A Scotsman's Incredible Letter. Palestinian Animals and their Sick Excuses! Where Have The Governors Gone?

 , 
===

The video of the student who thought the 1% could pay for everything was, on the one hand, fun to watch, but, on the other hand, dispiriting in how blithely she thinks the 1%ers have enough assets to pay for it all. She never did the numbers. I guess that might entail too much work.

She mentioned that her parents scraped to pay for her college costs. I wonder if she works part time to help defray her college costs. 

I studied electrical engineering before I went to law school. I worked 20 hours per week while carrying a full load. She doesn't impress me as being the kind of person who would consider a part time job. Too much work.

C----

My Response:

"First, the happiest and best ever of Thanksgivings and looking forward to meeting you while you are here..

Second, the young lady you spoke of is willing to work. She is simply waiting for Minimum Wage of $25/hour.  I do not understand why you did not understand this.

Also, why does she have to learn math.  Her head is empty and she wants it to stay that way. That is why she is in college

God Help us. POGO was right but he said the Enemy is Us.  Actually the enemy are Current College Educated  students.

Me"

==
An incredible letter whether  written by a non - Jewish Scottish professor to his students who voted to boycott Israel. 

More like him should be teaching on American College Campuses. (See 1 below.)
===
Where have all the Governors gone? (See 2 below.)
===
The animals called Palestinians and their sick excuses that leads them to murder! (See 3 below.)

and 

U.S World Wide Travel Alert has nothing to do with Islam! (See 3a below.) 
===

Dick

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)It's a response from Dr Denis MacEoin, a non-Jewish professor, to the motion put forward by The Edinburgh Student's Association to boycott all things Israeli, in which they claim Israel is under an apartheid regime. Denis is an expert in Middle Eastern affairs  and was a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Here's his letter to the students.

TO: The Committee Edinburgh University Student Association.

May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain 's great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University . Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field. I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote.

I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel .

That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.

Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I'm not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel . I'm speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a "Nazi" state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel , precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for.

It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is.

That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country's 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha'is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population).

In Iran , the Bahai's (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren't your members boycotting Iran ? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa . They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews - something no blacks were able to do in South Africa .

Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank.

On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.

In Israel , women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid.

Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home.

It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran , where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief.

Intelligent students thinking it's better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak.

I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel . I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it's clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens.

Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , Yemen , and Iran . They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world's freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahai's.... Need I go on?

The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. I ask you to show some common sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen to more than one side.

Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to protect them from one-sided argument.

They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930's (which, sadly, there was not), don't you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it?

Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please tell me that this makes sense. I have given you some of the evidence.

It's up to you to find out more.

Yours sincerely,

Denis MacEoin

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2)

The Disappearing Governors

By Thomas Sowell 

There is a painful irony in a recent decision of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on the side of Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, whom the U.S. Department of Justice tried to stop from making charter schools widely available to minority youngsters in his state.

The Circuit Court's decision over-ruled a lower court decision on the side of the Justice Department, which was opposing the large-scale creation of charter schools in Louisiana, on grounds that this would interfere with long-standing federal government efforts to racially integrate public schools.

In short, Governor Jindal's attempt to give minority children a chance for a better education prevailed against the attempts of the political left to use these children as guinea pigs for their theories about mixing and matching students by race.

What made the Circuit Court decision ironic and painful was that this decision came right after Bobby Jindal had withdrawn his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2016. Nor was he the first governor to withdraw from the campaign for a presidential nomination. Nor is he likely to be the last.

Some of us think someone who is going to govern from the White House ought to have had some experience governing somewhere else before, if only so that we can get some idea of how good -- or how bad -- he is at governing.

How good someone may have been in business, or in a profession, or as a member of Congress, is no real clue to what that individual will be like when it comes to governing the country.

Certainly choosing a first-term Senator on the basis of his political rhetoric is something that has not turned out well in the case of Barack Obama, and may turn out to be truly catastrophic, as international terrorism spreads.

The withdrawal of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and then of Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, are major losses -- not because we know that either of them would make a great president, but precisely because we have no idea whether either of them would have been great or awful.

The primary campaign is supposed to help us find out such things. Instead, the media have turned this into a side show about Donald Trump.

Nor was this all media political bias. The Fox News Channel, which broadcast the first "debates," opened up the second-tier candidates' session with a question about Donald Trump, who was not even present, rather than about the nation's problems, which have been all too present.

The media instinct for the flashy and clever irrelevancy seems to be non-partisan. The fact that we may be at a crossroads in world history does not seem to spoil their sense of fun and games.

Much of the time that could have been spent bringing out what candidates with governing experience have to offer was spent instead interviewing not only Trump himself but even members of his family.

This year the Republicans have had a much better qualified set of nominees to choose from than in previous election years. But most of them may be gone before we have learned enough about them to know whether we would have been for them or against them.

We may already know as much as we are likely to know about the three first-term Senators -- Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul -- since they have no governing records to be examined. We may also know as much about the candidates from outside politics -- Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina -- as we are likely to know.

It is the governors who have a record that goes beyond their rhetorical skills. And it is those records that need to be examined.

A complicating factor in this and some previous Republican primary campaigns is that there are so many conservatives splitting the conservative vote that it may guarantee that some mushy moderate gets the nomination, but cannot get enough Republican voters to turn out on election day.

At this point, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey seems to be the kind of articulate conservative candidate who can galvanize Republican voters to turn out on election day to vote, and perhaps even attract some Democrats with that political rarity, straight talk.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3)

The Middle East in One Bad Article

By JONATHAN S. TOBIN 

Today, another Israeli was killed and two more were wounded in a stabbing attack at a gas station by a Palestinian terrorist. On Sunday, another Israeli, a 20-year-old woman, was stabbed at an intersection near where 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts was killed. That attack was one of three assaults by Palestinians on Jewish targets that took place that day in which Israelis defending themselves killed all of the terrorist assailants. How did the New York Timesdescribe it in their initial report on the events of the day published on its website Sunday evening? The headline read as follows: “1 Israeli and 3 Palestinians Killed in the West Bank.” This was a classic example of moral equivalence in which Israeli victims are equated by mainstream media bias with terrorists.

By Monday that headline was changed to: “Israeli Woman and 3 Palestinian Attackers Killed in West Bank.” But before we give the Times too much credit for correcting the prejudice against Israel that was demonstrated in the initial headline, it’s important to note that the story was just as imbalanced as it devoted far more space to information about one of the attackers than the Israeli that was killed. But in spite of that tilt, it also contained some important information the demonstrated the way the “moderate” Palestinian Authority was encouraging violence. In other words, the story was everything that was wrong in the Middle East contained in one bad article.

The instinct to lump in together all those killed in the last two months as Palestinian terrorism surged into what is being called the “stabbing intifada” stems from a belief that what is happening is merely part of a “cycle of violence.” Seen in that way, there are no terrorists or victims, merely two sides that are equally to blame for the problem.

This ignores the fact that the conflict is driven by the Palestinian belief in the illegitimacy of Israel within any borders. That is something that has been made evident by their repeated rejections of peace offers that would have ended the Israeli presence on the West Bank and given them the independent state they say they want. Yet the Palestinians continue to seek out random Jews to kill on the streets and do it in the name of their desire to end an occupation that could have been finished long ago if they were not still obsessed with Israel’s destruction.

It was telling that the Times chose to highlight the death of one of the assailants, 16-year-old Ashrakat Quattanami. She is the daughter of an active member of Islamic Jihad, and Islamist terrorist organization that thinks Hamas is too moderate and is dedicated to the elimination of Israel and its Jewish population. However, the Times merely describe it as “militant group.”

The Times quoted her father at length:

“My daughter went to the Hawara checkpoint today to seek revenge in her own hands against the Israelis who have stolen our land and continue to kill innocent Palestinian people,” Mr. Qattanani, an imam at a neighborhood mosque, said in an interview. “Last night, she was very upset, and said, ‘If I become a martyr, give my organs to a Palestinian who needs them.’”

Mind you, there is no talk of statehood or of the West Bank. Rather merely a generic description of all Israelis as living on “stolen land.”

Yet the author of the piece, Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, told us nothing about 20-year-old Hadar Buchris, the one Israeli fatality of the day, other than her name, her age and the fact that she was from Safed, a city inside the 1967 lines. Nor did we learn anything about the person Qattanani tried to kill.

But what was of interest was the fact that not just her father’s radical group is lionizing as a martyr and the slain stabber. The Palestinian Authority officially declared her death “a war crime.” She died when an Israeli in a car spotted her chasing an Israeli girl with a knife knocked her down. A soldier then shot her. But both PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party and Hamas now mark the quick-witted driver for death.

In other words, after rejecting peace, even the Palestinian moderates think it’s okay for Palestinians to try to slaughter any Jew they meet and believe Israelis have no right to defend themselves against terror. The reasoning behind this stems from the Palestinians sense of identity that is inextricably tied to their century-long war against Zionism and not some complaints about the borders offered by the Israelis or the existence of Jewish settlements. As Daniel Polisar wrote in Mosaic magazine about his study of Palestinian public opinion, their glorification of violence and opposition to peace on any terms but Israel’s destruction is what continues to fuel the conflict.

What’s just as bad is when the Times — the flagship of the liberal mainstream media establishment — write and edit stories that convey the message that there is something inherently reasonable in a world view in which there is no moral distinction to be dawn between terrorists and their victims.

Indeed, as with the coverage of the war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, this article repeats cumulative casualty figures from the last two months of terrorism in which the higher number of slain Palestinian terrorists is compared to the total of Israelis stabbed, shot, or firebombed. The fact that Israelis have been able to defend themselves from many of these stabbings by gunning down would-be killers as they chase or stab victims is held against the Jewish state in much the same manner as it was blamed for its ability to prevent more casualties from Hams rocket attacks with the Iron Dome system.

It’s not often that one not particularly remarkable article could sum up everything that is wrong with the Middle East and the way Western liberals think about it, but the Rudoren piece does just that. So long as Palestinians get this kind of favorable coverage, it’s little wonder that they persist in their belief that sooner or later the West will hand them Israel on a silver platter.

3a)

State Department issues worldwide travel alert

The State Department issued a worldwide travel alert Monday over possible risks due to increased terrorism threats.

The alert comes amid information that ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terrorist groups (like Hadassah) continue to plan attacks in multiple regions by employing a “wide variety of tactics,” according to the State Department.

Authorities believe the likelihood of terror attacks will continue as members of ISIS return from Iraq and Syria, as well as the threat from “unaffiliated persons” planning attacks inspired by major terrorist organizations.

The State Department said that U.S. citizens should “exercise vigilance when in public places or using transportation” and “avoid large crowds or crowded places.”

Americans  are also urged to exercise particular caution during the holiday season, and at holiday festivals or events. The worldwide travel alert expires on Feb. 24, 2016.

The alert was issued after multiple attacks in the past year in France, Nigeria, Denmark, Turkey and Mali in the past year, as well as the bombing of a Russian airliner in Egypt, for which ISIS has claimed responsibility.

The State Department said that U.S. citizens should factor updated information into personal travel plans, and urges anyone with specific safety concerns to contact local law enforcement authorities.

A State Department official told Fox News that worldwide alerts “are issued periodically when there is a higher threat level," and are not the same as a warning tied to a particular event, like an election or hurricane.

“We want folks to still travel, but just to exercise greater vigilance,” the official said.

But despite the label “worldwide,” the alerts do not cover the territory of the United States itself.

The travel alert was issued the same day that Belgium's prime minister announced that Brussels would remain at the highest alert level for at least another week.

The increased security measures following the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris that killed 130 people have virtually shut down the Belgian capital.

There have been a total of six worldwide travel alerts in the last four-and-a-half years.

Fox News' James Rosen and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------