RUTHFULLY YOURS

With free speech under attack at campuses across the nation from the University of Missouri to Yale to Wesleyan to Claremont McKenna, it may come as no surprise that a recent effort to educate students about terrorism-promoting propaganda on campus have been derided as hate speech and “Islamophobia.”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center launched a new campus campaign this fall, titled “Stop the Jihad on Campus,” to confront the agents and supporters of Islamic and anti-Israel terrorism on American campuses.

As the campaign’s website, www.StoptheJihadonCampus.org explains, American campuses are the first front in the war of infiltration and propaganda that Islamists are waging against our country to advance the agendas of the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist army, Hamas.

These terrorist adversaries have two main agendas. Firstly, to limit free speech and stifle opposition to the Islamic holy war by stigmatizing critics as “Islamophobes” and by pushing university resolutions to ban open debate about Islamic terror and oppression as “Islamophobia.” And secondly, to destroy the State of Israel and the Jews who live in it.

The fight against racism began with calling for an end to segregation. Then somehow it became about bringing back racial quotas for minorities by calling them affirmative action. Except the quotas were bigger so it was a “good thing” even though it was blatantly against the call for equality.

Now we’re bringing back actual racial segregation on college campuses under the name “safe spaces”.

In the wake of last week’s protests and resignations at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), “safe spaces” for students of marginalized identities are popping up all over the campuses of the Claremont Colleges. After protestors called for action, CMC President Hiram Chodosh stated his commitment to providing a permanent safe space for students of color in the near future…

What many Muslims (and leftists) believe
In the light of the Paris attacks many people have been bemused at multiple contradictions in what many Muslims (and leftists) have been saying. For example, on one hand many believe Mossad carried out the attacks, but on the other hand they also believe the attacks are the inevitable result of Muslims being ‘persecuted’ by Israel and other Western countries. So, here is a reminder of a simple chart which clearly shows how rational many Muslims (and leftists) really are about politics.

It seems that Israel’s tax cuts under Prime Minister Netanyahu provide a real world example of how to increase investment and wealth. Paradoxical as it may sound, phasing out U.S. economic aid may also have made Israelis better off.
Since I’m a big fan of the Laffer Curve, I’m always interested in real-world examples showing good results when governments reduce marginal tax rates on productive activity.

Heck, I’m equally interested in real-world results when governments do the wrong thing and increase tax burdens on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship (and, sadly, these examples are more common).

My goal, to be sure, isn’t to maximize revenue for politicians. Instead, I prefer the growth-maximizing point on the Laffer Curve.

In any event, my modest hope is that politicians will learn that higher tax rates lead to less taxable income. Whether taxable income falls by a lot or a little obviously depends on the specific circumstance. But in either case, I want policy makers to understand that there are negative economic effects.

Writing for Forbes, Jeremy Scott of Tax Notes analyzes the supply-side policies of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Islamic State attacks in Paris have reopened the debate over antiterror surveillance, and a good thing too. President Obama’s CIA director John Brennan said this week that it has become more difficult to identify terrorists and break up their plots “because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role.”

Mr. Brennan mentioned no names, but by “unauthorized disclosures” he surely meant Edward Snowden, the spook who stole and absconded to Russia with details of the National Security Agency’s most highly classified antiterror surveillance programs. Jihadists responded by changing their communications habits, making them harder to detect.

We’ll learn more about why the French failed to prevent the Paris massacre, but it’s already obvious that it was in part an intelligence failure. French security had at least one, and maybe more, of the jihadists on their watch lists. But they either lost track of their movements, or failed to find or properly read clues about their intentions. The French are good at local surveillance—and you can bet they aren’t following the U.S. Army Field Manual in their interrogations—but the West needs global intelligence collection to fight global jihad.