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November 2015

These Dead Shall Not Have Died In Vain By Nancy Salvato

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln

Last evening, we shared a table with a young group of marines en route to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training in Maine. I woke up this morning feeling especially thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our nation and yet I kept thinking about the Gettysburg Address. This is because I worry whether our soldiers (and their families) deployed after 9/11, many injured or in coffins, sacrificed in vain. Did the soldiers who liberated our country from England, as well die in vain? Did the 620,000 casualties of the Civil War die in vain?

At 10 years of age, I became aware of terrorism. I watched it play out during the television broadcast of the 1972 Olympics when a terrorist group, identifying itself as “Black September”, killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Why were these athletes arbitrarily murdered on a world stage? I truly didn’t understand the catalyst until I was much older. Black September was a movement to avenge Palestinians’ losses in Jordan. This was one battle in a continuum of battles and part of a larger war.

Silence of the doves Yigal M. Gross

This week, in response to calls for the United States government to stop taking in Syrian refugees following last week’s horrific terrorist attack in Paris, Senator Elizabeth Warren uttered words that must now seem terribly ironic to her constituents.

“These events test us. It is easy to proclaim that we are tough and brave and good-hearted when threats feel far away — but when those threats loom large and close by, our actions will strip away our tough talk and reveal who we really are.

Not two days after Ms. Warren made those impassioned remarks on the Senate floor, one of Ms. Warren’s own constituents, eighteen-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts, was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel, together with two other innocent civilians. In response, the sanctimonious senator said nothing.

And that is not because Ms. Warren has a difficult time speaking. On November 18th, the day before Ezra Schwartz was murdered, Ms. Warren’s official Twitter account sent out more tweets than a sparrow in mating season — 11– about lobbyists, tax reform and the Economic Policy’s Women’s Economic Agenda. The day before that, Ms. Warren went to the Senate floor to deliver her remarks about Syrian refugees. And, lest anyone doubt Ms. Warren’s ability to multitask, she sent out tweets both before her speech (“Heading to the Senate floor now…”) and after her speech (“…Today I spoke about what I saw”). Yet she could not spare even a character for the beautiful young boy with the sweet smile from her home state.

Anti-Semitic Violence Erupts in New York as Muslim Taxi Driver Attacks and Robs Jewish Passenger

In an alleged hate crime, a Jewish passenger was attacked by a Muslim driver of a yellow New York taxi on Saturday night. The driver was held for questioning by police.
In an interview on Sunday with Israel National News, victim Moshe Indig told reporters about the attack. “I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn Saturday night at 8 PM. I asked the driver to make a phone call. He refused but then relented and put the call on the speaker. When he saw that I was speaking Hebrew, he said: ‘I hate the people and the language you are speaking. If I had known that you were a Jew, I would not have given you the call.’”

Bonjour Tristesse by Nidra Poller

Friday: Steady cold rain is falling as the truth starts to sink in. Rain extinguishes the memorial candles and flattens the bouquets in front of the grieving restaurants and the horrified Bataclan and piled in terraces around the Marianne at Place de la République. The streets of Paris are forlorn, the boutiques are empty, there’s no line waiting for a seat at the falafel joints, Christmas merchandise lies on the shelves, dumbstruck.

There was a brief moment of satisfaction at the news that the “mastermind” of last week’s attacks was indeed dead several times over and beyond recognition after the 7-hour siege of his last hideout. DNA or some other tracer was matched to some shreds or drippings of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, junior Daesh executive in charge of planning jihad attacks in France and the Benelux countries. The so-called mastermind was caught by CCTV at the Croix de Chavaux métro station in Montreuil last Friday night at around 10 PM. The black Seat used by the easy riders who had finished executing people on restaurant and café terraces had been abandoned less than two blocks away. And the Big Chief ducked into the metro and jumped the turnstile. Punk!

Which ‘Times’ Should You Read? by Jerold Auerbach:

Last week, two young Americans were murdered in terrorist attacks, one in Israel and the other in France.

Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old from Sharon, Mass., was spending his gap year as a yeshiva student and volunteer in Bet Shemesh. He was killed near Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, where he had just finished delivering food parcels to soldiers and visiting a memorial to three Israeli children who were kidnapped and murdered nearby last summer. In an article (November 20) devoted to five murders by Palestinian “assailants,” New York Times reporter Isabel Kershner devoted one paragraph (with fewer than 100 words) to the American Jewish victim.

Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old California college student who was spending a semester at a design school in Paris, was the only American to die in the recent ISIS terrorist assault that claimed 129 lives. She was described in the Times (November 20) by reporter Dan Bilefsky as “emblematic of dozens of other victims: Young. Ambitious. Chasing dreams. And eager to absorb the sophisticated swagger of a city rich in history and culture.”

The Campus Uprisings, Israel, and the Downfall of Larry Summers by Edward Alexander ****

The Wall Street Journal of November 14-15 carried an astute article by Roger Kimball (editor of the New Criterion) entitled “The Rise of the College Crybullies.” The lethal mixture of trembling sensitivity and mob ruthlessness in these student insurrectionaries has turned the country’s universities into a vast bedlam with a thousand wards. He tells how “the crybully…has weaponized his coveted status as a victim” with two calling cards: race and gender. He uses these to exploit to the fullest extent what Joseph Epstein has called “the unassailable virtue of victims.”

The past month alone has seen the humiliation and forced resignation of assorted faculty members, deans, and even university presidents. Some schools have run up the white flag of surrender even before they were invaded, or tried what might be called preemptive action to ward off the wrath of the new brownshirts by appointing presidents and provosts who proclaim their unswerving devotion to diversity training; or to appointing (more) deans of equity; or to fighting “minoritization” and “marginalization”; or to celebrating gay marriage and transgenderism; or to requiring “trigger warnings” about dangerous books; or to implementing race quotas; or to realizing all the other countless desiderata of campus radicals.

At NYU, for example, “Students of Color” currently list no fewer than 28 “demands” but encouraged the submission of still more. Their counterparts at Brandeis (as of this writing) lag behind with only 13, but are more peremptory and menacing about deadlines by which their demands must be met. Yale’s revolutionaries complain that their uprising against the school’s administration has come “at great expense to our health and grades,” and expect to be compensated accordingly. UC Berkeley’s Black Student Union and its satellites want allocations of money, black faculty, and black psychologists to bring them up to the achievement levels of Asian students at that noble institution. So far Mitch Daniels of Purdue University seems to be the sole exception in the entire country to the rule of presidential surrender to these campus insurrectionaries.

Argentina’s Political Earthquake Mauricio Macri, the new president, pledges to end the conflict of the Kirchner years.

In the midst of double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy, Argentines on Sunday handed victory in the presidential runoff election to 56-year-old Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri of the Cambiemos (Let’s Change) coalition.

With 76% of the vote counted as we went to press, Mr. Macri led with 52.87% against 47.13% for President Cristina Kirchner’s Peronist Front for Victory (FPV) candidate, Daniel Scioli.

The 58-year-old Mr. Scioli—the Peronist governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires—ought to have coasted to an easy victory. But his association with Mrs. Kirchner was a liability he couldn’t overcome. After 12 years of the Kirchners’ socialist economics, eight under this president and four before that under her late husband Néstor, Argentines want change.

Mrs. Kirchner’s uncivil rants against her political opponents, and a substantial loss of judicial independence and press freedom during kirchnerismo also contributed to Mr. Scioli’s defeat.

A Campus Mayhem Syllabus The grievance protests spread, and the adults keep rolling over.

By now you’ve heard that the insurrections at Yale University and the University of Missouri have spread to campuses from California to New Hampshire. The grievances and student demands for safe spaces vary, but the disease is the same: Faculty and administrators who elevate racial and gender diversity above all other values, including free speech.

The road trip begins at Yale, which erupted a few weeks ago after a faculty member suggested that the administration shouldn’t dictate what is an appropriate Halloween costume. In a better era she’d have won free beer at every party on campus, but this time the resulting ruckus featured a student cursing out a Yale sociologist on a lawn for being “insensitive.”

Last week’s response? “I have never been as simultaneously moved, challenged and encouraged by our community,” Yale President Peter Salovey said in a campus-wide letter. He promised a center exploring “race, ethnicity and other aspects of social identity”; more faculty digging into those topics; more training on spotting racism at what must surely be one of the most racially sensitive places on Earth. Mr. Salovey talked up Yale’s $50 million commitment to diversifying the faculty, and you can bet he doesn’t mean intellectual diversity.