RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s hostility to Israel usually plays out in a good cop-bad cop routine. As the top dog in a political party that still wants Jewish votes, he does not deliver bellicose anti-Israel speeches from balconies. Instead he leaves that to “bad cops” like Hillary Clinton, who described her role as the “designated yeller” at Netanyahu back in her Secretary of State days, and Joe Biden.

While Netanyahu and Obama had another bland White House session whose only purpose was to show that they can sit together in the same room without yelling at each other, the passive-aggressive attacks from Obama Inc. didn’t stop.

Biden is Obama’s go-to guy for starting incidents with Israel even during the Hillary days. Not much has changed now as Netanyahu’s visit was preceded by a Biden speech ranting that, “There is no excuse, there should be no tolerance for any member or employee of the Israeli administration referring to the president of United States in derogatory terms. Period, period, period, period!”

That’s four periods. If you’re counting.

For close to a half-of-a-century, leftist college professors have betrayed their vocation, a calling to educate their students into the intellectual traditions that compose Western civilization.

A liberal arts education is intended to civilize its recipients, to inculcate in them those excellences of head and heart that had always been recognized as the intellectual and moral virtues constitutive of human flourishing.

However, once leftist professors began working around the clock to convince their students that the West, far from being the repository of a rich plethora of wisdom and strength that the liberal arts ideal presupposes, is, rather, the source of the world’s evils, this classical conception of the liberal arts became more difficult to sustain.

The left produced nothing more or less than a paradigm shift. The older conception of the West implicates an ideal personality type, what we may call “the Heroic.” The newer vision of the West implies its own ideal personality type: the Victimized.

Campus leftists disrupted a Yale University conference on free speech and terrorized attendees Saturday as part of a lingering protest against school administrators’ allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.

Attendees at the “Fifth Annual Conference on the Future of Free Speech: Threats in Higher Education and Beyond,” sponsored by the school’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program, were given an unscheduled demonstration of the threat that college students pose to higher education today as they were harassed and spat upon by protesters.

This is the same campus that conservative icon Buckley, one of its most famous alumni, savaged in his seminal 1951 jeremiad, God and Man at Yale. The campus was the site of a war between “Christianity and atheism” and “the struggle between individualism and collectivism [which] is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

A holy war of conquest and extermination is being waged against America and the West, against Christians and Jews, and against infidels generally. Iraq, Syria, Israel and the United States are among the prime targets of this war, which is being waged with a savagery by al-Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas that has shocked the world. But even more shocking than the barbarism of these groups is the fact that there are organizations on American campuses that support the agendas of these terrorists and spread their propaganda lies, and do so with the financial and institutional support of university administrations.

Two of these organizations, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), were created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, godfather group to al-Qaeda and Hamas. They are the chief sponsors of annual campus events called “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” whose sole purpose is to spread the propaganda lies of the terrorist organization Hamas, and to demonize the Jewish state. They lead chants which call for the destruction of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” They are the chief sponsors of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, inspired by Hamas, whose goal is the economic strangulation of the Jewish state. Leaders of the Muslim Students Association have gone on to high-level positions in al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The most notorious of these was Anwar al-Awlaki, the head of al-Qaeda in the Yemen, who inspired the Fort Hood massacre and who before that was president of the Muslim Students Association at Colorado State.

Reprinted from the Washington Times.

Calling things by their right names is a prerequisite for seeing them as they really are. Last spring I spoke at more than half a dozen universities, including Ohio State and Stony Brook, where I was confronted by mobs of students cheering Hamas, a terrorist organization whose declared goal is the extermination of the Jews. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. On virtually every major university campus in America organizations exist whose leadership is dedicated to spreading the propaganda lies of Hamas designed to weaken and delegitimize the Israeli state, and promoting Hamas campaigns like Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) whose goal is its destruction.

The two leading organizations in this terrorist proxy campaign are the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which poses as a cultural group but is really a recruiting tool for its founding group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which was also created by a Brotherhood operative and takes an even more aggressive pro-terrorist role on campus defending Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and advancing its propaganda wars.

Well nobody, actually, unless you count a smattering of sometimes rude emails as representing credible threats to warmists’ lives and safety. As with climate change itself, our purportedly un-settled scientists refuse to share their evidence of bloodthirsty sceptics on the warpath
Why is the Australian Academy of Science going off the deep end claiming “reprehensible vilification” of warmist scientists? It’s now saying they’re being so threatened and harassed that their ability to do science is in jeopardy. Academy President Andrew Holmes, addressing a greenhouse conference in Hobart on October 27, claimed

The costs to individuals can be high. It is therefore critical that as scientists and experts we stand together. The ability of scientists to conduct their work, free of fear or hindrance, is vital to the future wellbeing of our community, and the Academy will continue to advocate for academic freedom…

“As the International Council for Science proclaims, the free and responsible practice of science is fundamental to scientific advancement and human and environmental well-being.

I thought at first he was chastising the academics at University of Western Australia over their successful witchhunt against non-sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, or that he was chastising academics at University of Melbourne for wanting punitive fines to drive sceptics out of the media. Or maybe rebuking US academic peers who wanted sceptic corporations to be prosecuted under the Racketeering and Corrupting Influences Act (that exercise backfired spectacularly). But I erred, Holmes’ victimology includes only orthodox climate scientists as its purported casualties.

A gaggle of hard lefties and fellow travelers is out to stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking Tuesday to the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with close White House ties.

Netanyahu is in DC mending fences after he fought hard against President Obama’s Iran nuke deal, hence the CAP event.

But various hard-left activists, liberal church types and Arab groups don’t think anyone should be allowed to hear what Bibi has to say. Backed by thousands of online signatures, they complain the CAP event grants legitimacy to Netanyahu’s “ever more expansionist policies of occupation.”

This, when he’s not even giving a speech, just joining a dialogue with Neera Tanden, CAP’s CEO and a veteran of both Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. And he’s taking audience questions, where critics can press him hard.

Sometime in the near future the EU is expected to publish guidelines on consumer labeling of all Israeli products produced over the so-called “Green Line,” the armistice line created when the war against the nascent Jewish State ended.

The EU considers all Jewish cities and towns over the pre-1967 lines to be illegal. As such, anything produced, grown or packaged in either eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria or the Golan Heights will be labeled so that consumers can more easily boycott those products.

The guidelines will be published by the office of Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief. No vote is required for this measure to be taken.

There is pushback to that labeling plan coming not only from Israel, but also from many members of the U.S. Senate.

A federal appeals court Monday upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the Obama administration’s plans to defer deportations for more than four million undocumented immigrants.

The 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds an injunction by a Texas federal judge that has blocked President Barack Obama’s 2014 immigration initiative, after leaders from 26 states challenged its legality.

The appeals-court ruling was widely anticipated, after a three-judge panel of the same court rejected the Obama administration arguments to quickly lift the injunction in May. But it paves the way for a potential appeal of the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court—and all but ensures that the immigration initiative will remained mired in a legal dispute through most, if not all, of Mr. Obama’s term in office.

In an article at the Washington Post, Janell Ross tackles the question of global attitudes toward immigration using data from Gallup polling and a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Unfortunately, there are some problems with Ross’ conclusions, starting with the following claim:

Adults with a college degree are more likely than those with lower levels of education to want to see immigration kept at its present level or increased.

The devil is in the details on this generalization. According to data from the IOM report itself, at a global level, those with a college degree (defined as “High education” by the report) are more likely to favor a decrease (36 percent) in immigration than those with “Low education” (31 percent), and there is no clear statistical difference (i.e., within the likely sampling error) between immigration views for those with “Medium” and those with “High” levels of education. There is also no difference in the proportion saying they want immigration levels increased (down at only 20 to 23 percent across all categories) with education.