RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We will not work with Israel’s universities” say 340 UK academics.

· In an unprecedented statement university teachers say they will not do business with Israel’s university institutions and system.
· Professors and lecturers, Fellows of the Royal Society and Fellows of the British Academy say they will not visit Israel’s universities.
· Academics from across 72 different institutions have made the Commitment, more expected to follow as campaign grows.
· Full page advertisement in The Guardian newspaper announces launch of the Commitment.
· Israeli universities “deeply complicit” with Israeli violations of international law.

A commitment signed by 343 academics across UK’s higher education system says they will not accept invitations for academic visits to Israel. They will not act as referees in activities related to Israel academic institutions, or cooperate in any other way with Israeli universities

This Academic Commitment is a response to the appeal for such action by Palestinian academics and civil society due to the deep complicity of Israeli academic institutions in Israeli violations of international law. Signatories have pledged to continue their commitment until Israel complies with international law, and respects Palestinian human rights.

The need for solidarity with the Palestinian people, as expressed in the Academic Commitment, is made more urgent today by the current escalation of violent conflict in Israel/Palestine. The fatalities are overwhelmingly of Palestinians engaging in street protests provoked by Israel’s 48-year and ever tightening occupation.

Here’s the roll of shame:

No need to rush to Specsavers or search for a magnifying glass: read more on this here

Declares Joy Wolfe, the redoubtable chairperson of StandWithUs UK:

‘ StandWithUs UK strongly condemns the call from British academics to boycott Israel. This move does nothing to help the Palestiians and potentially damages the long standing mutually beneficial links that are so important to both the UK and Israel. We welcome the strong statement from British Ambassador David Quarrey condemning the boycott call and reaffirming the UK’s anti boycott commitment. Ambassador Quarrey reiterated the importance of the significant and fruitful relationship shared by Israel and the United Kingdom.

“The British Government firmly opposes calls to boycott Israel. We are deeply committed to promoting the UK’s academic and scientific ties with Israel, as part the flourishing partnership between the two countries,” he said in a statement.

“The reality is one of rapidly strengthening trade and tech links between Britain and Israel. As David Cameron has said, the UK Government will never allow those who want to boycott Israel to shut down 60 years worth of vibrant exchange and partnership that does so much to make both our countries stronger,” he added.

Israeli academics should look closely at the names of those signing the boycott letter and ensure they do not further the double standards of the boycotters wishing to continue personal links’.

Nine years ago self-proclaimed “climate hawk” David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:

When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.

But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he’s singing a rather different tune:

Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.

Now he tells us.

Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.

When all strands of Palestinian political society came together in a deadly incitement based on religion radiating out from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, it left many dead on both sides of the religious divide – including the Jewish Israelis who were the prime target of Islam-motivated Palestinians.

Although the Islamic Movement and Hamas were two of the leading Palestinian instigators of the violence, it was the statements of a presumed secular Mahmoud Abbas that inflamed the Palestinian street. He, like Yasser Arafat before him, presumed to speak for the Muslim world when he exhorted his people in a televised address to his people on September 16,

“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

He was referring to his incitement to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount plateau, which is the holiest place in Judaism. About them he said,

“The Al-Aqsa Mosque is ours. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is ours as well. They have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet; we won’t allow them to do that.”

“Even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv, the Arab and Muslim world would still not recognize a Jewish state or agree to live with it in peace and harmony.”

“Much of the Islamic world now feels empowered, as perhaps never before, to seek global domination. This is the tangible and growing threat to the world; not global warming.”

“What we have witnessed for far too long are Israeli leaders constantly making endless concession to the deceitful leaders of the terrorist crime family known as the Palestinian Authority.”

In 2008 I wrote an article titled: “Forget Waiting for Peace.”

It is heartbreaking to look back now, in this year 2015, at what I feared would unfold for Israel those seven long years ago.

The reality of what I have been writing and warning about for so long is now even more stark today as Muslim Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, gleefully engage in an orgy of hate and murder against their Jewish victims throughout the towns and villages of Israel.

Israel’s internal security services, the Shin Bet, said earlier this month that the Palestinian militant group Hamas is among the key drivers of the violence raging in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The group’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, has called for an intifada, or uprising. Yet, he hasn’t unleashed Hamas’ huge arsenal of rockets or its trained fighting forces from the Gaza Strip, the territory he controls. Hamas has one foot in the uprising and one foot out.

Gaza has hardly been calm. Clashes along the border between Gaza and Israel have been happening daily, with breaches prompting the Israel Defense Forces to fire on the crowd. But, as Israeli journalist Amos Harel points out, Palestinian Islamic Jihad – the smaller Iran-backed militant group – was believed to be behind the border incidents, while Gaza’s Salafi groups that have been firing the rockets.

From an esteemed e-pal….”Daniel Gordis is a left-of-center Israeli who made Aliyah about 20 years ago. This article represents, among other things, a clear sign that despite fractious Israeli politics, an increasing proportion of the Israeli spectrum understands that peace cannot be made with the Palestinians until they accept the existence of a Jewish state. They do not currently accept a Jewish state in any borders. They teach their little kids Jew-hatred, and barbarism emerges from their population at the slightest pretext, or doesn’t need any pretext at all.A key fact in the long-term struggle is that the Palestinians currently feel encouraged in their war because the Europeans now have anti-Semitism seeping out of their pores. It was suppressed for some years after WWII, but it is impossible to suppress forever something so deeply engrained as European anti-Semitism (masquerading, not successfully, as anti-Zionism). But the most important key fact is that Obama’s hostility toward Israel (masquerading as Bibi-hatred) gives “permission” to the Europeans to give vent to how they really feel, and gives encouragement to the Palestinians that a crack has opened in the support of Israel by America. ”

Can they live together?
We have a young language instructor at Shalem College in Jerusalem, where I work. She’s a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She’s fun and warm, and a great teacher — the students like her a lot.

Late last spring, when things here were quiet, some of the students mentioned to the department chair that as much as they’d spoken with her over the past couple of years, they’d never discussed politics. They were curious what someone like her thought about the conflict in this region, especially now that she was teaching at an unabashedly Zionist college, had come to know so many Jewish students and had developed such warm relationships with them. How does someone like her see things here? How did she think we would one day be able to settle this conflict?
“So ask her,” the department chair said. “As long as you speak to her in Arabic (she’s on staff to help our students master the language), you can talk about anything you want.”
They did. They told her that since they’d never discussed the “situation” (as we metaphorically call it here in Israel), they were curious how she thought we might someday resolve it.
“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say.
“It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”

The media judges jihadist savagery as tolerable, but Jewish defensive action as unacceptable.

Some in the chattering class have argued that jihadism is understandable or even the “only option [1]” for supposedly disenfranchised Muslims seeking to overturn the status quo political order in the Middle East. This view evinces a soft bigotry of low expectations.

Conversely, the idea that Israel’s response to jihadism is always and everywhere “disproportionate” – that unless Israel acts in a self-righteously suicidal [2] manner [3] it is in the wrong – evinces a hard bigotry of “high” expectations. I put “high” in parentheses because the idea that sacrificing oneself to one’s enemies is a high and moral standard is among the most perverse and low ideas.

Never has this hard bigotry been better illustrated than in the media coverage [4] in recent weeks of the Third Intifada being perpetrated by Arab jihadists in Israel – an Intifada deemed by some the Obama Intifada [5].

The Secretary of State of the United States traveled to the Muslim country of Jordan to assure its Foreign Minister that Jews would not be praying any more at the holiest site in Judaism.

As Kerry put it, “It is Muslims who pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and non-Muslims who visit.”

Israel is often accused of apartheid and segregation, but here was the Secretary of State championing both, as long as it was Muslim segregation aimed at Jews. The Temple Mount “Status Quo” worriedly talked about by Kerry and the media as the answer to the recent Muslim stabbing spree is no different than the Muslim ban on Jews entering the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried, past the seventh step. It rewards Muslim violence by upholding Muslim segregationist racism.

Fantasy Islam: A game in which an audience of non-Muslims wish with all their hearts that Islam was a “Religion of Peace,” and a Muslim strives to fulfill that wish by presenting a personal version of Islam that has little foundation in Islamic Doctrine.

As I have mentioned before, “Fantasy Islam” is a popular game among many non-Muslims and so-called “moderate” or “reformist” Muslims. Reza Aslan appears to be such a Muslim.

Reza Aslan was born in Iran. In 1979, at the age of seven, he and his family fled the Iranian Revolution and came to the United States. At the age of 15 he converted to evangelical Christianity, but later returned to Islam. His website states that he is “an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions.” He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

In 2005 Aslan wrote a book titled No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. The updated edition came out in 2011. This article addresses that updated edition.

It should be noted that in his book Aslan listed The Life of Muhammad and the multi-volume work The History of al-Tabari, as among the books he “consulted.” These are classical works by Muslim scholars and major sources for information about Muhammad and Islam. Aslan even specifically mentions them as among those that have “catalogued” the story of Islam (p. xxiv). Unfortunately, although Aslan claims that he “consulted” them, we will see that he apparently overlooked conflicting information in these works in favor of playing Fantasy Islam.

Death Penalty for Apostasy is “Un-Quranic”

On p. 121 Aslan stated that the death penalty for apostasy was “un-Quranic,” and he stated that nowhere in the Koran “is any earthly punishment prescribed for apostasy.”