RUTHFULLY YOURS

Had scientist Matt Taylor simply dressed professionally for TV, there would be no “scandal” to speak of.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta project accomplished one of the most impressive scientific feats in our lifetime. They essentially moved a clunky machine from one speeding bullet onto another, by remote control, from 310 million miles away. It’s hoped this achievement will help usher in a new era of space exploration by teaching us how to exploit the raw materials swirling around the solar system. Also, it was really cool.

But it wasn’t cool enough for some feminists who found the shirt worn by Matt Taylor, Rosetta project scientist, to be a bigger deal. Taylor’s shirt, designed by a female friend, depicts a bunch of attractive, scantily clad women drawn from comic books holding guns. (Slate’s Amanda Marcotte oddly described their stances as “pornographic poses.”)

Rose Eveleth, a science writer, tweeted in response to a televised interview with Taylor: “No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.”

A meteor shower of hashtagged rage rained down on both sides of the Atlantic. “Shirtstorm!” “Shirtgate!” and similar bullshirt.

What should have been the best week of Taylor’s professional life ended with him weeping on TV as he apologized for his alleged crime.

Many of my friends and colleagues on the anti-PC right have responded with understandable outrage. And it’s true: Taylor’s confession of wrongdoing did feel forced — awfully North Korean.

Still, the feminists have a point. Although I like the shirt (which is now selling like hotcakes), I would never wear it to a nice restaurant, never mind on a globally broadcast TV interview. The reason I wouldn’t wear it has very little to do with my fear of offending feminists. It’s simply unsuitable professional attire. I’d ask critics of the feminist backlash, would you wear it on a job interview? How about to church or synagogue?

Alberta, Canada — While we are sitting on the tarmac waiting interminably for Newark’s permission to take off, the man in the seat to my right turns and asks me if I call Calgary “home.” I explain mildly apologetically that I don’t, that this will in fact be my first trip across the 49th parallel, and that — alas — I am stopping there only in order to connect with another flight. From the city’s sprawling international airport I will continue on up to Fort McMurray, the boomtown gateway to Canada’s tar sands.

“Ah,” he says, his interest piqued. “Actually, I’m in the oil business myself. I’ve been in New York for meetings.” Then he leans in. “Fort McMurray, eh? That’s a real gold-rush sort of place.”

My second flight of the day, this time on a noisy little turbo-prop puddle-jumper that sounds like a bomber from a World War II movie, gives me no reason to doubt his description. Unlike the large jet that took me from Newark, this aircraft is packed full of sturdy men wearing jeans, baseball caps, and steel-toed boots. There are no women — not a single pair of X chromosomes on board — and nobody speaks a word; they because they are discernibly weary of the journey, I because I am stunned into silence by what I can see outside. The 400 miles of Alberta we cross are just spectacular: Endless white fields sweep up toward the horizon for miles until they are broken by a line of snow-capped mountains. The sky is a dazzlingly clear blue, and the moon is visible. After 90 minutes or so of this, we land at a tiny airport and I drag my eyes from the window and look out into the snow. Regimentally, the men troop off. They have been here before.

The tar sands are a hot political issue in the U.S., the ultimate target of opposition to the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline. When environmentalists speak of “Keystone,” they are really speaking of Canadian tar-sands oil, for it is this that the pipeline would carry from the mines in Alberta down to the refineries along America’s Gulf Coast. But, however often they are reiterated, the State Department’s repeated findings that the pipeline would have “limited adverse environmental impacts” have fallen on deaf progressive ears. Environmental groups remain implacably opposed, claiming that the process by which tar-sands oil is extracted leads to unacceptable greenhouse-gas emissions and the irrevocable destruction of the local environment and wildlife. Meanwhile, following a drubbing of Democrats in the 2014 elections, President Obama is still signaling that he intends to wait the issue out — possibly until the end of his presidency. Republicans may have emphatically taken back the Senate and added to their majority in the House; Senator Mary Landrieu may be fighting for her political life in Louisiana, still clinging to the hope that her advocacy in favor of a bill that forces Obama’s hand could save her seat; and the public may still express broad support. But, six years on, the president remains unmoved. As of mid November 2014, Obama’s team was still hinting that he would veto any legislation that sought to wrest the decision away from him. The Senate bill, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said yesterday, “certainly is a piece of legislation that the president doesn’t support.”

CNN has always been widely hated in Israel, but its reporting on the latest Muslim terror attack with the murder of four Rabbis, three of them Americans, killed by two axe-wielding murderers, in a synagogue while at prayer, really hits a new low.

First there’s a description of the Israeli police shooting and killing “2 Palestinians” when the police had fired in self-defense at the terrorists who had just perpetrated four brutal murders.

As Honest Reporting shows, not only did CNN respond to a terrorist attack on Jews by interviewing a member of the racist PLO terrorist group, but its website and broadcast listed the two Muslim terrorists alongside their Israeli victims as casualties of the attack.

Meanwhile part of its broadcast also claimed that the attack was really an attack on a mosque.

The Chryon beneath that meanwhile states, “Israeli police shot, killed 2 Palestinians who had knives, hatchets.” That is technically true, but it also leaves out the massacre that they just committed.

CNN also unilaterally transformed a synagogue into a mosque.

CNN was always terrible, but this isn’t just bias or dishonesty. It’s the sort of thing you expect from Al Jazeera.

But just as a reminder that there are worse news networks out there than the BBC, here’s what happened when an Israeli minister tried to show a photo of one of the murder victims on the BBC, which spent quite a lot of time broadcasting a non-stop broadcast feed of Gaza casualties.

After U.S. Central Command called on us to help transport from Iraq enough yellowcake uranium to make several atomic bombs stored at Saddam’s nuclear weapons complex, I realized why neither the Pentagon nor the White House advertised the presence of this WMD precursor: safety and security.

Before the U.S. military moved in to secure the facility after the 2003 invasion, looters had been there first. Even though the universally recognized yellow-and-black radioactivity warnings were posted on the bunkers, locals had ripped open the storage areas and stolen casks of yellowcake with many sickened as a result. More importantly, we did not want the insurgents alerted to the exposed stockpile as they might attack the facility. This is also why the George W. Bush administration did not crow about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq, as recently reported by the New York Times. That is a serious quantity of WMD, by any standard. Interestingly, the Bush team could have diluted near-uniform shock at the failure to find WMD by highlighting these discoveries instead of allowing the narrative we all know to solidify: “no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found except a few dozen old, mustard-gas artillery shells left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.” Yet President Bush and his advisors chose to protect the troops and the mission rather than score political points back on the war’s second front, the American body politic. (None of this, however, mitigates any unpreparedness by the Pentagon to treat service members exposed to chemical weapons.)

Before my company arrived to provide guards and to build and operate a base camp for U.S. Department of Energy scientists dissecting Saddam’s nuclear weapons facility, the American Army had occupied the site with almost a company of infantry. This was quite a bit of combat power tethered to a non-populated, static location when needed to actively defend the people against the elusive al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists and Iranian-allied militias rampant until early 2008 when the American Surge forces and the Sunni Arab “Awakening” had turned the tide delivering our victory in the Iraq War. The limited number of combat troops available did not permit fixing them at every site where WMD were found or might be found. Hence the requirement to not advertise that Saddam had left thousands of chemical weapons lying around, potentially under any mound in mostly flat Iraq. That would have set off a dangerous treasure hunt—and if found, a tremendous threat to American troops and everyone in Iraq especially if weaponized nerve gas had ended up with al-Qaeda.

Originally published by the Harvard Crimson.

I never imagined that a day would come when some of the world’s leading corporations would fund calls for Israel’s destruction, let alone at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. But that is exactly what happened last week at Harvard.

My invitation to “Harvard Arab Weekend” promised to provide a “mosaic of perspectives and insights on the most pressing issues in the Arab world.” Many of the panels appeared worthy of the conference’s corporate support from McKinsey & Co, The Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bank Audi, Strategy&, and the energy giant Shell. And yet featured prominently on the conference agenda was a panel devoted to the destruction of Israel: “The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement: Accomplishments, Tactics and Lessons.”

The panel’s moderator, Ahmed Alkhateeb, began by noting that a primary goal of the BDS movement is “promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties” in what is today Israel. As President Barack Obama pointed out in 2008, this goal stands in opposition to a “two state solution” and “would extinguish Israel as a Jewish State.” And in an op-ed published in Al Akhbar newspaper, Cal State professor As’ad AbuKhalil, an outspoken advocate of the BDS movement, affirmed that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.” This is the “unambiguous goal…[and] there should not be an equivocation on the subject.”

He’s right. While Jews are the majority in the democratic state of Israel today, the BDS movement imagines and seeks a state in which Jews would ultimately become the minority, implying the end of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

Two Palestinian thugs, armed with cleavers, knives and a gun, invaded an orthodox synagogue in West Jerusalem early Tuesday during morning prayers, and proceeded to murder four Jewish worshippers in cold blood. At least a dozen others were wounded. Three of the murder victims were American citizens. The fourth was a British citizen. Three of the victims were also rabbis. Israeli police, arriving at the scene of the horrific massacre and exchanging gunfire with the Palestinians as they tried to escape, shot the murderers to death. But the horrible images of the slain and wounded worshippers with blood everywhere, drenching holy books, prayer shawls and walls of the synagogue, will live on for a very long time.

“To see Jews wearing tefillin and wrapped in the tallit lying in pools of blood, I wondered if I was imagining scenes from the Holocaust,” said Yehuda Meshi Zahav, the veteran leader of a religious emergency-response team as quoted by the New York Times. “It was a massacre of Jews at prayer.”

At least ten Jews have now been run over by cars and killed, or have been stabbed to death by Palestinians during the last month. Call this latest spate of violence the “Car Intifada,” as some Palestinian social media refer to it with a song by that name, or the “Knife Intifada,” as other Palestinians have coined it. Either way, Palestinian leaders have Jewish blood on their hands after exhorting their followers to commit such violent acts. The inciters to murder are as guilty as the murderers themselves.

Predictably, Hamas praised the cowardly synagogue attack as a “heroic” act. Hamas’s leadership claimed that the brutal murders were justified as legitimate responses to Israeli actions. “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time,” a spokesman for Hamas declared. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Al Jazeera International to expect “more revolution in Jerusalem, and more uprising.”

In a 2009 paper, “Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program,” Obamacare advisor Jonathan Gruber argued that there were too many Medicare Part D plans for seniors to choose from, which led them to make bad decisions when enrolling in a plan.

In the paper, written for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber wrote with Jason T. Abaluck that the privatization of the public Medicare program had resulted in dozens of private insurers offering a wide variety of insurance products for seniors to choose from. The result of so many choices, Gruber wrote, is that seniors are not making decisions that are in their best interest. ”First, elders place much more weight on plan premiums than they do on the expected out of pocket costs that they will incur under the plan. Second, they substantially under-value variance reducing aspects of alternative plans. Finally, consumers appear to value plan financial characteristics far beyond any impacts on their own financial expenses or risk.”

The paper noted that while standard economic theory would suggest that expanded choice is a beneficial plan feature, “There are reasons to believe that the standard model is insufficient, particularly for a population of elders. There is growing interest in behavioral economics in models where agents are better off with a more restricted choice set.”

One of the reasons that choices should be restricted for seniors is their inability to understand the choices available to them. According to Gruber, “These issues may be paramount within the context of the elderly, given that the potential for cognitive failures rises at older ages.” He continued, “There is substantial scope for increases in utility if consumers made better choices, and some of these gains could be realized by restricting to the three lowest cost plans.”

Gruber admits that his models did not distinguish between the case of rational consumers choosing plans they trust and consumers making poor choices due to a lack of cognitive ability. “In either case,” he concluded, “our estimates imply that consumers would be better off if there were less scope for choosing the wrong plan.”

At 7:01 on Tuesday morning two young Palestinian men, cousins from East Jerusalem, entered a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of West Jerusalem where about a dozen people were praying. The two were carrying a gun, a meat cleaver, and an ax.

By seven “Allahu Akbar!”-filled minutes later, when a policeman shot and killed the two, four of the worshippers were dead and six other people, including two other policemen, were wounded.

Two of the four dead were rabbis. Three, immigrants from the U.S., were dual U.S.-Israeli citizens (prompting the FBI to say it would investigate [2]) and one was a dual British-Israeli citizen. The dead included Rabbi Moshe Twersky, son of a renowned Boston-based rabbi and grandson of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik [3], a major Jewish thinker of the twentieth century.

Jerusalem police said the attackers were probably—as in other recent cases—lone wolves and not members of a terror organization.

The trigger for the attack was probably the death of a Palestinian bus driver who was found hanging in his bus on Sunday night, for which Palestinians blamed Israel. An autopsy report said it was suicide [4]—but to no avail, as the man’s death sparked yet another round of riots in Jerusalem on Monday.

Our lame duck reactionary president dares not mention the I-word.

What to say about the latest round of Islamo-carnage in Jerusalem that hasn’t been said thousands of times before? Golda Meir [1] made it all clear in her famous 1957 speech at the National Press Club in DC: “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

In other words, basically never. The hate culture of the Palestinians — and almost all Arabs — is so deeply imbued it’s hard to imagine it ever changing. After this recent incident, they danced in the street with hatchets and gave each other candy.

Lots of people have tried to make peace with them. The supposed war-monger Ariel Sharon uprooted his own people and gave the Palestinians Gaza. We all know what happened. Then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians the peace deal of the century. They walked away.

The reason is obvious. The Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution and never have. And not just Hamas with their infamous charter urging the death of all Jews, even Jewish trees (whatever that means) — all of them. Well, not absolutely all. There must be one or two somewhere who really want to share the land with the Jews. I just don’t know who they are. Nobody does. Certainly not Abu Mazen, who started his career writing a Holocaust-denying thesis in Moscow, or Saeb Erekat, who by now must have a Swiss bank account to rival George Soros.

Besides the failure, since 1948, to even recognize the existence of a Jewish state on any territory, one of the more revealing aspects of the putative peace negotiations is that the Palestinians [sic] have always refused to have a single Jew living on their land once they have a state, while there are some million and a half Jews already living in Israel. Palestine must be judenrein — Hitler’s dream realized.

Of course, we get not a peep from the Europeans about this. Instead, according to Haaretz [2], we get new secret plans from the EU to boycott those horrible settlements that allegedly are the root of all this evil. Only the Europeans, Peter Beinart, the fuddy-duddies at J-Street and some Brandeis professors could believe something so absurd. Maybe the latter American group can be added to the old black comic joke, more apropos than ever: “The Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

“Islamic radicals [are] hiding behind the scenes, influencing the minds of young people. … Someone is persuading them, brainwashing them.” — Ahmed Muthana, father of the jihadist Muthana brothers.

Mehdi Hassan is the fourth British man from the coastal city of Portsmouth to be killed while fighting for ISIS in Syria. Hassan was just 19 when he left with four friends for Syria in October 2013. They named themselves the “Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys.” Four of the five have been killed.

Much of the media has, over the last few years, attempted to explain why British Muslims are being radicalized, and why some wish to fight for a terror group known and feared for its brutality.

Some commentators blame the darker corners of the internet; some point to the supposed glamour and glory of war, and others attribute part of the blame to “government policy” and the “persecution” felt by British Muslims living in a country allegedly full of “anti-Islamic feeling.”

Those concerned with the practical workings of radicalization, however, look to the initial involvement of Western recruits to ISIS with extremist preachers and organizations. Even while crediting the allure of the internet, it seems improbable that anyone would join a cult or extremist group without some encouragement or introduction.