RUTHFULLY YOURS

The press briefing at the Foreign Office was a routine affair, a photo-opportunity for the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to show that the Anglo-American special relationship was not in tatters after all by standing alongside the visiting US Secretary of State, John Kerry. The question to Kerry, from Margaret Brennan of CBS, was one of those journalistic afterthoughts, tacked on to the end of a long-winded demand for a response to yet another Syrian denial of culpability: “And secondly, is there anything at this point that [Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?”

“Sure.” John Kerry’s reply was unhesitating. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that.” Then, a snort of dismissal: the busy statesman was evidently impatient with this line of speculation. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Kerry had misspoken. Did he realise immediately? Everybody else did. What was obvious to him was by no means so to the Russians and their clients in Damascus. Why wouldn’t Assad do it, and why couldn’t it be done? Hey presto — a diplomatic démarche! Before Washington had even woken up, a new Russian peace initiative was on the table, intended to delay any US attack until the Greek Kalends. From the Kremlin came the sound of popping corks; from the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the sound of gnashing of teeth; from the Pentagon, the sound of orders countermanded; from the Sixth Fleet off the Syrian coast, the sound of retreat; from Assad’s bunker, the sound of “Allahu Akhbar!”

And from the White House? Silence — or was that a sigh of relief? President Obama had been looking for weeks for a way out of launching an unpopular punitive action. Congress had supplied a reason for delay, but a congressional veto would make the President look weak. Obama needed another excuse to jaw-jaw rather than war-war. So he was secretly gratified by the Russian initiative — authorship of which was retrospectively claimed by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, to great applause in Warsaw. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the victims of the Syrian civil war: the dozens of towns reduced to rubble, the thousands of corpses, the millions of refugees. While the diplomats and inspectors talked, the war would go on.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/dizzy-spells/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f4ce370fe9-Mosaic_2013_10_9&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f4ce370fe9-41165129   There is something lubriciously intriguing about the biography of a Victorian statesman subtitled “The Two Lives”. Given the current fashion among biographers for closet-rattling in search of hidden skeletons, one might imagine the two lives to be anatomised were a hypocritically virtuous public existence and a sybaritically scandalous private one — a portrait […]

And I don’t mean the “itbach al-Yahud”-chanting crowd.

A friend sent me an article to read which appeared in the October 6th Jerusalem Post. The author, Aaron Magid, is a Masters candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. This brought back some painful memories of my own masters and doctoral studies in this same field decades ago. His essay was titled Feeling Uncomfortable At J Street. Here’s how he opened it…

“Attending the annual J Street Conference for the first time, I wanted to be proven wrong. Supporters of Israel within the Jewish community had ridiculed the newly created lobby group for launching harsh and unfair attacks against Israel. As a supporter of Israel who is also firmly opposed to increased settlement building and in favor of ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, I believed J Street would be my perfect home.”

Aaron will likely succeed where I failed. He attended this year’s annual J Street Conference because he sings some of those folks’ same tunes–he’s all for a Judenrein Judea, for example. This goes over nicely with too many running the duplicitous show in the Ivory Tower as well.

I naively expected that the same lenses of academic scrutiny would be applied towards Arabs and others pointing fingers at Jewish nationalism and Israel and paid the price. I was denied a Ph.D. dissertation advisor by the chief honcho, a specialist on Turkey, who, among many other such things, managed to never mention the word “Kurd” once and who liked to speak about “fascist Zionists” and such. I raised the wrong issues and asked the wrong questions.

Nuclear strategy is a “game” that sane and rational decision-makers must play.

In the best of all possible worlds, Iran could still be kept distant from nuclear weapons. In the real world, however, any such operational success is increasingly unlikely. More precisely, the remaining odds of Israel being able to undertake a cost-effective preemption against Iran, an act of “anticipatory self-defense” in the formal language of international law, are incontestably very low.

What next? Almost certainly, Jerusalem/Tel-Aviv will need to make appropriate preparations for long-term co-existence with a new nuclear adversary. As part of any such more-or-less regrettable preparations, Israel will have to continue with its already impressive developments in ballistic missile defense (BMD.) Although Israel’s well-tested Arrow and corollary interceptors could never be adequate for “soft-point” or city defense, these systems could still enhance the Jewish State’s indispensable nuclear deterrent.

By forcing any attacker to constantly recalculate the requirements of “assured destruction,” Israeli BMD could make it unrewarding for any prospective aggressor to strike first. Knowing that its capacity to assuredly destroy Israel’s nuclear retaliatory forces with a first-strike attack could be steadily eroded by incremental deployments of BMD, Iran could decide that such an attack would be more costly than gainful. Of course, any such relatively optimistic conclusion would be premised on the antecedent assumption that Iran’s decisions will always be rational.

But what if such a promising assumption should not actually be warranted? Moreover, irrationality is not the same as madness. Unlike a “crazy” or “mad” adversary, which would have no discernible order of preferences, an irrational Iranian leadership might still maintain a distinct and consistent hierarchy of wants.

Such an Iranian leadership might not be successfully deterred by more traditional threats of military destruction. This is because a canonical Shiite eschatology could authentically welcome certain “end times” confrontations with “unbelievers.” Nonetheless, this leadership might still refrain from any attacks that would expectedly harm its principal and overriding religious values or institutions. Preventing an attack upon the “holy city” of Qom, could be a glaringly good example.\

It is also reasonable to expect that even an irrational Iranian leadership would esteem certain of its primary military institutions. This leadership might still be subject to deterrence by various compelling threats to these institutions. A pertinent example would be the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a core power behind the Iranian dictatorship, a principal foe of the Iranian people, and the current leadership’s generally preferred instrument of terror and repression.

President Obama’s second cousin is a Tea Party guy from Kansas and it is now official: The Brody File has leaned that he’s running to be a U.S. Senator. He is going to take on sitting Senator Pat Roberts, who is 77 years old and has been in the Upper Chamber for more than 15 years. The official announcement will be later today.

Milton Wolf is President Barack Obama’s second cousin because his mother’s cousin was also Obama’s grandmother. Wolf is a Kansas radiologist who is also a columnist for The Washington Times. He wants to stop liberals like his cousin Barack from turning America into a “second-rate, European-style social welfare state.”

Here are some of Wolf’s past quotes:

“The reality is that whenever the Democrats have needed Republican votes to pass their agenda of growing government, they know that they have been able to count on Pat Roberts.”

“Tax increases, debt ceiling increases, expanding government healthcare. There are some people in this world who are stuck playing checkers when everyone else has moved on to chess. America is in trouble; we have moved on to three-dimensional chess and we are still looking at somebody who is voting for tax increases, voting for debt ceiling increases, voting for increased food-stamp spending, for increased regulations. I don’t know that America can survive that much longer.”

“My first goal is to save the Republican party from itself. My second goal is to save America from the Democrats. I love my party and have been loyal to it and it’s more difficult when my party is no longer to the ideals it proclaims. I oppose Obamacare not just because it is an economic disaster – it is an economic disaster – I oppose Obamacare because it is immoral. It is immoral for a government to get in between a doctor and a patient. It is immoral for a government to even know about a doctor-patient relationship. It is immoral for a government to decide who shall live and who shall die. And that’s what government health care does.”

Move over Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. If Milton Wolf can pull off the upset, you’ll have another Tea Party member up on the Hill.

The IPCC’s call to phase out fossil fuels is economic nonsense and ‘morally outrageous’ for the developing world

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation. Presenting itself as the voice of science on this important issue, it is a politically motivated pressure group that brings the good name of science into disrepute.

Its previous report, in 2007, was so grotesquely flawed that the leading scientific body in the United States, the InterAcademy Council, decided that an investigation was warranted. The IAC duly reported in 2010, and concluded that there were “significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC’s assessment process”, and that “significant improvements” were needed. It also chastised the IPCC for claiming to have “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence”.

Since then, little seems to have changed, and the latest report is flawed like its predecessor.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. A detailed examination of the 2007 report found that two thirds of its chapters included among its authors people with links to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and there were many others with links to other ‘green’ activist groups, such as Greenpeace.

In passing, it is worth observing that what these so-called green groups, and far too many of the commentators who follow them, wrongly describe as ‘pollution’ is, in fact, the ultimate in green: namely, carbon dioxide – a colourless and odourless gas, which promotes plant life and vegetation of all kinds; indeed, they could not survive without it. It is an established scientific fact that, over the past 20 years, the earth has become greener, largely thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Be that as it may, as long ago as 2009, the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – who is a railway engineer and economist by training, not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist – predicted that “when the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say: ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’” This was well before the scientific investigation on which the latest report is allegedly based had even begun. So much for the scientific method.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/historic-visit-italian-minister-culture-and-tourism-hebron-david-wilder

Italian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Massimo Bray, hosted by Tiph in Hebron, walked near Beit Hadassah, where he was met and greeted by David Wilder, spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish Community. Following brief introductions, the minister toured the Hebron Heritage Museum and visited the community’s dav-care center. The visit was very positive. It was suggested that perhaps an Italian-sponsored project, spearheaded by the minister, could try and bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in Hebron. The project could deal with common culture between both Arabs and Jews.

Hebron’s Jewish community welcomes such visits and hopes that other international leaders, particularly those from the EU, will follow in Minister Bray’s footsteps, following his example, and meet with Hebron community leaders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsDeaNjkWl8&feature=player_embedded#t=0

This week there was a milestone announcement that some may have missed. Half of Israel’s electricity now comes from natural gas – mainly from the new Tamar offshore gas field. As if to mark the occasion, last week was ablaze with news of energetic Israelis and their innovations and achievements.
Coinciding with the landmark natural gas highlight, Israel Corporation subsidiary IC Green Energy inaugurated a facility in New Jersey to produce gasoline from natural gas. The plant can produce up to 100,000 gallons (440,000 liters) of gasoline a year. Automobiles will be able to use the lower cost, less emissions fuel without any modifications.
Staying in the US, Ebay has brought in Israel’s Ormat Technologies to build a 5MW Recoverable Energy Generator (REG) for its Utah data center. REGs turn waste energy from industrial processes into usable electrical power. Ormat already recovers 160 megawatts in the USA and 595 MW worldwide.

Turning to individuals, Israel’s Miss Israel beauty queen, 22-year-old Ethiopian-born Yityish Aynaw, certainly energized the citizens of Los Angeles, where she was a guest of Christian preacher Ronald V. Myers. Rev Myers said that everyone should know what Israel did to rescue Ethiopian Jews. Over in Amsterdam, a 19-year-old Israeli, Shahar Shenhar, used the “magical” energy of his playing cards to become 2013 world champion at Magic: The Gathering. MtG is as popular as chess among young intellectuals.

When there is too much energy, Israel’s fire scouts are on hand to help put out the flames. About 1,500 Israeli teens (often from problem homes) learn to operate fire trucks, ladders and hoses, plus rescue techniques and types of fires. Their skills have saved lives directly, including two 18-month-old babies rescued from a burning apartment. Energetic kids also need safeguarding, so you may wish to consider the Israeli Foxiwatch to keep a watch on them. The Foxiwatch has GPS, a mobile phone and an emergency contact button.

For those who need more sophisticated monitoring of their energy levels and other physiological readings, Israel’s Elfi Tech monitors your pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, blood flow and much more, non-invasively at any time with the help of a sensor smaller than a dime. It has just been selected as a finalist of the Nokia Sensing XChallenge.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4011/abbas-fatah What has been happening in Fatah lately is more than differences of opinion among the faction’s top brass. A series of incidents over the past few weeks indicate that the Palestinian Fatah faction, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, is witnessing a sharp power struggle between some of its top leaders. The infighting in Fatah […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4004/islamophobia-dictionaries In Denmark, construction crews raised the first-ever minaret on September 3 that will alter Copenhagen’s low-rise skyline in a colossal project to build the biggest mega-mosque in Scandinavia. The so-called Grand Mosque was made possible through a grant of 150 million kroner ($26 million) from Qatar. This gift has led critics voice concern that […]