RUTHFULLY YOURS

Global warming became climate change in response to the inconvenient truth that there has been no warming over the past 17 years. This is called a “pause,” with the expectation and anticipation that any day now temperatures will begin climbing again. And when temperatures do rise, it could be called a “pause” in global cooling – or, in other words, another turn in the endless cycle of the Earth warming and cooling.

Pope Francis and President Obama continue to preach the perils of global warming, not concerning themselves with any pause or faulty climate models. One of the world’s leading climate change experts disagrees about those perils noting some “mathematical anomalies which effectively ‘disprove’ global warming.”

Dr. David Evans was a climate modeler for the Australian government. He has six degrees in applied mathematics. In analyzing “complex mathematical assumptions widely used to predict climate change,” he predicts stable temperatures until 2017, after which the Earth will cool for the next decade, ushering in a mini-ice age by 2030.

Can an accurate analogy be drawn between American race relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict? UC Berkeley ethnic studies assistant professor Keith Feldman advocates this particular “special relationship” in his 2015 book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, the subject of a recent lecture sponsored by the University’s Center for Race & Gender (CRG).

CRG is home to the notoriously politicized Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) whose 2012 annual conference featured a jargon-riddled talk from Feldman. He was in similar form for CRG’s September 24 Thursday Forum Series, which included “commentary” by Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley comparative literature professor best known for her virulent anti-Israel activism. Feldman, a fellow endorser of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, stood at the podium, while Butler was seated at a front table. An audience of approximately sixty comprised mostly of students filled the large classroom in Dwinelle Hall.

Feldman, whose manner was humble and, at times, apologetic, began by thanking Butler for being his “interlocutor” and CRG for its “Islamophobia project,” which he described as “unique globally” and a “community” that he had “been able to engage . . . in the construction of this book.”

A news photograph from Hazem Bader, who chronicles newsworthy doings in Israel for Agence France Presse, inspired a good deal of guilty giggles on Tuesday: A Palestinian thug mishandled his Molotov cocktail and managed to set fire to his T-shirt and then to his keffiyeh, which had his compatriots scrambling to put out the flames dancing on his head. That was not the sort of halo that the holy warrior had in mind at all — martyrdom, yes, inshallah, but not right now. Like all decent people of good will, my first reaction was: Serves you right, ass. And then a smidgen of guilt: If you’ve ever seen a human being burned, you don’t wish it on anybody. Not even these Jew-hating jihadi bums.

I myself have been closer than you’d generally like to be to that sort of fire on a few occasions: the automobile accidents and house fires that are part of the daily newspaper fare; the fiery climax of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco; a terrorist bombing of a train near New Delhi. Burning, it seems, is a very bad way to go.

But, as everybody from the Joker to Heraclitus to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins has observed: Everything burns.

I cannot help but seeing in the image of that hapless would-be Palestinian murderer a metaphor for the entirety of the Palestinian experience, and for the broader jihadist worldview.

Israel is on the brink of a third intifada. In the last several days, Palestinians have shot, stabbed, and rammed Israeli civilians to death, prompting fears that suicide bombings are next. But even without explosives, the attacks have been gruesome enough. In the the last 24 hours, two terrorists boarded a bus, locked the doors, and started shooting and stabbing passengers until one terrorist was shot to death and the other wounded. That same day, a Palestinian man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, emerged from his vehicle “swinging an axe,” and killed a rabbi before he was stopped. In two other incidents, Palestinians seriously wounded Israelis in stabbing attacks.

What’s prompting the violence? The typical, tired media explanation for Palestinian attacks is “frustration with the lack of progress towards peace” (as if “peace” were ever the terrorists’ goal). But this time the consensus is that the immediate reason for violence is Palestinian rage over rumored policy changes at Jerusalem’s most holy sites. The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit explains:

The stated cause of the recent surge in attacks is Palestinians’ belief that the Israeli government is trying to change the status quo at the holy compound in Jerusalem, a place revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. According to security arrangements dating back to 1967, the site, while open to Jewish visitors at specific times, is sealed off to non-Muslim prayer.

HOORAY FOR JON BON JOVI….RSK
Ra’anana, Israel — “We don’t run. / I’m standing my ground. / We don’t run, / And we don’t back down. / There’s fire in the sky, / There’s thunder on the mountains. / Bless each tear and this dirt I was born in. / We don’t run. / We don’t run.”

Jon Bon Jovi sang these words ten days ago to a raucous crowd of 50,000 Israelis during his first-ever performance in the Jewish state. “This should be the fight song for all you Tel Aviv-ers,” Bon Jovi told us that night, as my wife, my son, and tens of thousands of our closest friends wildly applauded.

Little did the rocker know how apt his words would prove to be. Minutes before his performance, two Israelis were stabbed to death in Jerusalem’s Old City by a Palestinian attacker, in part of what has become a surge in terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

Already this month, the Jewish state has absorbed dozens of murderous assaults with guns, bombs, fists, screwdrivers, cars, axes, vegetable peelers, and, most commonly, knives. Most of the attacks have been carried out in broad daylight in public places for maximum effect.

The terrorism hit very close to home for my family Tuesday morning with two separate attacks in our town north of Tel Aviv, just blocks from our kids’ school.

Again total cover up in the Muslim invasion of Europe. In this report, a doctor describes the stabbing of an attending physician at one of the hospitals overrun with Muslim migrants — there are no arrests and no media coverage, of course. But there’s more — what he describes is gruesome.

Czech doctor describes conditions in German hospital — watch the whole thing:

Here is an excerpt from a work in progress:

There will be no way of stemming the flow of refugees, no effective defense against jihad conquest without a re-evaluation of the “Israel-Palestine” conflict. It is not the cause of instability in the Middle East; it is the core, the base, the launch pad for an assault on Western values. No degree of magnitude and horror of Daesh atrocities has yet untangled the twisted media narrative. Faced this fall with a flareup of murderous violence against Jewish Israeli civilians—again—media junkies indulge in the usual cheap tricks, reversing chronology to switch cause with effect and turn the hate-filled murderer into a Palestinian victim “shot dead by the police.” Day in day out they spin the same tired tales to shore up their tumbling certitudes. “It’s all because of the colonization.”

The Yom Kippur liturgy, just followed in synagogues around the world, repeats several times references to God as one who rescues captives. The central daily Jewish prayer as well refers to God who “supports the fallen, heals the sick, sets captives free.” And throughout Jewish history, the redemption of captives has been considered an important commandment. This is the background to the repeated decisions by the state of Israel to free a hundred or a thousand Arab prisoners in exchange for one single captive Jew. It is also the background to Israel’s actions to rescue the entire Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities by bringing them to Israel.

The rescue of threatened Jewish communities has been a central public purpose of Jews living in safety. American Jews pressed their government to push back against repression in Morocco in the 19th century and in czarist Russia in the early 20th. They failed to get the doors open for many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but they tried​—​despite rampant antisemitism, not least in the State Department. They succeeded in opening the doors of Soviet Russia, whence a million Jews fled to Israel.

Friends, I have a piece about Israel in the current issue of National Review. I thought I’d “blow it out” here in Impromptus. By that I mean, do an expanded version, in bulleted sections. See what you think.

During last month’s presidential debate, many of the candidates mentioned Israel. Jeb Bush, for example, said that we need to reestablish “our commitment to Israel, which has been altered by this administration.” Carly Fiorina said that the first phone call she would make, from the Oval Office, would be to “my good friend Bibi Netanyahu.” Its purpose would be “to reassure him we will stand with the State of Israel.”

Ted Cruz said, “If I’m elected president, our friends and allies across the globe will know that we stand with them. The bust of Winston Churchill will be back in the Oval Office. And the American embassy in Israel will be in Jerusalem.”

From time immemorial, American presidential candidates have pledged to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Then, when they become president, they find it inconvenient. Ted, however, is serious.

(I’d better append my disclosure: here. He is a friend, and I back him.)

After the debate, some observers wondered, “Why so much attention to Israel? Are these people running for president of the United States or president of Israel?”

I myself have received similar questions over the years. People ask, sometimes with scorn, sometimes with sincere curiosity, “Why do you write so much about Israel? Why are you hung up on Israel?” I would think the answer were obvious. But if it were, people would not ask these questions. And honest questions deserve honest answers.

Israel is the only state whose very right to exist is called into question. (Ukraine, however, is beset with problems of its own. And Taiwan has well-founded anxieties.) Ever since it was born in 1948, people have tried to kill Israel. It is a tiny country amid enemies.

Four wars of annihilation have been waged against Israel. There have been smaller conflicts as well, though still serious. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel. The first came in 1979, the second in 1994. Israel is still waiting for the third treaty.

Was ExxonMobil better at climate science than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? This is the bizarre position now being adopted by climate activists such as Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes and 350.org’s Bill McKibben. As early as 1977, Exxon researchers “knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously,” McKibben claimed in the New Yorker last month. “Present thinking,” an Exxon researcher wrote in a 1978 summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Ten years later, in 1988, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme jointly established the IPCC and, according to a U.N. General Assembly Resolution, tasked it with preparing “a comprehensive review” of the state of knowledge of the science of climate change. Two years later, the IPCC produced its first assessment report. By the late 1980s, the threat of human-driven climate change had, Oreskes wrote in the New York Times last week, “become an observed fact.”