RUTHFULLY YOURS

Another scientist gets blackballed for his skepticism about global warming.

On Monday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson took a tilt at climate skeptics. “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,” Gerson wrote. As a non-scientist, he decided that the answer to the question of whether humans had warmed the planet was to trust scientists.

The article’s timing was unfortunate. Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Speigel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said.

Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied,

the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist.

One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:

Ever since she emerged on the US national political scene, the mainstream media and Hollywood have treated Hillary Clinton as if she’s the be all end all of womanhood. That she is the world’s smartest woman. That her ascension to the ultimate seat of power, the presidency of the United States, was nothing less than inevitable.

We’re hearing it again now — that Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in for the presidency in 2016. She’s unbeatable. No Democrat stands a chance against her if she decides to run. The Republicans shouldn’t even bother to field a candidate.

Of course, they were all saying the same things about Clinton in 2007. She became quite evitable when Barack Obama came out of nowhere to steal her birthright with grins, celebrity and empty speeches.

Clinton will probably prove to be just as not-invincible in 2016. For all the hype that the media builds around her, Hillary Clinton is probably the most over-rated politician on the planet.

Not only is Hillary Clinton not an inspiring candidate, with no compelling backstory to fuel her run. Not only is Hillary Clinton a lousy stump speaker whose cadence and style careen between the wooden and the clownish. Not only did she prove to be a terrible campaign manager in 2007-08, elevating incompetent loyalists to positions of power when seasoned professionals were needed. Not only is Hillary Clinton all of that. Not only does Hillary Clinton have horrible taste in fashion (pantsuits…really?) She’s a lousy, blundering oaf when it comes to policy.

Hillary Clinton’s political career is filled with major, damaging mistakes.

The most current example of Hillary’s follies is Boko Haram. That terrorist group is currently holding about 220 girls hostage in Nigeria, and is almost surely doing unspeakable things to its captives. This morning broke with news that the Islamic terrorists are planning to use the girls as bargaining chips to get hundreds of its own jihadists released from prisons in Nigeria and probably elsewhere. Islamist groups across the world have been angling for a way to get the blind sheikh, the Santa-hatted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack, released from prison in the United States. In fact, getting him released motivated the attacks on September 11, 2012, including the one in Benghazi, Libya, that Hillary Clinton later blamed on a YouTube movie.

Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic.

It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.

Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.”

This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.

On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world’s most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with “imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew “to preserve the celebratory spirit” of Smith’s commencement.

On Tuesday, Haverford College’s graduating intellectuals forced commencement speaker Robert J. Birgeneau to withdraw. Get this: Mr. Birgeneau is the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, the big bang of political correctness. It gets better.

Berkeley’s Mr. Birgeneau is famous as an ardent defender of minority students, the LGBT community and undocumented illegal immigrants. What could possibly be wrong with this guy speaking at Haverford??? Haverfordians were upset that in 2011 the Berkeley police used “force” against Occupy protesters in Sproul Plaza. They said Mr. Birgeneau could speak at Haverford if he agreed to nine conditions, including his support for reparations for the victims of Berkeley’s violence.

In a letter, Mr. Birgeneau replied, “As a longtime civil rights activist and firm supporter of nonviolence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks.”

Smith president Kathleen McCartney felt obliged to assert that she is “committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect.” And Haverford’s president, Daniel Weiss, wrote to the students that their demands “read more like a jury issuing a verdict than as an invitation to a discussion or a request for shared learning.”

Mr. Birgeneau, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Weiss and indeed many others in American academe must wonder what is happening to their world this chilled spring.

Collector Had Change of Heart on Works Stolen From Jews, Wanted Other Pieces to Leave Germany

Cornelius Gurlitt, 81 years old and his heart faltering, called a notary to his Bavarian hospital bed in early January, determined to write a last will and testament inspired by love and hate.

Mr. Gurlitt—stung by the local government’s seizure of the cache of priceless art that he called his life’s only love and by the world-wide furor over the fact that much of it was snatched from Jews by the Nazis—had two desires: to burnish his family name by giving the trove to a museum and to send it out of Germany.

Only two months earlier, after a German magazine had exposed his secret collection, Mr. Gurlitt had vowed never to return any of the paintings.

But the secret will he signed in the Ludwigsburg, Germany, hospital was his first step toward an agreement with German officials ensuring the looted works could go back to their rightful owners.

Cornelius Gurlitt for decades hid a collection of modern European masterpieces. Zuma Press

The story of the art collector’s change of heart is filled with legal maneuvering, delicate negotiations and personal appeals to Mr. Gurlitt by German government officials urging him to let go of art he so loved. His about-face culminated in frenzied and fragile negotiations between his lawyers and the government that climaxed just before his death last week.

Mr. Gurlitt’s decision, people close to him say, reflected in part his alienation from his country and anger at the Bavarian officials who confiscated his collection. At first, he “felt like a victim of Bavaria,” a person close to the collector says. But, as he began “growing paler by the day, he wanted to keep his father’s name from being tarnished and give back the Jewish art.”

Mr. Gurlitt’s story made global headlines in November, when the German magazine Focus reported that prosecutors in Augsburg had in 2012 secretly discovered about 1,400 valuable works in his apartment, including Nazi loot. In the final days of World War II, his father, art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, had loaded his family and those artworks into a truck to flee Allied bombing, ending up at a baron’s castle in Bavaria.

The roller-coaster quest to get late collector Cornelius Gurlitt to give back the Nazi-looted pieces in his trove nearly hit a wall until the ailing octogenarian had a fateful change of heart. Timeline

After the Focus report, Germany faced intense pressure from the U.S., Israel and others to return the looted works to their rightful owners. But in Mr. Gurlitt, Germany faced a difficult negotiating partner. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was under no legal obligation to cooperate. And his legal team at times splintered into camps, making it tough to negotiate.

A Wall Street Journal examination of the dealings over Mr. Gurlitt’s collection—based on unreleased documents and on interviews with politicians, officials close to the case and a small group that assisted the collector—provides an inside look at his last months and how close Germany’s deal came to collapsing before he died.

The government deal, involving Bavarian and national agencies, happened partly because of Mr. Gurlitt’s hope he would see the art again before his death—a wish that went unfulfilled.

Mr. Gurlitt had spent his later years living a hermit’s life in a fifth-floor apartment in Munich’s gentrified Schwabing district, tending to artworks he inherited from his father, one of Adolf Hitler’s art dealers.

Mr. Gurlitt had few outside contacts after his mother’s death, his days punctuated by strolls to the grocery store and afternoon coffee at the Palate Game, a cafe with a Queen Elizabeth II bobblehead doll in the window. His only extravagance seemed limited to trying different cakes, says Alexander Vesely, the proprietor.

The incident that ended his tranquil existence occurred Sept. 22, 2010. On the EC197 train from Zurich to Munich, customs officials searched Mr. Gurlitt and found €9,000—below the limit requiring a declaration but enough to raise tax-evasion suspicions. Prosecutors in Augsburg, Bavaria’s third-largest city, ordered a search of Mr. Gurlitt’s home on Feb. 28, 2012.

“The spiritual father of the fanatical incitement against the Jews was Abner of Burgos, a Jewish kabbalist and scholar who converted to Christianity in about 1321, upon experiencing a deep religious and spiritual crisis, and became known as Alfonso of Valladolid. His… despair of the Jewish question found expression in his polemics—some written in Hebrew, others in Spanish—which contain a complete doctrine of denunciation of the Jews and their laws and morals. Oral Law, he maintained, constituted a code of robbery, usury and deception. …Various sayings by the Talmudic sages … were interpreted by this apostate to mean that the Jews must be deprived of the easy livelihoods of usury and medicine, that they must be deprived of their autonomy and that they must be terrorized and subjected to harsh laws. Only then would they merit redemption.”

–H. H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People.

Prelude: at Vassar College

Starting in late February the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie has been the scene of some of the ugliest depredations yet organized by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign designed to expel Israel from the family of nations. The college founded in the nineteenth century by a brewer has become a witches’ brew of bullying and raw violence carried out by Students for Justice in Palestine and its collaborators. They described themselves as “staging an action [italics mine]” (on March 3) against the on-campus part of an International Studies class that was to include a trip to the Middle East to consider “water issues” in the region. Since the Jew and then the Israeli have been perpetually on trial it was considered necessary by Vassar to convene a special forum to consider the “ethics” of a course that would include setting foot in Israel. Although the trip’s itinerary confirmed that its (predictably tendentious) purpose was to convince students that Israel is unfairly depriving Palestinian Arabs of water, that slander was not sufficient to protect it (or its two garden-variety Jewish leftist instructors) from the wrath of BDSers, who consider Israel the devil’s own experiment station or, in the colorful lingo of Philip Weiss, a Jewish hater of Israel in attendance at the forum, “a blot on civilization.” Their violence (which included screaming, interruptions, and perhaps ululating) was the existential realization of a letter published on March 1 by a group of thirty-nine Vassar faculty members who condemned the Vassar administration for daring to criticize the recently passed resolution of the American Studies Association in favor of boycotting Israeli academic institutions.

The professors charged that critics of the ASA boycotters had had “a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas and opinions.” It is now almost 65 years since Lionel Trilling remarked (in The Liberal Imagination) on the way in which modern liberals not only want the right to go their own way in all things, but to go their own way without any questions ever being asked of them. Those who carried out the “action” also had their special complaint. According to Weiss they were “people of color” (perhaps by analogy with “jeans of blue”), and therefore entitled to accuse their critics of “racism.” (They understand liberal-left quackery only too well: liberals think “the poor” are their equals in every sense … except that of being equal to them.) But the final word on that allegation of “chilled” discourse was left to the gloating Weiss: “The spirit of that young progressive space was that Israel is a blot on civilization, and boycott is right and necessary. If a student had gotten up and said, I love Israel, he or she would have been mocked and scorned into silence.”

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim, 27, is a graduate of the School of Medicine at Khartoum University and lifelong Christian. Meriam, met and married her naturalized American husband in Khartoum in 2012, and they have a 20-month old toddler son. Currently pregnant with their second child, Meriam was sentenced to death for apostasy and 100 lashes for adultery by the Public Order Court in El Haj Yousif, Khartoum, Sudan on May 11, 2014. Meriam Ibrahim’s case illustrates starkly the liberty-crushing barbarity of Sharia, and the disgraceful, abject U.S. capitulation to the horror of this ubiquitous religious totalitarianism.

First there are the morally depraved Sharia “charges,” sham legal proceedings, and heinous “punishments”—all antithetical to Western conceptions of law and justice

A year ago, a purported relative of Ibrahim opened a case against her (and her husband) in Halat Kuku Court of Khartoum North for alleged “adultery” under article 146 of the Sudan Criminal Code because of her marriage to a Christian. Ibrahim’s husband Daniel Wani was accused of proselytizing a Muslim, and eventually authorities added the apostasy charge to Ibrahim herself. She was arrested on February 17, 2014, and is currently detained in Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison along with her 20-month-old son, Martin Wani. Meriam Ibrahim was charged with the so-called Sharia “hadd offenses” under Sudan’s Penal Code of adultery (per article 146), and “apostasy’”(forsaking Islam, per article 126).

Ibrahim’s Sudanese Muslim father abandoned the family when she was 6 years old, leaving her to be raised by her Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother. During a March 4, 2014 “hearing” Ibrahim testified before the Public Order Court that she is a Christian, showing her marriage certificate—which designates her as Christian—as formal proof of her religion. Moreover, three potential witnesses from Western Sudan who traveled to the hearing to validate Ibrahim’s lifelong adherence to Christianity were denied the opportunity to provide evidence. Indeed the refusal to accept such witness testimony, and denying a priori the validity of Ibrahim’s own claims, would be entirely consistent with a Sharia Court’s rejection (or dismissal) of non-Muslim testimony because infidels are deemed to be of a lower order of truthfulness. Ibrahim’s naturalized American husband, Daniel Wani reports that since their incarceration a guard named Kawther Hassen has not allowed his wife and son to receive visits, including from him, or to access medical assistance. However, Mr Wani also notes that his wife has been allowed visits by Muslim scholars who have been pressuring her to ‘return’ to Islam, the religion of her father.

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a hysterical article charging the New York Police Department with trampling Muslim civil rights by trying to recruit Muslims who had been arrested on other charges to be informants. The headline screamed “New York Police Recruit Muslims as Informants on Terrorism” and proceeded to “expose” the “profiling of Muslims” by the NYPD to serve as potential informants from within their communities. Reporter Joseph Goldstein interviewed people who had been questioned by police and found the exercise “coercive.”

NYPD records show “that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city’s holding cells and lockup facilities,” the story said. Police reports noted which mosque a suspect attended or whether he “had made a pilgrimage to Mecca.” The story did not say why this is inherently problematic and how this differs from policing on everything from drug peddling to organized crime. But its appearance on Sunday’s front page — on the right column above the fold — tells readers that this is a big deal.

The article implied that Muslims were being singled out by law-enforcement officials because of their religion, and that they were asked invasive and improper questions about their religion.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own it, H.L. Mencken once said, an axiom that The Times has demonstrated repeatedly by routinely deprecating the threat of “Islamic terrorism” in the United States. For years, The Times has blindly pursued an agenda that coincides with the same agenda of radical Islamic groups masquerading as “civil rights” groups in trying to prove that Islamic terrorists were unfairly convicted and framed.

Ignoring the facts about U.S. law enforcement techniques that apply to all members of divergent ethnic and religious groups to collect intelligence, Goldstein reported on what he presented as the improper questioning of Muslims held in jails. Amazingly, the paper did not question at all the credibility of the allegations perpetrated by those he interviewed, all of whom had been arrested and jailed for violating laws, including an NYPD sergeant convicted of perjury in the fabricated hunt for scoundrels in the NYPD.

As part of the paranoid Times narrative, the reporter portrayed as unethical and racist the tried and proven law-enforcement technique of recruiting informants among different ethnic population pools. The same tactic is applied in the fight against illegal gangs, druggies, and criminal organizations: street gangs, Mexican drug cartels, Japanese yakuza gangs, Italian mafia, etc. Recruiting members of different ethnic and racial groups to infiltrate gangs and criminals has been a successful, legal and proven technique of collecting vital intelligence by law-enforcement officials across the country.

For The New York Times to claim that recruiting jailed Muslims as informants in their own communities is somehow racist is manifestly disingenuous and dishonest. Pat Dunleavy should know. He served as deputy inspector-general of the New York State Department of Corrections.

In Part One of this review of James W. Ely, Jr.’s book, The Guardian of Every Other Right, I began:
At the end of Ayn Rand’s prophetic 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, a judge who is on strike with other producers against a future, nightmarish state of America (echoes of Obama) and has disappeared with them into a Rocky Mountain sanctuary, is at work. Before him is a “copy of an ancient document [the Constitution]. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…'”
At the end of Part One, I concluded:
…[T]he absence of a distinction between “personal” and “property” rights in the premises of the framers underscores Rand’s dictum about the integration of political, economic and intellectual freedoms. Only the framers never quite put it so succinctly. One almost wishes she had attended the Convention to instruct them on that point.
James Ely wrote that James Madison, a champion of property rights, wanted to ensure the protection of property rights, and drafted a proposed statement to be attached to the Constitution.
That government is instituted, and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Perhaps thinking that the purposes of government were self-evident, Congress did not accept this declaration. (p. 54)
But outside the enumerated powers granted to Congress, many men did not think it was so self-evident what the purposes of the government were. Thus the fierce debate for and against a bill of rights in the ratification period. Ely provides further evidence of Madison’s linking liberties with property rights when the Founder drafted the Fifth Amendment:
The amendment provides in part that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without just compensation.” Madison’s decision to place this language next to criminal justice protections, such as the prohibitions against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, underscored the close association of property rights with personal liberty….Like all of the Bill of Rights, however, these safeguards for property were binding only on the federal government. (p. 54)
No sooner had the Constitution with the appended Bill of Rights been ratified in November 1791, and circulated among the states, than lawsuits were filed citing the “takings” (or compensation) and contract clauses in the Constitution relating to state legislative powers.
In Part One of this review, I noted that Ely reveals that the chief violator of property rights was not the young federal government, but the states. In his chapter, “The Development of Property Rights in the Antebellum Era, 1791-1861,” Ely documents the persisting conflicts between the federal government and states. The federal government was largely barred from interfering with “states’ rights” to regulate the states’ internal business and economic activity:
Indeed, state governments were the primary source of economic regulation throughout the nineteenth century. The authority of the states to regulate the use of property was derived from both common law principles and the police power. The common law doctrine of public necessity and nuisance both subordinated the rights of property owners to the interests of the general community. Under the public necessity doctrine, for instance, it was lawful to destroy buildings to prevent the spread of fire or pestilence. (pp. 59-60)
The states still retain such discretionary “police power” to this day. For example, gambling, alcohol sales and/or consumption, the advertising of certain professional services, and prostitution are the subjects of restrictions or outright bans. Today, state “police powers” more or less follow federal and national trends. For example, outgoing Virginia governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat (and now a U.S. senator), signed a state law that banned smoking in all Virginia restaurants and private business establishments, including private clubs and bars, at the behest of a tenacious anti-smoking lobby. Violation of the law carries heavy financial penalties for both establishments and individuals, and not to the exclusion of arrest. The banning of smoking in private venues such as restaurants, bars, parks, and clubs represented a “taking” without compensation to property owners.
Many states, notably Kansas, are technically “dry” states, but allow “local jurisdictions” or counties to permit the sale and/or consumption of alcohol as long as they establish liquor boards and issue licenses to sell liquor “by the glass,” in bulk, or to manufacture and sell alcohol, or to serve it in restaurants or bars. Such laws also provide for state or local inspections of premises or production. Many states also have granted themselves exclusive monopolies to sell “hard” liquor; in Virginia, on the other hand, “soft” liquor, such as beer and wines, is regularly sold in supermarkets with the only restriction being sales to state-defined minors (many also contain age restrictions on sales of tobacco to minors).

Many Moroccan youths in the Netherlands have “no education, no prospects and are barely supervised. They are a ticking time bomb.” Mustapha Abbou, former Labor Party councilor in the city of Eindhoven.

The age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the number of women in this group is growing.

More than 100 Dutch Muslims travelled to Syria in 2013 with the intention of taking part in jihadist activities there, and at least 20 battle-hardened jihadists have since returned to the Netherlands, posing a significant threat to national security, according to a new report published by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD.

The AIVD annual report for 2013 was presented by Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk and AIVD head Rob Bertholee in The Hague on April 23. In contrast to previous years, when the main security threat was deemed to be a cyber-attack, the principal concern in this year’s report is the mounting threats posed by the returning jihadists, as well as by Muslim hate preachers who are using the Internet to radicalize young Dutch Muslims and incite them to violence.

The report warns that the presence of European fighters in Syria provides the jihadist groups active there with an “excellent opportunity to recruit individuals familiar with our region to commit acts of terrorism here.” In addition, returnees could “exploit their status as veterans to radicalize others in the Netherlands.” Overall, AIVD’s primary concern is about the radicalizing influence that Dutch jihadists will exert on Muslim communities in the Netherlands.

AIVD says the age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the number of women in this group is growing. Most of the fighters are of Moroccan descent, although some are from Bosnia, Somalia and Turkey. Many of the Dutch jihadists are second-generation immigrants who were born in the Netherlands. They mostly come from the Dutch cities of Delft, Rotterdam, Zeist and The Hague.

The vast majority of Dutch jihadists in Syria have joined one of two rebel groups, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] or Jabhat al-Nusra [JaN]. AIVD believes that at least ten individuals from the Netherlands were killed in 2013, including two Dutch jihadists who blew themselves up in suicide attacks (one in Syria and one in Iraq).

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/an-american-bride-in-kabul-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Phyllis Chesler, an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at City University of New York, best-selling author, legendary feminist leader, Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the author of 15 books. She is the author of her new memoir, An American Bride in Kabul.

Dr. Chesler discussed The Burqa: A Sensory Deprivation-Isolation Chamber, emphasizing why the West must ban the burqa for the sake of women’s rights and health (starts at the 8:40 mark). The discussion occurred within the context of a focus on her memoir and all of its ingredients, including being trapped in Afghanistan as a young bride, her terrifying experiences under Islamic Gender Apartheid, how the feminist Left has betrayed Muslim women, and much, much more: