RUTHFULLY YOURS

A settlement between the University of Illinois (UI) and former Virginia Tech University professor Steven Salaita was approved by UI’s Board of Trustees Thursday. He will receive a lump sum payment of $600,000 and $275,000 in legal costs. In return, he will not seek or accept future employment by the university.

Thus concludes a saga that began in the summer of 2014 when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) withdrew an offered position in its American Indian Studies Program due to Salaita’s vulgar, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets. He sued the university and unnamed donors, alleging breach of contract and violation of free speech.

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated.

Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted to follow suit. They will do so because Europe, rich and decadent, irresistibly tempts them. In all creation disease and frailty invite predators, as witnessed in the scene of Madame Hortense’s death in Zorba the Greek. Both the loss of the will to define and defend one’s native land and culture, and the loss of the desire to procreate, send an alluring signal to the teeming kazbahs and sukhs: Come, ye all, there’s money for nothin’ and chicks for free. Come, for no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—to keep you out in the name of its own survival. According to the leading German daily Die Welt (October 14), “Merkel’s call of welcome echoes even in West-Africa. The German welcome-culture appeals in Mali even to those who did not want to leave until now. TV pictures of nice people with welcome presents lure migrants. German visas can be bought.”

Spengler famously heralded The Decline of the West ninety years ago, but the English title of his magnum opus did not convey the dark, tragic implications of the word Untergang, “going under.” Spengler himself did not anticipate a cataclysmic event but rather an extended decline, a twilight. (Abendland, the West, literally means the “evening land.”) It now appears that the protracted fall is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
THIS week the European Commission announced guidelines suggesting that Israeli products from areas that came under its control in 1967 be labeled “Israeli Settlement” products and not “Made in Israel” as they have been until now. The policy carves out a special legal rule for Israel, not only contradicting the European Union’s own official positions on these issues, but also going against rulings of European national courts, and violating basic tenets of the World Trade Organization.

Faced with criticism from both the right and the left in Israel and the United States, the European Union claims its action is merely “technical,” rather than politically motivated or punitive. Yet this is belied by the fact that the measure comes in response to explicitly political demands for labeling by some member states’ foreign ministers, as well as anti-Israel NGOs.

In fact, the labeling controversy must be viewed as just one step in a broader, purposeful and gradual escalation of anti-Israel measures by the European Union. Two years ago, the commission promulgated a regulation that barred spending money on Israeli academic, scientific or cultural projects in the West Bank or Golan Heights. Then the union began refusing to allow imports of certain Israeli agricultural products. Last year, 15 European states issued warnings, alerting people to unspecified legal dangers of interacting with Israeli settlements. These steps, while supposedly motivated by what the European Union sees as Israel’s occupation of territory, have been applied only to Israel, and not to other countries regarded as occupiers in international law, such as Morocco or Turkey.

Just when you thought you’d heard it all from professional peace promoter Martin Indyk, he goes and one-ups himself. The ability to do so when the policies he has espoused over the decades have consistently backfired is an accomplishment in and of itself. And it explains why he was appointed twice to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel and also filled the role of assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.

Indyk, author of “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East,” has always held the position that an accord is possible between Israel and the Palestinians — if the “two sides” would only trust one another. This, of course, is why he was a perfect fit for Secretary of State John Kerry, under whom he was dispatched to Israel as an envoy to broker a deal.

Well, that didn’t work out so well, and he quit after nine months to return to his full-time job as director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He, like many peace processers, feels more at home presenting global strategies in a think tank than confronting the need for actual tanks in the real Middle East the rest of us occupy.

This is not to say that Indyk is uncomfortable in Israel. On the contrary, he loves visiting the country where he is treated like a king by the chattering classes, while enjoying a cappuccino or two from balconies overlooking the Mediterranean.

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.