Tharwat al-Sha’rawi was the widow of a terrorist killed by Israeli fire near Hebron in 1988, and a son-in-law of hers is a Hamas member now imprisoned in Israel. A knife was found in a bag inside the car she drove. And “two weeks before her death,” the ITIC notes,

Tharwat al-Sha’rawi wrote a will and spoke with her daughter Ihlam. She said the following: “I think I am going to die soon.… If I die, oh, Allah, let me die as a shaheeda and not in my bed” (Shasha.ps, November 8, 2015).

Even in the world of today’s terrorism, now very much in the spotlight after the Paris massacres, Tharwat al-Sha’rawi’s age and personal status would appear to make her unique.

Campus leftists promote bigotry and hate the same day the university president resigns.

On the same day that Missouri University (MU) President Timothy M. Wolfe resigned over “racism,” the MU Black Studies Department co-sponsored a lecture by David Sheen, a journalist who regularly compares Israelis to Nazis. The lecture was called “Racism in Israel.” The event was hosted by the MU Socialists, who posted the following description: “Remember the systematic racism experienced at Mizzou is part of the violent global system of white supremacy. Come to our event tomorrow night to learn more about connections between racism in Israel & racism on campus.” David Sheen is an anti-Zionist Israeli and an associate of Max Blumenthal, a notorious anti-Israel radical who has made comparing Israeli Jews to Nazis his career. The two were involved in an incident dubbed “Toiletgate” earlier this year when they chased a left-wing German politician into a toilet stall after he canceled a presentation they were slated to give in the German parliament. The MU Socialists have a history of anti-Israel events, and the lecture was sponsored by multiple groups. But, when I saw that the flyer read, “Sponsors: … Black Studies Dept,” I assumed the Black Studies Department was not fully informed about David Sheen.