RUTHFULLY YOURS

Pro-Israel bloggers like William Jacobson and Caroline Glick have brought much attention to a fiasco at Syracuse University first reported by The Atlantic. The invitation to Shimon Dotan, a leftist Israeli filmmaker, to speak on and show his anti-settler movie “The Settlers” at a Syracuse conference on religion and film, was revoked because of the fear of pressure from campus activists supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. While Jacobson and Glick wrote mordant commentaries, pointing to the alarming advance of antisemitism on campus, and The Atlantic stressed the role of political correctness, to me the most interesting character in this story is M. Gail Hamner, the tenured professor who disinvited Dotan. Here are extracts of her letter of disinvitation, taken from Jacobson’s blog, with his emphases. The letter is a classic example of shame-filled shamefulness:

I now am embarrassed to share that my SU colleagues, on hearing about my attempt to secure your presentation, have warned me that the BDS faction on campus will make matters very unpleasant for you and for me if you come. In particular my film colleague in English who granted me affiliated faculty in the film and screen studies program and who supported my proposal to the Humanities Council for this conference told me point blank that if I have not myself seen your film and cannot myself vouch for it to the Council, I will lose credibility with a number of film and Women/Gender studies colleagues. Sadly, I have not had the chance to see your film and can only vouch for it through my friend and through published reviews. Clearly I am politically naive. I also feel tremendous shame in reneging on a half-offered invitation….. I feel caught in an ideological matrix and by my own egoic needs to sustain certain institutional affiliations.

After this came out, as the Algemeiner reported, Syracuse University overruled her and promised, in a high-minded statement of its principles, to re-invite Professor Dotan. In itself that was good news, even if, as Jacobson emphasized, it averted its administrative eye from the dirty work that had put those pressures on Professor Hamner in the first place. Professor Hamner then issued another shamefaced apology in which she describes herself as “overly concerned” about “how others would react,” and apologizes for not having viewed the film in advance. Note, however, that confessing to the crime of not seeing the movie in advance amounts to the admission that if only everyone had known it was an anti-settler movie maybe it would have been okay. (Apparently not though, if Syracuse Professor Miriam Elman, the subject of the Algemeiner interview, is to be believed.)

Ms. Mac Donald is the author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016) and a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose fall issue this article is adapted.

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.

“There is no way out of this shooting spree,” Mr. Angelo said. His despair is understandable, because Chicago is the country’s most-glaring example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Chicago officers have cut back drastically on proactive policing under the onslaught of criticism from the Black Lives Matter movement and its political and media enablers.

In October 2015, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch during a crime meeting in Washington, D.C., that the Chicago police had gone “fetal,” and were less likely to interdict criminal behavior. That pull-back worsened in 2016, with pedestrian stops dropping 82% from January through July 20, 2016, compared with the same period in 2015, according to the Chicago police department. The cops are just “driving by people on the corners,” Mr. Angelo says, rather than checking out known drug dealers and others who raise suspicions. Criminals are back in control and black lives are being lost at a rate not seen for two decades.

If there is a theme to this 15th annual observance — the word “anniversary” just seems so wrong — of the most lethal enemy attack ever carried out on American soil, it is erasure.

At least that’s what they’re being told in Owego, N.Y. There, a Muslim activist group is demanding that the town’s 9/11 memorial be erased. Not all of it; just the word “Islamic.”

Carved into the memorial — the point of which is to signify that which we must never forget — is the factual assertion that, on September 11, 2001, “nineteen Islamic terrorists” carried out coordinated suicide-hijacking attacks against the United States.

The Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier has decided that the monument is dangerous because it “could encourage hatred toward Muslims.” Fifteen years on, we are supposed to believe that the danger we face is not an enduring global threat fueled by an ideology drawn directly from Islamic scripture; the danger lies in speaking honestly about the threat.

It has taken less than two years to go from Je suis Charlie — the fleeting show of solidarity in support of Western free-speech principles after Islamic terrorists mass-murdered cartoonists at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo — to Je suis Kerry. That’s a show of solidarity in support of our ineffable secretary of state who, when not steering aid, comfort, and goo-gobs of cash to the jihadist regime in Tehran, is telling the international media that maybe terrorism would go away if they’d just stop talking about it.

Erasure: It is Willful Blindness 2.0, specially fit for the age of Obama.

When I wrote my “Memoir of the Jihad,” willful blindness was an ingrained conscious avoidance of the abundant evidence of the threat posed by Islamic supremacism — the ideological commitment to coerce acceptance of sharia law, by force if necessary. It was a head-in-the-sand approach to easily accessible proof that the threat is rooted in Muslim scripture and a mainstream interpretation of Islam that stretches back over a millennium.

We’re way beyond that. Now, it is compelled blindness, a tireless campaign to erase the abundant evidence, to make it inaccessible. Alas, apologists of the See No Islam school cannot seem to make the jihadist carnage go away. But they work feverishly to make sure you can’t see what causes it. Or, if you do get a glimpse — because the carnage and its animating ideology are inextricably linked, and because jihadists are actually quite anxious to tell us why they do what they do — the apologists warn that you’ll keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.

Or, as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it while working to create an unconstitutional legal restriction against criticism of Islam, she and her Islamist government partners will “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel they have the support to do what we abhor.”

She wasn’t kidding. Mentions of “Islam” in connection with terrorism? Erased — in favor of “workplace violence,” “man-caused disasters,” and “overseas contingencies.”

Investigations of prominent Islamist organizations proved in a terrorism-financing prosecution to affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian jihadist branch, Hamas? Erased.

September 11 has long meant a lot to my wife and me. It marked the birth of our first child, a son Sydney, born fifty years ago this Sunday. Their first child, Alex, was born March 13, 2001, six months before the attack on 9/11.

Sunday marks fifteen years since we were attacked without warning by a small group of Islamic terrorists acting under the authority of al Qaeda. Fifteen years later we are still involved in a war against Islamic extremists. It has been a long time, and there is no end in sight. Thinking about this returns me to my own youth. Like Alex, I was born ten months before Pearl Harbor. Fifteen years after that attack the War was a distant memory. I was in boarding school. Japan and Germany, our former enemies, were now allies and on their way to becoming major economies. General Eisenhower had been President for four years. The economy was booming and, apart from periodically being told to duck under our school desks during simulated atomic bomb attacks, life for a fifteen-year-old, was peaceful and happy. How long will it be before such idyllic conditions return?

The horrific facts of what happened on 9/11 should never be forgotten. More people were killed that day than died at Pearl Harbor, or Americans killed on D-Day…and those killed on 9/11 were all civilians! Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly on November 10th, 2001, President George W. Bush said: “Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America there will be no forgetting September 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.”

Take a moment to think of what happened. Remember those who were lost. And recognize that the evil that perpetrated those attacks still lives. It must be eradicated if my grandson is to live with the hope and optimism that was mine sixty years ago.

To honor and to keep alive the memory of the victims of 9/11, at each year’s anniversary, FSM’s contributing editors share their thoughts about that day. This year, one of our favorite quotes from those remembrances is from Dr. Robin McFee who said,

“9/11, fifteen years later…To those we lost, may their memory be a blessing. And may God comfort those who mourn, and bless this great nation, and all who defend her.”

To that we say…Amen.
Reflections on 9/11 Fifteen Years Later by Ruth King

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/reflections-on-911-fifteen-years-later?f=must_reads#ixzz4JwXq2GaD

9 – 11 Fifteen Years Later: Don’t Let Future Generations Learn the Wrong Lesson by Robin McFee
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/9-11-fifteen-years-later-dont-let-future-generations-learn-the-wrong-lesson?f=must_reads
Fifteen Years On I Wonder What the Falling Man Would Think by Frank Salvato

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fifteen-years-on-i-wonder-what-the-falling-man-would-think
The Lessons of 9-11–We Were–And Still Are–Unserious by Peter Huessey

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-lessons-of-9-11-we-were-and-still-are-unserious?f=commentary#ixzz4JwWeXoPp

Why I Fight, Why I Write by Edward Cline

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-i-fight-why-i-write?f=must_reads#ixzz4JwXEZyHG