RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday night Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publically for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.

Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”

For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offe has been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really reject it, he just failed to respond.

But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.

Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected Olmert’s offer because by the time Olmert made it, he was steeped in criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight months later.

Walid Aly is a well-known Australian media commentator. This week on Channel Ten’s The Project he produced an impassioned and compelling speech about the Paris killings. This went viral, achieving 27 million views on social media within just a few days. That is more hits than there are people in Australia.

According to Walid Aly, ISIS is weak but it hides this because it wants us all to be afraid, very afraid. Its whole purpose is that our fear will turn to hate, and hate will ripen into ‘World War III’.

All people of good will who would stand against ISIS, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, must therefore come together in unity. According to Walid Aly, love, and less hate is what we need.

Walid Aly is absolutely right that we do need love. But like the air we breathe, love by itself is not enough. It is not all we need.

We also need truth, and a whole lot more of it. John’s gospel reports that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Truth without grace becomes a police state. But grace without truth is every bit as dangerous.

Walid Aly himself rightly identified the Paris atrocity as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. It is not hatred to ask what this word ‘Islamist’ actually means.

The deadly threats to the homeland posed by the legal immigration system.

For many years most people assumed that any discussion about immigration needed to focus on illegal immigration and the supposed “four border states” along the U.S./Mexican border.

My July 6, 2014 FrontPage article, “Border Security and the Immigration Colander: Why the breakdown of the Southwest border is only the tip of the iceberg” explained that our immigration system has many components and that not only must the U.S./Mexican border be secured, but that all elements of the immigration system must possess integrity if we are to be protected.

On February 5, 2015 FrontPage Magazine published my article, “The ‘Secure Our Border First Act’ Deception: Why it’s no solution to the immigration crisis.”

The official government report “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the United States and ultimately embed themselves in America as they went about their deadly preparations.

Page 54 contained this excerpt under the title “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:

Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.

• Gerald Walpin served as a U.S. inspector general from 2007 to 2009. He is the author of “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution” (Significance Press, 2013).

Last week, I was attacked by so-called “diversity” groups at Yale Law School because I had accepted an invitation from a student group (providing a forum for diversity of ideas), to speak on the meaning of the Birthright provision of the 14th Amendment. Without having heard what I would say, this speech-suppression coalition sought to prevent me from speaking by charging that I would utter “anti-immigrant rhetoric,” rest on “racist assumptions,” and express “racist and xenophobic ideas,” and “hateful ideologies.”

As a 1955 graduate of Yale Law School, it was difficult to believe that students who came to this excellent school would seek to prevent a diverse view from being expressed. After all, lawyers in the real world must be trained to hear their adversary’s differing views and be willing to answer them. Yale Law School itself proudly announces on its web site that it is “renowned as a center of constitutional law” — attained certainly by constant discourse, including differing views on the meaning of Constitutional provisions.

This was not simply an attack on my free speech right. It was an attack on all students’ right to obtain the benefit of free speech by hearing different views. Most disconcerting, it was not a single incident, but one of many in the nationwide movement at schools to suppress any thinking that the self-appointed student and faculty thought-police find unacceptable.

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.