RUTHFULLY YOURS

Seeming to give credence to Orwell’s quip that “some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals,” faculty at the University of Southampton in England will be sponsoring a three-day conference in April, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism,” conceived of to “explore the relatedness of the suffering and injustice in Palestine to the foundation and protection of a state of such nature and asks what role International Law should play in the situation.”

Not content with the way history and law have worked out independent of their intellectual meddling, the conference sponsors claim that the event will have great scholarly value and “. . . is unique because it concerns the legitimacy in International Law of the Jewish state of Israel” and “will focus on exploring themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism; all of which are posed by Israel’s very nature.”

What does that elevated and academically-inane doublespeak actually mean? Obviously, it is clear, both by the questions posited as the themes of inquiry of the conference, not to mention the list of toxic intellectuals who will present papers at the event, that the purpose and end product of the conference is yet another formalized indictment of Israel—nicely disguised as a bit of academic inquiry and brave new scholarship.

For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.

It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.

Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish.

Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”

Howard Jacobson’s latest novel really got to me. I have been reading Jacobson with pleasure since his 1983 debut novel Coming from Behind and was happily surprised when he was awarded the 2010 Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, although in my opinion he ought also to have won it earlier for his darker novel Kalooki Nights. Jacobson is a world master of the art of disturbing comedy and each new work of his advances the genre—this one by a giant step.

J, or more preciselyJ, begins with a challenge, first to typesetters and then to readers, to crack the code of the double lines that cross the eponymous letter. Kevern “Coco” Cohen’s father would always “put two fingers across his mouth, like a tramp sucking on a cigarette butt . . . to stifle the letter j before it left his lips.” Kevern follows his father’s custom, which might have been taken over from his father. But if this is a family sport, it is not much fun for the son who would have liked to understand this habit of erasure. As a reader who sees the potential jew in every jewel, I was certain I grasped what Kevern doesn’t, but my anxiety then focused on the whys and wherefores of striking or muzzling that portentous consonant.

For the past few days, the Times has been particularly consumed with the issue of income disparity and extreme inequality. First came Paul Krugman who found the presence of this disparity in Israel to be the worst in the advanced world with portentous consequences in store. On Wednesday, the lead editorial with the noxious headline “An Israeli Election Turns Ugly,” bemoaned the fact that “although the economy has grown, the country (Israel) itself has experienced widening income disparities and is now one of the most unequal societies in the advanced world.” (NYT 3/18) So it is with a proper degree of head-scratching that I call your attention to today’s review in the Food Section of Eleven Madison Park, a four-star restaurant which offers a tasting menu for $225/per each one-percenter.

When Muslims themselves now understand there is an issue, politicians and key decision makers throughout the West might do well to understand this, too — and seriously support them.

Another level that will have to be addressed is how Islam is presented in Europe’s education system. The Norwegian translation of the Koran has been abridged to take out the less-charming parts. Islam is presented as if were already reformed. It is as if Einar Berg, the translator of the Koran, were shocked by by what he translated, and tried to package it in a more charming light.

The crucial question is: Will Islam now be reformed to meet the version found in the textbooks? Or will the textbooks be altered to accurately describe Islam’s stated ideology?

This self-censorship — whether voluntary or the result of some implicit threat — is the death of enlightenmnet, humanism and the foundation of all science: the spirit of free inquiry.

Possibly more important is the pervasive, divisive focus on non-believers — the insistence on disparaging them and killing them — and how this might well condition the minds of many Muslims, especially children.

London Citizens, which receives tens of thousands of pounds from the government every year, is a coalition of faith groups that include extremist Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood organizations. London Citizens’ deputy chairman before 2014 was Junaid Ahmed, an Islamist activist who describes Hamas founder and leader Ahmed Yassin as a “hero” and has said that, “Every single [Palestinian] resistance fighter is an example for all of us to follow.”

In February, Britain’s largest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle disclosed that Yitzchak Schochet, a Rabbi in North London, was removed as patron of an interfaith charity because “the government believed he was too extreme.” It reported:

“According to a source close to the charity, the decision was taken after the Department for Communities and Local Government threatened to remove funding for other groups run by the charity’s head.”

Rabbi Schochet has undoubtedly made some troubling comments. In January, after the Islamist terror attacks in Paris, he stated that the staff of Charlie Hebdo “committed a sin against society,” and that, “Any sensitive human being who cares about the rights of another will find these cartoons abhorrent.” Islamist media outlets have condemned a tweet sent by Schochet, in which he told an anti-Israel activist: “I have a spare Israeli flag if you want to hang yourself on it.”

According to news reports, Cuba and the U.S. met for a short time, and then both sides said “no más y adiós”:

The United States and Cuba have ended their third round of talks on re-establishing diplomatic relations as abruptly as the meeting was announced, with no breakthrough on sticking points and in an atmosphere of rising tension over Venezuela.

A small group of American officials led by Roberta Jacobson, the top United States diplomat for Latin America, arrived in Havana on Sunday and met with Cuban counterparts on Monday. The talks ended without any public comment and despite earlier remarks by senior officials at the State Department who had contemplated an open-ended meeting that could last to midweek.

The Cuban Foreign Ministry released a short statement Tuesday acknowledging the meeting and saying that it had been conducted in a “professional atmosphere.” Talks would continue in the future, it said.

In France, while the immigrant enclaves swell with the self-righteously enraged, calls for the better integration of Muslims are denounced as racist by the elites who betray their heritage of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The future, according to a pair of best-selling books, belongs to Islam.

To understand how Australia could succumb to Islam you need to grasp only one thing: key élites in Western countries would sell out in a heartbeat. That is the primary lesson to be drawn from the two best-selling books about the crisis of Islam in France: Soumission (‘Submission’) a novel by Michel Houellebecq, published in January, and Le Suicide français (‘The French Suicide’) a history of French decline by Éric Zemmour, published last October.

This treachery is certainly the case with academics, as Houellebecq emphasizes by making François, the protagonist (or anti-hero) of his narrative, a professor of literature at Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. There he specializes in the work of the influential nineteenth century novelist of decadence, Joris-Karl Huysmans, most famous for À rebours (1884), published in English as Against Nature. This is a work saturated with hatred and contempt for the West, Christianity, and the values and conventions of middle-class life, as is the vast bulk of the work done by arts and humanities academics today. Houellebecq’s François lives vicariously in this realm of aestheticist indulgence, musing nihilistically how the Western masses are little more than animals, living their lives mindlessly, without feeling the least need to justify themselves. “They live because they live, and that’s all,” he says.

soumissionBut François is no different. He is facing a mid-life crisis: his academic career has stalled and the supply of young female students eager to trade sexual favours for special consideration is drying up. And he is only too aware that the knowledge he offers his students and the degrees they acquire at his diploma mill are of little value. What good is arcane knowledge of Proust if you’re selling perfume in a shop? Self-obsessed, François acts mainly as a witness to the succession of political events described in the novel (set in 2022), as the mainstream parties miscalculate in a catastrophic fashion, fragment the popular vote, and deliver France into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood, which immediately begins to establish an Islamist regime, beginning with the education system.

The Israeli election that looked like a cliffhanger when the polls closed on Tuesday had turned into a decisive victory for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party by Wednesday morning. With at least 29 seats in the parliament compared to 24 for the main center-left party, Israel’s Prime Minister should be able to put together a ruling coalition of center-right parties that is more manageable than his last majority.

The victory is a remarkable personal triumph for Mr. Netanyahu, who is now Israel’s second longest-serving Prime Minister after David Ben-Gurion. He gambled that he could assemble a more stable center-right coalition, as well as by giving a high-stakes speech to the U.S. Congress on Iran two weeks before the election, and in the final days stressing above all the security themes that must be Israel’s abiding concern.

Mr. Netanyahu and Likud were trailing in the polls in the final week as the opposition stressed the rising cost of food and housing and an economy that had slowed to about 3% growth from near 6% in 2010. But in the closing days Mr. Netanyahu played up that foreigners (read: President Obama) wanted him defeated, and he rejected statehood for Palestinians, reversing a position he had taken in 2009. The reversal gave the impression of opportunism, even desperation, but it also rallied conservative voters who had hinted at growing “Bibi fatigue” after his long tenure as premier.

One senator wants to know if former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deleted her emails regarding the very delayed designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist organization — and if a very well-heeled donor influenced that policy.

The query is not new for Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), but it’s now reflected in some additional disturbing lights: the admission by Clinton that she used personal email while the nation’s top diplomat and screened which ones to keep or discard, and the ascension of Boko Haram to an ISIS affiliate.

In June of last year, Vitter questioned why the State Department, under former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “misled” Congress on the threat posed by Boko Haram.

He cited 2011 evidence on Boko Haram presented to the State Department by the National Counterterrorism Center, followed by a delay in the group’s terror designation until fall 2013.