RUTHFULLY YOURS

PARIS—World powers gathered in Paris on Friday to kick off a French initiative to push the Israelis and Palestinians to restart peace talks, after a monthslong surge of violence that has left Western officials fearing the two sides are heading toward another full-scale conflict.

Amid severely strained relations between the two sides, the French have set a modest goal for the diplomats from 26 nations, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who are attending the meeting: an agreement to hold a peace conference near the end of the year, with the Israelis and Palestinians present.

French officials are hoping diplomats can approve steps to prepare for the conference but acknowledge that any substantive peace negotiations are far off.

“We can’t substitute ourselves for the concerned parties,” French President François Hollande said at the start of the meeting. “We can only give guarantees that the peace will be solid, durable and internationally controlled.”

Some 30 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in more than 300 Palestinian attacks since September. Palestinian officials say more than 200 Palestinians, mostly alleged attackers, have been killed by Israeli security forces during the same period.

The violence has subsided in the past two months, with Palestinians carrying out fewer than a dozen attacks or attempted attacks since April, compared with almost daily assaults until then. Tensions still linger, however.

Given the bleak mood, officials question whether either side can be persuaded to return to the negotiating table.

“We know the path is difficult,” a French official said.

The nations represented at the conference include Egypt, China, Russia, Germany, the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. The meeting was originally scheduled for May 30 but pushed back to June 3 so Mr. Kerry could attend. CONTINUE AT SITE

My friend Rich, the Chicago scribe, sends out a batch of informative e-mails on a variety of issues. This week he focused on education. The funniest is first in this list:

Santa Monica college students have a wedding ceremony as they marry the ocean. Who served as best wave? How will community property be divided in the event of a divorce? Naturally, faculty members are organizing this.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2016/05/26/insane-santa-monica-college-students-married-the-oceanand-got-intimate-with-it-n2169501?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

The leftist pollution of the American mind does not begin in college, but earlier. California is about to adopt a new history curriculum for grades K-12. As the largest state, new textbooks designed for California will be adopted elsewhere, and the curriculum itself, in textbooks or not will also be transported outside the state.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/california-poised-to-adopt-ultra-leftist-k-12-history-curriculum.php

It is almost impossible to overstate the sickness that is now prevalent at American universities, especially elite schools , the ones for which parents and kids will do near anything in order to gain admission.
Yale : Students demand the right to determine what material they will learn in individual courses- no more colonialist dead white male poets
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/01/decolonize-yale-students-circulate-petition-opposing-white-male-major-english-poets-requirement/?utm_source=hadaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Free speech is risky at Yale: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418/

Dartmouth: The gutless president whiffs, and there are no penalties for black students who invaded the library one night, disrupting those who were studying for finals,shouted racist epithets at them, taunted them, and physically threatened others. Now imagine the reverse, where white students shrieking white lives matter invades a library full of black students on a saturday night. This is of course an absurd thing to imagine, but try it out. Had the same events gone down with the races switched ,how many of the white students, all easily identifiable from the videos taken, would still be in school?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/06/dartmouth-and-double-standards.php

Oberlin- the school where social justice warriors come to graze:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/oberlin-is-an-insane-asylum/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges

Beaten down by decades of moral-equivalency abuse, Israelis treated the case of the gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo this week as they do any debate surrounding the legitimacy of ‎firing a weapon.‎

With an IDF soldier on trial for shooting a subdued Palestinian terrorist to death — and a brouhaha that ‎attracted international attention while causing domestic angst — the issue of whether an ape suffered ‎a wrongful death pales in comparison.‎

This is not to say that the Hebrew-speaking media did not consider the case of Harambe the gorilla ‎worthy of coverage. On the contrary, the item captivated Israeli news outlets as much as it did others.‎

But what was absent in the discussion in the studios of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem was the vitriol ‎against the zookeepers in Ohio, who had been faced with a painful choice that had to be made in ‎unfortunate circumstances. When a 3-year-old boy fell into the enclosure of a 420-pound ape — ‎and was swung and dragged every which way, into and around water — the life of one was suddenly ‎thrust into the balance against that of the other.‎

What made the event particularly tragic for all concerned was that the gorilla did not appear to be ‎attacking the toddler with purposeful aggression; in fact, he seemed confused about what to do, and ‎had he been female, the whole episode might have turned out differently. But his immense strength, ‎grip and erratic movements could have killed the child, even inadvertently. Anyone watching the video ‎of the events can see this clearly. Indeed, the little boy is unlikely to have survived even minutes ‎more in the clutches of the 17-year-old silverback.‎

Furthermore, according to the zoo, shooting the gorilla with a sedative dart would first ‎have agitated him and would have taken time to take effect, and therefore was not an option. So the only ‎recourse was to rescue the boy at the expense of the ape. ‎

Animal-rights activists and many other Americans responded to this life-saving gesture as though it ‎was an act of first-degree slaughter. Indeed, “murder” was the word bandied about on social media — ‎aimed both at the zoo and at the child’s mother, who was accused of being at fault for not preventing ‎her son from climbing the fence of the enclosure and falling in. The harsh criticism culminated in a ‎Change.org petition titled “Justice for Harambe,” which has garnered hundreds of thousands of ‎signatures. ‎

TO CONTRIBUTE GO HERE: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/contribute.php

On Tuesday, the European Union (EU) announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube.

On Wednesday, Facebook deleted the account of Ingrid Carlqvist, Gatestone’s Swedish expert.

It’s no coincidence.

Ingrid had posted our latest video to her Facebook feed — called “Sweden’s Migrant Rape Epidemic.” As you can see, Ingrid calmly lays out the facts and statistics, all of which are meticulously researched.

It’s a video version of this research paper that Gatestone published last year. The video has gone viral — racking up more than 80,000 views in its first two days.

But the EU is quite candid: it is applying a political lens to their censorship, and it now has teams of political informants — with the Orwellian title of “trusted reporters” — to report any cases of “xenophobia” or “hate speech” to Facebook for immediate deletion.

It’s political censorship. It’s outrageous. And it’s contrary to our western values of free speech, political freedom and the separation of mosque and state. But in another way, it’s a tremendous compliment — the world’s censors think that Gatestone Institute’s work is important enough and persuasive enough that it needs to be silenced.

Well, not if we have anything to say about it. We raised such a ruckus about this attack that the Swedish media started reporting on Facebook’s heavy-handed censorship. It backfired, and Facebook went into damage-control mode. They put Ingrid’s account back up — without any explanation or apology. Ironically, their censorship only gave Ingrid’s video more attention.

Facebook and the EU have backed down — for today. But they’re deadly serious about stopping ideas they don’t like. They’ll be back.

As you know, just last week we started releasing high-quality original videos, hosted by our Gatestone experts. Our first four videos have already been watched by more than 150,000 people!

It’s a great way to make our research come alive — and as Ingrid’s viral video shows, to get our ideas noticed.

So I want Gatestone’s talented experts to make more videos — a lot more! We need to win the battle of ideas. Can you help?

Each video costs us approximately $500 to produce. But as Facebook’s attack on us shows, they’re worth every penny.

Will you help us do that?

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Deborah Weiss Moment with Deborah Weiss, a Human Rights lawyer who is an expert on the subject of free speech and terrorism related issues. She is the author of The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s Jihad on Free Speech. Visit her website at vigilancenow.org.

Deborah discussed Ballet Jihad, unveiling a Muslim convert’s agenda to restrict the world of ballet in the name of “tolerance.”

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Deborah discuss Freedom of Speech: Under Attack in America, unveiling how the U.S. is submitting to Islamic blasphemy codes and the high price it will pay for doing so.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/06/02/the-deborah-weiss-moment-ballet-jihad/