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November 2015

The Rise of the College Crybullies The status of victim has been weaponized at campuses across the nation, but there is at least one encouraging sign.Roger Kimball

For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.

To people unindoctrinated by the sensitivity training that is de rigueur on most campuses today, these sentiments might seem unobjectionable. But to the delicate creatures at Yale’s Silliman College they were an intolerable provocation. What if students dressed as American Indians or Mexican mariachi musicians? Angry, hysterical students confronted Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the master of Silliman, screaming obscenities and demanding that he step down because he had failed to create “a place of comfort, a home” for students. The episode was captured on video and went viral.

The War on Terror Escalates A murder spree in Paris shows the West needs a new antiterror offensive.

The international campaign to degrade and defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria is showing its first signs of real life in nearly a year. And not a moment too soon. As we went to press Friday night, a wave of shooting and bombing attacks in the streets of Paris was another grim reminder that what used to be called the war on terror is escalating—and still global.

On Friday the Pentagon reported that it was “reasonably certain” it had killed Mohammed Emwazi, the ISIS executioner better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike in eastern Syria. Among Emwazi’s many victims were American journalists Steve Sotloff and James Foley, Japanese reporters Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.

If confirmed, Emwazi’s death will deprive ISIS of its most notorious spokesman and puncture jihadi illusions that their Mideast strongholds are immune to U.S. reprisals. It also comes on the heels of ISIS’s loss of the Iraqi city of Sinjar after an assault by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters supported by U.S. air power. The Yazidi city had been mostly empty of inhabitants after ISIS massacred some 2,000 of its people, causing a mass exodus. Retaking the city will help Kurds sever the links between the ISIS strongholds of Raqqa in eastern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq.

Bankruptcy and Mud by Bassam Tawil

“If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.” We often hear Arabs privately saying, “the Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.”

Every Palestinian youth knows that the weekly riots at the “traditional friction points” serve as social events, later used by Palestinians operatives for propaganda.

As our elders have said for years: “Falastin [‘Palestine’ in Arabic] begins with falas [bankruptcy] and ends with teen [mud].”

Palestinian bloggers were amazed when Israelis protested the cruel slaughter of chickens in poultry-packing plants, and during epidemics. “If only we Arabs,” they wrote, “who kill people cruelly and wholesale, cared as much about people as the Jews care about animals.”

Civilian cameras often record events of startling cruelty carried out in Arab countries, in areas of conflict. We often hear Arabs privately saying, “The Zionists have never done to us what we do to ourselves.” This is usually said by Syrians, who have hated the Jews for generations, when they give their thanks for the medical treatment they receive in Israel. Despite the hatred fostered by Hamas, after the most recent military operation, many Gazans admitted that the IDF did in fact warn civilians before attacking terrorist targets protected by “human shields.”

The Collectivist Mentality of Muslims : Edward Cline

The Cretans both by land and sea are irresistible in ambuscades, forays, tricks played on the enemy, night attacks, and all petty operations which require fraud, but they are cowardly and down-hearted in the massed face-to-face charge of an open battle. – Polybius, Histories, Book IV, Volume II of the Loeb Classical Library (1922), p. 319. Translated by W.R. Paton.

The other evening, when I came upon that specific description of the military strengths and weaknesses of the various ancient Greek states in the events leading up to the Social War of 220-217 BC, I was too strongly reminded of how Muslims act when operating in gangs. Polybius’s description of the Cretan method of fighting and not fighting is also a description of guerrilla warfare – often called rape jihad. That is what Muslim gangs wage wherever they roam – in Britain, in France, in Germany, in Sweden, in virtually every country where they reside in large numbers, including in the United States.

Steven Salaita’s Anti-Israel ‘Martyrdom’ Nets Him $600k, Fees by Cinnamon Stillwell

A settlement between the University of Illinois (UI) and former Virginia Tech University professor Steven Salaita was approved by UI’s Board of Trustees Thursday. He will receive a lump sum payment of $600,000 and $275,000 in legal costs. In return, he will not seek or accept future employment by the university.

Thus concludes a saga that began in the summer of 2014 when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) withdrew an offered position in its American Indian Studies Program due to Salaita’s vulgar, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets. He sued the university and unnamed donors, alleging breach of contract and violation of free speech.

Srdja Trifkovic :Immigrant Invasion

Over 8,000 migrants entered Serbia on November 11 on their way from the Middle East to Western Europe. The item went unreported by the major media because it was not newsworthy. Daily totals may vary, not much, as the Great Invasion of 2015 continues unabated.

Millions are on the move, with unknown further multitudes tempted to follow suit. They will do so because Europe, rich and decadent, irresistibly tempts them. In all creation disease and frailty invite predators, as witnessed in the scene of Madame Hortense’s death in Zorba the Greek. Both the loss of the will to define and defend one’s native land and culture, and the loss of the desire to procreate, send an alluring signal to the teeming kazbahs and sukhs: Come, ye all, there’s money for nothin’ and chicks for free. Come, for no Western nation has the guts to shed blood—alien or its own—to keep you out in the name of its own survival. According to the leading German daily Die Welt (October 14), “Merkel’s call of welcome echoes even in West-Africa. The German welcome-culture appeals in Mali even to those who did not want to leave until now. TV pictures of nice people with welcome presents lure migrants. German visas can be bought.”

Spengler famously heralded The Decline of the West ninety years ago, but the English title of his magnum opus did not convey the dark, tragic implications of the word Untergang, “going under.” Spengler himself did not anticipate a cataclysmic event but rather an extended decline, a twilight. (Abendland, the West, literally means the “evening land.”) It now appears that the protracted fall is over, and the stage is set for a series of quick, brutal catastrophes.