RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, in response to calls for the United States government to stop taking in Syrian refugees following last week’s horrific terrorist attack in Paris, Senator Elizabeth Warren uttered words that must now seem terribly ironic to her constituents.

“These events test us. It is easy to proclaim that we are tough and brave and good-hearted when threats feel far away — but when those threats loom large and close by, our actions will strip away our tough talk and reveal who we really are.

Not two days after Ms. Warren made those impassioned remarks on the Senate floor, one of Ms. Warren’s own constituents, eighteen-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts, was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel, together with two other innocent civilians. In response, the sanctimonious senator said nothing.

And that is not because Ms. Warren has a difficult time speaking. On November 18th, the day before Ezra Schwartz was murdered, Ms. Warren’s official Twitter account sent out more tweets than a sparrow in mating season — 11– about lobbyists, tax reform and the Economic Policy’s Women’s Economic Agenda. The day before that, Ms. Warren went to the Senate floor to deliver her remarks about Syrian refugees. And, lest anyone doubt Ms. Warren’s ability to multitask, she sent out tweets both before her speech (“Heading to the Senate floor now…”) and after her speech (“…Today I spoke about what I saw”). Yet she could not spare even a character for the beautiful young boy with the sweet smile from her home state.

The Wall Street Journal of November 14-15 carried an astute article by Roger Kimball (editor of the New Criterion) entitled “The Rise of the College Crybullies.” The lethal mixture of trembling sensitivity and mob ruthlessness in these student insurrectionaries has turned the country’s universities into a vast bedlam with a thousand wards. He tells how “the crybully…has weaponized his coveted status as a victim” with two calling cards: race and gender. He uses these to exploit to the fullest extent what Joseph Epstein has called “the unassailable virtue of victims.”

The past month alone has seen the humiliation and forced resignation of assorted faculty members, deans, and even university presidents. Some schools have run up the white flag of surrender even before they were invaded, or tried what might be called preemptive action to ward off the wrath of the new brownshirts by appointing presidents and provosts who proclaim their unswerving devotion to diversity training; or to appointing (more) deans of equity; or to fighting “minoritization” and “marginalization”; or to celebrating gay marriage and transgenderism; or to requiring “trigger warnings” about dangerous books; or to implementing race quotas; or to realizing all the other countless desiderata of campus radicals.

At NYU, for example, “Students of Color” currently list no fewer than 28 “demands” but encouraged the submission of still more. Their counterparts at Brandeis (as of this writing) lag behind with only 13, but are more peremptory and menacing about deadlines by which their demands must be met. Yale’s revolutionaries complain that their uprising against the school’s administration has come “at great expense to our health and grades,” and expect to be compensated accordingly. UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union and its satellites want allocations of money, black faculty, and black psychologists to bring them up to the achievement levels of Asian students at that noble institution. So far Mitch Daniels of Purdue University seems to be the sole exception in the entire country to the rule of presidential surrender to these campus insurrectionaries.

By now you’ve heard that the insurrections at Yale University and the University of Missouri have spread to campuses from California to New Hampshire. The grievances and student demands for safe spaces vary, but the disease is the same: Faculty and administrators who elevate racial and gender diversity above all other values, including free speech.

The road trip begins at Yale, which erupted a few weeks ago after a faculty member suggested that the administration shouldn’t dictate what is an appropriate Halloween costume. In a better era she’d have won free beer at every party on campus, but this time the resulting ruckus featured a student cursing out a Yale sociologist on a lawn for being “insensitive.”

Last week’s response? “I have never been as simultaneously moved, challenged and encouraged by our community,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in a campus-wide letter. He promised a center exploring “race, ethnicity and other aspects of social identity”; more faculty digging into those topics; more training on spotting racism at what must surely be one of the most racially sensitive places on Earth. Mr. Salovey talked up Yale’s $50 million commitment to diversifying the faculty, and you can bet he doesn’t mean intellectual diversity.

Lots of people have been asking why the world mourns French victims of ISIS terrorists but not Israeli victims of Palestinians terrorists, and why on days like today (when Palestinian terrorists massacred several Israelis in different attacks) not a single main stream news channels even reports on the attacks. Well the following chart explains very clearly why. You see ISIS and the Palestinian terrorists have absolutely nothing in common!!!!

About 50 Israeli Arabs have joined Islamic State in the past few years, but the number who support the radical group’s violent ideology is considerably bigger • Is the Islamic State monster gaining a foothold in Israel, too?

One day, Othman Abdul Kiyan disappeared from his home. His neighbors in the Negev Bedouin town of Hura said he had gone to Turkey for a vacation after successfully finishing his grueling medical training in Jordan.

But in May 2014, when Othman failed to show up for work as a resident at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, everyone was amazed to discover that Othman had given up his dream of medicine and joined Islamic State. The news was hard on his family; a few even went to the hotel room where he had stayed in Turkey. There they found a few of his personal items. Members of the hotel staff told them their son had rented a car and not returned. A few months later, his family received the news that Othman had been killed in the fighting in Syria.

Moussa Khalil Abu Kush from the Negev village of Arara also completed medical school in Jordan. Like Othman, he was exposed to jihadist ideology there and wrote Facebook posts supporting Islamic State. He was arrested by the Shin Bet security agency, expressed remorse, and was ordered to pay a fine and perform community service.

Khalil, a resident of east Jerusalem, disappeared from his home, too. His worried relatives told Israeli security forces that their son worked as an orderly at the Eitanim psychiatric hospital and had a membership to the fitness center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before he disappeared, Khalil told his family and his bosses that he was taking a few weeks off to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he actually bought a one-way ticket to Greece. From there he flew to Istanbul, and with the help of an Islamic State operative he reached the Syrian border and joined the organization. The mystery of his disappearance was solved only when and his comrades were arrested by the Shin Bet when they returned from Syria.

The cutthroats of ISIS, Al-Queda, the Taliban, Boko Haram and any other Islamic terrorist gang at large in our time also have the same religious incentive – and are afflicted with the same psychotic obsession.

It is also fortuitous happenstance that two accomplished students of the subject of Islam, thousands of miles apart and within days of each other, published columns about what drives Islam’s penchant for homicide, torture, rape, mutilation, conquest, and destruction. They are Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, in his November 11th column, “Why Islam is a Religion of War,” and the mysterious Norwegian writer Fjordman, in his November 17th piece, “Islam: A Permanent World War,” on Gates of Vienna. Their common theme is why Islam makes war on the West. Their themes intersect at certain points, and then go off in different directions.

Greenfield led off with:

Islamic violence is a religious problem. Islam derives meaning from physical supremacy, so war becomes an act of faith. To believe in Islam, is to have faith that it will conquer the entire world. And to be a true Muslim, is to feel called to aid in that global conquest, whether by providing money to the Jihadists or to become a Jihadist.

This means that a jihadist is much like a schoolyard bully, who must triumph over his opponents and strike fear in and compel submission by the other kids. It is an absolute necessity. It is important that others witness this triumph. It is even better if he triumphs in cooperation with other bullies, or with their encouragement. It is proof of his faith. His being the “last man standing” over his vanquished and bloodied foe is taken as proof for him of the metaphysical supremacy and superiority of his faith, and of the efficacy of physical force in the name of Islam. He has faith in that fallacy. It must be true. It’s the only thing he’s sure of.

White privilege. It’s everywhere, I tell you. You can’t escape its smothering influence — even at one of the finest (and most expensive) schools in the land.

Take the case of this poor, wilting flower. Nissy Aya is now in her fifth year of undergraduate study at Columbia University. She was supposed to graduate last year with the rest of her class, but finds herself — totally not her fault — on track to graduate next year.

Ms. Aya says that she has experienced much angst and anguish while taking Columbia’s Core courses, studying the greatest, the most powerful, the most tolerant civilization in the history of the human race — Western civilization. It seems that Ms. Aya has feelings of inadequacy when reading all these books by dead white males.

I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIS than … Barack Obama.

This puts me at odds with Barack Obama, as is often the case. It is worth explaining my reasoning, though, since – as our bloviator-in-chief is fond of saying – this is a teachable moment.

The president of the United States, shamefully but characteristically, took the opportunity of being on foreign soil – in the Philippines with its large Muslim population – to smear his fellow countrymen over their effort to protect American national security. The Republican initiative, led by Senator Ted Cruz, would thwart Obama’s scheme to import thousands of refugees and prioritize the asylum claims of Christians. In response to this “rhetoric,” Obama seethed, “I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL.”

The president elaborated that “when you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative.”

So tough here to untangle the ignorance from the demagoguery. For starters, asylum does not involve placing comparative values on the lives of different categories of people. And no one would be more offended than Christians at the notion that Christian lives should be valued more highly than those of other human beings. (By contrast, the conceit that Muslim lives – especially the lives of male Muslims – are more worthy than others is a leitmotif of Islamic scripture that is reflected throughout sharia law.)

Asylum, instead, is a remedy for persecution that is controlled by federal law. Obama lashed out at Republicans for promoting a “religious test,” which he claimed was “offensive and contrary to American values.” Yet, because asylum addresses persecution, governing law has always incorporated a religious test. Again, that is not because the lives of one religion’s believers are innately better than others; it is because when religious persecution is occurring, the targeted religion’s believers are inevitably more vulnerable to murder, rape, torture, and other atrocities than co-religionists of the persecutors.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma.

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”
According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.

This new climate is slowly being institutionalized, and is affecting what can be said in the classroom, even as a basis for discussion. During the 2014–15 school year, for instance, the deans and department chairs at the 10 University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

An abbreviated version of the following testimony was delivered yesterday by UMAction Director John Lomperis to the board of directors of the General Board of Pensions and Health Benefits of the United Methodist Church. This denominational agency, which manages billions of dollars of assets and investments on behalf of the church, has been pressured by activists for the Palestinian cause to divest from companies described as “profiting from the Israeli occupation,” as these same activists have successfully gotten some United Methodist annual conferences (regions) to do.

Thanks for hearing me out. I am here as your brother in Christ, as a longtime fellow United Methodist, as an elected General Conference delegate, and as the director of one of the major evangelical caucuses within our denomination, the UMAction program of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Some activists have lobbied various United Methodist leaders to single out certain companies for divestment because of their business with Israel, particularly companies characterized as “profiting from the Israeli occupation.”

As you approach these matters, both for the board’s internal work and for your influence at General Conference, I respectfully express my hope that you will consider some reasons why such agendas are morally irresponsible, factually misleading, unrepresentative of United Methodists, and really harmful to the church we all love.

I wish to make clear that I do not adhere to the dispensationalist theology that drives many Christians to support Israel. Rather, I am driven by a deep concern that my church’s social witness be thoughtful, well-informed, and devoted to the highest standards of social justice.