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May 2016

Jason Riley Is the Latest Conservative to Be Disinvited from a College Campus By Peter Wood & Rachelle Peterson

The higher-education disinvitation sweepstakes continue. Virginia Tech has just disinvited Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow. Riley had been asked to deliver the BB&T Distinguished Lecture at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. But late last week he received an e-mail from the faculty member who arranged the lecture informing him that the head of the Finance Department, the J. Gray Ferguson Professor of Finance, Vijay Singal, had vetoed the invitation. We obtained a copy of this email.

Why? Mr. Riley, who is black, has attracted some negative attention since his publication in 2014 of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Professor Singal feared that whatever controversy Riley had attracted so far would be amplified once he set foot on Virginia Tech’s campus. He imagined there would be amplified controversy over Riley’s speech because Virginia Tech is still reverberating from the last BB&T Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Charles Murray on March 25.

That event was widely noted because of the exceptionally clumsy way that Virginia Tech president Tim Sands handled it. Sands sent an “open letter” to the Virginia Tech community on March 10, ostensibly upholding the invitation to Murray but doing so in such poison-pen language that he practically wrote the placards for the protesters. In Sands’s words, Murray’s work, particularly The Bell Curve, is “discredited,” “flawed,” “used by some to justify fascism, racism and eugenics,” and “regarded by some in our community as repugnant, offensive, or even fraudulent.”

It emerged that Dr. Sands actually knew little of Murray’s scholarly work, but relied instead on hearsay from Murray’s distempered critics. Murray answered Sands with a pungent open letter of his own; delivered his scheduled lecture despite some protesters; and left the campus with only one significant casualty — namely President Sands’s reputation.

The link between the Murray affair and the disinvitation to Riley isn’t speculative. The letter to Riley telling him his lecture is canceled plunges right into the recent history, including Tim Sands having “embarrassed himself and the university” with his open letter. The professor who wrote to Riley clearly felt chagrined by this turn of events. He is “sure” that President Sands “never read” The Bell Curve, at which he directed such vitriol. And Sands’s remarks, he says, served as an accelerant to a protest at the business school two days before M

Britain’s “Routine and Commonplace” Anti-Semitism by Richard Kemp and Jasper Reid

Each of these politicians accused of anti-Semitism was voted into power by an electorate who knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views, they would not have been elected.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace.” — Mehdi Hasan, British Muslim political journalist.

The consequences of Western politicians’ continued weakness and appeasement are far greater than encouraging anti-Semitism and undermining the State of Israel. It is the fatal and irreversible descent of their own countries.

Battle-hardened British soldiers were moved to tears by the horrors they witnessed at the Nazi charnel house of Bergen-Belsen when they liberated the concentration camp in April 1945. Yet seventy years after thousands of troops fought and died to destroy the regime that murdered six million Jews, the scourge of anti-Semitism is again on the march across Europe.

In just one week, a British student leader, a Labour Party constituency MP, a London council leader, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee and even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have all been accused of being mired in Jew-hatred.

It is the tip of the iceberg. Each of these people was voted into power by an electorate that knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views they would not have been elected.

All are on the political left, but the problem does not stop there. The cancer of Jew-hatred today spreads from right to left throughout European nations and in all supranational bodies including the European Union and the United Nations. It is led by politicians, human rights groups and the media, whose contorted worldview has contaminated ordinary people on a scale unimaginable possibly even to the arch-propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels himself.

Of Livingstone, Hitler and the unmentioned Nazi Palestinian Mufti by Yithak Santis

This article is co-authored with Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs—

In the uproar following Ken Livingstone’s comments about Hitler having been a Zionist “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” a crucial point has not been raised: the collaboration at the highest levels with the Nazi regime by Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the father of Palestinian nationalism.

The intense criticism against Livingstone is appropriate. Correcting the history of the Zionist movement and its response to the rise of Nazism is paramount. Yet, if dealing in any manner with the Nazi regime delegitimizes a national movement, then Palestinian leader Haj Amin’s close collaboration with the likes of Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Goebbels should make anti-Israel campaigners rethink their strategy of injecting the Holocaust into their assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

There is a world of difference between the desperate effort of Zionist leaders to rescue German Jewry from the Nazis, which by definition required the need to “deal” with Berlin, and Haj Amin’s overt alliance with Nazi Germany including support for the Final Solution.

Anti-Israel campaigners often make the point that Palestinian Arabs should not be “made to pay for the Holocaust,” a “European crime.” This argument fails on two counts. First, it ignores the three millennia of unbroken Jewish habitation of the land of Israel, in which Jews are an indigenous people. Secondly, it denies the close collaboration with Nazi Germany by the Palestinian leadership of that era, which by 1941 knew of, supported and even participated in the Nazi genocide. This is something for which contemporary Palestinian leadership must finally acknowledge and take responsibility.

Scholars have written comprehensively on this Palestinian (and other Arab) collaboration with Nazi Germany. There is no excuse for ignorance on this matter. Jeffrey Herf’s “Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World”, Klaus-Michael Mallmann’s and Martin Cüppers’ “Nazi Palestine”, Zvi Elpeleg’s “Through the Eyes of the Mufti: The Essays of Haj Amin, Translated and Annotated,” David G. Dalin’s and John F. Rothmann’s “Icon of Evil” and many other historians documented extensively this chapter of World War Two history.

British Jews in false Labour by Ruthie Blum

Just when you think things could not possibly get any worse, they always do. Take the case of the Jews and the British Labour Party, for example.

No, not the Jews who are becoming an increasingly open target of the rampant and rabid anti-Semitism that has been afflicting the so-called liberal side of the U.K. political spectrum for some time now. The election of Jeremy Corbyn to head the party that supposedly represents the mainstream Left was already a bad omen, as it reflected the way the wind was blowing where Israel was concerned.

This did not come as a surprise to anyone, least of all Israelis. Europe is in the throes of what National Review columnist and author Andrew McCarthy has been warning about for years: the deadly marriage of radical Islamists to Western leftists, which once would have seemed counter-intuitive. After all, the former oppose everything the latter stand for and then some. This includes, but is not exclusive to, the treatment of women and gays.

The end result is that old-style anti-Semitism, of the upper-crust variety — the type that became totally taboo after World War II saw millions of Jews marched into the gas chambers — has found a new home. This one has a stamp of legitimacy brandished on its front door. It is the right to express vitriol against the State of Israel, the collective successful Jew.

It’s a neat trick and one that worked even before the Holocaust. Exhibiting racism toward people who are affluent, educated, innovative and integrated into your society is a guilt-free pleasure in any case. But being provided an opportunity — in the form of a flourishing state in the Middle East accused by anti-Western forces of behaving badly — to spew unfounded poison is like winning the jackpot.

When coupled with a historical British tendency to glamorize figures like Lawrence of Arabia, this British brew becomes irresistible to those anti-Semites who were forced, or even went willingly, into the closet for a few decades.

Enough has been said over the past couple of weeks about the sorry condition of Britain’s liberal universities and the party that best suits academia. Indeed, the situation has grown so dire — most recently with the election of Muslim anti-Zionist Malia Bouattia as head of the National Union of Students, and the suspensions of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Labour MP Naz Shah — that even Corbyn is saying he will launch an investigation into the phenomenon.

BIG GREEN’S DIRTY POWER: DANIEL GREENFIELD

Big Green is big business. The global renewable energy market is estimated at over $600 billion. Obama’s stimulus boondoggle alone blew around $50 billion on green energy. Annual spending is somewhere around $39 billion a year and that’s just the tip of the Big Green iceberg.

California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions. And the endgame is a national and a global
carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.

Environmentalism isn’t a hippie with a cardboard sign. It’s multinational corporations and big banks. It’s environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project. It’s subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense. It’s brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs. It’s a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.

Big Green is booming business. But it can’t succeed on its own. Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Even as the science behind the conspiracy theory that claims humans are warming the planet continues to fall apart, Big Green is escalating its crackdown on climate science. If you are going to falsely claim that 99.99% of scientists agree with you, the best way to ensure that is by criminalizing scientific dissent.

The Month That Was – April 2016 by Sydney Williams

What have we come to? Consider April. Alexander Hamilton was allowed to remain on the ten-dollar bill because of a Broadway musical. Curt Schilling was fired from his job at ESPN because he had the audacity to say: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves.” Harvard College deemed single sex “final clubs” dens of iniquity, but a “sex fair” made brighter an already “enlightened” university? Facing charges of child molestation, but, even so, named ambassador for President Obama’s Latino and Black youth programs, rapper Rick Ross was invited to the White House. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order giving the right-to-vote to 206,000 ex-cons. In a muddled statement regarding the desperate financial situation facing New York City hospital’s, Mayor William de Blasio asserted: “There will be no lay-offs, but there will be staff reductions.” Overseas, Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2012 shooting rampage, claimed that isolation in his three-room suite, which includes windows, a treadmill, fridge, TV and Sony PlayStation, violated his human rights and posed a threat to his mental well-being.

Andrew Jackson was never on my short list of great Presidents; so Harriet Tubman, in my opinion, is a good replacement. But the initial instinct of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew was to toss Alexander Hamilton into the distaff sea. That showed either a remarkable ignorance of history, or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the man who first held the office he now holds. It is ironic that the left, which claims that Republican religious and social orthodoxies deprive them of believing in science, should condemn a man whose observation was based on the definitive science of chromosomes. Despite a study she had commissioned that found 87% of campus sexual assaults occurred in University-owned and operated dorms, Harvard’s president Drew Faust found fault with clubs that are independent of the College. She expressed no concern that a University-sponsored fair displaying vibrators, dildos and other sex toys will have any effect on the male libido. During his White House visit Mr. Ross had his ankle bracelet alarm go off, which presumably amused any youths that were present. As for Governor McAuliffe, he later denied to reporters that his motivation was political – the possibility that the almost 4% extra votes might help Mrs. Clinton never crossed his mind! There is nothing I can add to Mr. de Blasio’s verbal contortions. As for the cold-blooded killer Breivik who certainly had mental health problems before going to jail, the Norwegian judge decided his rights were being violated, that he should not be held in isolation…and that the Norwegian people should pay his legal bills. The moral in Aesop’s fable of the frog and the scorpion: real, embedded evil cannot be countered by benevolence.

The planet is out of control. Perhaps it is not greenhouse gasses that is the cause of climate change, but the verbal bovine faeces that vents from Washington, Brussels and other places of political power? Mark Twain must feel a sense of omniscience. Freedom of speech continues to be denied conservatives on campuses. Will it now be denied by Congress? Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has asked the Justice Department to bring civil cases against “climate dissenters,” using RICO statutes. We live in a world that condemns Israelis as racists for their treatment of Palestinians, but condone misogynist Muslim men for treating women as slaves. In Luddite-like fashion, Vermont decided that advancements in biotechnology should not apply to food eaten by “Green Mountaineers.” Up seems to be down; right is wrong; east is west. I am reminded of Roberto Binigni in Down by Law: “It’s a sad and beautiful world.” (Maybe “strange” and “crazy” would be better?) Will we right this ship that is foundering in a sea of dissembled ignorance and moral and cultural relativism, or are we doomed to another dark age?

April may not be, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, the cruelest month, but last month had its share of tragedies. The month saw two earthquakes in Japan and one in Ecuador. Dozens died in Japan and more than 480 in Ecuador. Five hundred refugees from Africa drowned, as their over-crowded boat sank in the Mediterranean. Through the 26th of April, according to Wikipedia, 478 people were killed during the month in dozens of terrorist acts in twenty-five countries on four continents. Hundreds more were wounded. Iran, trying to appear noble in Western eyes, announced that it may send Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, to help fight ISIS, another terrorist group. Vladimir Putin, a progenitor of terror and crime, announced plans for a “several-hundred-thousand strong national guard” to fight terrorism and organized crime! It smacks of Mussolini’s “Black Shirts,” the paramilitary wing of Italy’s National Fascist Party.

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS: ANTI-SEMITISM IN ALBION READ IT ALL

Haaretz: The British Left can’t tackle anti-Semitism if it doesn’t want to understand it

* Tom Gross: There has been a great amount of coverage in the British media in recent days concerning the furious row that is engulfing Britain’s main opposition Labour party about anti-Semitism within its ranks. The vast majority of readers of this list live outside the UK, so for those interested, I attach seven articles below. (By coincidence, the authors of these articles are all subscribers to this list: four are left-wingers; three are on the right.)

* Niall Ferguson (London Sunday Times): Former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s claim that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel” is nonsense and based on the claim of the [self-hating Jewish] American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner, who at an anti-Israel meeting in Connecticut, said that Jews were as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”. As early as April 1920 Hitler called for Jews “to be exterminated”. In Mein Kampf he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] war and during the war 12 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were therefore not voting for a Zionist resettlement programme. At a torchlit parade on February 6, 1933, in Hamburg 20,000 brownshirts chanted: “Death to the Jews,” and – according to one eyewitness – “sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives”.

* Leading British historian Andrew Roberts: The sole reason Ken Livingstone brought up the Fuhrer in his interview was to be as vicious and loathsome as he possibly could to any Jews listening.

* Leading British World War Two historian Antony Beevor: For Livingstone to describe Hitler as a Zionist is “grotesque”. * Liam Hoare (Haaretz) : Anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Jewish racism – but it is also a unique form of prejudice, at once a virus and pathology. Anti-Semitism is a condition where Jews are the eternal antithesis. The hatred against them survives by constantly mutating. Christian anti-Judaism flowed into race-and-blood anti-Semitism. The accusation that Israelis murder Palestinian children and harvest their organs is the freshest incarnation of the old blood libel. Jews have been held responsible for both capitalism and communism, modernity and backwardness, powerfulness and powerlessness, sexual prowess and sexual inadequacy, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

* Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph) : Jeremy Corbyn has refused to share a platform with David Cameron over the EU referendum, although they both advocate a Remain vote. [But Corbyn happily] shared a platform with Sheikh Raed Saleh, who (elsewhere) called Jews “bacteria”; with representatives of the British Muslim Initiative, which plays the anti-Semitic card of comparing Jews with Nazis with its “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” placards; with what he calls his “friends” from Hamas, whose charter calls upon Moslems to kill Jews. And Corbyn has shared platforms with others who claim that “the Jews” that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

* Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian): “So this is my plea to the left. Treat us the same way you’d treat any other minority. No better and no worse. If opposition to racism means anything, it surely means that.” * Jonathan Freedland: Israel was deemed a “disease” by a caller to a 2010 show on Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, without objection from the host, Jeremy Corbyn.

* Tom Gross: The Guardian itself (though not Jonathan Freedland), along with the BBC, has been contributing to British anti-Semitism for decades now, as I have documented on countless occasions, for example here in my time showing the Guardian editor parts of Israel and the West Bank and here. I have also many times in the past, documented the anti-Semitism of Mayor Livingstone on this list, for example, here.

* David Hirsh: Last month Livingstone said that in his 45 years in the Labour Party he had never once seen any anti-Semitism. On that occasion he was jumping to the defence of Gerry Downing, a Labour Party member who wanted to “re-open the Jewish Question” and Vicki Kirby, a Labour member who tweeted that the Brits “invented Israel when saving them [the Jews] from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher”. He was also trying to douse the scandal in Oxford University Labour Club after its Chair resigned, saying that members seemed to have “some kind of a problem with Jews”. These were the students who taunted Jewish members calling them “Zios” and singing “Bombs over Tel Aviv”. – See more at: http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001608.html#sthash.JkHXvBzB.dpuf

Time to Tutor Trump Just not the way Professor George Will would. By Jed Babbin

George Will, writing in the Washington Post yesterday, said that if Donald Trump is nominated conservatives should help him lose all fifty states. Will wrote that they should do this in order to “…reap the considerable satisfaction of preserving the identity of their 162-year-old party while working to see that they forgo only four years of the enjoyment of executive power.”

Will is wrong, appallingly so. That’s obvious to anyone who values our national security more than the identity of the Republican Party.

The simple fact is that if Trump were to lose to Hillary Clinton, the nation would be doomed to four or eight years of governance by a person who is unfit to be president by any measure. Mrs. Clinton’s connivance with President Obama produced the most damaging foreign policy since Lyndon Johnson waded into Vietnam. That policy is Hillary’s proudest (and only) achievement. Her handling of our most closely guarded secrets, making them vulnerable to interception by every foreign government and terrorist group, is unforgivable as is her comprehensive corruption.

We know the rest. Hillary would pack the Supreme Court with more Kagans and Sotomayors. I’m told that Trump will soon announce a list of possible Supreme Court nominees that will please conservatives. Let’s hope he does.

It’s unimaginable that any of us would work for Hillary against Trump, even those of us who have been sharply critical of him. It’s time to accept that, unless something really strange happens, Trump will be the Republican nominee this year. Therefore it’s our duty to help educate him.

Trump is a businessman so he sees national security and foreign policy only from that perspective. He’s unfamiliar with how national security and foreign policy must be managed to the nation’s benefit. He doesn’t know how to pull the levers of American power to move the world. So we have to help him learn. Some of the people I know and trust are trying to influence him on these matters as evidenced in his foreign policy speech last Wednesday.

There were a lot of good points Trump made in that speech and some not so good. Let’s take them in the order he made them.

Trump’s adoption of the “America First” slogan is unfortunate. Though it has a good ring to it, the slogan is freighted with the history of the isolationist “America Firsters” of the 1930s. (That movement lasted until three days after Pearl Harbor.) A potential president needs to be aware of that kind of history and avoid connecting himself to it. Insertion of two letters to make it “Americans First” might help.

Britain won’t leave Europe, but watch it collapse from a distance: David ‘Spengler” Goldman

OXFORD–As it has for over 500 years, the Magdalene College Choir sang the Hymnus Eucharisticus from a tower high above this university town on the first day of May, followed incongruously by a dirty Elizabethan ditty about nymphs in Spring. An Anglican vicar blessed the bedraggled revellers crowding the surrounding streets. Most of them had tippled through the night.

Undergraduates for centuries celebrated May Morning by jumping off Magdalene Bridge into the shallow and frigid River Cherwell, but this year police barriers made the stream inacessible. Risk aversion has trumped tradition even in Oxford, once the last redoubt of British bloodymindedness. Whether one thinks the British Empire organized rapacity (mostly) or a civilizing influence (occasionally) or both (mainly), the men who made it evinced a madcap daring. The once-adventurous British no longer wish to leap into the unknown, except perhaps in the fantasy world of Harry Potter. For the same reason, Britain will vote to remain in the European Union on June 23. The annoyance of remaining in Europe is not too onerous to bear, and the risk of something going pear-shaped during a British exit (“Brexit”) is incalculable. Besides, Europe is gradually falling apart on its own, which means that the British have no urgent need to exit at the moment.

Stick around long enough, alas, and you turn into a theme park: the Oxford faculty recalls the last Spartan hoplites oiling their hair, playing their flutes and drilling in phalanx for Roman tourists at the end of the first century. Oxford is the world’s prettiest university town and a tourist destination par excellence, with dons and students substituting for the cartoon characters who greet the guests at Disney World.

Oxford today is all overpaying foreign students and bewildered Britons with middle-class accents. The accents are the giveaway: absorbing the clipped consonants and plummy vowels of the academic dialect was half the reason to go down to Oxford, the hallmark of acculturation into the British elite. Oxford itself is divided quaintly into thirty colleges, which range in order of poshness from Balliol to Ruskin and in braininess from Merton to Pembroke. Students meet weekly with a tutor and otherwise are left to their own devices. That is the mode of learning most easily replaced by Internet communication and the digitization of libraries, but such is Oxford’s residual cachet that inertia will carry it forward for another century.

The barbarians have not conquered it so much as infiltrated, as in the late Roman Empire. Oxford’s faculty still speak the King’s English and strike grand poses, but their grandeur is redolent of caricature. The end of empire spelled the end of the British elite, that is, the Mandarin caste of civil servants and military men who played Great Games and fought Britain’s wars. Almost nothing is left of the British merchant banks who once dominated world finance. As the victors in two World Wars, Britons are the only Western Europeans still ready to fight, as they did effectively in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Britain’s military and political role is too withered to support an elite caste.

I saw the darkness of antisemitism, but I never thought it would get this dark Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Racism is not a specific illness but a general sickness. Display one symptom and you display them all. If you show me an anti-Muslim bigot, I will be able to guess his or her views on the European Union, welfare state, crime and “political correctness”. Show me a leftwing or Islamist antisemite and, once again, he will carry a suitcase full of prejudices, which have nothing to do with Jews, but somehow have everything to do with Jews.

The Labour party does not have a “problem with antisemitism” it can isolate and treat, like a patient asking a doctor for a course of antibiotics. The party and much of the wider liberal-left have a chronic condition.

As I have written about the darkness on the left before, I am not going to crow now that it has turned darker than even I predicted. (There is not much to crow about, after all.) I have nothing but respect for the Labour MPs who are trying to stop their party becoming a playpen for fanatics and cranks. It just appears to me that they face interlocking difficulties that are close to insoluble.

They must first pay the political price of confronting supporters from immigrant communities, which Labour MPs from all wings of the party have failed to do for decades. It may be high. While Ken Livingstone was forcing startled historians to explain that Adolf Hitler was not a Zionist, I was in Naz Shah’s Bradford. A politician who wants to win there cannot afford to be reasonable, I discovered. He or she cannot deplore the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and say that the Israelis and Palestinians should have their own states. They have to engage in extremist rhetoric of the “sweep all the Jews out” variety or risk their opponents denouncing them as “Zionists”.