RUTHFULLY YOURS

“NILI” is now available. You can see it directly via the following link:

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“NILI” relates the dramatic tale of a Jewish spy ring in Palestine during World War I. Led by world-famous scientist Aaron Aaronsohn, this small group of men and women put their lives at risk to provide vital information to the British, which ultimately helped in the defeat of the Turks. As the deputy military secretary to Field Marshal Edmund Allenby said:

“It was very largely the daring work of young spies, most of them natives of Palestine, which enabled the brilliant Field Marshal to accomplish this undertaking so effectively.”

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There is great confusion in our political discourse today. “Former” Communists in Russia are sounding more and more like conservatives. The same might be said of “former” Communists in the United States. Everyone talks a good anti-Communist line. After all, Communism is dead, and only exists (we are told) as an artifact of college life. Most people are focused on Global Warming, multiculturalism or homosexual rights. Nobody seems to notice that Global Warming, multiculturalism and homosexual rights are artifacts of the supposedly “dead” religion (some of whose acolytes have become “conservatives”). Well, there are a few of us – a small minority – who see what is happening. As a member of this minority I feel as if a cold wilderness has swallowed me up. I do not feel represented by the big foundations, or the conservative “smart set.” And so, when Diana West’s American Betrayal was published, and received favorable attention, I was excited and hopeful. But then, predictably, the celebrity pundits of the alternative Left (i.e., the Republican Right) began to attack Wests book, starting with David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh. There had to be, in the greater scheme of things, an attempt to kill the book. It was getting too much attention, and God knows what would have happened if somebody had not intervened.

It all began when Mr. Horowitz removed a positive review of West’s book from his Frontpage website, replacing it with a negative review by Ronald Radosh, titled McCarthy On Steroids. Baring his fangs, Radosh proved to be the Alternative Left’s junkyard dog. He alleged that West’s book was full of “yellow journalism conspiracy theories.” He described Mrs. West as Joseph McCarthy’s “heiress” and attacked her scholarship. It was, in fact, no review at all. It was a dishonest, poorly devised, hit-piece. Little wonder that Radosh was rhetorically impaled by historian M. Stanton Evans, who commented on Radosh’s “extensive” lack of knowledge “made the worse by the strange inventions with which the discourse [was] salted.” Evans wondered how such an egregious poseur could set up shop as an “Olympian arbiter” when he knew so little about the topic. Evans mused, “It is quite a puzzle.”

Here, indeed, we approach a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Here we have, from the website of a famous “conservative” (and former Marxist) pundit, a studied misrepresentation of a tremendously important book – a book that can open people’s eyes to the historical roots of our present malaise. Although the snarling poseur has been exposed as a drooling incompetent, there has been no apology or backtracking on the part of Mr. Horowitz. When offered a chance to moderate his position, Horowitz dug himself into a deeper hole. During a question and answer session at the Heritage Foundation, Horowitz was challenged on this issue by Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Below is a brief transcript of the exchange:

Sebastian Gorka: I’m with the FDD Foundation for Defense of Democracies. My father was put in prison for life by the Communists … and I like this idea that they [the Communists] lost in the 1960s but they won by stealth since then. From your presentation it seems clear that we are in a very small minority in terms of understanding the deep story. Maybe people are disturbed getting thrown off their health care … but to understand the backstory to where we are today, there are very few of us. Given your reputation in what you’ve accomplished, and the ten volumes of articles, it would seem very lacking in strategy to attack those on your own side. Can you talk about why you’ve taken somebody whose written what I think, as a Ph.D. who teaches at university, a historically important book such as [American Betrayal] and divided the Right yet again. If you have issues with Diana West’s technical expertise, then take her to task on that; but ad hominem attacks that destroy the unity of our camp will not make us stronger in 2016.

David Horowitz: … I am a very busy person … so I don’t monitor Frontpage…. An article appeared that was a review of Diana West’s book American Betrayal. It was an endorsement. I knew it was going to be read … as an endorsement from me. I looked at the book, actually Ron Radosh called me and alerted me … so I got the book off Kindle and I began reading it, and in my judgment it is a very very bad book and I see it as a threat to everything I have done, and Radosh has done, and … all the conservatives who have dredged up the information from the archives about Communist influence. But I don’t attack people on the Right. [So] I removed the review…. This book is a complete reinterpretation of the Second World War based on the presence of Soviet agents and Communists … and sympathizers, fellow travelers in the Roosevelt administration. And to inform Diana that I removed the review, because I didn’t want to be seen endorsing it, that if she needed to reply she could have as much space as she wanted. I actually had in mind … to have her debate Radosh. I’m a great believer in intellectual debate and dialogue. She rejected the offer and went on the attack. She called me a totalitarian, a commissar and a book-burner. So if you have a problem with this so-called ‘war,’ the war is all coming from her end….

If you remember anything from this controversy, at least remember Horowitz’s words: “But I don’t attack people on the Right.” How, then, does he explain publishing an all-out assault on Mrs. West’s reputation. He has personally said that Mrs. West’s scholarship is sloppy, that her book should never have been written. He called it “a very very bad book.” Everyone recognizes, as a matter of necessity, that people are obliged to defend themselves. And why, then, should Mrs. West be obliged – according to Mr. Horowitz’s insinuation – to defend her reputation on his website, on his terms? What egomaniac attacks a person’s integrity, blackens their reputation, dismisses their work, and expects them to produce a reply which will bring more readers and publicity to themselves? Naturally she could not accept Horowitz’s invitation to reply on frontpage. Furthermore, we have eyes to read the ungallant review of Mr. Radosh, the unscholarly poseur who fired the first shot in the so-called “war.” (In my view, this “war” was nothing but a bungled mugging in which the mugger was seriously injured by blows from the victim’s purse.) Even more egregious, the Radosh review was not written in the style of a gentleman; rather, it was a parade of gratuitous insults peppered with more than twenty falsehoods (as documented in Mrs. West’s reply, available on Amazon as The Rebuttal: Defending ‘American Betrayal’ From the Book-Burners). As for Diana West’s alleged ad hominem reply to Mr. Horowitz – if it has a snout and it oinks, the cognomen “pig” is not an ad hominem. It was perfectly reasonable for Mrs. West to satirize her assailants as metaphorical book-burners and totalitarians; for they used Communist rhetorical techniques to cover the tracks of Communist subversives – and to cover their own tracks. It doesn’t matter if Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Radosh are anti-Communists. It doesn’t matter what kind of Communists they are. It is strategy that counts, and strategy is how we should judge them. In the above-quoted exchange, Dr. Sebastian Gorka suggested that Horowitz was lacking in strategy because he was obstinately dividing an already attenuated anti-Left minority by attacking Mrs. West. We all know that Mr. Horowitz is not an idiot. If he did not intend to divide the enfeebled cadre, then why did he attack the lady’s book? Well, we can go back to the idea that he is an idiot, but let’s play the Devil’s Advocate for a few paragraphs. If the attack on West was done innocently, without any intention to divide the conservative Right, why was it done with so little regard for the truth? Aha! There is the telling point. The words of M. Stanton Evans, and the rebuttal of Mrs. West, reveal one invention after another by Professor Radosh, one blatant falsification after another endorsed by Mr. Horowitz. Anyone can click on the links above, go to the source material, and read.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” said Vladimir Lenin who led the revolution that imposed Communism on Russia.

When he wrote, ‘Mein Kampf’, Adolf Hitler said “whoever has the youth has the future.” In his vision for the Nazi Party, education would be the key that ensured that he had ‘the youth’ of Germany fully indoctrinated.

All dictators and authoritarian regimes know that what is taught in their schools offers the greatest opportunity to maintain control over their societies.

That is what has been occurring since the introduction of the Common Core standards that the Obama regime has imposed on our national education system and the good news is that protests against it from concerned parents and others are beginning to increase and gain momentum.

Teachers will tell you that “one size fits all” does not apply in the classroom and never has. Children learn at a different pace with some doing so rapidly while others need extra help and attention. Learning that is entirely dependent on ceaseless testing puts stress on every child and that is the most common complaint about Common Core.

Education in America has been in decline since the 1960s when the teachers unions gained control over the process, putting themselves between the local boards of education and parents. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter who signed it into law in 1979? It began operation on May 4, 1980. You will find no reference, no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution and it should not be a function of the federal government.

In a recent commentary by Joy Pullmann in The Daily Caller, she said, “The latest scheme is the field testing of Common Core assessments. This spring more than four million kids will be required to spend hours on tests that have little connection to what they learned in class this year and will provide their teachers and schools no information about what the kids know.”

Many conservatives are applauding the recent Supreme Court Schuette decision upholding the right of the citizens of Michigan to ban racial preferences. As Charles Krauthammer writes, the 2003 Grutter decision, which like Schuette did not ban racial preferences altogether, was correct: “The people should decide. The people responded accordingly. Three years later, they crafted a referendum to abolish race consciousness in government action. It passed overwhelmingly, 58 percent to 42 percent. Schuette completes the circle by respecting the constitutionality of that democratic decision.”

This approval of Schuette, however, ignores 2 problems. The first is that a state’s ban on racial preferences doesn’t end racial preferences; it just spurs universities to find more creative and subtle ways to take race into account. Second, it leaves in place the duplicitous, ideological, and incoherent doctrine of “diversity” that ever since the 1978 Bakke decision has been the “compelling state interest” justifying taking race or sex into account.

In November of 1996 the voters of California passed Proposition 209, the Civil Rights Initiative, which amended the state constitution to forbid the state from “discriminat[ing] against or grant[ing] preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” Yet despite the clear-cut legal prohibition, race-based preferences and policies live on in California higher education.

Take, for example, the process of hiring faculty in the California State University system. Despite the “end of affirmative action,” every hiring committee still must have an “affirmative action” representative, which after Proposition 209 was renamed the “Equal Employment Opportunity designee.” Despite the name change, the EEO designee performs the same function based on the same assumptions the voters supposedly rejected. The purpose of this representative is not to make sure the most qualified and suitable person is chosen for the position regardless of race, sex, or any factor forbidden by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The EEO designee can be from any department on campus, and so in most cases will not have much awareness of the qualifications required for the position. Yet despite this lack of knowledge, no hire can go forward without the EEO representative’s approving signature at every step of the process, in order to make sure no qualified minority candidate has been unjustly passed over. But by definition the only “qualification” that matters to the EEO designee will be race or sex.

For the Democratic Party, history began and ended with the election of George W. Bush. Nothing had happened before him. Every world crisis began with him and would only come to an end when the Democratic Party finally squeezed one of its own into the White House.

If there was a problem, Bush had caused it. If another country hated America, it was Bush’s fault. Bush alienated Europe, Russia, Asia, the Middle East and even parts of Antarctica.

It was all his fault, the media, academia and angry Trotskyite grandmothers marching for peace and tyranny in San Francisco agreed. Books were written and movies were made. Cartoons were scrawled and songs were written.

It was all Bush’s fault.

It never occurred to the Democrats, even as they were making excuses for every tyrant from Saddam to Putin to Ahmadinejad, that the sum of all evil might not be George W. Bush.

When Hillary Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a misspelled Reset Button, it wasn’t the Russian end of the arrangement that was being reset.

Putin had been running the country through various offices all along. Despite his change of title, nothing significant was going to change in Moscow. It was the United States that was being reset.

The Obama campaign was a giant reset button. Among all its other resets, resetting the economy, resetting welfare, resetting the ocean levels and resetting the military, it was also going to reset America’s relationship with the world. Obama promised to “rebuild” American alliances in keeping with the leftist theme that everything wrong with the world could be blamed on President Bush’s alienation of the international community by riding through Baghdad like a unilateral cowboy on a pale horse.

Tyranny with a Smile

How Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran sell their message to the world

George Galloway, the far-left British parliamentarian, is an expert politician. When one district gets sick of him, he simply stirs up hatred and runs again someplace else.

But Galloway isn’t just a politician. He’s a Western puppet for tyranny’s propagandists.

Today, Galloway has three TV news shows: Comment on Press TV (the Western propaganda arm of the Iranian government), Sputnik on RT (the Western propaganda arm of the Russian government), and A Free Word on Al Mayadeen (a propaganda arm of Hezbollah and Iran).

These shows claim to provide original, objective explorations (hence the name “Sputnik”) of important issues. The reality is a little different.

Consider Galloway’s standard fare.

For RT, Galloway portrays Putin’s invasions as self-defense. For Press TV, he offers ludicrous anti-Israeli theories about Ukraine. For Al Mayadeen, Galloway hosts fanatics who take cheer from U.S. hesitancy and assert Putin’s conquests as acts of moral generosity. Regardless of the rank hypocrisy — Al Mayadeen’s sponsor, Hezbollah, self-identifies as a resistance against foreign occupations — these channels must not be underestimated.

These are powerful agents of anti-Americanism.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar on the “Good Koran” vs. the “Radical Koran” — on The Glazov Gang
A leading scholar analyzes the phenomenon of Jihad-Denial and the reluctance to recognize the true threat we face.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/dr-mordechai-kedar-on-the-good-koran-vs-the-radical-koran-on-the-glazov-gang/

When I was editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, I once presented the hundredth-anniversary copy to President Ronald Reagan. “Great,” he said. “Something older than I am in the Oval Office.” Yes, this little anecdote acknowledges Reagan’s spontaneous self-deprecating wit, but it also shows that at one time the president of the United States would take time in his busy schedule to salute America’s oldest women’s magazine. That’s because Ladies’ Home Journal, which will cease monthly publishing with its July issue, was then considered America’s premier women’s publication, with a circulation of 6 million.

So it’s a sad ending for the publication that was launched in 1883 by Cyrus Curtis, who also started the Saturday Evening Post. LHJ developed out of the popular women’s page in Curtis’s first publication, a periodical for farmers. His wife was the first editor, and the second, a Dutch immigrant named Edward Bok, was the editorial genius who transformed the Journal into a mass magazine for millions.

Early in the 20th century, Bok had great insight about what would interest “modern” readers. In every issue he featured the celebrities of the day, including Civil War generals, actresses, presidents, and members of the British royal family. He also crusaded against popular patent medicines — distillations of alcohol and opium — which addicted many middle-class women at the time. And he wrote shockingly straightforward editorials warning women about sexual diseases such as syphilis. Yes, Bok seemed to know, celebrities, sex and addiction would become basic subjects for the popular press.

Through the decades, reflecting the nation’s economy, the magazine had its ups and downs; however, many consider the 1940s and ‘50s to be the golden age for LHJ and the other large-circulation women’s service magazines, known as the “seven sisters.” Then at the helm was a husband and wife editing team, Beatrice and Bruce Gould, who published serious news about World War II for wives and mothers on the home front and launched the Journal’s best-known and longest-running feature, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” as a way to teach couples about the value of marriage counseling. The magazine was so prestigious, in fact, that Marilyn Monroe complained to Edward R. Murrow that while she had appeared on many magazine covers, she was unhappy because she had never been on the cover of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

In the 1970s, a group of feminists believed that LHJ was not acknowledging the importance of the incipient women’s movement and the changes happening in women’s lives. They staged a sit-in at the office of editor-in-chief John Mack Carter. Carter agreed to publish their manifesto. Afterwards he said he did it because he was afraid the women were not going to let him go to the bathroom. The Journal’s readers were not enthusiastic about the feature that was published.

I came to be editor of LHJ in the beginning of the 1980s, when the magazine was, once again, in quite serious trouble. It was up for sale only a short time after I arrived, and no major publishing company wanted to buy it. An entrepreneur finally took it over with hardly any money changing hands. But he was supportive of the editorial changes I made. I knew that LHJ was best when it was the most journalistic of women’s magazines. I sent reporters to work with Mother Theresa, locate the injured children of Chernobyl, and interview Margaret Thatcher, Marina Oswald, and Mary Jo Kopechne’s bitter parents. With the help of a talented editorial staff, a strong advertising team, and the appearance of Princess Diana, who frequently graced the cover, the magazine suddenly grew popular and profitable again. The entrepreneur sold the magazine after only a few years to the Meredith Corporation for $90 million.

‘Everyone is in favor of free speech,” Winston Churchill once wrote. “Hardly a day passes without its being extolled.” And yet, he added dryly, “some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

This aphorism, generally applicable as it is, could easily have been issued to describe the attitude of one Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist and opponent of free inquiry who is currently suing National Review for libel.

Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, rose to prominence for his “hockey stick,” a graph that purports to depict global temperature trends between the years a.d. 1000 and 2000. The graph takes its name from its shape, which shows a mostly flat line of temperature data from the year 1000 until about 1900 (the handle of the hockey stick), followed by a sharp uptick over the 20th century (the blade). Based on this graph and related research, Mann has built a noisy public career sounding the alarm over global warming — a plague, he argues, that has been visited upon the Earth as a result of mankind’s sinful penchant for fossil fuels.

In the course of his evangelizing, Mann has shown little tolerance for heretics. A recent op-ed he penned for the New York Times is illustrative. “If You See Something, Say Something,” the headline blares, mimicking New York subway warnings and suggesting a not-so-subtle parallel between the dangers of global-warming “denial” and the murderous terrorism that brought down the Twin Towers. In the opening paragraph of the piece, Mann castigates his critics as “a fringe minority of our populace” who “cling[] to an irrational rejection of well-established science.” These aristarchs, Mann contends, represent a “virulent strain of anti-science [that] infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist.” Alas, such comparisons are commonplace. In the rough and tumble of debate, climate-change skeptics are routinely recast as climate-change deniers, an insidious echo of the phrase “Holocaust deniers” and one that has been contrived with no purpose other than to exclude the speaker from polite society.

Secure as he appears to be in his convictions, Mann has nonetheless taken it upon himself to try to suppress debate and to silence some of the “irrational” and “virulent” critics, who he claims have nothing of substance to say. To this end, Mann has filed a lawsuit against National Review. Our offense? Daring to publish commentary critical of his hockey-stick graph and disapproving of his hectoring mien.

Ostensibly, Mann’s litigation against National Review is the product of a blog post written by Mark Steyn back in 2012, in which Steyn provided commentary on a separate article (written by Rand Simberg and published on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog) that had drawn a crude analogy between Mann and Jerry Sandusky, the convicted child molester and former assistant football coach at Mann’s employer, Penn State. Steyn quoted a passage in which Simberg had stated, “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.” Distancing himself from the Sandusky analogy, Steyn averred that he was “not sure I’d have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker-room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does.” “But,” Steyn continued, “he has a point.” After all, “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus.” (This “tree-ring” remark refers to Mann’s reliance on controversial “proxy” data to gauge historical temperatures — about which more below.)

This is the best memorial of the Holocaust- a home and a haven for Jews who are oppressed anywhere in the world. Israel is the absolute emblem of Jewish will to survive and thrive….rsk
The first three months of 2014 saw a rise in aliyah—Jewish immigration to Israel. A 312% increase from France, 70% increase from Ukraine, 100% increase from Brazil. The absolute numbers are not huge; if the current rate continues, the total for this year will be about 20,000—compared to, for instance, much higher numbers of former-Soviet Union Jews who came to Israel in the 1990s.

The present uptick, though, appears likely to continue and could accelerate. Amid rising antisemitism, about two-thirds of French Jews are considering emigrating, and half of those are considering Israel. Similar, if somewhat less dramatic, numbers are reported among Jewish communities elsewhere in Europe.

I read such reports with elation, as if reading that I personally had won some prize or had some other good fortune coming my way. This is rather interesting in light of the fact that I’ll soon have been living in Israel for 30 years. More than enough time, of course, to get over romantic visions, to be inducted into the many dimensions of ordinary, flawed human reality that constitute Israel as they do other societies.

And yet, after almost 30 years, nothing—essentially—has changed the feeling I had when I came to live here on September 6, 1984. That this is the true home, that no other place where Jews live can come close to it.

About a year ago the Grand Canyon Mall opened in Beersheva about a 15-minute walk from where I live (the name is a play on kanion, the Hebrew word for mall). The publicity proudly trumpeted that it had taken its place as the largest mall in Israel. Its three floors have it all—boutiques, shoe stores, bookstores, toy stores, electronics stores, candy stores, cafes, fast-food joints, a drugstore, a supermarket, you name it.

Thirty years ago there were few, relatively small malls in Israel, and I would have found the Grand Canyon depressing. What, the same chase after material goods? Now, walking to the Canyon almost every day for a reading break in a café, I find the place exhilarating. Yes, the same chase after material goods—so what?