Displaying posts published in

July 2016

The Road to Yale’s Free-Speech Crisis It began in the ’60s. By Eliana Johnson

Bill Buckley was one of the first to suggest there was trouble brewing on campus when he published God and Man at Yale in 1951. He argued that Yale University was doing more to strengthen students’ belief in godlessness and Communism than in Christianity and capitalism. It was an early warning.

That became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, when universities were the churning center of the anti-war movement, with students rioting against campus police and occupying administrative buildings. Those struggles, which focused in part on accusations of American oppression in the Third World, fed directly into the conflicts of the ’80s and ’90s over the proper role of the Western canon in undergraduate education. It was in 1987 that Jesse Jackson led Stanford students in a protest of a then-required course in the literature and philosophy of the West, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.”

Throughout these battles, Yale has been both the breeding ground for and the adjudicator of higher education’s challenges — from the Buckley-instigated debate over whether universities should hire Communists to Yale’s heavy-handed attempts to maintain order in the Vietnam era to the debate in the ’90s over a $20 million donation for a course in the study of Western civilization that was ultimately rejected by the university. All these episodes were subjects of national headlines — and all reflected larger national struggles.

In the debates over free speech that raged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Yale bucked the national trend, issuing a report that stated unequivocally the centrality of free expression to the purpose of the university. The Woodward report — as it was called after C. Vann Woodward, the eminent historian who chaired the committee that wrote it — came in response to a series of events in which speech had been stifled. The report concluded that while certain speech might cause “shock, hurt, and anger” — consequences not to be dismissed — the right to free expression was more important. If the university was to serve its central purpose — to foster “free access of knowledge” — nothing could supersede that right.

With campus activism warming up once more, events at Yale are again providing a window onto the national scene. Last fall, the school was engulfed in a months-long scandal over an e-mail about Halloween costumes that ended with the resignation of two liberal professors, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, from their administrative posts. At root was the collision between the Christakises’ deeply held belief in free speech — for which they have a long record of advocacy — and the university’s devotion to cultural diversity, particularly when student protesters are armed with their emotions.

Washington’s Hollow Men The government/media power elite are spectacularly ignorant of the American people. By Victor Davis Hanson

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.

— T. S. Eliot

In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.

But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.

There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”

In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different.

Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc.

Net worth, whether made or inherited, helps. But lots of billionaires, especially Midwestern sorts, are not part of the elite, in that their money does not necessarily translate into much political or cultural influence — or influence of the right sort. (Exceptions are Chicago traders who bundle millions for Hillary.)

The Democrats’ ‘Emergency’ Assault on the Second Amendment Schumer and Obama misunderstand the Constitution. By Andrew C. McCarthy

To hear the Democrat-media complex tell it, guns themselves are responsible for last month’s carnage at a gay nightclub in Orlando — not the jihadist (a registered Democrat) who pulled the triggers again and again while screaming “Allahu akbar” and pledging allegiance to ISIS. This “blame the guns” meme spearheads the Left’s latest campaign against the Second Amendment.

President Obama and his allies in Congress seek to deny the constitutional gun-ownership rights of Americans merely suspected of terror ties — even as the Left champions the non-existent immigration rights of aliens from regions notorious for terror ties. The backbone of the Democrats’ stratagem is a specious “constitutional” claim, one whose logic would empower the government to strip every civil right the Constitution is designed to protect against government encroachment.

As posited by Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) at a Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Democrats claim that many constitutional liberties are routinely restricted in emergency circumstances — in particular, Fourth Amendment rights against warrantless search and arrest. Hence, the argument goes, Second Amendment rights, too, may be stripped away if Democrats can concoct an emergency — such as the ongoing crisis in which guns, apparently with minds of their own, mow down infidels.

At the hearing, Republicans, led by Senator John Cornyn (R., Tex.), made the point that the right to keep and bear arms is rooted in both self-defense and insurance against government’s propensity toward tyranny. The right pre-existed the Constitution. Thus, the Second Amendment is not its source. The right to keep and bear arms is natural and inalienable; the Second Amendment protects it, and Congress has no legitimate power to restrict it.

That does not mean the right is without limitations. As we shall see, like “the freedom of speech” safeguarded by the First Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms had well-known limitations at the time it was adopted. Unquestionably, Congress and state governments have the power to enforce those limitations. But those limitations are part and parcel of the right as originally enshrined in the Constitution. They do not imply a government power to enact additional restrictions in response to “emergencies” or other modern conditions.

RELATED: Democrats Abandon Due Process

EDWARD CLINE: THE FOOL’S GOLD OF PRAGMATISM

I made the remark during a recent email discussion of my eviction by my former landlady because I was seen as a “risk” to my neighbors, and that it was more “pragmatic” to remove the “threat” by throwing me to the ISIS wolves. Rather than thank me for defending her rights, she wished to eliminate the potential “threat” to her tenants and property.
The situation, inaugurated when the FBI/NCIS paid me a visit on May 18th to inform me that my Rule of Reason site was on the radar of ISIS and other Islamic terrorist organizations, but the agent advised me that I was in no imminent danger. Thousands of Americans have been “targeted” by ISIS activists, or by wannabe terrorists. Their landlords or bankers have not told them to get lost. It is hard to ken the mentality of a person who would pretend that evicting me – an unprecedented event in my life – would somehow magically ward off any murderous Islamic mischief from her other tenants.

The best way, according to the landlady, to avoid any potential unpleasantness with Muslims and Islam, was to extinguish the red light that was Edward Cline. Get it off the property and as far away as possible. Deny that he existed.

I was instantly relegated to the status of a post WWII displaced person. I am currently “living out of a suitcase” in a dump of a motel. It has been a very stressful and costly experience for me. Not even several stories about the sheer irrationality of her actions have swayed the person I have not so fondly nicknamed, “The Bitch of Buchenwald.” As Daniel Greenfield noted in his article, the landlady acted, for all intents and purposes, and whether or not she knew it, as an agent of ISIS. There are scores, even thousands of her ilk in our federal, state, and local governments. Obsessed with not rocking the Islamic boat, though that boat has rocked with increasing frequency with hundreds of lives lost just in the West.

What Doesn’t Work against Terrorism We have not learned as much as we think. By Kevin D. Williamson

When an Independence Day visitor to New York City got his foot blown off by a bag of explosives left in Central Park, the first thing that the authorities did was to reassure us that this was not an act of terrorism.

The first version of the story, trumpeted on CNN and elsewhere, was risible: People try to make homemade fireworks around Independence Day, and that’s probably what this was. And, truly, who among us could fail to appreciate the rich tradition of lovable, ungovernable scamps growing up on Fifth Avenue and 61st Street mixing up explosive concoctions out in the cow barns behind their $15 million apartments? The same kids no doubt dreamt of running away to join the circus while their nannies shoved them off toward Dalton.

If it wasn’t the Huck Finns of the Upper East Side, then who might it have been? The news reports were almost unanimously scrupulous in declining to say.

Outside of the reach of Tom Wolfe’s “Victorian gentleman,” the reactions were rather different: “An IED has been exploded in Central Park,” I was informed. I don’t know that that was the case, with media coverage of the incident being maddeningly vague as of early afternoon on July 4.

I cannot say with any confidence at the moment what happened in Central Park. I can say with some confidence what will happen, if not in Central Park then in similar high-profile public locations, because it has happened already and there is no reason to believe that it will not happen in the future.

The Islamic State and its groupies have a great deal in common with al-Qaeda, but there is a tactical difference that is going to be very important to us in the coming years. It may be the case that al-Qaeda did not follow up the September 11 attacks with an equally terrifying string of less spectacular low-level attacks because its members were unable to, but it also is the case that al-Qaeda was organizationally disinclined to do so, believing, at an institutional level, that such dramatic, theatrical attacks should be followed only with larger, more dramatic, more theatrical attacks. The Islamic State, on the other hand, is satisfied if it can inspire some mentally unstable loser on Facebook to shoot up a gay club in Orlando, or a shopping mall somewhere, or a school bus somewhere else.

We should assume that such low-level attacks are going to become a regular part of our lives for the foreseeable future — unless something truly effective is done to counter them.

What would that look like?

We have, by this point, a great deal of experience with what doesn’t work.

Bad Ideas Created Benghazi The deadly cost of trying to sever Islamic terrorism from its roots. Bruce Thornton

The House Select Committee on Benghazi report confirms what we pretty much already knew. The Obama administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completely politicized this country’s foreign policy in order to ensure the reelection of Obama and to serve the future presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton. Along the way Obama, Clinton et al. made dangerous decisions, such as establishing the consular outpost in Benghazi, and ignoring the consul’s pleas for more security. They also ignored the many warning signs of incipient attacks, bungled the response to the attack on September 11, 2012, and then obfuscated, spun, and outright lied in the aftermath. The House report adds new details that flesh out the story, but enough had already been leaked to confirm Clinton’s despicable sacrifice of American lives on the altar of her obsessive ambition.

Toxic ambition, sheer incompetence, and the self-serving politics of the individuals involved mean they bear the primary responsibility for this disaster. But Benghazi illustrates as well the climate of bad ideas that make such decisions possible. Bad politicians eventually go away, but malignant ideas and received wisdom are deeply rooted in our institutions, transcending individuals. The Benghazi fiasco illustrates two particularly tenacious ones.

The military intervention in Libya, the origin of the Benghazi tragedy, was another act of Western wishful thinking about “democratizing” and “reforming” the Muslim world. Despite the failure of George W. Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, the so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions encouraged the Wilsonian “freedom and democracy” promoters in 2011 to make Libya yet another poster-child for this doomed project. Moreover, intervention seemingly could be done on the cheap. No troops need be deployed, since jets and missiles could topple the psychotic Muammar Gaddafi––an autocrat straight out of central casting, whose genocidal bluster gave the West a pretext for intervention.

For Hillary and Obama, this was the perfect opportunity to show those neocon militarists what “smart power” was all about, and strike a contrast with the “cowboy” Bush’s “unilateralist” bumbling in Iraq. A UN resolution was secured, and a NATO-led coalition of 19 states assembled for enforcing a no-fly zone. The mission soon escalated into bringing about regime change and the death of Gaddafi.

For a while, this was a perfect, low-cost, quick little war that would illustrate the various shibboleths of moralizing internationalism: international diplomatic approval for the use of force, multilateral coalition building, a reliance on air power that minimized casualties among participating militaries, and a smaller role for the US, which would be “leading from behind,” as an Obama advisor said. This last idea reflected Obama’s belief that the US needed to diminish its role in world affairs and avoid the arrogant overreach that stained its history abroad, most recently in Iraq. This notion of America’s global sins is another bad idea reflecting ideology, not historical fact.

For Secretary of State Clinton, the Libya intervention would be the showcase of her tenure at State and proof of her superior foreign policy skills and presidential potential. Of course, we all know that the toppling of Gaddafi has been a disastrous mistake. Gaddafi was a brutal creep, but he kept in check the jihadists from Libya eager to kill Americans in Iraq and foment terror throughout the region. His departure created a vacuum that has been filled with legions of jihadist outfits across North Africa, including ISIS franchises. They are armed in part with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals such as surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Yet eager to protect her defining foreign policy achievement, Hillary kept open the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi even as other nations pulled out their personnel because of the increasing danger caused by the new Libyan government’s inability to control and secure its territory.

Florida Muslim Leader ‘Likes’ Killing of Jews Sofian Zakkout’s violent hatred of Israel turns to blind hatred towards all Jewry. Joe Kaufman

Sofian Zakkout’s intense hatred of Israel has led him to apply the same bigotry towards Jews in general. Last month, under one of his postings on social media calling for the destruction of Israel, Zakkout showed his approval of a cartoon inviting a Muslim wielding a rifle to murder a Jew that was in his vicinity. This month and hereafter, Zakkout must be shunned from society, if not be called to account for incitement to commit violence.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout is the founder and President of the Miami, Florida-based American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA). Both Zakkout and his group regularly attack Israel on the internet and, once in a while, hold rallies to do the same. One AMANA rally in particular, held in July 2014 outside the Israeli Consulate in Downtown Miami, featured rally goers repeatedly shouting “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.”

For Zakkout and his group to sponsor such a rally was no strange occurrence. Indeed, Zakkout has, for years, used social media to promote Hamas, its founders, its leaders and its militants. Zakkout has publicly stated, “Hamas is in my heart and on my head.”

Yet, following the rally, Zakkout took his bigoted rhetoric many steps forward by targeting not just Israelis, but Jews in general. Above photos he posted from the event, he wrote in Arabic, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!” He signed it, “Br. Sofian Zakkout.”

Zakkout’s rhetoric against Jews has gotten progressively worse. On a number of recent postings he made onto social media, he has referred to Jews as “apes and pigs.” This past February, he promoted a video on his Facebook page claiming “the Holocaust was faked.”

On June 1st, Zakkout posted a graphic on his Facebook page depicting the map of Israel draped in a Palestinian flag next to a militant holding a rocket launcher. Over the graphic, the caption reads, “As long as my heart beats, I believe PALESTINE will be FREE.” Under the graphic is written, “From the river to the sea in sha’a Allah,” which is a well-repeated calling for the destruction of the Jewish state from one side of Israel, which borders the Jordan River, to the other side bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

Moral Equivalence Has Become a Moral Atrocity The international community’s failure to distinguish good from evil — and the victims it produces. Caroline Glick

We have reached the point where moral equivalence has become a moral atrocity.

The smart set in the West has insisted for over a generation that Israel and the Palestinians are morally equal. There are extremists, on both sides, they say. Both sides are responsible for the absence of peace.

The first serious outcry against this lie came immediately after the Palestinians began their terrorist war against Israel in September 2000. That war, incited, directed, funded, commanded and celebrated by Yassir Arafat and his henchmen, including his successor Mahmoud Abbas, began two months after Arafat overturned the table at Camp David in response to then prime minister Ehud Barak’s offer to withdraw from 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of Gaza and half of Jerusalem to enable the establishment of an independent state of Palestine in the areas.

The areas in question, Barak said, would be handed over to the PLO Jew free. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the areas set to become Palestine, would be forcefully evicted from their homes to ensure that the delicate, sensitive Palestinians, wouldn’t be troubled by the Jews with their “dirty feet,” in the words of Abbas.

That, of course, wasn’t enough for Arafat. And it was insufficient not because Barak failed to give him what he demanded. It was insufficient because his demands were insatiable. Arafat was never interested in peace.

As his deputy Faisal Husseini said at the time, the peace process was a “Trojan Horse.”

Its purpose was to get the PLO bases of operation inside of Israeli territory in order to expand its ability to destroy the Jewish state. This is the reason that despite the fact that the international community has given them more financial assistance than any other people in the history of humanity, the Palestinians have not built a society. They have received tens of billions of dollars in development aid and failed to develop an operating economy.

This failure isn’t due to incompetence or corruption.

It is simply that the Palestinians don’t want those things. They chose not to develop independent institutions.

ISIS’s Ramadan Killing Spree Hundreds slaughtered in a single weekend as Obama boasts “progress.” Joseph Klein

ISIS is celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with multiple massacres. ISIS’s followers are heeding the message released by ISIS’s spokesman, Abu Muhammed al-Adnani, before Ramadan began. Jihadists must attack to “gain the great reward for martyrdom in Ramadan,” he declared. ISIS looks to the example of Prophet Muhammad himself who defeated his enemies in Mecca in the Battle of Badr, which took place during Ramadan.

In the last week alone, ISIS followers have struck in several cities – Istanbul, resulting in at least 44 deaths, the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka that left 22 dead, and most recently Baghdad, where a suicide bombing on a busy shopping street killed at least 200 people including dozens of children. On the penultimate day of Ramadan, ISIS even struck inside Saudi Arabia. It has reportedly taken credit for a suicide attack in Medina, Islam’s second holiest city.

The Baghdad attack, which occurred in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood, was the deadliest single bombing attack in the Iraqi capital in years. In taking credit for the massacre, ISIS warned in its statement that “the raids of the mujahedeen [holy warriors] against the Rafidha [Shiites] apostates will not stop.” The attack laid bare the folly of President Obama’s decision against military advice to pull out all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011. It also revealed gaping holes in the Iraqi government’s security measures for the capital. Baghdad residents were so disgusted that they jeered and threw objects at Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi‘s convoy when he visited the devastated area to inspect the damage.

The Ramadan spree of jihadist killings began early in the Muslim holy month when on June 8th ISIS-affiliated Palestinian terrorists struck Tel Aviv, killing four people. They “belonged to the largest Palestinian cell linked to ISIS to be uncovered so far by Israeli security services,” according to DEBKAfile. The plan, DEBKAfile reported, was to have originally included “a mass-murder shooting attack on a crowded train.”

Four days after the Tel Aviv attack, the Orlando massacre was carried out by an individual who had regularly attended a radical Islamic mosque and pledged his allegiance to ISIS during the shooting. Two illegal immigrants from Tunisia, who were ISIS followers, stabbed a 26-year-old transgender man in Brussels the day before the Orlando attack. A man claiming allegiance to ISIS stabbed a police official and his companion to death in France a day after the Orlando attack.

Muslim Nations Defend Palestinian Terror During UN Terrorism Review After U.S. Citizen Murdered Near Hebron By Patrick Poole

Thirteen-year-old Hillel Ariel, a U.S. citizen, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist last week while sleeping in her bed in her home near Hebron.

The day after her murder the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the group representing all 57 Muslim-majority nations, tried to insert justifications for Palestinian terror during a United Nations review of its counter-terrorism strategy.

Stephanie Granot of The Jewish Press reports:

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), attempted to introduce language condoning terrorism under certain conditions into a draft of a UN Counter-Terrorism Resolution. The official document is expected to be finalized on Tuesday when the General Assembly concludes a bi-annual Review of its UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.

The OIC, an organization of 57 member-states that considers itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world”, has Permanent Delegations to the United Nations as well as to the European Union. Several days prior to the start of the Review, OIC Representative Abdallah Y. Al-Mouallimi (Saudi Arabia) sought to insert the following clause to the draft of the resolution: “Terrorism in the name of self-determination and national liberation does not constitute terrorism.”

Shortly after Rep. Al-Mouallimi addressed the General Assembly, Israel’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador David Roet delivered an impassioned and powerful speech…

Subsequent to Ambassador Roet’s speech, some significant diplomatic maneuvering by the Israel’s Mission to the UN, and a steadfast refusal on Israel’s part to allow member-states to compromise draft language for the sake of a unanimous consensus, the clause was ultimately not included in the final draft of the review, entitled “The United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy Review”.

As the article notes, the OIC, which is the second largest inter-governmental body in the world behind the United Nations, has a permanent delegation at the UN.

In May, just a month before the Orlando terror attack that killed 49, the OIC blocked LGBT groups from attending a UN conference on AIDS held days before the attack.

The defense of Palestinian terrorism is a recurring topic of the OIC.

In April 2002, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, the OIC adopted a declaration on international terrorism. But during the debate the OIC could not agree on a definition of terrorism, but did reject “any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism.”

The OIC’s Islamic Fiqh Council published a January 2003 resolution explicitly endorsing Palestinian terror attacks, saying suicide attacks are a legitimate form of jihad:

3- The Islamic Fiqh Council asserts that jihad and martyr operations done to defend the Islamic creed, dignity, freedom and the sovereignty of states is not considered terrorism but a basic form of necessary defense for legitimate rights. Thus the oppressed peoples who are subjected to occupation have the right to seek their freedom via all means possible.

4- The Islamic Fiqh Council stresses that martyr operations are a form of jihad, and carrying out those operations is a legitimate right that has nothing to do with terrorism or suicide. Those operations become obligatory when they become the only way to stop the aggression of the enemy, defeat it, and grievously damage its power.

5- It is not allowed to use terms such as “jihad”, “terrorism”, and “violence”, which have become frequently used by today’s mass media as scientific terms, to mean other connotations beyond their basic well known meanings.

In between its unashamed defense of terrorism, the OIC has taken up the cause of suppressing freedom of speech in the name of combating “Islamophobia.” CONTINUE AT SITE