RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is bleeding members. Between 2000 and 2013, almost 765,000 members left the organization, a loss of nearly 30%. Last week the church’s leadership met in Detroit for crisis talks.

No, not about the emptying-pews crisis. The Israel-Palestinian crisis.

On Friday, in a close vote (310-303), the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)—the largest of several Presbyterian denominations in America—resolved to divest the organization’s stock in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions. The church’s Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment said the companies have continued to “profit from their involvement in the occupation and the violation of human rights in the region,” and have even “deepened their involvement in roadblocks to a just peace.” Israel’s counterterrorism and defense measures have included razing Palestinian houses (with Caterpillar equipment), operating Gaza and West Bank checkpoints (with Hewlett-Packard technology), and utilizing military communications and surveillance (with Motorola Solutions technology).

The church signaled its antipathy for Israel earlier this year by hawking a study guide called “Zionism Unsettled” in its online church store. In the 76-page pamphlet, Zionism—the movement to establish a Jewish homeland and nation-state in the historic land of Israel—is characterized as a “a struggle for colonial and racist supremacist privilege.”

In a postscript to “Zionism Unsettled,” Naim Ateek, a Palestinian priest and member of the Anglican Church, explains the meaning of the charges in the pamphlet. “It is the equivalent of declaring Zionism heretical, a doctrine that fosters both political and theological injustice. This is the strongest condemnation that a Christian confession can make against any doctrine that promotes death rather than life.”

In one response, Katharine Henderson, president of New York’s Auburn Theological Seminary, said in February that the “premise of the document appears to be that Zionism is the cause of the entire conflict in the Middle East,” in essence “the original sin, from which flows all the suffering of the Palestinian people.” And amid intense criticism of the study guide from the Anti-Defamation League and other groups, the church’s General Assembly declared on Wednesday that ” ‘Zionism Unsettled’ does not represent the views of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” But the assembly didn’t bar the church from continuing to distribute and sell it.

Albert Spratte, the sergeant-at-arms of the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley, says there are two types of illegal immigrants crossing the border: those whom Border Patrol catches and those who catch Border Patrol. While driving along a remote stretch of road next to the Rio Grande River south of McAllen, Texas, Spratte points at various paths and identifies which type of immigrant traffic uses each one.

Soon, a man comes out of the brush and walks toward Spratte’s nondescript green truck to surrender. The man says he’s traveled 15 days from El Salvador and is headed to California to do some remodeling work. He says he’s been to the United States before and adds that he still has the paperwork of his order to appear in court from several years ago.

Spratte calls Border Patrol to report the man’s apprehension and gives him some Gatorade and water. The man says he’s traveling alone, but Spratte isn’t buying it. He says people traveling in large groups have characterized the sharp spike in OTM border traffic — OTM meaning “other than Mexicans.” A group of nearly 300 Central Americans recently turned themselves in to American officials, he says.

“Next week 300 is going to be nothing,” Spratte says. “It’ll be 500 or 400 until they make the decision to start enforcing our immigration laws and deporting people.”

When a Border Patrol official arrives, the surrendering man voluntarily walks to the back of the vehicle and climbs in. He’s headed to a local Border Patrol station but likely won’t be there very long. Instead of being sent back home, he will probably be let go within the U.S., with an “order to appear” at a later date. If he fails to appear, he will be deported in absentia, but he almost certainly will not be pursued unless he commits another crime.

Zury Arrita, a 25-year-old Honduran woman, says she and her daughter were detained for four days before they were released at the McAllen bus station. From there she made her way to the nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where volunteers provide food, clothing, medical attention, and temporary shelter.

These days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing strong criticism from an unlikely corner. In a private meeting this past May, the leaders of several settlements accused him of stymieing the settlement enterprise. His response, that Israel had to “consider international constraints,” was not well received.

Soon after the meeting, on May 29, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics issued a report that supported the settlers’ claims. In the first quarter of 2014, the bureau reported, the Israeli government had approved only 232 residential units for construction in the area that Israelis commonly call Judea and Samaria and most people know as the West Bank. That rate is roughly half that of the last decade, which saw an average of 1,687 units built each year. And given that existing settlements currently house roughly 350,000 Israeli citizens — who have an annual birthrate of about four percent — this slower rate of construction can hardly sustain even natural population growth. The community leaders who met with Netanyahu last week know that better than anyone.

A geographic analysis of the data, moreover, suggests that the settlers have an additional reason to worry: under Netanyahu’s current government, construction outside the so-called major settlement blocs — the areas most likely to remain part of Israel in a final peace settlement — has steadily decreased. Over the past five years, the number of homes approved for construction in the smaller settlements has amounted to half of what it was during Netanyahu’s first premiership in 1996–99. Moreover, the homes the government is now approving for construction are positioned further west, mostly in the major blocs or in areas adjacent to the so-called Green Line, the de facto border separating Israel from the West Bank. The 1,500 units that Israel announced plans for earlier this month were also in the major blocs and in East Jerusalem, continuing the pattern.

Mañana is here

Much has changed, obviously, since I published Mexico: chaos on our doorstep [Hardback, Paperback: 232 pages, Madison Books (July 24, 1989), ISBN-10: 0819172960, ISBN-13: 978-0819172969, Amazon, $13.17].

. As so often has happened, my timing was bad. The book’s research identified a problem prematurely and the title raised hackles among some Latin American specialists, most of whom had a more optimistic view.

But what led me to write the book may still be as relevant. It was my “discovery” of the startling fact that the 1500-mile U.S. Mexican border was the only land frontier between what in those days was called The Third World, pre-industrial, poverty-stricken, and unstable societies,.and the First World of a few “developed” European and North American countries, Australiasia and Japan. Ultimately, I argued, that was bound to lead to a security crisis for Washington.

The prediction has been a long time in coming and we may still not be there yet – but recent events on the border suggest we are very near at least.

I couldn’t but be struck these past few days with the familiarity of “the children crisis” on the Texas border. In my reporting for the book in Mexico and in the U.S., particularly among Mexican Americans, the head of Los Angeles’ medical services told me his budget was coming apart because pregnant illegal Mexican women increasingly were using his facilities. They accomplished two purposes: they got free medical services not then available in Mexico except to the rich. But more important, they established the American birthright of their offspring who might in later years claim citizenship for their families. But his complaint was that in order to meet this additional drain on his facilities he was having to reduce his postnatal care extension service.

Substitute the nationalities of the current children and accompanying parents and pregnant women now producing “a humanitarian crisis” and you see trends haven’t changed.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/surrendering-to-isis-in-iraq-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Josh Brewster and joined by Michael Hausam, a writer at IJReview.com, Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know, and Ernie White, a civil rights activist.

The Gang gathered to discuss, Surrendering to ISIS in Iraq?

The guests also tackled America’s Border Crisis, Hillary’s Fantasy about Hamas’ Genocidal Technocrats, Benghazi ‘Suspect’ Captured, The IRS’s “Lost” E-mails, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

New Yorkers would buy no tickets to a Broadway musical that celebrates those Hamas kidnappers. So why stand for this?

If you’ve been reading that the Metropolitan Opera has cancelled “The Death of Klinghoffer” you’ve been reading it wrong.

Sneaky how they made a big announcement that is only half true in order to silence complaints that the opera is partly pregnant with anti-Semitism.

Europeans eat this up.
The worldwide telecast has been scrubbed, yes, you read that correctly, but live performances of this opera that justifies hell on earth will still be performed at Lincoln Center starting in October. I checked. The irony is too much from the Met website…

Which is happy to announce that tickets are available for performances Oct. 24 and glad to note that WHEELCHAIR LOCATIONS are available for needful patrons.

That much is in compliance with State and Federal guidelines, but were they laughing when they wrote that OUCH line?

Given the circumstances it comes across as mockery.

The scandal of fiddled global warming data
The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.

Like Groundhog Day, in the movie of that name, Iraq won’t go away. In what Friday’s New York Times curiously called “robust military moves,” President Obama is now sending 300 military advisers to Iraq to complement the 275 servicemen who are guarding the American Embassy.
My point, in this instance, is not to argue who is at fault for the chaos in Iraq. Other than one observation, let us agree to disagree, at least for the moment, as to the cause. An aspect of Saddam Hussein’s nearly 24-year reign that too often is forgotten was his wanton brutality. We know he used mustard gas, Sarin and nerve agents (all weapons of mass destruction, by the way) against the Kurds. No one knows how many of his own people he killed, but estimates range from 600,000 to well over a million. In other words, he killed his own people at the rate of between 25,000 and 50,000 a year (or 68 to 136 every day) for 24 years! In the gallery of the world’s worst monsters, Saddam Hussein stands in the front ranks.

Regardless of the cause, we are left with a mess. Syria and Iraq are in disarray. Iran is moving toward nuclear capability. Islamic extremists not only threaten Iraq and Syria, they are doing so in North Africa, as well as in such West Africa nations as Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Ironically, today Iran is being touted by some as a bulwark of relative stability in the Middle East. The U.S. has reached out to the Mullahs to aid in derailing the assault on Baghdad by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In return, Iran may be invited into the community of nations, if they forswear developing nuclear weapons. Agreeing to the latter, means one is willing to rely on trust without the Reagan qualifier of verification.
Regarding Iraq, the temptation is to throw up one’s hands and say a curse on both your houses –battle it out. We don’t care. But can the United States, the world’s largest power (and the most democratic State to ever serve in such a capacity) afford to give up responsibility for global peace? Historically, it has been the threat of force, not passivity or negligence, which has preserved peace. And, like it or not, we are the elephant in the room.
In puzzling over what actions the Russians might take in 1939 as the world was preparing for war, Winston Churchill described the country as being “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but,” he added, “perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” As we ponder the problem of the Middle East, it is worth thinking of our national interest as it pertains to the region. Our self-interest appears to be comprised of four distinct, but related parts: first and most critical is maintaining stability in the region; second, preventing the export of terrorism to our homeland and to that of our allies; third, ensuring that Gulf Coast oil continues to flow, and, fourth, the preservation of Israel as a free and independent nation. All are, of course, interrelated. The critical question: Will a dismembered and strife-torn Iraq affect our national interests?

REPORTED BY RAHEEM KASSAN

CITY OF LONDON, United Kingdom – Historian and author Niall Ferguson today delivered a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies’ inaugural Margaret Thatcher Liberty Conference, discussing the “wobbliness” of U.S. President Barack Obama, and noting how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have dealt with the challenges the West faces today.

Speaking in front of a several hundred strong crowd in the historic and grand surroundings of London’s Guildhall, Ferguson said that NATO was no longer a credible force in the world, which has led to the resurgence of Russia as a global power. Prime Minister Thatcher, he noted, would have “striven to make NATO a force… and urged President Obama to make the red line [with regard to Ukraine] a real one”.

Ferguson, who is the author of ‘Civilisation: The West and the Best’ as well as being a history professor at Harvard University, said: “We are in cultural decline too… In the wake of victory [in 1991] came a serious decline of the West.

“Who would have predicted in 1989 that by the year 2014 that at least on one measure, China would be the biggest economy in the world, and still under the control of a Communist party? What a defeat.”

“Imagine how Margaret Thatcher would have responded to the fiascos we have seen in Syria and with respect to Ukraine,” he said, before going on to note that the former PM would have supported freedom-loving dissident movements in both countries, the opposite of what modern leaders have done.

“Have we made comparable efforts to support dissidents in the Middle east and North Africa, have we helped them in the way we helped the opponents of Communism? No, and not surprisingly their revolution failed and their revolution was hijacked by the enemies of freedom”.

Ferguson believes that a referendum on European Union membership would have been combatted by Thatcher, who would have fought to avoid a federal political union under Germany’s control. He said that “a British exit from the European Union would be a profound set back… but if the British voter is confronted with exit and being part of a German-led federal state – could you really blame [them] for voting for the exit?”

Ill Met: opera house at war over money
A bitter dispute has sprung up between managers and workers at New York’s Metropolitan Opera as financial crisis
looms

PETER GELB, the formidable general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, turned up at the opening gala for a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin a few months ago wearing a pair of rainbow braces — a small but colourful gesture of solidarity with gay and lesbian Russians then being threatened by Vladimir Putin.

Gelb could have used some braces last w

The Met’s spending has included £100,000 on silk flowers (Kathy Willens)

eek after a bitter dispute with powerful backstage unions caught him with his trousers down.

A discordant clash between managers and workers at the Lincoln Centre opera house, which regards itself as the biggest, richest and most admired in the world, has divided the aesthetes of New York and raised alarming questions about the future of opera in America.

The launch this month of a new round of contract negotiations with 15 unions representing singers, musicians, stagehands and support staff has turned into a public slanging match over everything from Gelb’s salary to allegations of bedbugs in the men’s chorus changing rooms.

At stake in an increasingly toxic confrontation is not just the Met’s $311m (£180m) annual budget (against £112m at Covent Garden), or the daunting costs of staging opera with unionised workers who demand £400 for moving a single cello onstage. The real concern is the future of opera in the internet world, and how an art form whose patrons are mostly ageing white people can be adapted to a younger, multicultural audience.

Both sides describe the crisis in near-apocalyptic terms, not least because the Met’s former neighbour at the Lincoln Centre — the New York City Opera — went bankrupt last year.