RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303880604579405450058012742#printMode

John Dingell announced on Monday that he plans to retire from the House of Representatives at the end of this Congress, and his initial parting shot came with unusual ill-grace. “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,” the 87-year-old told the Detroit News. “It’s become very hard because of the acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.”

The Democrat from southeastern Michigan was first elected in 1955 and never served in the minority until after the GOP sweep of 1994. He was among those who, Congress after Congress, steadily built the modern administrative state with its vast powers to redistribute income and regulate to punish or reward companies.

In his political heyday as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 1980s, Mr. Dingell liked to boast that his writ extended to every corner of the American economy. He wasn’t far off. Yet when all economic and cultural questions become political, is it any wonder that politics becomes more acrimonious?

Mr. Dingell may have intended his “obnoxious” barb at the tea party and Americans angry with Washington, but most of those people don’t know how to maneuver through the corridors of power. They can’t afford to hire someone from “the Dingell bar,” the name adopted with an almost civic pride by the Washington lawyers who were well paid for representing businesses caught in the Dingell investigative cross-hairs. Many were his former staffers.

The “Dingell method,” another phrase from the era, was to conduct an investigation, selectively leak what his staff found to a newspaper and TV network (double the media points), then haul the poor business targets for a public grilling before the cameras. The journalists would win prizes for the appearance of enterprise. The CEOs would be advised by the Dingell bar to be obsequious and remorseful whether guilty or not. The acrimony was one-sided.

News from the Middle East is full of the threat of Arab revolts “springing” up in Jordan and challenging the rule of King Abdullah II, son of the late King Hussein. The throne in Amman is depicted as the “ancient” Hashemite Dynasty of Jordan. It’s a royal historical scam. There has never, repeat never, been an ancient Hashemite legacy in Palestine, unless 1922 is “ancient” history.

Abdullah I (left), King of Jordan and (right) his brother Feisal 1 of Iraq.

That year the British deeded 82% of Mandated Palestine to the Arabs. King Feisal got Iraq and his kid brother Abdullah Senior (great-grandpa to the present Abdullah) had to be mollified so they gave him Trans Jordan. He was assassinated and his grandson King Hussein, known as “Al-Malik Al-Insan (“The Humane King”), succeeded his father who was Talal the insane, who ruled only for a few months.

Again, check out the family tree which derails the spin of the ancient Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Please note that the family tree is detailed in small print in Arabic, but the English translation has been removed. The Hashemite clan ruled over parts of the Hijaz region of Arabia from 967 to 1925 in unbroken succession. Moreover, the late King Hussein’s branch of the Hashemite family ruled the holy city of Mecca from 1201 until 1925. When Abdullah (the First) took over Jordan, the local nomadic Arab population was totally indifferent. Calvin Coolidge could have been made king and it would not have created much of a stir.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-four-great-waves-of-defense-neglect#ixzz2uQVGZRPI

If an additional $50 billion a year seems like a lot, how much would be the cost to the United States if adversarial nations continue to chip away at the free world until America finds itself either isolated or impotent to effect a reversal as it faces rogue terrorist states armed with the most deadly of weapons?

America’s fourth wave of neglect of its military since the end of World War II may have disastrous geostrategic consequences.

While Congress has passed a temporary slowdown in the decline in American defense spending with a two-year budget framework, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, which restores $32 billion to the Department of Defense, the projected defense resources available for the next eight years will not allow the United States to protect its own security, let alone that of its allies.

Taken together, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned[1], previous and projected cuts to military budgets from 2009-2023 threaten dangerously to undermine the stability required for both economic prosperity and relative peace among the world’s major military powers, as well as America’s global standing.

One of the nation’s top defense analysts sums it up: “The reality is, for all its promise, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement still only addresses less than 7 percent of the defense sequester. Much more work needs to be done to lift the specter of sequestration once and for all …”[2].
THE FIRST WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1945-1950

After World War II, U.S. security suffered. The decline in defense spending after 1945 was large, $90 billion down to $14 billion at the beginning of the first year after the war’s end (FY1947 or July 1, 1946). With the end of World War II, support for a strong US military was not a sure thing.

While the Marshall Plan, or European Economic Recovery Plan, did stop a significant portion of the planned expansion of the Soviets into Europe[3], these efforts consisted primarily of significant American economic assistance and the transfer of surplus military equipment to designated countries, with some American personnel transferred for training purposes as well – but without the deployment of American soldiers[4].

Despite the success of the Marshall Plan, however, serious security threats remained in the post-WWII period. The communists threatened to come to power in Turkey and Greece and succeeded in taking power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 — a move, it was feared, that would imperil the freedom of other states of Europe.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-silences-complaining-employers-with-irs

President Barack Obama is using the IRS to silence employers unhappy about Obamacare.

That’s the hidden purpose behind the employer mandate delay announced on Feb. 10. The administration released 227 pages of mind-numbing regulations ridiculously billed as making “the compliance process simpler and easier” for employers. Hidden in the gobbledygook (on pages 125-126) is a requirement that employers sign a statement to the IRS – meaning under penalty of perjury – claiming they have not reduced the number of employees or cut hours to shield themselves from the costs of Obamacare.

The administration called it a mandate delay. Nonsense. The delay applies only to a minuscule fraction of midsize employers (50-99 full-time workers) who currently don’t provide coverage. They’re mostly in retail and hospitality, and they will be allowed to continue not offering it. Their workers (about 1.9 million) plus dependents will either stay uninsured or sign up with Obamacare. The administration is hoping for the latter.

But nine out of every 10 midsize employers already provide coverage, and for them, last Monday’s announcement was about hush money, not delay. They are required to continue providing coverage, and worse, most will have to switch to the costlier Obamacare package of benefits because that’s the only plan for sale. State insurance regulators and insurance companies have already said “no” to renewing noncompliant plans.

The only thing these employers get from last week’s rule change is a “stop complaining” bribe. The Affordable Care Act says employers have to pay a whopping $3,000 each time a worker goes onto the Obama exchanges and gets a taxpayer-subsidized plan. Now the administration is offering to waive that penalty. Employers who want this deal must attest to the IRS that they haven’t laid off workers or cut hours to squeeze under the 99-worker threshold.

King Abdullah of Jordan is displaying discernible signs of panic over the future of his kingdom. Dismissing any notion that it might become an “alternative homeland” for Palestinians, he recently declared to high Jordanian officials: “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine and nothing but that, not in the past or the future.”

According to Arutz Sheva (February 24), the Jordanian state news agency Petra reported that in a meeting with his parliamentary leaders the king warned of “talk about the so-called alternative homeland” for Palestinians. “This, God willing, will be the last time we talk about this subject.” There is, apparently, increasing apprehension in Amman lest Secretary of State Kerry’s proposed framework agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority might implicate Jordan. The king is worried that Jordan would be required to accept even more West Bank Palestinians than it already has (now comprising a majority of the population). He is hopeful that any peace agreement will include the transfer of Palestinians from Jordan to the new Palestinian state.

The first indication of concern was back in 2007 with the revocation of Jordanian citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, who were declared to be “stateless refugees.” (Imagine the international outcry if Israel acted similarly toward its own Palestinian citizens.) Further revealing of their precarious status in the Hashemite kingdom, some 340,000 Palestinians are still confined in Jordanian refugee camps.

The king has reason to be worried lest Jordan might become the State of Palestine. History reveals why. Back in 1920, when the League of Nations Mandate to govern Palestine was bestowed upon Great Britain, it cited “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the legitimacy of grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Jews were granted the right of settlement throughout “Palestine,” comprising the land east and west of the Jordan River.

Great Britain, however, retained the right to “postpone” or “withhold” Jewish settlement east of the Jordan. Two years later, with the creation of Transjordan by the British to reward Prince Abdullah of Arabia for his wartime cooperation, Jewish settlement was restricted to the land – all of it – west of the Jordan. That right has never been rescinded. It includes Hebron no less than Tel Aviv.

So it is that Jordanian Palestinians are already at home, east of the Jordan River, which comprises two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine. Surely the resistance of Hashemite monarchs, backed by Bedouin tribes, should not be permitted by the international community to impede Palestinian statehood within the borders of their own national home according to international law.

Jews of European origin tend to think of their roots in the “old country”—if they think of them at all—with nostalgia for a sweet bygone era of people speaking in cutesy Yiddish, wandering around a picturesquely poverty-stricken farming village the way the characters do in Fiddler in the Roof, eating various smoked meats. In fact, the world of 19th-century and 20th-century Jewry in Europe was an extraordinarily complicated, jangly, emotionally fraught, tragic, and soon-to-be-tragic-on-an-unimaginable-scale place and moment in time. This was a historical moment during which a beleaguered, tormented, bedraggled people with no social capital but their connection to an ancient peoplehood and faith made their mark on the world in an almost unimaginably bold cultural ferment.

This hit home, and hard, for me last night in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center, when the remarkable non-profit group Pro Musica Hebraica presented a most unusual evening. The sole performer was Evgeny Kissin, the 42-year-old Jew born in Soviet Russia universally considered one of the greatest living pianists. Kissin played pieces by three almost entirely forgotten Russian-Jewish composers—Mikhail Milner (1886-1953), Alexander Veprik (1899-1958), and Alexander Krein (1881-1953)—as well as a sonata by the far-better known Swiss-born Jew Ernest Bloch (who spent his adult life in the United States and died in Portland in 1959).

That Kissin played magnificently wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was this: Kissin paused twice to recite, entirely from memory and in Yiddish, 11 poems, many of them lengthy—a set by the original “Jewish intellectual,” I.L. Peretz, and the other set by the great modern Hebraist Haim Bialik (who, I only learned last night, also wrote in Yiddish). In a demonstration of the fact that a showman is a showman no matter the medium, Kissin declaimed them in a deep, rich voice with the plummy fervor of a Thomashefsky.

Israel, needless to say, is not an apartheid state. But—in a distinctly Jewish way—it is a state apart.

Just in case the anti-Israel calendar wasn’t crowded enough, “Israel Apartheid Week” began on Monday. On university campuses and at sit-ins in North America and Europe, activists have been showcasing the alleged brutality of Israel toward the Palestinians, persuading the persuadable to connect the Jewish state with the despised whites-only regime of South Africa, and mobilizing support for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” campaign that is aimed at turning Israel into an international pariah.

At the University of Toronto, where the event had its genesis in 2005, this week’s attendees are being treated to such elegant nuggets as “Globally Resisting Settler Colonial States through Campaigns & Solidarity,” “Pinkwashing, Homonationalism & Love under the Time of Apartheid,” and, my personal favorite, “Rethinking the Syrian Golan in the Context of Apartheid.” (At this point in their civil war, not even the Syrians know who controls the Syrian side of the Golan.) A few movies and other cultural events make brief nods to actual Palestinians, but for the most part the focus falls relentlessly on the state of Israel and its crimes.

When it began in 2005, the event was simply another among the many campus protests associated with the American war in Iraq and Israel’s supposedly disproportionate measures of self-defense during the second intifada: some flag-waving, some posters, some quaint 60s-style chants. But even as the intifada tapered out, Israel Apartheid Week took off, quickly spreading beyond North American university campuses to cities around the world. Disheveled protest gave way to meticulously planned programs featuring anti-imperialist celebrity speakers and lurid open-to-the-public exhibits of alleged Israeli war crimes. Over the years, studiously avoiding any analysis of the actual dynamics of life in Israel or the territories, the event has stayed on message: Israel treats the Palestinians the way apartheid South Africa treated blacks, forcing them into the equivalent of Bantustans and brutally depriving them of all political and social rights. To judge by recent endorsements garnered from movie actors and pop stars, always a bellwether of politically correct opinion, the movement might be gaining strength.

Which means that it has now, alas, become a dreary necessity to respond to the substance of the allegation. Is there any truth at all to the equation of Israel with South Africa?

“”….This is the creed that I seek to promulgate both now, and forever. The Jewish people are free — and they of right ought to be free. No journalist, academic, professor, statesman, student, or governmental organization can ever take that right away. It is the spirit of that day which resides in me. It is the song that they sung that I will never cease to sing. And I will work to ensure that that song comes to reside throughout all the earth, eternally….”
When addressing contentions that run counter to such normative values as justice, morality, and truth, I believe it is my academic professional duty to analyze the details of the argument in question and illustrate to my audience why such contentions are sub-par, nefarious, and worthy of reproach.

Admittedly, it is difficult to analyze such pieces from a purely academic standpoint when invectives are hurled at me personally — not in a spirit of academic debate, but rather, to malign and denigrate my personal character. Indeed, I am tempted to speak out in an equally hostile tone against those who would attack me in a pejorative manner. However I will attempt to refrain from doing so here as it is my moral duty to be civil both to my enemies and to my friends, and because I do not believe it to be fitting to stoop down to the level of disrespectful persons. It is in that spirit of civility that I write this piece.

On February 22, a gentleman by the name of Richard Silverstein took considerable issue with an article I wrote in the The Times of Israel about the contentions of one Judith Butler, professor at the University of California, Berkley. I find Butler’s analysis regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict lamentably disagreeable.

Silverstein did not point out any possible faulty premises in my column. He did not question the evidence I presented. He did not find I was lacking in my analysis. Instead, to illustrate his (ahem) intellectual prowess, he shared a Facebook status linking to my column and in his commentary, wrote: “They finally did it: found a Negro Zionist: Uncle Tom is dancin’ for joy!”

It’s no accident that “Israel Apartheid Week,” an annual two-week extravaganza that began this week, focuses on Western college campuses. It’s not just because that’s where young, impressionable future leaders can be found. It’s also because, as a new study reveals, the educated mainstream is the mainstay of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism in today’s West. That counterintuitive finding explains why college campuses are such fertile ground for attacks on the Jewish state.

Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin reached this conclusion after studying 10 years’ worth of hate mail–14,000 letters, emails, and faxes in all–sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin. In an interview published in Haaretz yesterday, she said she fully expected to discover that most of it came from right-wing extremists. But in fact, right-wing extremists accounted for a mere 3 percent, while over 60 percent came from educated members of “the social mainstream – professors, Ph.Ds, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students,” she said. Nor were there any significant differences between right-wing extremists’ letters and those of the educated mainstream, Schwarz-Friesel said: “The difference is only in the style and the rhetoric, but the ideas are the same.”

To be clear, these letters weren’t just criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians; we’re talking about classic anti-Semitism–as evident from the samples Haaretz cited:

“It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition?” one letter said.

“For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide,” said another.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/25/israeli-minister-bennett-to-bbc-host-would-you-hand-over-half-of-britain-to-someone-who-keeps-on-killing-you-video/ Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday turned the tables in an interview on BBC’s Hard Talk when he asked host Stephen Sackur, “Would you hand over half of Britain to someone who keeps on killing you?” In the combative interview, Bennett countered Sackur at every turn. Asked about his resistance to the internationally acclaimed […]