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November 2015

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: DIVERSITY

“When our student societies decide they want to put on events, they ask ‘do you think there is any particular risk, or do you think that there is any reason to think that any student would feel threatened or unsafe at inviting a particular speaker’?” Those Orwellian words were spoken by the president of Students Union at Leeds University in England to David Aaronovitch of the London Times. They could, however, have been spoken by campus leaders, administrators or professors at any U.S. university or college.

We should all subscribe to the concept of diversity. Typically, we think of it in terms of race, religion, place of national origin, sexual preference, socio-economic backgrounds and/or the physically and mentally challenged. We ignore, however, diversity of opinion. The word implies tolerance for those different from ourselves. There is no question that diversity strengthens us as individuals and as a nation. Arthur Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance.”

Persecuted Pakistani Christian Visits Washington, DC :Anrew Harrod

This was an interesting presentation of often stark views.

“We witness our Christian faith and proclaim the word of God in the land where Islamic fundamentalists and extremists are in power,” stated recently a Pakistani Christian to a Washington, DC, area Christian gathering. Speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals back home, “Thomas” expressed with somewhat rudimentary English stark views about Islam during a church reception for about 30 and subsequent interview.

“You are very much free and blessed people,” Thomas noted for his American audience who “do not need guards while you worship.” By contrast, reception displays on Pakistani Christians included a photo of an adolescent pastor’s son standing guard with an assault rifle before a church. This “son is protecting the worshippers by putting his life in danger and father is preaching the gospel to save the life of the worshippers,” he stated.

An interviewed Thomas noted how guards averted massive casualties during a March 2015 attack on Lahore, Pakistan’s Catholic Church by preventing suicide bombers from entering, yet he distrusted Muslims in Pakistani security forces. While he perceived a lax official response to attacks upon Christian institutions or mosques of Pakistan’s Shiite minority, the army responded vigorously to a 2014 terrorist massacre at a Peshawar army children’s school. Christians often insist upon having private Christian guards for whom “their brothers and sisters are inside” church.

RUTHIE BLUM: NARROW ESCAPES

Right before Monday’s meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, the two leaders gave perfunctory opening statements to the press.Due to their famously strained relations, which hit rock bottom when Netanyahu addressed Congress in March, the much-touted tete-a-tete has been leading the news in Israel for reasons beyond the aid package and Palestinians.

To sweeten the pot for Netanyahu detractors gleefully awaiting another Obama hissy fit, a pre-trip scandal erupted over the appointment of Ran Baratz as public diplomacy czar. Netanyahu’s selection of Baratz to fill this role caused an international stir when it emerged that the person about to make Israel’s case to the world had spent years posting very undiplomatic diatribes on Facebook against both U.S. and Israeli officials.

So, when Obama and Netanyahu exchanged pleasantries and spoke a few scripted lines prior to meeting privately, everyone — myself included — was hanging on their every nuance for clues. And leave it to Obama to provide a whopper of a glimpse into the workings of his mind.

Arguments from Ignorance: Edward Cline

The Bible Believers benefited from living in nation governed by the rule of law. Under Sharia law, they would be condemned to death.

Daniel Greenfield ran an interesting story on November 9th, “The Atlantic: Freedom of Speech Victimizes Muslims,” about the Bible Believers case, in which an en banc court reversed the group’s responsibility for basically “disturbing the peace” of an Arab American festival in 2012.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday found that Wayne County violated the constitutional rights of a group of religious proselytizers who were kicked out of an Arab-American cultural festival in 2012.

In a rare reversal of a previous decision from three-judge appeals court panel, an en banc review by 15 judges yielded a majority ruling that Wayne County is civilly liable to the group of evangelical Christians who sued after being ordered to leave the festival by sheriff’s deputies.

Why I Am Visiting Israel—and Why You Should Visit, Too By Dennis Prager

Jerusalem – I want to explain why I am in Israel.

I am here with 450 American (and a German and a Canadian) listeners to my radio show. About 400 are non-Jews.

We are here on a “Stand with Israel” tour organized by the syndicator of my radio show, the Salem Radio Network. I am accompanied by my wife, my producer Allen Estrin and his wife, and my radio colleague Mike Gallagher.

#ad#​People frustrated with the direction of America and the direction of the world regularly ask: “What can I do to make any difference?”

Here is one of the best answers I know: visit Israel. And do so especially when there are terror attacks.

If every time there were a spate of attacks on Israel, few people canceled their trips to Israel in response or — if I may imagine a much better world than the one we live in — tourism to Israel actually increased, three huge things would be achieved.

Reported EU Trade Rule Singles Israel Out for Discrimination By Marco Rubio —

The European Union is poised to make a significant mistake this week — one that will harm its relations with the United States, politicize international trade, undermine economic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, and reward Palestinians who reject peace with Israel.

The EU will reportedly release a new trade rule that singles out Israel — and only Israel — for discriminatory treatment. The rule requires products sold in Europe and produced in what the EU considers “Israeli-occupied territories” to be specially labeled. The labels are intended to encourage Europeans to boycott Israeli products, and to stoke European animosity toward Israel — which is already at disturbingly high levels. There are more than 200 disputed territories worldwide and yet European leaders have chosen to single out only the Jewish state for this economic sanction.

The rule is grossly unjust. It makes a mockery of the EU’s claimed commitment to international law. It punishes Israel for Palestinian leaders’ repeated rejection of statehood offers and for their ongoing refusal to negotiate. In the midst of a new wave of Palestinian terror, the EU seeks to punish Israel while taking no action against Palestinians inciting and perpetrating murder.

Why Is the White Working Class Dying? Truck drivers, trappers, farmers don’t rate in the eyes of our elites. By Victor Davis Hanson

A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such).

That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal), psycho-social maladies leading to increased suicide, and legal and financial problems. In search of root causes, are we to think that the white working class eats less healthy foods than, say, blacks and Hispanics of the same class? Do whites visit the doctor less? Or are they more prone by nature to disease and culturally induced illnesses? The answer seems probably not.

The study’s findings belie conventional wisdom, which has focused almost exclusively on the plight of minorities, who in many areas have proven unable to achieve parity, ostensibly because of endemic and lethal white racism.

The Mizzou Meltdown By Rich Lowry

It was doubtful that the University of Missouri would stand up to a left-wing pressure campaign targeting its president, but when the football team joined the campaign, it was all over.

Missouri is an SEC school, where even a mediocre football program — Mizzou is 1-5 against the rest of the conference — has formidable financial and cultural power.

If anyone running the university had any guts, the school would have told the team, “Come back and talk to us when you can beat sad-sack Vanderbilt, or at least score more than three points against them.” Given the team’s performance, the proper rejoinder to its threatened boycott should have been, “How would anyone notice?”

Instead, Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri system, is out in one of the most parodic PC meltdowns on a college campus to date. The Missouri episode shows how the political climate on campus falls somewhere between a Tom Wolfe novel, a Monty Python skit, and the French Terror.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: YALE’S IDIOT CHILDREN ****

Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?

It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”

Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .

For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion.

When Will Obama and the West Listen to Hamas? by Khaled Abu Toameh

What senior Hamas figure Musa Abu Marzouk and other Hamas leaders are saying is very clear: Even if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, Hamas and other Palestinians will continue to fight until Israel is completely destroyed.

Hamas is openly stating that it will use any future Palestinian state as a launching pad to attack and eliminate Israel.

Hamas is not a small opposition party in the Palestinian territories that can be dismissed as a minor player. Hamas is a large Islamist movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the entire Gaza Strip with its population of 1.8 million Palestinians. Hamas, not much different than Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, has its own security forces, militias, weapons and government institutions.

The Obama Administration and Western governments can talk as much as they like about the two-state solution. Even if President Abbas agrees to a Palestinian state, he will never be able to persuade Hamas, Islamic Jihad and many other Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to exist.