RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Brendan O’Neill, is Editor of Spiked-Online.com
It’s been clear for years that the left has been losing the moral plot. But I never thought I would see it apologise for, even defend, the stabbing to death of Jews. The silver lining for the left is that it’s impossible for it to sink any lower. This is as low as it gets.

The response in the West to the spate of foul murders by car, knife and meat cleaver in Israel has been almost as shocking as the killings themselves. Many have stayed silent, a global version of “bystander culture”, where people look awkwardly at the ground as someone is battered in front of them. The Western media is currently a shameless shuffling bystander to murders in Israel.

Others have asked, “Well, what do Israelis expect?” The crashing of cars into rabbis waiting for a bus and the hacking at Israeli citizens doing their weekly shop is treated as a normal response by Palestinians to their woes.

Anyone who believes Voltaire’s familiar adage that history never repeats itself invariably confronts Karl Marx’s challenge that history does exactly that: “first as tragedy, then as farce.” There can be no doubt where Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his acolytes stand on this philosophical disagreement. They are true-believing Marxists who faithfully reiterate hoary lies about the imagined murder of innocent Palestinian boys by evil Israelis.

Fifteen years ago, a France 2 broadcast ostensibly revealed a 12-year-old Palestinian boy dying from Israeli gunfire in his father’s arms. Filmed in Gaza only days after Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the Temple Mount had sparked Palestinian rioting in Jerusalem that launched the second intifada, the poignant image of terrified Muhammad al-Dura moments before his (presumed) death went viral. Israeli cruelty, vividly documented and endlessly transmitted, became a mantra that inspired, among others, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who slit the throat of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl) and Osama bin Laden.

Months after the al-Dura incident, an IDF investigation concluded that if the boy was indeed killed it could not have been by Israeli bullets. By then, however, Muhmmad al-Dura’s martyrdom had become an inspirational mantra for the second intifada. But an Israeli government inquiry launched 12 years later revealed the mendacity of Palestinian allegations (and likely French complicity). In scenes not shown by France 2, al-Dura was seen alive raising his arm and turning his head toward the cameraman — after his presumed death.

Recent reports have indicated that hundreds of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps troops entered Syria in early September. Moreover, the accord on intelligence among Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria suggests Russian troops will be assisting the Iranians in the war against ISIS. That may not be all.

Israeli officials are appropriately concerned that Russian troops will be operating in the Golan Heights along with Hezbollah and Assad-led Syrian forces. Israel is faced with the additional challenge of the expanded Russian presence in Syria, especially in the Latakia region, where in the past IDF forces destroyed arms convoys intended for Hezbollah.

When Israeli forces returned fire on two Syrian positions near Quneitra, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded: “We respect Israel’s interests related to the Syrian civil war but we are concerned about its attacks on Syria.” Clearly this statement is mutually contradictory; if you are concerned about Israel’s interests than it must be protected by defensive military action. Nonetheless, this response stands as a warning signal. Certain attacks may be justified as long as they do not jeopardize the position and security of Syria’s President Bashar al Assad.

The world divides into those who sincerely believe in that “Coexist” sticker and those who think it’s a delusional evasion. After all, if it weren’t for that big Muslim crescent “C” at the front, you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all:

That peace-symbol “O”? It’s Muslims, alas, who kill secular hippie pacifist backpackers in Bali nightclubs.

That equal-rights “E”? It’s Muslims who take girls as their sex slaves in Nigeria and kill their own daughters and sisters in Germany because rape has rendered them “unclean”.

The star-of-David “X”? It’s Muslims who are currently stabbing and running over Jews in Jerusalem and then celebrating by passing out free candy.

In India, it’s Muslims vs Hindus. In southern Thailand, Muslims vs Buddhists. The world is a messy, violent, complicated place, but as a rule of thumb, as I said all those years ago in America Alone, in most corners of the planet it boils down to: Muslims vs [Your Team Here].

Secretary of State John Kerry explained at the State Department’s Climate and Clean Energy Investment Forum today why climate change is “certainly one of two of the defining issues of our generation and perhaps the defining issue of our generation, because of the stakes.”

“The other being the rise of radical extremism, sectarianism, and the failure of states simultaneously surrounding it, and vast populations of young people needing jobs instead of mind-bending theories of false assumptions about Islam and other things. Both are gigantic challenges,” Kerry acknowledged.

But “thankfully,” he said, “the solution to this particular challenge, climate change, is actually just as simple as the realization that it is the challenge that it is.”

COP-21, the 21st Conference of the Parties (to the Global Climate Treaty) is convening in Paris (November 30 to December 11, 2015) to try to impose global restrictions on the emission of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide. The usual cast of characters will show up — delegates from nearly 200 nations, who have made a lifetime career out of the climate business, plus some 15,000 hangers-on. We think they will fail to reach an effective international agreement — for a variety of reasons: Important developing countries have other priorities; scandals are brewing and may flare up; and the climate itself is not cooperating. But the media will portray Paris as a huge success, trying to burnish the environmental-climate legacy of President Barack Obama.

Paris will be a big “nothing-burger”

Do you remember Anne Gorsuch, who may have coined this pungent term? She was the first female administrator of EPA, and rather different from both Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy. Gorsuch served for a couple of years in the Reagan administration, during which time she managed to cut the EPA budget and slim down the agency. She proved that a determined administrator can do something to rein in the regulatory excesses of the EPA. [Actually, one of the most effective ways of achieving that goal might be to expand the EPA office in Alaska, and then transfer most of the Washington activists to that office.]

Supporters of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are truly rare among that country’s Christian minority, yet Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) found one. Hartford Seminary Professor Najib George Awad’sSeptember 28 presentation (audio) before six people in ACMCU’s boardroom continued a longstanding, surreal ACMCU pattern of never locating Christians with any fears of Islam.

With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”