Displaying posts published in

April 2016

Missouri Students’ Latest Target: The Campus Sushi Restaurant By Jillian Kay Melchior

Early into fall semester at the University of Missouri, a student wrote to the chancellor complaining about the logo for Sunshine Sushi, a restaurant in the Student Center.

The e-mail, entitled “Racism at Mizzou,” said that the logo closely resembled the Imperial Japanese flag used during World War II, and thus “has the same meaning as the Nazi’s Hakenkreuz [also known as the swastika], which was the symbol of the Nazi.” The student, whose name was redacted, added, “I wish to have this logo changed.”

The logo did somewhat resemble the Rising Sun flag, which has a controversial history but is also symbolically significant well beyond wartime Japan.

The flag dates as far back as the 17th century and is still flown today by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. It’s also used commercially, adorning everything from touristy T-shirts to Japanese beer cans to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper company. Some Japanese sports fans have also adopted the symbol to root for their favorite teams. A black version of the logo emblazoned character Danny LaRusso’s headband in the classic 1984 American film The Karate Kid.

E-mails reviewed exclusively by Heat Street and National Review show that soon after receiving an e-mail complaining about the Sunshine Sushi logo, Mizzou’s administrators promptly met with twelve students from different Asian organizations on campus, facilitating a meeting with the restaurant’s owners.

“The owners . . . have agreed to consider changing their logo if our students come up with something equal or better than their current logo,” wrote Jeff Zeilenga, the university’s assistant vice chancellor. He said they were “very willing to work with our students in good faith to find a better image” even though they “are under no obligation to change their registered logo of 15 years.”

The owners of Sunshine Sushi say they chose their original logo as a symbol of American freedom, not Japanese aggression.

Oo Min Aung, the sushi restaurant’s co-owner, was born in Myanmar and marched in pro-democracy protests before immigrating to the United States. He says that he chose a shining sun because he “wanted something that would symbolize the meaning of freedom, liberation.”

“I didn’t see any problems with my own logo,” Aung says. He says he met with students and tried to explain what the logo meant to him. But, he adds, “For people who came from Korea or China, I didn’t understand how much my old logo reminded them of their dark days with Japan. . . . [So I changed it] when I found out these people were not very happy with my logo — and they were students, too, and without them, I wouldn’t be here.”

Setting the Record Straight on Britain, America, and World War II By Victor Davis Hanson

While in London last week, President Obama waded into the upcoming British referendum about whether the United Kingdom should stay in the European Union.

Controversy followed his lecture about the future of the Anglo-American relationship should Britain depart the EU. Obama also implied that without an EU, the United States might again be dragged into European squabbling, as it had been in the prior world wars.

Americans might take this occasion to reflect on Britain’s role in World War II.

Before the war, the League of Nations had done nothing to deter the future Axis powers from invading or annexing Albania, Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, and Ethiopia.

Britain’s alliance with France might have deterred Nazi Germany had Winston Churchill, not Neville Chamberlain, been prime minister in 1939. Or an isolationist United States might have helped had it been willing to conclude a defense pact with the Western European democracies.

What ensured a war were the appeasement of Nazi Germany by Britain and France, the isolation of the United States from global responsibilities, and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Adolf Hitler. All three developments combined to convince Hitler that he could bully or invade his neighbors without consequences.

America entered the war on Britain’s side in late 1941, after more than two years of war that saw Hitler consolidate a continental empire larger than the present European Union. The United States declared war on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy on December 11, 1941 — but only after the two Axis powers declared war on us first. Had Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini not declared war after Japan’s December 7, 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, America may well have concentrated on defeating Imperial Japan and stayed neutral in the European theater.

Great Britain was the only major power to fight for the entire duration of World War II, from its beginning after the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 until the surrender of the Japanese in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

In late June of 1940, after the fall of Western Europe, Britain was the only major power in the world still resisting Nazi Germany. Otherwise, all of Europe was either occupied by Hitler, neutral, or supposedly neutral but surreptitiously aiding the Third Reich with shipments of supplies.

What a week for integration Britain! Douglas Murray

It’s been a terrific week for integration Britain. First the National Union of Students (NUS) elected what the BBC joyously headlinedas its ‘First black Muslim woman president.’ Wahey! Another victory for diverse Britain. But amid the preliminary bunting some people still remembered that Malia Bouattia is principally known for two things: a reportedly extreme opposition to some things Jewish, and an equal opposition to measures which protect the country which gave her and her family sanctuary when they fled from Algeria. Ms Bouattia denies being an anti-Semite and insists she is, instead, simply anti-Zionist.

Of course expecting people to receive asylum in our country and then feel even slightly grateful for the fact must seem so patriarchal and twentieth century. The new deal seems to be that people flee some terrorist-destroyed hell-hole, arrive in the UK and then campaign against efforts to protect ourselves from terrorism. And people wonder why people’s hearts might be hardening towards not just migrants but to genuine refugees?

Ms Bouattia made her name in student politics with a ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ campaign. And it seems nobody ever gave her the simplest answer, which is, ‘I dunno. Maybe for the same reason that if you went to Algeria you might find it somewhat ‘black’.’ Of course it would probably be considered not just rude but racist for someone who found themselves in the unlikely situation of fleeing the UK to go and live in Algeria to start a campaign called ‘Why is my curriculum black?’ But maybe that’s because of the Crusades, or the British Empire or some other tired excuse of the new demagogues.

Anyhow, we have our ‘first black Muslim woman president’ of the NUS and now a grateful nation only has to make its way through the first non-binary President of the NUS, the first non-binary President of Muslim background of the NUS and so on. At any rate, perhaps somewhere around the end of the next century the NUS could get round to electing a vaguely conservative student? Or perhaps that’s the realm of science-fiction.

In any case, yesterday brought another great success story. Naz Shah got a fair amount of sympathy at the last election, primarily because of her story of a forced marriage to a cousin in Pakistan, but also for being insulted on the campaign trail by George Galloway. Now it turns out that the new Member of Parliament for Bradford West is a bit like the old one. Except this one seems even more virulent.

I noticed earlier this year from her appearance on an edition of the BBC’s The Big Questions that although she had suffered some of the harsher corners of Pakistani culture, Ms Shah was no moderate. And then yesterday morning the wholly unsurprising news emerged that she has spent recent years railing against the Jews and the State of Israel on social media. Specifically she seems to approve of a plan toremove all the Jews of the Middle East from Israel. If there is any irony to a Bradford Muslim telling the Jews of the Middle East to ‘go back to where they came from’ then it is clearly lost on Ms Shah.

Of course this is the same Ms Shah who sits on a Parliamentary Group investigating anti-Semitism. She has already issued the pro-forma statement stressing that in the wake of this unfortunate outing of her views she will be ‘seeking to expand my existing engagement and dialogue with Jewish community organisations, and will be stepping up my efforts to combat all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism’. Yes – that’s it! All that’s needed is for Shah to ‘fight’ racism just that little bit harder. Hitherto she just hadn’t been doing it quite enough. All she needs to do now is promise to crush ‘all extremists’ a little bit more and the sunlit uplands will be reached for all of us.

But she hails from a culture and a religion where anti-Semitism is rife. Why would you expect her not to hold some of the rancid views of that culture as well as some of the nicer bits? In any case, her attitudes have now proved so extreme that she has had to resign as John McDonnell’s PPS. Imagine how extreme you have to be to be too extreme for John McDonnell.

I say all this is a success for integration Britain, because every week brings up cases like this and nobody seems remotely willing to reflect on them. While people in senior jobs in public life turn out to be open and essentially unapologetic racists, we pretend that all that’s needed for our country’s future to be secure is to tweak the racism awareness lessons a bit more or make one more big push to ‘smash’ the fascists.

The mistake is far more basic. For decades, successive governments in Britain pretended that if you brought millions of people from other cultures into this country and gave them enough time plus all the provisions of the British state then before long they would be down the pub and failing to attend church like everyone else. For some time now it should have been clear that a great many people who come into our country have no such desire. They – and very often their children – have another set of ideas, a different attitude towards the purpose of life and an alternative view of what constitutes respected ‘authority’.

Nobel Prize-worthy chutzpah: Ruthie Blum

If world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking finally wins a Nobel Prize, more than four decades after developing his theory of black holes, he will have Israel to thank for it.

Yes, a professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa claims to have verified Hawking’s hypothesis. In a paper posted on the physics website arXiv.org, Jeff Steinhauer described how he had simulated a black hole in the laboratory and witnessed the process that Hawking’s equations predicted.

As someone who backs the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against the Jewish state, Hawking is probably just as perturbed as he is elated by Steinhauer’s revelation. On the one hand, there are few pleasures in life as sweet as vindication, particularly for a scientist considered ahead of his time. On the other, someone swayed by very unscientific theories presented as facts by anti-Israel activists necessarily would be hard pressed to feel grateful to the very entity he wishes to shun.

And shun is precisely what Hawking did to Israel in 2013, when he reneged on a commitment to attend and be a key speaker at the fifth annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem. Though his office claimed that ill health was at the root of his cancellation, a few weeks before the event, it subsequently emerged that Palestinian professors had advised Hawking to respect their academic and cultural boycott of Israel by not showing up.

Initially, everyone believed Hawking was unwell. After all, the now 73-year-old with a degenerative motor neuron disease related to ALS (Lou Gehring’s disease) is wheelchair-bound, virtually paralyzed and uses a speech synthesizer for verbal communication. That he is still alive at all, let alone functioning at the level that he does, is miraculous. So the notion that he might have had medical reasons for backing out was both plausible and understandable — until this turned out to be a flimsy excuse for his succumbing to BDS, a very different kind of malady.

Trump Declares Iran Deal a Disaster — but Doesn’t Offer an Alternative By Andrew C. McCarthy

In Wednesday’s foreign-policy speech, Donald Trump accurately described President Obama’s Iran deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as “disastrous.” But his understanding of why this is the case is elusive — formed through his deal-maker prism, not by history, ideology, and the American interests he vows to prioritize. His remarks also raised more questions than they answered about his intentions. That means the speech was counterproductive because undermining the Iran deal — which is very much in America’s interests — requires presidential contenders to affect the behavior of the relevant players right now, not a year from now.

Trump pronounced the Iran deal disastrous because

In negotiation, you must be willing to walk. The Iran deal, like so many of our worst agreements, is the result of not being willing to leave the table. When the other side knows you’re not going to walk, it becomes absolutely impossible to win.

That is wrong. The JCPOA debacle is the result of being at the negotiating table in the first place. We gave the store away simply by sitting down, absent any conditions or changes in behavior, with a committed enemy of the United States, the world’s prime state sponsor of terrorism, while it was actively fueling anti-American jihadists, calling for “Death to America,” holding American hostages, threatening the annihilation of Israel, persecuting its own people, and developing nuclear power and ballistic missiles in violation of international law. Just by coming to the table, Obama signaled that he was ripe for the taking. It was never a matter of not knowing when to walk away.

Rutgers Goes Sharia-Compliant Student newspaper destroys every copy of latest edition featuring cartoon of Muhammad. Robert Spencer

The April 5, 2016 issue of The Gleaner, the student paper of Rutgers University–Camden, published a cartoon of Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus in a bar. Its content, however, cannot be known at this point, because at the behest of Muslims on campus, and in a case fraught with implications for the health of the freedom of speech today, the entire issue has been deep-sixed.

Two weeks after the cartoon was published, the April 19 issue of The Gleaner contained a letter from the Muslim Brotherhood campus group, the Muslim Students Association, saying that it found the image offensive and asking The Gleaner to remove the image from the April 5 issue and circulate a new edition of that issue without it. The MSA letter claims that Christians and Jews on campus told MSA members that they, too, found the image offensive.

The MSA letter states: “Even though freedom of speech and press is emphasized and is something all of us value as proud Americans, the University prides itself on diversity of people of different faith and backgrounds so we feel that it is necessary to respect those faiths and backgrounds by honoring their beliefs.”

The April 19 Gleaner also contains a response to the MSA letter, written by Christopher Church, the Editor-in-Chief of The Gleaner. Church apologizes to the MSA and agrees to meet with it “so that we can rectify this issue and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.” He also agrees to remove any copies of the offending April 5 issue from the Gleaner boxes around campus and destroy them.

Defeating Hamas in America The BDS movement and its role in the jihadist war against Israel. Caroline Glick

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

To defeat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, it is first necessary to understand it.

The BDS campaign is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Activists from US coast to coast robotically parrot the same lies, employ the same tactics of bullying, intimidating and silencing pro-Israel activists and speakers on campus after campus.

Their goals are uniform. They seek to silence pro-Israel voices in US academia as a means to destroy general public support for Israel in America.

And they seek to make Jew-hatred socially acceptable in elite circles in America for the first time since the Holocaust.

This month it was leftist MK Tzipi Livni’s turn to fall victim to BDS bigotry and defamation. During a public appearance at Harvard Law School, one of the heads of BDS movement at the school, Husam el-Qoulaq, asked her why she is “smelly.”

Qoulaq is the head of Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard Law School.

SJP is the central engine of the BDS movement.

Its members are the ones who organize the “divest from Israel” resolutions routinely passed by ignorant or intimidated student representatives on college councils.

Muslim Countries Slam Israel—For Protecting Them The Golan Heights is the latest “outrage.” P. David Hornik

On Tuesday the Organization of Islamic Cooperation held an “emergency,” “extraordinary” meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The OIC includes violence-wracked countries and failed states like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and others, as well as severely poor and dysfunctional countries like Burkina Faso, Somalia, Bangladesh, and others. Not a single one of the organization’s 57 countries is a frontrunner in terms of freedom and prosperity, and most are far below that level.

But the topic of Tuesday’s “emergency meeting” was that on April 17 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that: “Israel will never withdraw from the Golan Heights.”

The meeting’s final communiqué “Condemns strongly Israel, the occupying power, and its macabre acts to change the legal status, demographic composition, and institutional structure of the occupied Syrian Golan.” It also “expresses unconditional support for the legitimate right of the Syrian people to restore their full sovereignty on the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The Arab League—whose 22 member states make up a sizable chunk of the OIC—had already weighed in on Netanyahu’s words on April 21, calling for a special criminal court to be set up and put Israel on trial for the transgression.

The Golan was controlled by Syria from 1948 to 1967, during which time Syrian gunners often fired at the Israeli communities below and forced their residents to sleep in bomb shelters. Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War—and fortunately, since then, has kept it and developed it.

Today, with Syria devolved into Hobbesian war and fragmentation, the Heights are all the more strategically vital to Israel, and the idea of trading them for “peace” has—at least in the Israeli discourse—died a well-deserved death. The Golan, by the way, constitutes less than 1 percent of Syrian territory, and Syria’s loss of it almost 50 years ago is the least of its problems.

But there is further irony in the Arab League’s and the OIC’s reactions to Netanyahu’s words.

Fighting BDS By Elise Cooper

At the recent Stand With Us conference, it became obvious that the anti-BDS movement is becoming empowered. American Thinker interviewed those willing to combat BDS both on college campuses and with legislation.

California Assemblyman Travis Allen (R) has been on the forefront of pushing legislation to counter the BDS movement. First introduced in January he has since decided to co-author, in a bipartisan manner, another bill, AB 2844, to ensure its passing. In its current form the bill requires that California will not contract with any entity that officially boycotts the State of Israel, calling Israel a “vital ally and only democracy in the Middle East.” Every 180 days the list is updated.

California should join other states that have considered such legislation. Currently there are seven states that passed bills, seven pending, of which five of those are highly likely to pass. AB 2844 has been approved by two committees and will shortly be up before a third, after which it will go to the floor for a general vote. Unfortunately, as it moves through committees some will try to change the language from its original form. The Democrats do not have a good track record nationally, considering many did not see the Iran Nuclear Deal as a problem, so will this BDS bill be watered down?

Allen noted to American Thinker, “Republican support will be contingent on it remaining a strong bill with clear language. It is important that all members of the legislation need to work together to ensure the bill is not unduly complicated or watered downed through the process. The resulting law must be concise and effective.”

He wants to remind Californians, “Israel has a level of freedom not enjoyed by surrounding countries in the Middle East. When the proponents of boycotting Israel talk about freedom of equality and tolerance they should be asked if the same standard is applied to other countries around the world. I introduced the bill to show that California values its allies and our taxpayers do not want to support prejudice with their tax dollars. California has a closeness with Israel: over two billion dollars in trade, over 1500 companies do business in Israel, and Governor Brown signed a memorandum of understanding in 2014 to increase collaboration and trade with Israel.”

More and more opponents of BDS are putting the movement on the defensive. People are recognizing that one of the important battlefields is the terrain of college campuses.

Molly, a senior at Stanford University, is attempting to pass a resolution on campus against anti-Semitism. She sees herself as a student advocate and does not believe in a “tepid response. I did not have the support of the Hillel Director… She works in an organization that should help make the lives of Jewish students better. I was actually inspired by her response, because she forced me to stand up for what I believe. There is no strong leadership on campus that says anti-Semitism is not okay, so we need to stand up for ourselves. I warn my fellow students who are not Jewish, anti-Semitism, which is also anti-Zionism, is a canary in a coalmine. The first piece of discrimination starts with the Jewish people and goes forward to others.”

BARTLE BULL: REVIEW OF “A RAGE FOR ORDER” BY ROBERT F.WORTH

The Agony of the Arab Spring
Of the five countries where citizens rose up in 2011, only Tunisia is relatively stable and free. It also produces the most Islamic State recruits.

In early 2011, two young Syrian women named Aliaa and Noura whiled away spring mornings strolling to university or lying on Aliaa’s bed talking about suitors. Dark-haired Aliaa was the daughter of an Alawite military officer; blond Noura was the daughter of a well-known Sunni doctor.

They lived in Jableh, an ancient Phoenician port where the Sunni center of town, with its cafes and Mediterranean promenade, is surrounded by green hills of Alawite and Christian villages. Aliaa and Noura were the best of friends.

Then came the Arab Spring. In Syria, it began five years ago last month. By 2013, Noura was a refugee in Turkey, and Aliaa was worrying that, “if Bashar [al-Assad] falls . . . we, here, will all be in the niqab [the Muslim face veil], or we will be dead.” Noura had once promised to name her first daughter after Aliaa. Now the Sunni was accusing her former friend of trying to convert her to Shiism, and the Alawite thought she had discovered a pattern of Saudi links in her friend’s behavior during those happier days.

“Their friendship belonged to a world that no longer made sense,” writes New York Times reporter Robert F. Worth in “A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS.” “They had redefined each other, little by little, as enemies.”