Displaying the most recent of 89871 posts written by

Ruth King

Posters Target Neo-Nazis at Boston and Chicago Campuses “How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough.” Sara Dogan

Students at several Chicago and Boston-area universities awoke this week to find their campuses papered with posters exposing members of Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis and supporters of anti-Israel terrorism. The posters were designed by the David Horowitz Freedom and were placed in the early morning hours on the campuses of Harvard University, Brandeis University and Tufts University in the Boston area and at the University of Chicago and DePaul University in Chicago.

The posters reveal comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews.

These statements include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

A second poster exposed Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. Bazian recently came under fire for an anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.” He has also openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America.

A third poster depicts the organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as a puppet of Hamas terrorists. As has been revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and otherIslamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

A Muslim Committed the Worst Anti-Semitic Hate Crime of 2018 And no one is talking about it. Daniel Greenfield

The worst anti-Semitic hate crime of 2018 took place outside a restaurant in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Izmir Koch, an Ahiska Turkish migrant who had already been in trouble with the law, allegedly demanded to know if there were any Jews around. A man who been at the restaurant replied that he was Jewish. Izmir punched him in the head, and then kicked him while he lay on the ground.

The victim, who wasn’t actually Jewish, suffered bruised ribs and a fractured eye socket.

Now a federal grand jury has indicted Izmir for committing a hate crime. The violent assault was the single worst anti-Semitic hate crime of 2018. So far. And it’s generated very little interest from the same activists and media outlets who had been accusing the White House of not acting against anti-Semitism.

Izmir had already been facing two counts of felonious assault, one involving a deadly weapon, from 2016. He was found guilty a month after the Cincinnati assault, along with a number of comrades and family members. That assault had taken place outside their trucking company in Dayton, Ohio.

A former employee had come to collect the money that he was owed, and Izmir Koch, Baris Koch, Sevil Shakhmanov and Mustafa Shakhmanov allegedly assaulted him with crowbars, and possibly brass knuckles and a baseball bat. The victim, who apparently had a knife, fought back.

Izmir, Boris and Murad were Turkish Muslims from the former Soviet Union who had migrated to this country. A few years before that fight, the local media was talking up their “positive impact” on the community in Dayton. But it didn’t take long for the legal problems to begin. The benefits of bringing these Turkish Muslims to Dayton were quickly outweighed by the violence they had brought.

The Cincinnati assault is one of the most physically violent recent anti-Semitic attacks. But the perpetrator is a Muslim immigrant and the alphabet soup organizations don’t want to talk about it.

It doesn’t fit their profile or their agenda.

Leftist Fascist Reign at U of Penn Professor told to “cease the heresy.” Jack Kerwick

It seems that it’s impossible to pass through a single week without hearing about multiple outrages in academia. And it seems just as obvious that the most obscene of these outrages tend to unfold at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning.

Take, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania. Penn is an Ivy-league school located in the city of Philadelphia. It has recently been in the news because of “controversial” comments made by one of Penn’s veteran faculty members, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law, Amy Wax.

Back in September of last year, Wax appeared on The Glenn Show, the on-line podcast of Brown University professor, Glenn Loury. During their exchange over some of the deleterious consequences of those race-based preferential treatment policies favoring black student applicants, Wax shared with her host—who is black—some of the observations that she’s made over the duration of her career at Penn.

“Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the first half of my required first-year Civil Procedure course.”

Wax and Loury were discussing what’s come to be known as the “mismatch” effect of so-called affirmative action: In their eagerness to satisfy their quotas for black students, colleges and universities wind up mismatching students with institutions. So, Penn, say, recruits black students that, while they would’ve performed excellently at a second-tier school, lack competitiveness at an Ivy-league school. This move on the part of the first-tier schools in turn has ramifications that affect the whole available pool of black students, mismatching them with institutions throughout the entire system.

To Appreciate Freedom, Remember Slavery Echoes of Exodus in the rise of modern Israel from the Holocaust’s ashes. Ruth Wisse

Re-enacting slavery is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but this is how Jews celebrate Passover. Eating matzo—the bread of affliction—and horseradish, Jews gather at the ceremonial Seder to recall their enslavement under Pharaoh in ancient Egypt. Every family and household recreates the text of the Haggada, the narration, in its own way, to ensure that each participant experiences the national ordeal.

It might seem strange that people who prepare challah for the Sabbath and welcome the New Year with apples and honey choose to mark the low point of their history. Slavery is emotionally humiliating, physically harmful and psychologically degrading. It includes having sons killed at birth and daughters at the mercy of rapists, eating only bitterness and providing sweetness for slaveholders.

And many families need no reminder national enslavement recurs for the Jewish people. Benjamin Ferencz, who helped prosecute the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, named his 1979 book about Jewish forced labor “Less Than Slaves.” Whereas slaves are generally well-maintained to ensure they remain productive, concentration-camp inmates were worked to death as another means of annihilation. The Haggada is mild compared with the Jewish experience under Hitler. Why commemorate a repetitive history of bondage?

The answer lies in the prescribed rhythm of the Seder, which passes from slavery through stages of gratitude to the Almighty to songs of liberation. Jews tell the hard truth about their past because they might otherwise take freedom for granted. Like athletes who know they must train for the marathon, Jews rehearse the Exodus to practice overcoming slavery.

Furor Over The Citizenship Question On The Latest Census Is Ignorant Fearmongering By Kyle Sammin

The Commerce Department announced Monday that the 2020 Census will include a question about whether the people being counted are citizens. This seemingly uncontroversial inquiry has sent many activists on the Left into a tailspin as they prophesy discrimination against immigrants, especially those who immigrated here illegally. California announced the state would sue to stop the change.

Everyone should take a deep breath and relax. Questions about citizenship and national origin have been a part of the United States Census for more than a century without any negative effects on the non-citizens it surveys. Of all the questions the government asks on the census, this one — which merely confirms information the government already has or should have — is the least problematic, and is completely in line with the Census Bureau’s historical practices.
It’s Not A New Question

The Constitution requires the federal government to take a census every ten years, but it does not require them to collect very much information. The grant of power is specific, but also contains a degree of flexibility: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

For the first five censuses, the government stuck very narrowly to this remit. From 1790 to 1840, they listed only the name of the head of the household and the number of people living there. These numbers were divided by age group, sex, race, and (because of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause) condition of servitude. The slavery question was the only one strictly necessary, since the apportionment of representatives did not vary based on the sex or age ratios within a given congressional district.

Tony Thomas Warmism Gets a Courtroom Thrashing

While professed journalists were taking dutiful dictation from local alarmists keen to blame bushfires on global warming, a telling court case has been unfolding in California, where catastropharians set out to sue Big Oil for wrecking the planet. It hasn’t gone as planned.

The current tactic of global-warming catastrophists is to sue major oil companies for wrecking the planet — never mind that fossil-fuel energy has lifted billions from squalor and back-breaking toil during the past 150 years and continues to do so. The most advanced of these cases is now playing out in a US federal court in San Francisco before Judge William Alsup. Because he’s insisting on evidence about human causation of warming, the case has tested the soundness of orthodox climate science and so far found it wanting.

Leading sceptic scientists have also submitted briefs, opening up a climate debate warmists have been desperate to avoid for the past decade. This article will look at the court case and then at the history of climate debates.

In the US there’s a rash of lawsuits by green/liberal plaintiffs against the federal government and oil majors, with one echoing the ‘children’s crusade’ of 1212. The plaintiffs, 21 kids the youngest no more than ten, have been marshalled to sue the US government for allegedly fostering climate warmth and degrading the kids’ “rights to life, liberty and property”.[1] One plaintiff, 19-year-old Sophie Kivlehan, is the granddaughter of James Hansen, godfather of the global anti-CO2 jihad and a man who has obscenely compared coal trains with those that transported Jews to Nazi extermination camps.[2] [3]

But the big excitement last week was the so-called “Exxon knew” lawsuit brought by the cities of San Francisco and neighbouring Oakland against five oil majors.[4] The two plaintiffs claim the oil producers conspired Big Tobacco-style to conceal the climate harm of their products. The majors are supposedly responsible for the local sea level rise and should therefore pay billions of dollars for sea walls, dykes, whatever.

Well, yes, it’s all ridiculous. The San Francisco tide gauge (1854-2016) shows an upward trend complicated by some sinking of the land — the city is, after all, in an earthquake zone, and has been rocked repeatedly — but the “rise” is still a mere eight inches over the past 100 years. The plaintiffs’ lawyers are nevertheless making their song and dance about the rise, savouring a reported 23% of any damages to be paid by Big Oil. Their case relies by necessity on future sea-damage forecasts by the shaky CMIP5 suite of climate computer-models, and then they need to demonstrate that the oil majors are responsible, as distinct from, say, car and truck drivers who actually pump out the emissions. Another six Californian counties and cities are trying to run similar cases and in New York, the city wants $US20 billion restitution from the oil majors (less, of course, a hefty cut for the lawyers).

I’ve edited a conservative paper on a very liberal campus for a year. Here’s what I’ve learned. Matthew Reade – Pomona College

A powerful conservative perspective is essential to ensuring students, including liberals and progressives, obtain the greatest benefit from their education https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/43408/

In the late 1990s, a group of conservative students convened at Claremont McKenna College to create a new political journal at the Claremont Colleges. They aspired to inculcate an “appreciation for the privileges and obligations of citizenship in a free society,” and to mount a full-throated defense of conservatism both on campus and beyond. Thus was born the Claremont Independent.

Today, more than 20 years since our founding, it is striking to reflect upon how far the Independent has come since those quiet beginnings. We started as a print publication—the internet era was yet to arise—circulating copies on our campus in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Today, the Independent is an award-winning national media outlet with tens of thousands of online readers; and we cover a Claremont campus that is now a raging hotbed of progressive activism.

Our independence—we take no money from any of the Claremont Colleges—has permitted us to hold administrators and campus activists accountable through tough reportage and sharp opinion editorials. We have taken Title IX coordinators to task for serious alleged violations of the rights of students to impartial adjudication of sexual assault cases; have uncovered sexist and anti-gay tweets from, ironically enough, the (now-former) director of the Claremont Colleges’ LGBTQ center; and have covered the shutdown of conservative speakers on campus, including, most notably, pro-police scholar and Black Lives Matter critic Heather Mac Donald last April.

Atlanta Still on Its Knees, a Week After Ransomware Attack Crippled City’s Computers By Chris Queen

One week ago, the City of Atlanta’s computer system took a hit from a ransomware attack that has left the city still struggling to operate normally. The city was caught off guard on March 22 when the attack took place, and the city is still experiencing issues that are at best an inconvenience and at worst an ordeal.

Details about the attack are still a little cloudy. City authorities did confirm that the attack on their network took place and that a ransom note followed. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stated that the attacker demanded $51,000, though no one else has confirmed the amount.

Bottoms spoke out on the nature of a ransomware attack on her city, as CNN reported:

“I just want to make the point that this is much bigger than a ransomware attack,” she said. “This is really an attack on our government, which means it’s an attack on all of us.”

Ransomware is malicious software that blocks users from accessing some or all of their computer systems by locking them out until a ransom is paid. Officials haven’t said whether the city was going to pay the ransom

“Everything is up for discussion,” was the Mayor’s reply when asked directly by reporters whether the city would pay up.

How has the cyber attack affected the daily lives of Atlantans? Fortunately, the city’s 911 system, law enforcement, and public safety systems did not suffer, nor did Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (though the airport didn’t recover its public wi-fi until Monday). But for the run-of-the-mill citizen attempting to interact with the city, life is certainly not normal.

Stormy Daniels: The Crime and the Cover-Up By Andrew C. McCarthy

Would a $130,000 payment to buy a porn star’s silence violate campaign-finance laws?

Greetings from beautiful Orange County. We’re getting ready for the second of two Golden State events (we were in San Francisco yesterday), part of National Review Institute’s celebration of Bill Buckley’s legacy a decade after his passing.

For me, the road trip is tacked on to a longer-than-usual vacation. It has ended up being the longest break I have taken from writing in many years — maybe since I started writing full time 15 years ago. I am grateful for the time to think at length about things rather than trying to analyze them on the fly.

Even before detaching, I had mostly stopped watching television news, since there doesn’t seem to be much effort at straight news anymore. When the mainstream media fawned over the Obama administration, I was glad to have the conservative media as an alternative because much of the criticism was pointed and thoughtful. But now that we have an administration I usually agree with on policy led by a president who is, at best, a deeply flawed man, I find the cable coverage almost completely useless. Much of the opposition to Trump is unhinged — though, having had some time to reflect on it, the natural impulse of Trump critics to conflate policy disagreements with personal revulsion over Trump’s character is, if not excusable, at least understandable. Even Trump fans (and there are many we’ve visited with in California) tend to temper their praise with grumbling over the president’s antics. Meanwhile, much of conservative media sounds eerily like the mainstream media during the administration of Bill Clinton, even as comparisons to that deeply flawed man have become the leitmotif of Trump apologia.

On vacation, I contented myself with flipping through news sites and reading books — the best of which were Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic and David Bahnsen’s Crisis of Responsibility (and in the making-up-for-lost-time category, I’ve even almost finished Anna Karenina!). Sunday night’s 60 Minutes episode featuring the Stormy Daniels interview was the first news program I’ve watched in a while (mainly because it came on right after the Kansas–Duke thriller). I’ve been on the road ever since, so maybe the snippets of reactive coverage I’ve seen are not fully representative, but they have been awful.

Report: Israeli stealth fighters fly over Iran Two IAF F-35 Adir fighter jets entered Iranian airspace undetected, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.

Two Israeli F-35 fighter jets entered Iranian airspace over the past month, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Thursday. The act is a signal of heightened regional tensions, especially in light of recent Israeli military attacks in Syria, including against Iranian bases in the country.

Sources quoted in Al-Jarida stated that two stealth fighters flew over Syrian and Iraqi airspace to reach Iran, and even targeted locations in the Iranian cities Bandar Abbas, Esfahan and Shiraz.
The report states that the two fighter jets, among the most advanced in the world, circled at high altitude above Persian Gulf sites suspected of being associated with the Iranian nuclear program.

It also states that the two jets went undetected by radar, including by the Russian radar system located in Syria. The source refused to confirm if the operation was undertaken in coordination with the US army, which has recently conducted joint exercises with the IDF.

The source added that the seven F-35 fighters in active service in the IAF have conducted a number of missions in Syria and on the Lebanese-Syrian border. He underlined that the fighter jets can travel from Israel to Iran twice without refueling.

Israel has admitted to launching about 100 air strikes on Syria over the past five years, targeting Hezbollah terrorists, weapons convoys and infrastructure, and it is believed to be behind dozens more.On March 21, the IDF cleared for publication that Israel was behind the 2007 destruction of a nuclear reactor that was under construction in northern Syria.

In February, Israeli F-16 fighter jets entered Syrian airspace, striking 12 Iranian targets in Syria in response to an Iranian drone that was shot down over Israel. Two Israeli crew members were wounded when they ejected from their jet before it crashed, which was later determined to be caused by pilot error.

In response to the Iranian drone, a senior Israeli official warned that Israel will react with force to Iran’s efforts to entrench itself further in Syria.

“…the Iranians are determined to continue to establish themselves in Syria, and the next incident is only a matter of time,” he said, warning that Israel does not rule out that that the Islamic Republic will continue to try to attack Israel.