RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Muslims and Islam can’t take criticism or mockery or slander, perhaps they should get out of the kitchen.

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.” President Barack Obama before the U.N. General Assembly, September 25, 2012.

It seems, to judge by his record before and after his U.N. address, in this instance that Obama delivered a verbose, sanctimonious dose of his silver-tongued taqiyya that mentioned desecrated images of Christ and Holocaust denial just so he couldn’t be accused of bigotry or favoritism. However, he hasn’t had much to say about the desecration and destruction of Christian and Jewish edifices and objects by ISIS, or by Islamic enthusiasts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and in other culturally enriched Islamic pestholes.

On the other hand, it’s fairly well known that Muslims can slander other creeds with legal and social impunity, and even publicly threaten death and dismemberment of anyone who slanders Mohammad and Islam or mentions them with a jaundiced eye.

But, how can you slander an icon, or a cartoon character, a fictional book, movie, or TV character, or a person who might not have even existed historically except in the minds of countless “believers” whose minds anyway are not too firmly anchored to reality? But perhaps it isn’t the icon of Mohammad that should be slandered, mocked, and defamed, but those to whom the icon is a reality.

Forget the housing bubble, the education bubble is about to burst.

Student loan debt is at $1.2 trillion. College enrollment increased under Obama, but graduation rates fell. Barely half the students who enrolled in 2009 graduated. His plans for expanding enrollment rates worked, but the plans for expanding graduation rates didn’t.

And some of the biggest casualties were black students.

81% of black graduates had taken out loans and 39% of black borrowers drop out of college. This money helped keep colleges that were deeply in debt afloat. But it didn’t do much for graduation rates.

Black student loan rates had increased by 20 percent since the ’90s. But black male graduation rates had hardly increased at all.

Only a third of black male college students graduate. Among black women, it’s 44%. And the college graduation gap between white and black students has continued to increase under Obama.

It isn’t just Woodrow Wilson who’s got to go.For the social justice warriors on America’s college campuses these days, force and intimidation are paying off in spades.

Following the occupation of the president’s office courtesy of the “Black Justice League,” Princeton University is the most recent “institution of higher learning” to relent to students’ demand to reject “racism.”

President Christopher L. Eisgruber has “agreed”—more accurately, was bullied into agreeing—to petition the Board of Trustees to consider reevaluating “the legacy” of America’s 28th president and one-time Princeton University president, Woodrow Wilson.

The website Inside Higher Ed informs us that the Black Justice League regards Wilson’s as a legacy of “racism” that continues to inform “campus policy and culture.”

These elite, Ivy League universities are indeed a dangerous place for racial minorities. Perhaps this is why it isn’t only the eradication of every last vestige of the ominous name and image of Wilson from their school that these fonts of wisdom and courage demanded. They as well demanded—wait for it—the retirement of the distinction of “master” at the school.

You read this correctly: Students at one of the most elite academic institutions in the world feel threatened by the word “master.”

All hope may not be lost. (The following is the note from the university president in its entirety.)

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!

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

President Obama claimed last week that his plans to attend an upcoming climate change conference will be “a powerful rebuke” to Islamic State terrorists, who took credit for the brutal November 13 Paris attacks.

“I will be joining world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference,” stated Barack. “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

Obama isn’t the first politician who has spoken of the relationship between climate change and terrorism. Secretary of State John Kerry recently stated in a speech that climate change is a threat to the security and stability of the US and other countries.

Not surprisingly, liberal celebrities are also on board with the climate change-terrorism correlation. At a U.N. climate summit, Leonardo DiCaprio (seen here aboard his 450-foot super-yacht in Cannes) stated that he agrees with the notion that climate change is our single greatest security threat.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media ‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.

The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.

A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars
When the defenders of academic freedom leave campus lynch mob victims to fend for themselves.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1915 Columbia University economics professor E.R. A. Seligman shared a draft document with his colleagues, Princeton economics professor Frank Fetter and Johns Hopkins philosophy professor Arthur O. Lovejoy. The three succeeded in putting into final form what became the founding document of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a 16-page “Declaration of Principles.” It defined for the first time a fully worked conception of “academic freedom” and is nine-tenths of the reason why Americans give any credence to the idea that college professors should have some special measure of protection for their research, their publications, and other expressions of (some of) their views.

One hundred years later, how is the AAUP’s founding vision holding up? Consider the case of Vanderbilt professor of political science and law Carol M. Swain. Professor Swain wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, The Tennessean, last January, under the title “Charlie Hebdo attacks prove critics were right about Islam.” The university’s Muslim Student Organization objected and the furor reached the national press. Swain also posted some of her pro-Christian views on her popular Facebook page, which Vanderbilt students began to read more assiduously after the op-ed, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of someone who was willing to dissent publicly from the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. The spectacle finally proved too much for one alumna, Emily Arnold, who created a petition calling for Swain to be fired from the university. The petition was later amended to call for “suspending” Swain instead of firing her, and requiring her to undergo “cultural sensitivity” training.

The petition says that over the past few years Swain “has become synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism.” Swain, it alleges, has engaged in unprofessional intimidation on social media, discriminatory practices in the classroom. It had gained as of a few days ago 1,736 signers.

The gist of the petition is that Arnold and her friends disagree with Swain’s views and would like Vanderbilt to shut her up or get rid of her. In an online interview, Arnold expresses her delight in the large number of fellow students who have joined her. She is “shedding tears of joy.”

Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for the Humanities recently hosted Gideon Levy. Levy, the author of articles such as, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”, is yet another in a line of Students for Justice in Palestine speakers who have justified the racist murder of Jews.

Last year, SJP’s Israel Apartheid Week included Max Blumenthal, an advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Israel, whose views even critics of the Jewish State find horrifying. A Forward reviewer wrote of his previous book that, “It could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club.”

One of Blumenthal’s attacks on Israel was cited by the Neo-Nazi gunman who tried to murder Jews outside the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City. Blumenthal was deemed too hateful by the German Communists who had invited him to speak. And yet he was not too extreme for Brandeis’ SJP.

Jewish students at Brandeis are forced to cope with a campus where Students for Justice in Palestine campaigns for Rasmieh Odeh, who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket before the Sabbath. Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, two Hebrew University roommates who had come there to buy canned food, the way so many college students do, were torn to pieces by bombs hidden in coffee cans.

On Islamophobia First, let’s define phobia.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (1971):

Phobia: Fear, horror, or aversion, esp. of a morbid character….So Phobist nonce-wd. one who has a horror of or aversion to anything.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1956) states:

Phobia: An irrational, persistent fear of a particular object or class of objects.

The Oxford definition does not claim that a phobia is necessarily irrational, but however stresses its cause as being a person. The Webster’s definition does not even mention a person, just objects or classes of objects, which, of course, can include persons. Other dictionary definitions more or less track the Oxford and Webster’s definitions.

And here is the origin of the term Islamophobia, from Discover the Networks.

The term “Islamophobia” was invented and promoted in the early 1990s by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a front group of the Muslim Brotherhood. Former IIIT member Abdur-Rahman Muhammad — who was with that organization when the word was formally created, and who has since rejected IIIT’s ideology — now reveals the original intent behind the concept of Islamophobia: “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.” In short, in its very origins, “Islamophobia” was a term designed as a weapon to advance a totalitarian cause by stigmatizing critics and silencing them….

Although the term was coined in the early 1990s, “Islamophobia” did not become the focus of an active Brotherhood campaign until after 9/11. Since that time, Islamist lobby organizations (including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR) and Muslim civil-rights activists have regularly accused the American people, American institutions, law-enforcement authorities, and the U.S. government of harboring a deep and potentially violent prejudice against Muslims. The accusers charge that as a result of this “Islamophobia,” Muslims are disproportionately targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes and acts of discrimination.