RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not least among those welcoming the respite of Thanksgiving must be the nation’s college and university administrators. After student protests evicted Tim Wolfe as president of the University of Missouri, officials at other institutions of higher learning (if we may still call them that) were harassed by shouting or otherwise threatening students. At Princeton University, students occupied the office of the school’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, demanding that he throw Woodrow Wilson down the memory hole.

Even at the remove of several weeks, it is remarkable to recall that the disturbance at Yale University was over “offensive” Halloween costumes. But amid the protests, some important principles are now at risk, notably free speech. We asked at the time where the adults were on campus—either school presidents or boards of trustees? The answer, so far, is that most have caved like wet cardboard. The most hopeful adult response has come from 18- to 22-year olds—the students themselves.

Security checks are necessary – all Israelis are used to opening their bags and passing through metal detectors before being allowed to enter a bus or train station, shopping mall or concert hall.

Palestinian terrorists have taken the lives of more than 20 people, ranging in age from 18-year-olds to a man in his seventies, since the latest wave of attacks started on October 1. (Although arguably, this is not a wave but more like a stormy sea: The exact moment when it started is hard to pinpoint.) People have an understandable need to rationalize the attacks. I can tell you what is not the trigger: Checkpoints.

Recently I have heard an increasing number of Palestinians and their supporters claiming that it is the fear and humiliation of military checkpoints that are “fueling the despair” that leads people to decide to kill Israelis, using whatever they can: knives, scissors, guns, axes, or cars driven into a crowd of pedestrians.

The frustration at checkpoints is real. The need for checks even more so.

It is the equivalent of security checks at an airport. Once upon a time, pre-flight security checks were perfunctory. That was before the Palestinian hijackings that began in 1968, targeting Israelis and Jews. Since September 11, 2001, airports everywhere enforce rigorous rules, some obvious, others verging on the ludicrous.

It is becoming increasingly egregious to persist with the shabby charade that any consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.

After years of counterproductive concessions and compromise, it is unlikely that the situation is still retrievable by consensual means… remedial measures will require coercive action on a wide scale… Unless the Jews convey the unequivocal message that any…challenge to their sovereignty will be met with overwhelming lethal force, they will increasingly be the victims of such force at the hands of their Arab adversaries – “Into the Fray,” The Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2014

It was with these the words that I concluded my column written almost exactly a year ago. In it, I warned that the country was “on the cusp of carnage” – which was also the title of the column.

No consensual resolution possible

Within days, carnage was upon us, with Jews at morning prayers in a Jerusalem synagogue hacked to death by hate-crazed Arabs brandishing meat-cleavers. Since then, the brutal butchery has continued unabated, indeed, accelerating considerably in recent weeks, with a score of Israelis being slaughtered by Palestinian Arabs.

Alexander Levlovich, Naama Henkin, Eitam Henkin, Aharon Banita-Bennett, Nehemia Lavi, Alon Govberg, Chaim Haviv, Yeshayahu Krishevsky, Richard Lakin, Omri Levy, Avraham Asher Hasno, Benjamin Yakubovich, Ya’akov Litman, Netanel Litman , Reuven Aviram, Aharon Yesayev, Yaakov Don, Ezra Schwartz, Hadar Buchris, and Ziv Mizrahi were stabbed, stoned and shot to death – literally for no other reason than being Jewish.

With each gory week, it is becoming increasingly pointless to pretend some consensual resolution to the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is possible.

If Muslims and Islam can’t take criticism or mockery or slander, perhaps they should get out of the kitchen.

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.” President Barack Obama before the U.N. General Assembly, September 25, 2012.

It seems, to judge by his record before and after his U.N. address, in this instance that Obama delivered a verbose, sanctimonious dose of his silver-tongued taqiyya that mentioned desecrated images of Christ and Holocaust denial just so he couldn’t be accused of bigotry or favoritism. However, he hasn’t had much to say about the desecration and destruction of Christian and Jewish edifices and objects by ISIS, or by Islamic enthusiasts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, and in other culturally enriched Islamic pestholes.

On the other hand, it’s fairly well known that Muslims can slander other creeds with legal and social impunity, and even publicly threaten death and dismemberment of anyone who slanders Mohammad and Islam or mentions them with a jaundiced eye.

But, how can you slander an icon, or a cartoon character, a fictional book, movie, or TV character, or a person who might not have even existed historically except in the minds of countless “believers” whose minds anyway are not too firmly anchored to reality? But perhaps it isn’t the icon of Mohammad that should be slandered, mocked, and defamed, but those to whom the icon is a reality.

Forget the housing bubble, the education bubble is about to burst.

Student loan debt is at $1.2 trillion. College enrollment increased under Obama, but graduation rates fell. Barely half the students who enrolled in 2009 graduated. His plans for expanding enrollment rates worked, but the plans for expanding graduation rates didn’t.

And some of the biggest casualties were black students.

81% of black graduates had taken out loans and 39% of black borrowers drop out of college. This money helped keep colleges that were deeply in debt afloat. But it didn’t do much for graduation rates.

Black student loan rates had increased by 20 percent since the ’90s. But black male graduation rates had hardly increased at all.

Only a third of black male college students graduate. Among black women, it’s 44%. And the college graduation gap between white and black students has continued to increase under Obama.

It isn’t just Woodrow Wilson who’s got to go.For the social justice warriors on America’s college campuses these days, force and intimidation are paying off in spades.

Following the occupation of the president’s office courtesy of the “Black Justice League,” Princeton University is the most recent “institution of higher learning” to relent to students’ demand to reject “racism.”

President Christopher L. Eisgruber has “agreed”—more accurately, was bullied into agreeing—to petition the Board of Trustees to consider reevaluating “the legacy” of America’s 28th president and one-time Princeton University president, Woodrow Wilson.

The website Inside Higher Ed informs us that the Black Justice League regards Wilson’s as a legacy of “racism” that continues to inform “campus policy and culture.”

These elite, Ivy League universities are indeed a dangerous place for racial minorities. Perhaps this is why it isn’t only the eradication of every last vestige of the ominous name and image of Wilson from their school that these fonts of wisdom and courage demanded. They as well demanded—wait for it—the retirement of the distinction of “master” at the school.

You read this correctly: Students at one of the most elite academic institutions in the world feel threatened by the word “master.”

All hope may not be lost. (The following is the note from the university president in its entirety.)

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

President Obama claimed last week that his plans to attend an upcoming climate change conference will be “a powerful rebuke” to Islamic State terrorists, who took credit for the brutal November 13 Paris attacks.

“I will be joining world leaders in Paris for the global climate conference,” stated Barack. “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

Obama isn’t the first politician who has spoken of the relationship between climate change and terrorism. Secretary of State John Kerry recently stated in a speech that climate change is a threat to the security and stability of the US and other countries.

Not surprisingly, liberal celebrities are also on board with the climate change-terrorism correlation. At a U.N. climate summit, Leonardo DiCaprio (seen here aboard his 450-foot super-yacht in Cannes) stated that he agrees with the notion that climate change is our single greatest security threat.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media ‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.

The recent wave of student protests is aimed at liberal professors and administrators.

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.

A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.