RUTHFULLY YOURS

CAIR’s foundation was built upon anti-Israel activists seeking to tear apart Western society. Today’s CAIR is no different. A current hotspot for CAIR extremism is in Orlando, Florida, where CAIR-Florida just held an annual fundraising banquet and just hired a coordinator to take the place of a recently arrested sexual predator. The days of Orlando only being about theme parks and tourism are over. Now, residents and tourists have something else to look forward to – the threat radical Islam.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was established in June 1994 as being part of the American Palestine Committee, a terrorist umbrella group headed by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. The people who founded CAIR, including present National Executive Director Nihad Awad, were previously leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), a now defunct organization that was at the time the American propaganda wing of Hamas and also one of the groups that made up the Palestine Committee.

CAIR-Florida, like those who established its parent organization, is made up of anti-Israel radicals.

CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly has referred to Hezbollah as “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization” and, in August 2014, tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of G-d…” In December 2010, CAIR-Florida CEO and Statewide Regional Operations Director Nezar Hamze, repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas, when given numerous chances to do so, stating “I’m not denouncing anybody. I’m not getting involved in the politics.”

France’s plan to use its position at the UN Security Council to bring about the deployment of international monitors to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem has been condemned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers as biased, unhelpful and detached from reality.

Certainly it is all those things. But France’s decision to use its diplomatic position to advance a plan which if implemented would end Israeli sovereignty over Judaism’s holiest site is first and foremost a French act of aggression against the Jewish state.

Contrary to what the French government would have us believe, France’s Temple Mount gambit is not an effort to quell the violence. French protestations of concern over the loss of life in the current tempest of Palestinian terrorism ring hollow.

France doesn’t really oppose Palestinian terrorism.

If the world is lucky, nothing of greater substance than delegates’ hotel bills will emerge from the upcoming catastropharian confab in the City of Light. And if things go badly for common sense? Well, Malcolm Turnbull will be tickled even pinker and the rest of us left poorer
This December’s annual UN Conference of the Parties in Paris — known as COP 21 — takes place in the context of 18-plus years of global temperature stability. Many scathing remarks have been made about previous meetings, especially the 2009 Copenhagen gathering which Kevin Rudd attended with a 114-strong delegation, expecting to forge an agreement that would deliver the greenhouse gas abatement commitments he and others had promoted.

Since then, five subsequent annual meetings also have failed to bring agreements on binding commitments. This has been much to the relief of those who consider that human-induced climate change is non-existent or trivial and that to counter it would cripple national economies and, indeed, the world economy.

The ghost of the “pause” in temperature increases is, however, hardly haunting the upcoming meeting. The impetus for action this year is particularly strong. President Obama has made an agreement into a “signature” policy that will define the success of his Presidency, saying, “My definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we’ll get in Paris.”[1]. The President also has argued that climate change has contributed to the rise of ISIS and Boko Haram[2], and his national security adviser, Susan Rice, swears that the world faces disaster unless we stop climate change [3].

United Nations Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon has jetted into Jerusalem on a fool’s errand – with tensions continuing to escalate between Arabs and Jews as their conflict spanning almost 100 years remains unresolved.

The Secretary-General observed:

“Beyond the immediate tensions, what is missing is the resolve to restore a political horizon for talks, and a political process that delivers real results and hope … We must, for the future of our children, turn back from this dangerous abyss, safeguard the two-state solution and lead people back onto the road towards peace”

Safeguarding this “two-state solution” – code words for creating a second Arab State in Mandatory Palestine in addition to Jordan – is a lost cause. Restoring talks on this failed political process after twenty years of fruitless negotiations is meaningless United Nations babble speak.

This story is almost unbelievable.

The elite and pricey Williams College has a speaker series called “Uncomfortable Learning.” The idea is to bring to campus people whose thinking is unconventional and who will spark thought and debate. One speaker who was invited is Suzanne Venker. She dissents from most of the feminist orthodoxy and sent in the text of her talk ahead of time. As she explains in this piece, she wanted the students to hear her view that feminism fails “because it denies the existence of biology and teaches that equality means sameness, which is a losing proposition when it comes to planning a life….”

You can guess the rest. When students found out that a speaker who’d make them THAT uncomfortable was going to be on campus, they did just what so many of our brilliant young minds enrolled at elite colleges do — they demanded that Venker be kept from speaking.

What is the endgame of the contemporary green movement? It’s a critical question since environmentalism arguably has become the leading ideological influence in both California government and within the Obama administration. In their public pronouncements, environmental activists have been adept at portraying the green movement as reasonable, science-based and even welcoming of economic growth, often citing the much-exaggerated promise of green jobs.

The green movement’s real agenda, however, is far more radical than generally presumed, and one that former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said is defined by a form of “misanthropic nostalgia.” This notion extends to an essential dislike for mankind and its creations. In his book “Enough,” green icon Bill McKibben claims that “meaning has been in decline for a long time, almost since the start of civilization.”

And you may have thought the Romans and ancient Chinese were onto something!

How is Israel supposed to negotiate when its very existence is considered unacceptable?
Some hard realities need to be faced about the Middle East “peace process.” The US, EU, UN and others have said the “settlements” are an obstacle to peace. The Arabs point to the “occupation.”

However, neither of these are the core issue…. and frankly, they never have been. Why? Keep in mind there was no “occupation” or “settlements” in 1948 when the surrounding Arab nations attacked the fledgling Jewish nation one day after declaring independence.

Moreover, where were settlements or occupation in 1967?

So if it isn’t the “occupation,” or “settlements,” what is the real issue? While many consider these to be legitimate issues, the Arabs are using them as a deliberate smokescreen.

The core issue is the Muslim’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist. It’s as simple as that. This is the main reason why the first attempt at a two-state solution (the 1947 UN partition plan) was not successful. The Muslims would not allow a Jewish state on land which they consider theirs. Its size or borders didn’t matter. It was, and remains, its mere existence.

Remember when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) that universities would no longer need race-preferential admissions policies in 25 years? By the end of this year, that period will be half over. Yet the level of preferential treatment given to minority students has, if anything, increased.

Meanwhile, numerous studies—as I explain in a recent report for the Heritage Foundation—show that the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action are less likely to go on to high-prestige careers than otherwise-identical students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them in the middle of the class or higher. In other words, encouraging black students to attend schools where their entering credentials place them near the bottom of the class has resulted in fewer black physicians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and professors than would otherwise be the case.

But university administrators don’t want to hear that their support for affirmative action has left many intended beneficiaries worse off, and they refuse to take the evidence seriously.

The mainstream media support them on this. The Washington Post, for instance, recently featured a story lamenting that black students are less likely to major in science and engineering than their Asian or white counterparts. Left unstated was why. As my report shows, while black students tend to be a little more interested in majoring in science and engineering than whites when they first enter college, they transfer into softer majors in much larger numbers and so end up with fewer science or engineering degrees.

It is painful to hear the phrase “lone wolves” applied to the handful
— and perhaps tomorrow the dozens and then the hundreds — of killers
of Jews “liked” by thousands of “friends,” followed by tens of
thousands of “Tweeters,” and connected to a constellation of sites
(such as the Al-Aqsa Media Center and its page dedicated to “the third
Jerusalem intifada”) that are orchestrating, at least in part, this
bloody ballet.

It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about “Palestinian
youth no longer subject to any control,” after seeing the series of
sermons published by the Middle East Media Research Institute, in
which preachers from Gaza, facing the camera, dagger in hand, call
upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they
can, to inflict as much pain as possible and to spill the maximum
amount of blood; doubly painful to hear that refrain from Mahmoud
Abbas himself, at the outset of this tragic chain of events a few
weeks back, describing as “heroic” the murder of the Henkins in the
presence of their children, and then expressing indignation at seeing
the “dirty feet” of Jews “defiling” the Al-Aqsa Mosque and declaring
“each drop of blood” shed by “each martyr” who dies for Jerusalem
“pure.”

Why did Professor Yvonne Haddad call Naim Ateek and Jonathan Kuttab “two Palestinian Christians writing eloquently about Palestine?” Why – as he welcomed them to Georgetown University on Sept. 25 – did he say that he has been following these anti-Israel propagandists for years? The pair’s background and biases also appeared to not bother the “Christians in the Holy Land” event’s audience members, which included a Catholic priest and Haddad’s colleague, Jonathan Brown.

Although largely unstated at the panel, Ateek (an Anglican priest) and Kuttab (a University of Virginia Law School graduate) both have longstanding anti-Israel backgrounds. The pair was among the 1989 founders of the Sabeel Ecumenical Theology Liberation Center in Jerusalem, a Palestinian Christian organization noted for its anti-Semitism and condemnation of Israeli “apartheid.” With Kuttab’s approval, Ateek subsequently helped draft the 2009 Kairos Palestine document with its praise of terrorism and replacement theology.