RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most of us are in awe of students who manage to get accepted to Princeton – it seems like they would surely be the creme de la creme with perfect SAT scores and grade point averages to match. At the very least, such students would have mastered the rudimentary rules of grammar that are essential for clear writing. So it was with disappointment that I read the following sentence written by Princeton student Tal Fortgang and printed in the NYT of May 3rd: While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life.” This was from an essay titled “Check Your Privilege,” first published in The Tory, a campus magazine.

An editor must have reviewed it after Fortgang submitted it and possibly it was also read by one of Fortgang’s teachers or a faculty advisor to the magazine, yet no one redlined it or called the need for subject/verb agreement to the writer’s attention. The publisher of The Tory adds some comments of his own in a letter to the editor in today’s NYT (5/12) but not a word of apology for the editorial oversight. Similarly, the NYT never offered the parenthetical SIC that usually accompanies a verbatim quotation with an error in it. In the original Times article, the project manager for Princeton’s Black Student Union issued the following rejoinder to Fortgang’s essay: I don’t think I’ve met an African-American who believes that they are judged solely by their character.” Same unacceptable error. Has it gone viral on campus?

The subject of the essay is explained in Fortgang’s words: The phrase (check your privilege), handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laserlike at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion in a personal Weltanschauung.” This is a young man who’s got some guts, along with his age-appropriate sophomoric bombast, and deserves a first-class education including meticulous attention to the mechanics of writing – old fashioned grammar. Princeton – your students deserve more diligent instruction; NYT – your readers deserve better proofreaders. You’ve both got the privilege – now own it properly and check the grammar!!

Last week, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein ran a sensationalist story detailing alleged Israeli spy activities in the United States. Stein, citing dubious sources, claimed that Israeli spies attempted to monitor Al Gore’s bathroom activities (an image too frightening to imagine) while drugs and women are routinely employed by Zionist spies to entice U.S. officials into handing over information of value. The sources for these and other absurd allegations contained in the article were mainly anonymous with one notable exception, an obscure ex-intelligence character and former CIA employee named Paul Pillar.

One look at Pillar’s past articles, publications and speeches puts the Newsweek screed in proper context. Pillar is a rabid Israel basher. In March 2014, he spoke at the so-called “National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel ‘Special Relationship’” where he attacked Israel on everything from its defensive military operations in Gaza to its concern over Iran’s procurement of nuclear weapons. He even attempted to downplay Iran’s threat to wipe Israel off the map claiming that it was a mere mistranslation. Pillar took his place at the summit alongside miscreants such as Cynthia McKinney and Alison Weir, whose radical views on the Jewish state veer uncomfortably into David Duke territory.

In 2012, Pillar authored an article featured in an anti-Semitic blog in which he likened Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa thus repeating the false and unsubstantiated narrative of the most vitriolic Israel haters. Pillar also demonstrates his extreme bias and ignorance by characterizing the Six-Day War as a war “that Israel launched and used to seize the West Bank and other Arab territory.” Clearly context and facts mean absolutely nothing to this wretched person.

Briefly, the Six-Day War began when Egypt blockaded the Gulf of Eilat to Israeli shipping, kicked UN peacekeepers out of Sinai and then deployed seven divisions there, violated Israeli airspace with Mig-21 overflights and fired mortar shells at Israeli border settlements. These belligerent actions were of course accompanied by the perfunctory threats to throw the Jews into the sea. Israel struck preemptively to thwart Egyptian aggression. It is important to note that Israel warned Jordan to stay out of the conflict. However, Jordan’s King Hussein, drunk on false Arab claims of victory, struck first prompting a swift and decisive Israeli military response. The deceitful Pillar neglects to note any of this in his one-way rant.

In 2013, Pillar wrote an article supportive of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, referring to Israel as a colonizer and again falsely asserting that Israel initiated the war on the Jordanian front. Pillar also authored another article titled “We can live with a nuclear Iran” where he of course downplays legitimate concerns of nuclear weapons falling into the hands world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

Like the insidious and deranged Israel bashers Alice Walker and Roger Waters, Pillar is a man guided by a venomous hate and is bent on vilifying the only democracy in the Mideast and sabotaging U.S. relations with Israel at all costs. No one really took note of Pillar and his regurgitated banal diatribes until Newsweek’s Jeff Stein decided to mainstream this fringe extremist and his fables.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islams-role-in-boko-harams-kidnapping-of-schoolgirls-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Mark Durie, a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Dr. Durie discussed Islam vs. Human Conscience, analyzing how Islam wages war on humans moral judgment and intuition (starting at 5:30 mark). The discussion occurred within the context of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria and the Islamic roots of that barbaric act. Dr. Durie shed light on the Islamic theology that inspires and sanctions Muslims to enslave and rape kafir women.

Democrats “absolutely must boycott this absurd, insane, sickening, repulsive, shameful, and at the same time shame-less circus,” read an article at the Daily Beast last Wednesday. While you may be forgiven for assuming that the author was referring to the Obama administration, he actually was describing the upcoming hearings on the Benghazi investigation, which the article bluntly calls “bullsh*t.” That’s because progressives are rallying now in a desperate effort to dismiss Benghazi as a joke and the hearings themselves as a waste of time.

From the beginning, when four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens were killed in a terrorist assault in Libya in 2012, the administration did its level best to downplay the attack and divert responsibility for the murders to a scapegoated “Islamophobic” filmmaker and his hilariously inept, obscure YouTube video dramatizing the life of Islam’s prophet Muhammad.

But unlike the lapdog media, the right refused to accept the administration’s whitewashed narrative, so now that the left is feeling the heat from hearings to be chaired by bulldog South Carolina Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, they are naturally going on the offensive (when has the left ever gone on the defensive?). That means reaching for the most effective weapon in their arsenal: ridicule. Remember, this administration’s guru Saul Alinsky counseled that “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” It is simultaneously a defensive and offensive strategy.

Political commentator and consultant Donna Brazile, for example, mocked on Twitter that “The Republicans are hyping the Benghazi hearings like they are about to launch a new TV series: what should we call this?” One Twitter respondent called her tweet “a horrifying display of arrogance and disrespect for the dead.” Another jabbed back that the show should be called “Truth and Consequences.”

Missouri Democrat Representative Stacey Newman got into the act, sending out the cutesy tweet that she was “thinking of saying ‘Benghazi’ while debating tomorrow on the House floor. Just to see what happens.” This is a woman who asserts in her Twitter bio that she is most “obsessive” about “saving lives due to gun violence” – unless they are American lives and Islamic guns, apparently. Then it’s just funny.

Leftist policy is the search for the root cause of evil. Everything from a street mugging to planes flying into the World Trade Center is reduced to a root cause of social injustice. Throw poverty, oppression and a bunch of NGO buzzwords into a pot and out come the suicide bombings, drug dealing and mass rapes.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group that kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, or a drug dealer with a record as long as his tattooed arm.

Obama and Hillary resisted doing anything about Boko Haram because they believed that its root cause was the oppression of Muslims by the Nigerian government. Across the bloody years of Boko Haram terror, the State Department matched empty condemnations of Boko Haram’s killing sprees with condemnations of the Nigerian authorities for violating Muslim rights.

Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton haven’t championed #BringBackOurGirls because it’s a hashtag in support of the kidnapped girls, but because it undermines the Nigerian government. They aren’t trying to help the kidnapped girls. They’re trying to bring down a government that hasn’t gone along with their agenda for appeasing Boko Haram and Nigerian Muslims.

The hashtag politics aren’t aimed at the terrorists. They’re aimed at helping the terrorists.

There’s a reason why the media and so many leftists have embraced the hashtag. #BringBackOurGirls isn’t a rescue. It denounces the Nigerian government for not having already gotten the job done even as the State Department stands ready to denounce any human rights violations during a rescue attempt.

Obama and Boko Haram want to bring down the Nigerian government and replace it with a leadership that is more amenable to appeasement. It’s the same thing that is happening in Israel and Egypt.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that now that gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military, the Defense Department needs to look at how it can accommodate transgender individuals.

Hagel told ABC’s This Week that “the issue of transgender is a bit more complicated, because it has a — a medical component to it.”

The American Psychological Association defines transgender as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” Pfc. Bradley Manning, the day after being sentenced in the Wikileaks scandal, changed his name to Chelsea and has requested hormone therapy in prison. Army records continue to identify him as a male even though he has requested to only be called female.

“These issues require medical attention,” Hagel said of the general issue of transgenders, who are barred from military service under current policy. “Austere locations where we — we put our men and women in — in many cases, don’t always provide that kind of opportunity. I do think it — it continually should be reviewed.”

“I’m open to that, by the way. I’m open to those assessments, because, again, I go back to the bottom line. Every qualified American who wants to serve our country should have an opportunity if they fit the qualifications and can do it,” he added. “This is an area that we — we’ve — we’ve not defined enough.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement after Hagel’s remarks that it looks “forward to working with the Pentagon to end these outdated rules that harm our military.”

“This willingness to evaluating changes to the medical regulations is overdue but very welcome,” said NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling. “If the Secretary were able to meet and talk with the trans service members I’ve met, he’d understand the answer is self-evident. These are amazing people who serve even though they must hide a basic part of who they are.”

The group cited its National Transgender Discrimination Survey that showed “about one-fifth of all transgender adults are veterans, making transgender people approximately twice as likely as others to serve in the military.”

Dr. Andrew Bostom closes the preface to his new volume, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran [1], with several rhetorical questions, answered encyclopedically in the chapters that follow.

At first glance, someone unfamiliar with the nature of the subject might recognize in them a resemblance to Jeopardy!, now in its 30th year. Jeopardy contestants must correctly identify the historical event, leader or trivia — in the form of a question. To a description, for example, of “totalitarian religious law dictating behavior in all aspects of life for persons of said faith,” a well-tutored college student might ask: “What is sharia?” Of a treaty signed in March 628 between a famous charismatic figure and military commander and a competing Arabian tribe, a brainy homemaker might respond: “What is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah?”

However, few Westerners can actually provide these correct responses, a issue that puts Western society in grave jeopardy.

Only the near-universal ignorance on Islam could explain why the Western press corps and leaders of the so-called “P5 +1” nations — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Iran — all naïvely lauded the late November 2013 news of an interim agreement to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and blindly accepted the notion that the deal would halt Iran’s future military goals.

Actually, the opposite happened. The P5 leaders, hopeful that a written agreement could put Iran’s nuclear ambitions to rest, were all-too-easily duped by Iran.

This reality marched to the fore on February 11, 2014, when Iranians massed in the streets of Tehran shouting “down with the U.S.” and “death to Israel” to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, during which Ayatollah Rehollah Khomeini reestablished the Iranian Shiite theocracy that the 20th century Pahlavi shahs had forestalled for an all-too-brief 54-year juncture (1925-1979).

As if to punctuate the madness of any attempt to reach agreement, current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that day stated that the country’s nuclear program would continue “forever,” and that all Western sanctions to stop it had been “brutal, illegal, and wrong.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, two of the wealthiest and most famous men in America were a pair of Jewish brothers named Nathan and Isidor Straus. Owners of R.H. Macy’s Department Store and founders of the A&S(Abraham & Straus) chain, the brothers were multimillionaires, renowned for their philanthropy and social activism.

In 1912, the brothers and their wives were touring Europe, when Nathan, the more ardent Zionist of the two, impulsively said one day: “Hey, why don’t we hop over to Palestine?”
Israel wasn’t the tourist hotspot then that it is today. Its population was ravaged by disease, famine, and poverty; but the two had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren, and they also wanted to see the health and welfare centers they had endowed with their millions.

However, after a week spent touring, Isidor Straus had had enough. “How many camels, hovels, and yeshivas can you see? It’s time to go,” Isidor decreed with edgy impatience in his voice. But Nathan refused to heed his brother’s imperious command. It wasn’t that he was oblivious to the hardships around him; it was precisely because of them that he wanted to stay.

There never was any need for pushing….Abbas and Hamas have exactly the same murderous ideology…just a difference in tactics….What Indyk and Kerry have done is show their bias against Israel coming straight from the White House…..rsk

Abbas correctly calculated that so long as he continued to negotiate with Israel, the U.S. and the Europeans would continue to prop him up with political backing and financial support in the mistaken belief that a peace deal could be reached.

Thus Kerry and Indyk have been pushing Abbas into a corner by trying to tempt him to commit suicide in the name of permanently solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

While Israeli leaders seek peace, Palestinian leaders seek an endless peace process.

Palestinians say that for Muslims, Palestinian land reaches “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea” — that is, over all of what is now Israel. In their view, Tel Aviv is illegally occupied territory just as much as any of the settlements in the West Bank. This view is based on the Muslim doctrine, deeply rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, called “waqf” (religious endowment). Any territory once under the control of Muslims, must forever be controlled by Muslims.[1] According to Islamic law, “If a person makes something waqf, it ceases to be his property and neither he nor anybody else can gift or sell it to any other person.[2]

Unfortunately, the premises on which American negotiations — led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Martin Indyk[3] — are based are completely at odds with the premises on which Middle Eastern negotiations are based.

Americans seem to believe that all problems are solvable; if there is no solution, it simply means one has not tried hard enough. Americans generally are prepared to compromise on particular points to attain other points that are more important to them. When both sides reach an agreement, Americans usually are prepared to put past disagreements to bed. By making concessions, neither side has compromised its personal honor. Americans focus on the goal, which is to attain an agreement both sides can live with. We negotiate, arrive at an agreement and let bygones be bygones.

The document warns that increasing numbers of students in Hamburg are being influenced by Islamist propaganda and are embracing radical Islam and idolizing jihadist fighters in Syria.

The problems in Hamburg are drawing renewed attention to the alarming growth of Salafism in Germany. Salafists openly state that they want to replace democracy in Germany (and the rest of the world) with a Sunni Islamic government based on sharia law.

Muslim radicals are imposing Islamic norms and values in primary and secondary public schools in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, say school officials, who are asking for stepped-up monitoring of the Salafist groups thought to be behind the Islamization efforts.

At least 25 schools across Hamburg are believed to have been infiltrated by Salafists and other fundamentalist Muslim groups, according to German media reports. But local politicians from the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD)—a party committed to enforcing multiculturalism in Hamburg—have refused to disclose precisely which schools are affected.

Now, for the first time, a confidential report leaked to the German newspaper Bild identifies seven of the problem schools by name. The schools where Islamist fanatics are “waging a religious war” against non-Muslim teachers and classmates are located in districts across the city, the document says, but the situation in Mümmelmannsberg in eastern Hamburg is “particularly appalling” and “the focus of an organized strategy” by Islamists to recruit new followers.

Teachers and school administrators say that efforts by Muslim fundamentalists to run the schools “according to their own rules” have increased in recent months, and speculation is rife that the document was leaked by someone seeking to force city officials into taking more forceful action.

School principals are being pressured, among other demands, into setting up special prayer rooms for Muslim children, who are increasingly gathering for prayers and shouting Islamist slogans on school playgrounds. Girls are requesting exemptions from gym classes and swimming lessons, and are being harassed if they fail to dress according to Islamic norms.