RUTHFULLY YOURS

I have a proposal: Let’s turn the whole damn campus into a “space of healing.”

Such “spaces,” we learn in Rich’s excellent column on the Mizzou mau-mauing (to be read in conjunction with similarly insightful columns by Kevin and our friend Roger Kimball on last week’s Yale mau-mauing), are what university administrators failed to “create” so the coddled children could grieve over … well … everything.

As always, there are pretexts aplenty – purported racial insults (you’ll have to forgive me – or not, who cares? – if I won’t believe these incidents happened as described until that is convincingly proved) and, of course, the killing of a teenager who was attacking a police officer right after knocking off a convenience store. Speaking of Michael Brown, Columbia Law school students who claimed to be too “traumatized” by the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer he attacked were permitted to postpone their exams – evidently, a classroom with a test placed on the desks is no longer a “safe space” on the American campus.

Can we please stop pretending that this is anything other than what it is? As an institution taken over by the hard Left, “higher education” simply wants to confiscate more of our money and obliterate any remaining vestiges of meritocracy. The agitators know that if they agitate enough, no matter how trifling the pretext, they will get concessions.

So let’s stop paying for it.

Americans could learn a thing or two from Bibi Netanyahu.

The Israeli prime minister was in Washington this week to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award. He made some controversial remarks — at least controversial at AEI, where I am a fellow, and where the freedom agenda is alive and well — about the need to be realistic about what’s going on in the Middle East. Sometimes, he said, brutal dictators are better than the real-world alternatives: even more brutal Islamist movements hell-bent (or, if you prefer, paradise-bent) to conquer the world.

Less controversial but more intriguing was his description of the turmoil in the Middle East. “The core of the conflicts in the Middle East is the battle between modernity and early primitive medievalism,” Netanyahu explained.

Everyone understood what he meant, of course. The Islamic State believes the Muslim world took a wrong turn more than a thousand years ago.

The Taliban, the Wahhabis, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and all the other Islamists share this same worldview to one extent or another. Not every Islamist believes in crucifying Christians or throwing acid in the face of little girls going to school. But they all reject modernity, pluralism, secularism, democracy, and, in many cases, even science.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week has confirmed President Obama’s assessment that the much vaunted two-state solution proposed by Obama’s predecessor President George W. Bush on 30 April 2003 (the Roadmap) will not happen whilst Obama is President – or indeed ever. Obama’s conclusion was announced by White House Middle East Advisor Rob Malley ahead of Netanyahu’s arrival at the White House after an absence of thirteen months.

“The president has reached the conclusion that right now – barring a major shift – the parties are not going to be in a position to negotiate a final status agreement,”

The major shift required – recognition of Israel as the Jewish State – is a pure pipedream. Speaking the language of diplomatic doublespeak – Netanyahu told Obama that Israel’s negotiating position was immutable:

“I want to make it clear that we have not given up our hope for peace. We’ll never give up the hope for peace. And I remain committed to a vision of peace of two states for two peoples, a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.”

Israel had flagged demilitarization and Jewish statehood as non-negotiable positions it required for concluding successful negotiations with the Palestinian Authority when Israel listed its 14 Reservations to the Roadmap’s terms twelve years ago.

Maybe the EU did us a favor on Wednesday. At least now we know what we’re up against.

With the publication of its new guidelines to member states encouraging them to label Jewish products produced beyond the 1949 armistice lines, the Europeans finally convinced us that they hate us. They don’t care about peace. They don’t care about the Palestinians. They just want to harm Israel.

This is old news for long time EU watchers. Since late 2000, Europe has inexorably ratcheted up its hostile treatment of the Jewish state to the detriment of chances of peace.

Take for instance the timing of the EU’s first official act of open economic warfare against Israel.

On July 29, 2013 US Secretary of State John Kerry brought the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams together in Washington to officially launch a new round of peace talks.

The same day, the EU announced that starting at the beginning of 2014, it would be ending all joint projects with and all funding from the EU and its member governments of Israeli entities located or operating in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights. The only exceptions to the funding and cooperation ban were Israeli organizations working to harm Israeli control over the areas, and non-Jewish Israeli entities.

Due to demands by student activists and their enablers on the staff and faculty of University of Missouri, the President and Chancellor have now resigned.

Good riddance.

Neither Tom Wolfe nor R. Bowen Loftin deserves an iota of sympathy. In fact, they are at least as contemptible as the lynch mob that drove them from their offices, for they had been every bit as guilty as the professors and football coaches who have spent years pandering to the sophomoric bullies who society expected for them to educate.

This last point bears repeating: The University of Missouri, like the overwhelming majority of America’s institutions of “higher learning,” exists on the taxpayer’s dime. No college, no student, is entitled to one penny that belongs to someone else. That society subsidizes Mizzou implies a duty—a duty!—on the part of the latter to make its students into educated, self-disciplined, law-abiding citizens.

Wolfe, Loftin, and Mizzou’s football coaches and faculty have failed miserably on this score. They have reneged on their contract with the rest of us. They have betrayed their American compatriots, including those millions and millions of working-class and middle-class Americans who labor diligently day after day and week after week only to have a portion of their earnings confiscated and redistributed to grease the wheels of the Academic-Industrial-Complex.

This summer President Obama visited Alaska, where he stood in front of a shrinking glacier and said, “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now.” At a conference in Anchorage, he made the apocalyptic prediction that “submerged countries, abandoned cities . . . entire industries of people who can’t practice their livelihoods, desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own, and political disruptions that could trigger multiple conflicts around the globe” would be the wages of failing to act now to stop global warming.

Most environmentalists cheered the President’s statements, while some have been critical of him for betraying the cause by allowing Shell Oil to drill off Alaska’s Arctic coast. But all assume that their opinions are based on hard science. While science does play a huge role in modern environmentalism, old cultural myths influence much of what many people believe about humanity’s relationship to nature. For some, their belief system approaches a nature worship that has little value for solving the environmental problems troubling the world today.

Dr. Carol Swain was born in segregated Virginia. The second of twelve children, she grew up sharing a bed with her sisters in a shack that had no running water. Her family was so poor that she had no shoes and had to stay home from school when the weather was bad. She never did make it to high school.

And now 1,400 leftist fascists have signed a petition to Vanderbilt University demanding that one of the most respected African-American scholars in this country take diversity training or be “terminated.”

The petition to force a conservative black woman to undergo diversity training comes from Nick Goldbach, a white hipster student and self-described “urban enthusiast” who claims that working as a waiter at a “sustainable” luxury urban resort in Connecticut taught him about “common humanity.”

Nick cares about “civil rights and social action,” “chic and unassuming” dining experiences and getting a black woman whose writings about race and racism were cited by Supreme Court justices fired.

And once that’s done, Nick and a few of his closest social justice warrior pals can celebrate with another “chic and unassuming” dining experience. Dr. Swain had worked her way up from a GED to a PhD by taking a job at McDonald’s where the dining experiences are unassuming, if not especially chic.

A federal judge has refused to stop Texas from withholding the birth certificates of children born in the U.S. to mothers who are illegal immigrants. But he has also called for a full court hearing to determine if the civil rights of these newest U.S. citizens are being violated by the policy.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman’s ruling that the Texas Department of State Health Services can continue denying birth certificates to “undocumented” immigrant families’ U.S.-born babies if their identification doesn’t meet Texas standards “an important first step in ensuring the integrity of birth certificates and personal identity information.”

“Before issuing any official documents, it’s important for the state to have a way to accurately verify people are who they say they are through reliable identification mechanisms,” Paxton said in a statement his office released following Judge Pitman’s ruling.

The Texas Department of State Health Services refuses to recognize some forms of identification offered by illegal-immigrant families including the identification cards known as “matriculas consulares” that are issued by Mexican consulates.

Today’s undergraduates probably know little, if anything, about the cataclysmic movement in China known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It began in 1966 before all of them (and even a great number of their professors) were born. This massive national crusade, instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong, was intended to create a pure communist man and woman, devoid of the constraints of materialism and personal ambition.

It started with the closing of the schools and the re-education of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie and ended up with years of incredible violence, taking millions of lives. The actual statistics are still a state secret, but a recent biography of Mao states “at least 3 million people died violent deaths and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another.”

Boris Johnson got himself disinvited from several events in the West Bank this week. More’s the pity in a region that needs the sort of truth-telling with which the London mayor caused such a stir.

On a visit meant to boost trade ties with Britain, Mr. Johnson sought to reassure Israelis that the long-running boycott, divest and sanction movement against Israel in the West is not a majority position:

“I cannot think of anything more foolish than to say that you want to have any kind of divestment, sanctions or boycott against a country that, when all is said or done, is the only democracy in the region, is the only place that has in my view a pluralist, open society. Why boycott Israel?”

“And by the way,” he continued, “I think there’s some misunderstanding over here [in Israel] about it. The supporters of this so-called boycott are really just a bunch of corduroy-jacketed . . . lefty academics who have no real standing in the matter and I think are highly unlikely to be influential on Britain.”

This was too much for the Palestinian charities that pulled the plug on meetings with him later in the week. The Sharek Youth Forum canceled Mr. Johnson’s visit, describing his remarks as an “inaccurate, misinformed, and disrespectful statement” that “fails to acknowledge our very existence as Palestinians,” according to the Independent newspaper. Several other sessions were dropped as well.