RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trigger warning: This essay was written by one who feels no need to check his gender, race and class, and who does not apologize for offending readers who may suffer feelings of inferiority due to racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, or other issues of oppression.

For more than a decade, feminist blogs and forums have used the term “trigger warning,” or simply “TW,” to alert victims of sexual abuse that they may want to avoid certain articles or pictures online. While concerns about trigger warnings have been around for a while, what prompted the recent spate was a disturbing letter from Dylan Farrow, adoptive daughter of Woody Allen, accusing him of sexual molestation when she was seven years old. The letter was printed in the New York Times on February 1. Six days later Mr. Allen wrote a denial, claiming her memories were “implanted” by her mother, Mia Farrow. I have no idea who is telling the truth and that isn’t the purpose of this note. What was interesting is that following publication the blogosphere became inundated with tweets – varied in terms of where responsibility lay – but consistent in that all suggested the letter should have been preceded with a “trigger warning” label, the contents might prove sensitive to those who had experienced such molestation.

The desire to protect children against depictions of violence and explicit sexual encounters is endemic to parenting. At the same time, fascination with the forbidden is as old as mankind. Nevertheless, despite hands thrown in the air in despair, generations of young have matured into emotionally healthy adults – or, at least, reasonably so. Our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers, in some cases) returned from the Pacific and Europe following World War II, having witnessed brutality on an unprecedented scale. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was then called “battle fatigue” or “combat neurosis.” Many returning vets had trouble adapting, but most did not. They simply chose not to speak of what they had seen. Could modern psychiatry have provided better tools that would have allowed these people to live more productive lives? Perhaps. However, those returning vets helped power the American economy become the biggest and most powerful in the world. They were instrumental in the passage of Civil Rights legislation. They helped lay the foundation of a society richer and more inclusive than the one they inherited. Tom Brokaw dubbed them the “Greatest Generation.”

Not surprisingly, the UK’s main “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, has provided its readers with a thoroughly Marxist analysis of Boko Haram’s recent kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yes, revolutionary socialism may be almost dead in the UK; but Marxist theory is still alive and kicking.

So why Marxist? Well this newspaper has blamed Boko Haram’s actions on the economic and social problems supposedly caused by man-caused global warming in Nigeria. In other words, the Guardian doesn’t blame Boko Haram for the actions of Boko Haram; it blames global warming. In fact I will argue that it ultimately blames Western capitalism.

The Guardian’s position isn’t a surprise. This newspaper doesn’t blame acts of terrorism on the terrorists who commit those acts either. (Unless the terrorist is white, right-wing and goes by the name of Anders Behring Breivik.) The Guardian, instead (depending on the article and the time of day) blames Islamic terrorism on: unemployment, the Iraq War, Islamophobia, racism, oil, the Danish cartoons, anti-Islamic films, the banning of the burkha, Westerners in Saudi Arabia, The Satanic Verses, Israel, 1967, the Balfour Declaration, autocratic Arab regimes (which are, of course, “propped up by the West”), the “far right”, “anti-terrorism legislation”…

Come to think of it, Noam Chomsky (much loved by Guardianistas) also blamed the Syrian war on global warming. He once said:

“There was a drought of unprecedented scale in Syria… Therefore, the tragedy that has unfolded in Syria is partly a consequence of global warming.”

The Guardian article in question (written by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed) partly relies on a study by the United States Institute for Peace (which is funded by Congress). More specifically, the Institute “links climate change with violence in Nigeria”. In terms of detail, it states that

“…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.”

Three things are taken for granted here:

In a graduation season when distinguished guests such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Condoleezza Rice, Christine Lagarde, some state senator from Colorado and a camel in Minnesota have all been bounced from campus by student protests, John Kerry somehow managed to slip through the net and deliver his speech to Boston College students. Can you guess what it was about, boys and girls?

Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduates of Boston College on Monday that they have doom and destruction to look forward to if they don’t take climate change more seriously than previous generations.

‘And I know its hard to feel the urgency as we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston,’ Kerry said, ‘you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your communities or your families.

‘But let me tell you, it is.’

If the U.S. does not act, ‘and it turns out that the critics and the naysayers and the members of the Flat Earth Society – if it turns out that they’re wrong, then we are risking nothing less than the future of the entire planet.’

This is apparently the one speech you’re still allowed to give at American universities.

A thousand minutes — give or take, just past midnight to 7 p.m. — may seem like a long stretch to sit in silent vigil at the doorstep to the White House in Lafayette Square, but not so much for a Marine vet who has been on some grunt shifts in his life.

Thus Terry Mahoney, who served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps, didn’t think twice about the extended vigil, in which he tried to imagine what it felt like for Amir Hekmati passing his 1,000 days in a tiny cell in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

He tweeted selfies in the still of the Washington night, greeted the sun with a standard parade of joggers rushing past, and saw the runners replaced by droves of suits wielding smartphones.

And as every moment of everyday life unfolded in the square, nothing changed for a Michigan man falsely accused by the Islamic Republic of conspiracy to commit espionage.

Monday’s vigil brought the Hekmati family to Washington to meet with lawmakers, give a hug or two to all of the players who’ve helped try to bring Amir home, and alert a passerby or two in the park to a cause they may have known nothing about — a proud first-generation American and Iraq war veteran who went to visit extended family in Tehran for the first time, only to find himself arrested without due process and facing a death sentence at one especially harrowing time during his lengthy incarceration.

“If someone would have pulled me aside and whispered in my ear the challenges that were awaiting me, I would have never believed them. If they would have told me that my brother would have been captured by Iranian intelligence officials and held in Evin prison, I would have thought that they had watched too many movies. If they would have told me he would be sentenced to death, I would have thought they were crazy, and if they would have told me this death sentence would be overturned but he would be kept in solitary confinement, away from his family, attorney and the outside world, I would have thought they were out of their minds,” Amir’s sister Sara told a crowd assembled on the lawn.

The British government should deny its enemies the opportunities for exploitation presented by the International Criminal Court and withdraw now from the process. Any other course would represent an unprecedented and historic betrayal.

Today the United Kingdom sits alongside Libya, Darfur and Sudan as the International Criminal Court [ICC] launches an investigation into alleged war crimes by the British Army in Iraq.

This perversion brings to mind German Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s powerful words at the end of the Second World War:

“Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It was not long before they came again for the Jews – this time in the newly established Jewish state. And over the years, Israel’s enemies, unable to destroy her in battle, have used “lawfare” – the abuse of Western laws and judicial systems – to try to undermine and delegitimize her.

The main building of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/Vincent van Zeijst)
A leading player in this unremitting assault has been the UN Human Rights Council [UNHRC], which has passed resolution after spurious resolution against Israel while ignoring horrific human rights abuses around the world. The fundamentally flawed Goldstone Report, which concluded that Israel had been guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the IDF’s defensive operation in Gaza in 2008-09, is an example of the UNHRC’s distortions of reality.

To their credit, the United States and five European countries opposed the UNHRC’s resolution to endorse Judge Goldstone’s assault on the Jewish state. Predictably, the United Kingdom declined to vote. This is characteristic of Britain’s refusal to speak out when Israel, one of the West’s staunchest allies, comes under attack, whether by rockets from Gaza directed against her civilian population or by lawfare, directed against her government and armed forces.

And now another instrument of the “international community” is coming for Britain. In the latest of a barrage of legal attacks against British forces in recent months, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s preliminary examination will look into allegations that British troops abused detainees during the Iraq conflict between 2003 and 2008.

Bensouda will decide whether or not Britain is making genuine investigations into these allegations and whether prosecutions are likely to be brought against individuals if the evidence warrants it. If Bensouda is satisfied, she will then lay down standards to be followed by the British judicial system and monitor progress and performance against those standards.

Property rights must be treated as integrated with other individual rights, such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. To divorce any or all these rights is to pose a perilous dichotomy.

The Guardian of Every Other Right: Part V

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” – Ayn Rand, 1963*

Chapter 7 of James Ely’s book, “The New Deal and the Demise of Property-Conscious Constitutionalism,” chronicles the Supreme Court’s timid retreat from a semi-efficacious defense of property rights, unsure of the propriety of property rights unless linked to the “public good,” browbeaten by “public opinion,” and savaged by the Progressives.

The new political outlook emphatically rejected the laissez-faire philosophy. Justice Louis D. Brandeis expressed this reform sentiment when he declared in 1932, “There must be power in the States and the Nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs.” (Italics mine; p. 125)

“Experimentation” meaning that Progressivism was basically a John Dewey-esque program of applied political and economic Pragmatism. While “constitutionalism” relied on a strict interpretation of the Framers’ principled meanings – an “ideology” regarded with hostility by Progressives and others of a collectivist stripe – Progressivism is an ideology empty of any principles except a desire and commitment to control, rule, and “harmonize” the whole country and make it fit into an authoritarian straightjacket. If a new” sin” tax or regulation of manufacturing or a new levy on corporate profits doesn’t work here, maybe it’ll work over there, and if it doesn’t, we can try something else. Never mind the inconvenience to property owners and the dislocation of market forces the experiment produces. You can’t achieve an omelet of “social equity” without breaking some eggs. Or some heads. Theories and principles and definitions just get in the way.

Borrowing from the Progressive legacy, President Roosevelt’s New Deal program was grounded on the notion that government had an affirmative duty to promote the general social welfare….Congress and the states enacted an extraordinary array of measures that greatly enlarged governmental supervision of the economy and sought to redistribute wealth and economic power. This social welfare approach flatly contradicted the insistence on limited governmental activity, marketplace competition, and respect for property rights that were at the heart of traditional constitutionalism. (Italics mine; p. 125)

Perhaps Pope Francis will address the ongoing persecution and massacres of Christians in the Moslem world???? rsk

Pope Francis will take a helicopter from Jordan to Bethlehem in “a sign of recognising Palestine” as Father Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate in Jerusalem said.

The Pope will be in the “holy land” to spiritually bestow a birth certificate to another Arab-Islamic state.

“This visit will help us in supporting our struggle to end the longest occupation in history”, Ziyyad Bandak, Mahmoud Abbas’s adviser for Christian affairs, told Voice of Palestine radio. “He will have a lunch with Palestinians, with families suffering from the occupation… then he will visit Dheishe refugee camp to witness the suffering of Palestinian refugees”.

Pope Francis will be accompanied by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem “in the building of the Great Council on the Esplanade of the Mosques”. It will be an implicit recognition of Islamic hegemony over the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site in the world.

The Pope will begin his visit in the fictional and terrorist “State of Palestine” and not in the real and democratic State of Israel.

We should not see as natural the fact that different Popes refused to recognize Israel for fifty years after its founding.
History repeats itself. In 1974 the Vatican implicitly recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but not the State of Israel. It took twenty years to do that. We should not see as natural the fact that different Popes refused to recognize Israel for fifty years after its founding.

The number of so-called taxi-rapes has snowballed to such an extent that a British judge recently issued a warning that no woman can expect to be safe while travelling in a cab.

Ibrahim Munir, an exiled senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood now living in Britain, when asked if violence would be an option, replied, “Any possibility.”

“Do I have to change my religion to get the best [banking] deal?” — Lloyds Bank customer, quoted in The Daily Telegraph.

Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during the month of April 2014, and can be categorized into three broad themes: 1) The British government’s growing concern over Islamic extremism and the domestic security implications of British jihadists in Syria; 2) The continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in all aspects of British daily life; and 3) Ongoing questions of Muslim integration into British society.

1. Islamic Extremism and Syria-Related Threats

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced a “thorough probe” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Britain. At a press conference, he said:

“We want to challenge the extremist narrative that some Islamist organisations have put out. What I think is important about the Muslim Brotherhood is that we understand what this organization is, what it stands for, what its beliefs are in terms of the path of extremism and violent extremism, what its connections are with other groups, what its presence is here in the UK.”

The review will be headed by Sir John Jenkins, the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. This has led some analysts to surmise that the oil-rich nation—which sees the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to its own stability—is pressuring Cameron to ban the group from British soil. (Cameron’s announcement also came just weeks after Britain finalized a deal for the sale of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon strike jets to Saudi Arabia.) Jenkins has been asked to compile a report on the movement’s “philosophy and values and alleged connections with extremism and violence.”

Just like old times. Bonnie and Clod are back, with all the sturm, drang, thunder and lightning that made the Clinton years such good and not-so-clean fun.
Politics lost their X-rating when Bill and Hillary departed Pennsylvania Avenue with their considerable baggage piled high on the wagon. Only wars and arguments about boring stuff followed, about guns, taxes and whether two little men could fit together on a wedding cake. Monica’s thong and Hillary’s lamp-throwing titillated, but Barack Obama’s fear and trembling in the shadow of the mosque frightens everybody.
Hillary is trying to shape her 2016 presidential campaign, if there is one, as an international adventure high above the fray, where mere mortals sweat out campaigns. She will soon learn, as Republican strategist Mark McKinnon says, “there is no ‘above the fray’ in politics anymore. There is only the fray.”

Bubba can’t wait for the bang bang to start. He predicts the targeting of the wife will intensify as she moves closer to 2016. “It’s just the beginning,” he tells Gwen Ifill of PBS, “and they’ll get better at it.” Bubba purely loves the game, and that’s why he’s so good at it.

Whether Hillary likes it or not, everything will be about Bubba. Younger voters have no memory of him, and he relishes the opportunity to introduce himself, baggage and all. His raffish good ol’ boy charm makes him irresistible to voters. Who else could have won a second term with impeachment on the way? Charm, raffish or otherwise, is something no one has ever accused Hillary of. She’s not much like Lurleen Wallace, whom George Wallace installed as governor of Alabama when he was no longer constitutionally eligible to run himself, but the Wallace precedent will inevitably be applied. Bubba will apply it himself if no one else does.

This week Hillary took her first public policy steps as a neo-candidate, telling the American Jewish Committee that the United States must be “tough” and “clear-eyed” with Iran over its nuclear works, which would be a relief for Israel after eight years of timidity and vacillation by an administration that she was an important part of. She expressed polite League of Women Voters scorn for Washington gridlock — “I would like to see our own democracy work more smoothly” — and sounded more like she was ready for a well-mannered campaign for the Student Council than as a candidate for the White House.

This leaves the issue of the hour to someone else. Bubba elbowed everyone out of the way to jump into the furor over Hillary’s health and Karl Rove’s suggestion that she was brain-damaged after taking a fall in her home 18 months ago. Chuckling (appreciatively) at a question at an economic forum in Washington, he aimed a load of birdshot at the Republican campaign manager once called “George Bush’s brain.”

The Honorable Ed Timperlake is a Fellow at IASC was the first Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Public Affairs and then Public and Intergovernmental Affairs when VA was elevated to Cabinet status.

Veterans are sick and dying and some at the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) simply do not care. It is time for a reckoning.

Over the last few years it has become known that the DVA’s Undersecretary for Benefits has demonstrated total incompetence, and now America is seeing that some leaders in the Veterans Health Administration, as currently reported, may have actually been criminally negligent. The Secretary, based on his Congressional testimony, over time appears rather oblivious.

It is a difficult story to report on because investigating and reporting on the medical health of specific veteran cases, patient privacy safe guards of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) apply. It is the responsibility for all in the media and law enforcement to publicly respect the privacy of veterans and their specific illness, wounds or disease. This is a critical issue, not to further hurt those who have given so much.

However, respecting HIPPA can still allow a discussion of what America’s veterans may be facing when VA care is denied or delayed. The emerging Department of Veterans Affairs scandal of secret waiting lists is abhorrent and unacceptable. For one generation it is doubly hateful and now for our current warriors equally potentially sinister and deadly.

My fellow Vietnam combat veterans were and now should again be concerned about a grateful nation not delivering on earned benefits and letting them die alone waiting in the dark during their end of life years. Unfortunately, veterans and their families have been there before, but one visionary DVA Secretary said not on his watch.