RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vermont, the state that gave us unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is home to another radical liberal breed named Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Along with Sanders, Sen. Leahy represents the left flank of the Democratic Party and often finds himself at loggerheads with its more centrist members.

Not unsurprising, Leahy is also a visceral critic of Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy and stalwart U.S. ally. In 2011, citing alleged human rights violations, he proposed a bill that would have cut funding to three elite Israeli units that conduct counter-terror operations in Judea/Samaria and Gaza, prompting intervention by Israel’s then defense minister, Ehud Barak.

In 2012, Leahy employed veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric to oppose an amendment proposed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that called for the State Department to provide a more accurate accounting of which actual Palestinian refugees were being serviced by U.S. tax dollars. In opposing Kirk, Leahy implied that those who favored the amendment had other interests and not those of the U.S. in mind thereby invoking the blatantly anti-Semitic “Israel firster” canard, which implies divided Jewish loyalties.

Leahy now seems to have set his sights on obtaining “justice” for Arab terrorists neutralized by Israel while conducting terror attacks against Israelis. He recently sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to investigate “gross violations of human rights” alleged to have been committed by Israel’s security forces. The letter, which also names Egypt as an offender, claims that Israel may have engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently featured an article lamenting the lack of “diversity” in my discipline. Philosophy, so goes the article, just hasn’t been welcoming toward minorities and women.

Thankfully, such enlightened departments as that found at Penn State University have endeavored to “decolonize the canon.”

Of course, academia isn’t in the least bit interested in promoting the only diversity that can, or should, mean something in an institution of “higher learning.” Its equation of “diversity” with gender and racial representation is part of the problem.

Indeed—and I say this as someone who is an academic who happened to have grown up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Trenton, NJ—there exists far more intellectual diversity at the corner bar than can be found in your average college or university.

Not only does the data confirm the endless anecdotal evidence that legions of academic dissidents like myself have acquired over the years. The data reveals that academics are moving even further to the left.

The most recent study available was conducted by the University of California. Its findings were released a little more than three years ago in the November of 2012 issue of Inside Higher Education.

The study identifies five ideological or political categories: “far left,” “liberal,” “middle of the road,” “conservative,” and, finally, “far right.” What it finds is that faculty of all ranks from both universities and colleges, institutions that are private and public, large and small, religious and non-religious, self-identified as “far left” to a significantly greater extent than they had just three years earlier: In 2008, 8.8% so self-identified. In 2011, that number had risen to 12.4%.

Earlier this month, the Israeli authorities planned to launch a criminal investigation into the conduct of left-wing organization Breaking the Silence for collecting classified military information. This came following an expose on Channel 2 news that showed Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies of reported wrongdoing in the Palestinian territories from IDF soldiers, soliciting operational information. The Israeli NGO claims to be a human rights organization, but it has compelled young people to divulge sensitive information about troop movements and other operational maneuvers.

It is difficult to make a case for how collecting sensitive, classified information about the IDF can possibly help the Palestinian cause, short of planting the illusive hope in the minds of Israel’s enemies that they can defeat the Israeli militarily. And the sooner the Palestinians wake up from that corrosive illusion, the more lives will be saved, on both the Palestinian and the Israeli side of the conflict.

Yet, with a criminal investigation hanging over them, Breaking the Silence still gave a talk at the Brown University-Rhode Island School of Design Hillel and was scheduled to give another at the Columbia/Barnard Hillel on Thursday.

This is not the first time Breaking the Silence has gone on tour to distort and air Israel’s dirty laundry to American Jewish college students. In 2013, Breaking the Silence appeared at the Hillel houses of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. This is, however, the first time that they are on tour while under criminal suspicion.

‘They’re blowing up jet passengers and blasting subway trains, and all he wants to do is dance, dance, dance.”

President Obama resembles the airheaded young lady depicted in Don Henley’s 1984 rock hit. As her surroundings grow increasingly perilous, all she wants to do is dance.

Obama similarly debased himself and humiliated his country via a tango in Buenos Aires, a baseball game with Cuban despot Raul Castro in Havana (including with Obama doing the wave), and an Easter-eve round of golf. All this transpired barely hours after radical Islamic terrorists turned Brussels into a slaughterhouse. Just before Obama partied, ISIS killers wounded 316 and murdered 32 innocents, including four Americans, in a NATO-allied capital.

What, if anything, will make Obama abandon his Ringling Bros.–quality clown routine, display a modicum of maturity, and — at long last — get serious about obliterating jihad in general and ISIS in particular?

Perhaps once ISIS goes radioactive, it finally will dawn on Obama that Islamic terrorism is no laughing matter.

“Recent weeks have brought growing evidence that ISIS is actively seeking weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear material,” Karl Vick wrote in a bone-chilling dispatch in Time magazine’s April 4 edition. “The evidence is piecemeal but alarming to counterterrorism experts who’ve watched ISIS grow increasingly aggressive.”

Aggressive, indeed.

Someone fatally shot Didier Prospero four times inside his home just outside Brussels, just two days after the terror onslaught. His job as a guard at a nuclear medical-research outfit raised eyebrows, as did disputed reports that his access pass was stolen.

Workers at Belgium’s atomic-energy plants at Doel and Tihange were sent home after the Brussels attacks, reportedly for fear that one or more insiders might try something ugly. Eleven such employees at Tihange had their badges stripped in recent weeks, four since the Brussels mayhem.

Belgian officials believe that suicide bombers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui recorded ten hours of surveillance video of a high-level Belgian nuclear scientist after hiding a camera in the bushes across from his home.

Someone obscured a surveillance camera at the Doel nuclear-power station in 2014, then drained 17,200 gallons of turbine lubricant, nearly causing a reactor to overheat.

Beyond sabotaging an atomic-energy plant from inside, terrorists most likely would aim less for building a Hiroshima-style A-bomb, and more for crafting a radioactive-material-filled dirty bomb. While such a weapon’s conventional explosion might kill only dozens, it would irradiate thousands, panic millions, create billions in economic losses, and yield infinite global anxiety.

We hear often that Mahmoud Abbas is keen on having Palestinians vote in a democratic election. Yet Abbas turned 81 last week and appears ready to remain at the helm until his last day — free elections for Palestinians be damned. That makes sense: Hamas could easily best Abbas in such an election.

Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah are still far from achieving any form of reconciliation. This, despite all the talk about “progress” that has been reportedly achieved in talks between the two parties taking place in Doha, Qatar.

Hamas is also cracking down on journalists, academics, unionists and even lawyers in the Gaza Strip.

Yet Abbas’s West Bank rivals Hamas in Gaza, in terms of a lack of human rights and freedom of speech. The idea of free and democratic elections there is a joke. Abbas will leave a legacy of chaos.

Best birthday wishes to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, who turned 81 last week. The octogenarian appears ready to remain at the helm until his last day — free elections for Palestinians be damned.

Abbas has inherited a tradition of tyranny. His predecessor, Yasser Arafat, was also president for life. Both have plenty of company, joining a long list of African presidents who earned the notorious title of “President for Life” – in Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, Eritrea and Gambia. And let us not forget the Arab dictators in these ranks.

One might hope for at least a deputy — someone to fill the impending and inevitable power vacuum in the PA. Not likely.

Abbas has fiercely resisted demands from leaders of his ruling Fatah faction to name a deputy president or a successor. His reasoning: the time is not “appropriate” for such a move. Palestinians should instead concentrate their energies on rallying international support for a Palestinian state.