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May 2017

Palestinians: Embattled, Weak Abbas Comes to White House by Khaled Abu Toameh

The joke among Palestinians is that were it not for Israel is sitting smack in the middle, the two warring Palestinian states [the West Bank and the Gaza Strip] would be dispatching rockets and suicide bombers at each other.

Abbas is well aware that the Palestinian house is on fire. Instead of working to extinguish the blaze, however, Abbas spends his time spreading the lie that peace in our time is possible, if only Israel would succumb to his demands.

The story of Gaza — which went straight to Hamas after Israel handed it to Abbas — is not a tale Abbas likes to tell. The same scenario is likely to be repeated in the West Bank if Israel makes a similar move.

This week, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump will sit down together to talk. This is the first such meeting since the US presidential election, and it comes at a time when the Palestinian scene is characterized by mounting internal tensions, fighting and divisiveness. The disarray among the Palestinians, where everyone seems to be fighting everyone else, casts serious doubt on Abbas’s ability to lead the Palestinians towards a better future. The chaos also raises the question whether Abbas has the authority to speak on behalf of a majority of Palestinians, let alone sign a peace agreement with Israel that would be acceptable to enough of his people.

Abbas, however, seems rather oblivious to the state of bedlam among the Palestinians, and appears determined to forge ahead despite the radical instability he is facing.

He is travelling to Washington to tell Trump that he and his PA leadership seek a “just and comprehensive” peace with Israel through the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

In the meeting, Abbas is likely to repeat his long-standing charges that Israel continues to “sabotage” any prospect for peace with the Palestinians.

Abbas is not likely to mention the mayhem that the PA leadership is facing at home. Nor is the fact that the Palestinians are as far as ever from achieving their goal of statehood likely to be a preeminent subject. Why bother discussing inconvenient truths, such as the deep divisions among the Palestinians and failure to hold presidential and parliamentary elections, when you can point the finger of blame at Israel?

Abbas’s trip to Washington coincides with a peak of tension between his PA and Hamas, the Islamic movement that rules the Gaza Strip. The rivalry between Hamas and Abbas’s PA, which climaxed in 2007 when the Islamic movement violently took over the Gaza Strip from Abbas loyalists, has created a reality where the Palestinians are divided, physically, into two separate entities.

Palestinians: Does Anyone Here Care about Muslim Women? by Bassam Tawil

These are embarrassing truths that the pro-Hamas feminist, Linda Sarsour does not want to hear. The rights of women who are being oppressed by Hamas are the last thing on her mind.

Sitting in the comfort of the U.S. and other Western countries, Linda Sarsour and her colleagues are too busy inciting against Israel to remember the plight of women in most Arab countries, including those living under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas. Sarsour’s claim, that Zionism and feminism are incompatible, is nothing but a grimy lie.

The Palestinian Hamas terror movement recently banned Palestinians living under its control in the Gaza Strip from celebrating International Women’s Day. Hamas dismissed a decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) government in the West Bank to give all civil servants a day off on this occasion, arguing that International Women’s Day was a “Western and foreign” event that is incompatible with Islamic traditions and teachings.

The Islamic movement also issued a warning to all public and private institutions in the Gaza Strip, including schools and universities, to refrain from marking the occasion.

Hamas’s decision drew sharp criticism from many Palestinians, especially women’s groups and human rights organizations, as well as the Palestinian Authority. The critics maintained that the ban was a sign of Hamas’s disrespect for women and their contribution to Palestinian society.

The General Union of Palestinian Workers issued a statement in which it condemned Hamas’s refusal to acknowledge and honor the role of Palestinian women. The statement said that Palestinian women have made huge sacrifices and contributed remarkably to the Palestinian labor force and the development of society.

The Hamas ban also angered many Palestinian men, who expressed outrage over the “humiliation” of Palestinian women. Fathi Tbail, a leading Palestinian journalist, commented: “I will celebrate International Women’s Day, whether you (Hamas) like it or not. All you represent is retardation!”

French Elections: Emmanuel Macron, a Disaster by Guy Millière

Anti-West, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish diatribes were delivered to enthusiastic crowds of bearded men and veiled women. One hundred and fifty thousand people attended.

Emmanuel Macron promised to facilitate the construction of mosques in France. He declared that “French culture does not exist” and that he has “never seen” French art. The risk is high that Macron will disappoint the French even faster than Hollande did.

On the evening of the second round of elections, people will party in the chic neighborhoods of Paris and in ministries. In districts where poor people live, cars will be set on fire. For more than a decade, whenever there is a festive evening in France, cars are set on fire in districts where poor people live. Unassimilated migrants have their own traditions.

Paris, Champs Elysees, April 20, 8:50 pm. An Islamic terrorist shoots at a police van. One policeman is killed, another is seriously wounded.

The terrorist tries to escape and shoots again. The policemen kill him. One hour later, the French Ministry of Interior reveals his name and his past. His name is Karim Cheurfi. He is a French Muslim born in an Islamized suburb of France. In 2003, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the attempted murder of two policemen. He was released before the end of his sentence. In 2014, he targeted a policeman and was sentenced again. And released again. In March, the police were informed that he was trying to buy military-grade weapons and that he contacted a member of the Islamic State in Syria. An inspector discovered that he had posted messages on jihadist social media networks expressing his willingness to murder policemen. The police searched his home and found several weapons and a GoPro video camera similar to the one terrorists use to film their crimes. The police and members of the French justice system did not think they had sufficient evidence place him under surveillance.

The Champs Elysées attack clearly shows that the French justice system is lax regarding dangerous people and that the French police pay only limited attention to suspects who are communicate with terrorist organizations and who seem to be hatching terrorist projects.

This terrorist attack summarizes everything that is broken in terms of security in France today.

Men with a profile similar to that of Karim Cheurfi have, in recent years, been responsible for most of the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium: Mohamed Merah, who killed three Jewish children and the father of two of them in Toulouse in 2012; Mehdi Nemmouche, who attacked the Brussels Jewish Museum in 2014 ; the Kouachi brothers, who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015; Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews in the Saint Mandé grocery Kosher store Hypercacher; Samy Amimour and others who maimed and murdered 130 innocent people in the Bataclan theater in November 2015; Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck into the crowd in Nice in July 2016, killed 86 people and wounded many others, and, among others, those who beheaded a priest in Normandy a few weeks after the attack in Nice.

The successive French governments under the presidency of François Hollande showed themselves to be appallingly weak and impotent.

Europe: What Happens to Christians There Will Come Here by Giulio Meotti

“Be careful, be very careful. What has happened here will come to you.” — An elderly priest in Iraq, to Father Benedict Kiely.

Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

“Shouldn’t the issue of Middle Eastern Christians wake up European civilization to its core identity? Shouldn’t we in Europe and the West be telling ourselves that these attacks are also aimed at us?” — Mathieu Bock-Côté, in Le Figaro.

“I fear we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of Christianity in Northern Africa in Islam’s early days”, a Lutheran bishop, Jobst Schoene, warned a few years ago.

In ancient times, Algeria and Tunisia, entirely Christian, gave us great thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. Two centuries later, Christianity has disappeared, replaced by Arab-Islamic civilization.

Is Europe now meeting the same fate?

In the Middle East, “Christianity is over in Iraq” due to Islamic extremism; in Europe, Christianity is committing suicide.

Within 20 years, more babies will be born to Muslim women than to Christian women world-wide; it is just the latest sign of the rapid growth that seems to be making Islam the world’s largest religion by the end of the century, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center.

“Christianity is literally dying in Europe,” said Conrad Hackett, the head of the researchers who worked on the Pew report.

According to it, between 2010 and 2015, the Muslim population increased by more than 150 million people to 1.8 billion.

In Europe, how many Christians have been “lost”? Between 2010 and 2015, “deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million during this brief period”.

At this pace, Christianity will vanish in Europe.

In the same time frame, in most European countries — including Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia — Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births. “In Germany alone, for example, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births between 2010 and 2015, a pattern that is expected to continue across much of Europe in the decades ahead”, Pew discovered. There are clear patterns of demographic trends, church attendance, closures of parishes and the declining number of priests.

These patterns are why Islamic leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been waging a demographic war against Europe. “Have not just three but five children”, Erdogan said to Muslims in the old continent. “You are the future of Europe”. This plan is called, in Islam, hijrah: expanding Islam by migration, based on Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622.

Christianity in Northern Europe has already been weakened by atheism, a trend possibly accelerated by modern gains in science and medicine. The American sociologist Phil Zuckerman, after spending more than a year in Scandinavia, published a book, Society Without God. Recently, after a nationwide advertising campaign by the Atheist Society thousands of people left the Church of Denmark. Norway’s state church lost more than 25,000 members in a month. Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

Socialist-Run Venezuela Descends Into Chaos Massive anti-government protests reach a tipping point. May 1, 2017 David Paulin

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Venezuela was going to be a workers’ paradise. President Hugo Chávez said so and declared early into his first term, in 1999, that Venezuela and Cuba would sail toward the same “sea of happiness.” Not surprisingly, Venezuela is now a workers’ hell. Authoritarian and dysfunctional, the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation of 31 million people suffers dire food shortages; soaring levels of violent crime (28,479 deaths reported last year); and epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Unemployment is soaring – not surprising given that large swaths of the economy have been nationalized. Venezuela’s court-ordered seizure of a General Motors plant is the latest such calamity.

Now Venezuelans are venting their anger like never before, and this includes protesters who were once the bedrock of Chávez’s political base – the poor. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have staged massive anti-government protests that turned streets and highways into seas of humanity. Security forces and armed pro-government militias – Chavista enforcers riding motorcycles — have met the protesters with force: rubber bullets, tear gas, and deadly gunfire. More than 30 people have died and hundreds injured and arrested. Protesters are demanding fresh elections and the restoration of an independent parliament. Human rights watchdogs and neighboring countries are voicing concern over the unfolding crisis.

The protests are aimed at President Nicolás Maduro, the bus driver-turned politician who succeeded the late Hugo Chávez. Maduro has double downed on Chávez’s policies. Now he embodies all the traits of a dictator in an oil-producing country whose coffers hit rock bottom as oil prices tanked. Venezuela produces little for itself. It is dependent on oil. Petrodollars, however, can no longer pay for Venezuela’s traditional style of governance: statism and bread-and-circuses populism. Maduro, for his part, blames the chaos on an “economic war” being waged against him by Washington and Venezuelan elites.

Besides massive protests, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding as thousands of refugees from Venezuela flood into neighboring Brazil on a quest for food and medical care now unavailable to ordinary Venezuelans thanks to shortages created by Venezuela-style socialism. Yet amid the chaos, well-connected Venezuelans and officials are getting rich thanks to epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela’s vice president, is accused by U.S. authorities of being a drug “kingpin.”

Portents of the coming chaos were obvious (or should have been) months into Chávez’s first term 18 years ago, even if Washington turned a blind eye to it. First came Chávez’s words, his anti-Americanism and leftist rhetoric – words that some in the Clinton administration naively believed were mere bluster. They wanted to believe Chávez was a democratic reformer who would take on Venezuela’s endemic statism and corruption. But then came Chávez’s actions.

Trump Assists Victims Of Criminal Aliens Finally, immigration policies that serve and protect Americans. Michael Cutler

On April 26, 2017 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) posted a self-explanatory news release, “DHS announces launch of new office for victims of illegal immigrant crime, Office built with input from victims impacted by crime” that is illustrative of President Trump’s pro-American mindset and commitment to keeping his immigration campaign promises.

This long overdue approach to immigration stands in stark contrast to the Obama administration that sought to portray illegal aliens, including such aliens who committed serious and often heinous crimes, of being the “victims” while blithely ignoring the true victims, those who either fall victim to the violence of criminal aliens or are members of the families of such victims.

This bogus and morally bankrupt perspective is still a fundamental element of the policies of the leaders of the Democratic Party and is behind the creation of “Sanctuary Cities” whose mayors should be given an MVP Award by ISIS and drug cartels.

America’s immigration laws were enacted to protect national security, public safety, public health and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

A review of a section of law comprehended within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S. Code § 1182 – Inadmissible aliens provides clear and unequivocal evidence of how reasonable and vital our immigration laws are to America and Americans.

Therefore it is hard to imagine who could be opposed to the effective and fair enforcement of such fundamental laws. However, for decades, the enforcement and administration of our immigration laws, under a succession of administrations from both political parties, put the desires of aliens, special interest groups and corporations ahead of Americans.

Consequently, huge numbers of Americans have lost their lives and livelihoods as a direct result of what I have come to refer to as Immigration Failures – By Design.

CNN’s Islamist Offers Christophobia, Judeophobia and Hinduphobia CNN is ready to offend every non-Muslim religion on earth. May 1, 2017 Daniel Greenfield

Reza Aslan has built a career complaining about Islamophobia. Throw a dart at a map of colleges and the odds were good that Aslan would be speaking at one of them about the rising threat of Islamophobia.

Earlier this year, Aslan, an Iranian Muslim, announced that he was going to change people’s minds about Islam and make them more tolerant, “through pop culture, through film and television.“

“Stories have the power to break through the walls that separate us into different ethnicities,” Aslan rhapsodized, “different cultures, different nationalities, different races, different religions.”

CNN gave Aslan a forum. Nearly every episode of “The Believer” that aired has made some religion that isn’t Islam look freaky, unpleasant and threatening. Instead of breaking through the walls, it has surveyed different non-Islamic religions only to sneer at them as strange and weird.

Instead of Islamophobia, it offers Non-Islam-ophobia.

“The Believer” kicked off with an episode featuring a sect of cannibals whom the show associated with Hinduism. Its last episode spread fear over the threat posed by Orthodox Jews. CNN’s “Believer” clips offer Reza Aslan explaining why he’s a Muslim sandwiched between a doomsday cult leader who calls himself “Jezus”, voodoo, scientology and a Mexican death cult.

Not even Al Jazeera would have been this blatant about its Islamic agenda.

Reza Aslan, CNN and “Believer” have already offended a whole range of religious groups. Hindus angrily denounced the misrepresentation of their religion. But the left has much less interest in Hinduphobia than it does in Islamophobia. Hindu protests outside CNN offices in five cities garnered almost no coverage from the same media that covers every single Islamic protest against Islamophobia.

The media doesn’t believe that all forms of religious bigotry are created equal.

Orthodox Jews condemned Aslan for his fearmongering aimed at Judaism. But the left is uninterested in criticizing anti-Semitism from Islamists. Especially those on its payroll.

“The Believer” has tried to smear Christians, Hindus and Jews. It has yet to profile Muslims. Despite Aslan’s interest in teaching Americans not to be Islamophobes, he seems to prefer pushing Christophobia, Judeophobia and Hinduphobia. But bigots can’t be expected to fight bigotry.

“The Believer” treats non-Islamic religions as a freakshow. The gimmick attracts viewers. See Reza Aslan eat brains, talk to a doomsday cult leader or act afraid of Jews in fedoras. Look at all those freaks!

But don’t expect to see Shiite Muslims cutting their children in the street for Ashura on “The Believer”.

Tufts and Brandeis College Administrations Promote Terrorist Propaganda, Silence Opposing Views Brandeis professor: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses.” Sara Dogan

Editor’s note: Tufts University and Brandeis University are the latest two schools named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Over the weekend, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on both campuses. These posters pose a challenge to the Tufts and Brandeis administrations to defend speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, rather than ordering it silenced as they have in the past.

Brandeis University: Campus Administration

Brandeis University, located in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, is notable for being one of America’s few elite universities to be founded by Jews and is named for Louis B. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. In recent years, Brandeis has been conspicuous for a more disturbing reason—as an academic center that is uniquely welcoming to pro-terrorist speech and ideology directed against Israel while showing extreme hostility towards those who oppose Israel’s terrorist adversaries.

Members of Brandeis’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine have hosted numerous events featuring speakers that defend anti-Israel terrorism and the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Among these are radical professor Noam Chomsky who gave a speech describing Israel’s actions towards Palestine as “vicious, brutal and criminal” and claimed that Israel “is alone in denying” its “illegal occupation of territories.”

In April 2015, the Brandeis administration selected former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering to be honored as the university’s commencement speaker. Known for his extreme anti-Israel views, Pickering has written that Israel has conducted a “half-century-long occupation” of Palestine that is tantamount to “the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.”

In 2014, a Jewish student at Brandeis, Daniel Mael, exposed a secret faculty listserve where more than 90 left-wing Brandeis faculty exchanged radical views. Some of the listserve’s participants promoted Hamas propaganda while espousing anti-Semitic comments and expressing hatred of Israel. Professor Donald Hindley, for instance, referred to the Jewish state as “The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government,” in a post about the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists.

Hindley also sarcastically wrote: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses…” and compared an event challenging the anti-Semitic BDS movement to “Germany in the later 1930s with everyone at least a Nazi sympathizer.”

Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman, meanwhile, wrote on the listserve seeking signatures for an open letter to “end the illegal occupation in Palestine.” According to the letter, “the government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives.”

When Brandeis University president Fredrick Lawrence condemned these statements as “abhorrent”( but took no official action against the professors who made them), some faculty who participated in the listserve, along with the Brandeis English Department, condemned his comments and sought a faculty forum on freedom of speech on campus.

While welcoming anti-Israel and pro-Hamas speech on campus, Brandeis has also exhibited hostility towards those who are critical of Islamic terrorism. In April 2014, under pressure from students and faculty, the Brandeis administration acted to withdraw an honorary degree that had been offered to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born women’s rights activist and critic of radical Islam who has condemned the mistreatment of women in Muslim countries, and especially the practice of female genital mutilation. Eighty-seven Brandeis faculty members signed a petition citing Ali’s “extreme Islamophobic beliefs” as a reason why the honorary degree should be rescinded. Showcasing the university’s blatant hypocrisy, Brandeis had previously awarded an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, who has a long history of anti-Semitic statements, among them the claim that “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community.”

Brandeis also failed to take action when SJP members disrupted a university panel featuring six members of the Israeli Knesset. The SJP activists repeatedly yelled the epithet “war criminals” at the panel participants and attempted to distribute fake warrants calling for their arrest.

For its history of repeatedly welcoming anti-Israel and pro-terror speakers and protests on campus while allowing those who would present opposing views to be silenced, the Brandeis administration makes our list of Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.

Tufts University: James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering

The campus of Tufts University has repeatedly rolled out the red carpet for supporters of the BDS movement against Israel. In 2014, it hosted the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) National Conference, a secretive event which to which media access was strictly controlled and monitored but according to the conference agenda, instructed attendees on how and when to take “direct action” against supporters of Israel.

Tufts SJP has repeatedly condoned anti-Israel terrorism in its published works and statements and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week during which the BDS movement against Israel is promoted. It has also violated campus regulations by distributing mock “eviction notices” to Jewish students in the dorms, which it falsely claims are similar to notices “routinely given to Palestinian families living under oppressive Israeli occupation.” Tufts SJP also attacked and delegitimized the campus pro-Israel group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) by labeling it “literally a hate group.”

No action was taken against SJP, yet when the David Horowitz Freedom Center attempted to hang posters describing SJP’s links to Hamas and its genocidal agenda, three Tufts administrators— Dean of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Dean of the School of Engineering Jianmin Qu and Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon—emailed a statement to the entire Tufts student body, condemning the posters and claiming that they violated the University’s community standards.

Therapeutic Universities and Soft Despotism The safe-space’s heart of darkness. Bruce Thornton ****

Bad ideas make bad schools, bad schools make bad citizens, bad citizens make bad laws, bad laws make bad government. That’s the recipe for tyranny.

The phenomenon of rich, privileged “snowflake” college students demanding “safe spaces” from “microagressions” rightly provokes derision and scorn from normal people. Those who live among the slings and arrows of the real world, where actions have consequences and one’s delicate self-esteem is a matter of indifference, can only shake their heads at such childish tantrums. But the roots of this degradation of the university’s traditional mission to cultivate critical reasoning rather than narcissism run deep in our therapeutic culture, and threaten the virtues and qualities of mind necessary for self-rule and political freedom.

Start with the “self-esteem” fad that colonized the schools more than 25 years ago. In 1991 a widely publicized “study” proclaimed, in the words of a New York Times headline, “Gender Bias in Schools Is Still Short-Changing Girls.” Because of the “unconscious bias” of teachers, the tale went, grade-school girls are wounded in their self-esteem and thus rendered incapable of excelling in traditional male-dominated disciplines like science and math. Though the study’s methodology and conclusions were quickly discredited, it went on to provide intellectual support for the $600 million Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993. It also encouraged the more expansive application of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendment Act, which threatened the cut-off of federal money to colleges in order to coerce them into policing “discrimination” on the “basis of sex.”

This is just one example of how left-wing identity politics, in this case feminism, generated phony “research” that gave a patina of science to contested and dubious ideology, which then became enshrined in federal law. Today, the abuse of Title IX drives the administrative infrastructure of universities that caters to selected victim-groups, creates unconstitutional inquisitions that investigate and punish allegations of “sexual assault,” and shuts-down free speech by conservatives. After all, we mustn’t let wounded self-esteem damage the prospects of women and minorities already victimized by the “patriarchy” and “racism.”

So it’s not just the left-wing ideology that corrupts universities. Intellectual development and training have been replaced by an obsession with students’ feelings. How students feel is now more important than how well they think.

Indeed, over the years universities have developed numerous services for students that monitor their psychological health and offer therapeutic solace. For example, I just received an email from my campus of the California State University system, the largest in the U.S. with half a million students and 23 campuses. The email came from the Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation outfit, its acronym CARE revealing its therapeutic thrust. This “collaborative effort” uses a “community approach” to help professors identify “students who are facing significant personal struggles, in distress, or students of concern” and direct them to the appropriate services. These services include free counseling; “Let’s Talk,” a drop-in venue for therapeutic intervention; and a licensed clinical social worker available by appointment at no cost. We professors are supposed to monitor our students for “signs of stress” and then alert them to these services.

What has any of this to do with higher education? What business is it of the university to monitor the psychological well-being of legal adults? Partly schools are engaging in preemptively protecting themselves from liability or a federal investigation. If a depressed student commits suicide in a dorm, the existence of these services and programs for depressed students can offer protection from being sued. The university administrative apparatus also benefits from the expansion of its offices and services, and the added resources and manpower they require. This need to service students’ psychological health has contributed to the expensive administrative bloat in higher education, which has led to fewer full-time professors, more exploited adjuncts, and higher tuition costs.

Identity politics programs also find such offices to be useful allies for reinforcing their ideological agendas. Identity politics is predicated on victimhood, and victimhood generates demands for compensatory programs and services. Minority students and women presumably are being psychologically wounded by racism and sexism, and thus should have services that apply therapeutic balm to their psychic wounds. Given the rarity these days of legal or violent expressions of sexism or racism, victims must look to psychological effects like “low self-esteem” or subjective perceptions of “microagressions” as evidence of “unconscious racism” and other occult biases. The therapeutic services offered by the university validate this victim narrative, as do sexual harassment policies, “hate speech” codes, and other policies all backed up by badly written federal and state laws. They all assume the therapeutic imperative to protect students from damage to their self-esteem.

More generally, this therapeutic infrastructure infantilizes students, and contributes to the dumbing down of university standards of admissions and evaluation, lest students suffer even more trauma from poor academic performance, flunking courses, or dropping out. Thus apart from the hard sciences, most college curricula today are the equivalent of high school courses fifty years ago, and in some cases are not even up to that standard. The obsession with “hurtful” speech similarly assumes a child-like sensibility that must be cossetted and protected in order to avoid psychological damage. In the case of black students, this attitude is particularly patronizing and insulting. College students whose ancestors survived everyday racist slurs and lethal violence now must be protected from subjective slights often invisible to most other people. And universities tolerate and even enable the violent tantrums thrown by those who have been led to expect the whole world to respect their tender sensibilities and inflated perceptions of themselves and their political beliefs.

Hence the sorry state of higher education in America. Legal adults who can join the military and vote, who drink and fornicate, who drive cars watch porn, are treated like preschoolers who need hand-holding and constant guidance from bureaucratic nannies. Standards of admission are lowered and grade inflation runs rampant so that privileged victim-groups aren’t slighted and their self-esteem damaged by hidden racism and sexism. The administrative bureaucracy waxes ever fatter, even as the number of full-time professors diminishes and tuition costs soar. And the tax-payer is on the hook for much of the bill, as the federal government now backstops the over $1 trillion in student debt, billions of it unlikely ever to be repaid.

‘I am a Muslim Arab and an Israeli Zionist, and I love the Jewish people’ (Must read!!!!!)

One of the most patriotic families in Israel lives just a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip. The father—a former Gazan—wears a medallion with the map of Israel and a Star of David around his neck, two of his sons are IDF soldiers who are willing ‘to die for the State of Israel,’ and they all feel a strong connection to Judaism. Years after being smuggled into Israel following the father’s secret collaboration with the Shin Bet, they declare: ‘We have no other country.’

When she arrived in Israel, N. knew that she was ill and that her days were numbered. A female IDF soldier escorted her from the Erez Crossing to the entrance to her son’s home, in one of the Jewish communities near Gaza.

“I opened the door for her and gave her a hug,” her son, D., recalls. “She saw the children. I said to her, ‘Mother, look, my sons are in the army. My sons are soldiers.’ We hadn’t seen each other for years. I looked at her. She was happy. She asked me to take care of them, to make sure that nothing happened to them. Before we parted, she hugged my two soldiers in her arms and said to them: ‘Inshallah, I hope we will soon get to see this uniform in Gaza. When will Israel come back there? We have no life.’”

“Grandmother kissed us incessantly,” says Y., a sergeant in the IDF. “She stroked our hair and kept saying, ‘May God protect you.’”

N. stayed with her family for a month. Shortly after returning to Gaza, she passed away. “I feel so relieved,” says D., “knowing that my mother was pleased with us when she died.”

The family members outside their home in the Gaza vicinity area. ‘The first time my son came home in his uniform, I cried. It was a dream come true’ (Photo: Gadi Kabalo)
The family members outside their home in the Gaza vicinity area. ‘The first time my son came home in his uniform, I cried. It was a dream come true’ (Photo: Gadi Kabalo)

It’s a complicated story. It begins in Gaza and continues in Israel. D. and his wife gave all their sons Hebrew names. They chose to name them after people from the General Security Service, the Shin Bet, whom they worked with. A., the eldest son, was born in Gaza and received an Israeli name when they came to Israel. Sergeant Y. is the second son. R., the youngest son, serves in the IDF too, holding the rank of corporal.