RUTHFULLY YOURS

Years ago, probably in the mid to late 1950s, Grand Union opened a grocery store on the outskirts of Peterborough, New Hampshire, thereby ringing the death knell for the two or three small, independent grocery stores in the village. It was my first experience with Joseph Schumpeter’s dictum of creative destruction. For a few months, my mother hung to her principles and refused to enter what she called, the “grand onion.” But eventually, lower prices and dwindling products on the shelves of the financially-strapped independents forced her to change.

What prompted this subject was an article in the business section of Monday’s New York Times, headlined, “Principles Are No Match for Europe’s Love of U.S. Titans.” The article discusses how tech behemoths, like Amazon, Google and Facebook create a love-hate relationship, with consumers. Many feel principled when independent stores are placed in jeopardy or by the perceived ill-treatment by “Big-box” companies of warehouse employees. But for Guillaume Rosquin of Lyon, in the Times article, a $200 savings on a Blackberry was enough to put his “issues with working conditions aside.” Seven of the ten most visited websites in Europe are operated by American companies. Google has an 85% market share for search in Europe, compared to 65% in the U.S. Facebook, the target of several investigations for its tax practices in Europe, continues to add users – now numbering 150 million Europeans, or roughly one in three.

Amazon is the most visited website in Europe and the world. In June, they had a total of 282.2 million visitors, 35% of which were Americans and 31.8% were Europeans. Twenty years ago, the company did not exist. Principle versus price/convenience is an issue with which we all struggle. But it is also “creative destruction” that is at work. I have a brother who owns what some people claim is the best independent bookstore in the United States, the Toadstool in Peterborough, NH. In full disclosure, I own one share, or four percent of the business. Yet, on a Sunday morning, reading the New York Times book review section, I often – shamelessly – log onto Amazon.

Creative and aspirant individuals have always led innovation. When they live within a democratic capitalistic society they thrive. It is no surprise that American companies dominate web-based businesses in Europe rather than European, because America’s culture has allowed and encouraged the creative forces to be unleashed that provide for a dynamic society. However, a natural consequence of unleashing the creative spirit is inequality in terms of outcomes. For those who are bright, creative and aspirant will do best. However consumers benefit as well. Two principal benefits of creative destruction are reduced prices and greater availability of goods and services.

In the film Obvious Child, Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a stand-up comedian who specializes in making jokes about her private parts, with the occasional foray into fart humor. She is about to go onstage. Her friend offers her some encouragement: “You are going to kill it out there!”

Donna replies: “I actually have an appointment to do that tomorrow.”

Donna’s talking about her abortion appointment.

Get it? It’s funny because it’s true. Or if you’re like me, you think it’s not funny because it’s true.

Many critics think it’s funny. One dubbed it “far and away the most winning abortion-themed comedy ever made.” Of course, as an artistic genre, that’s setting the bar pretty low, like serving the best gas-station sushi in the state of Oklahoma.

Since it opened last month, the film has grossed less than $2 million. Compare that to 2007’s Juno, a brilliant film widely seen as pro-life (at least among pro-lifers), or Knocked Up, a raunchier romantic comedy also hailed by abortion foes, both of which grossed more than $140 million domestically. Obvious Child, then, seems less like the cultural watershed its friends and foes make it out to be and more like a barely successful art-house flick.

That’s worth noting given that the film’s writer and director, Gillian Robespierre, was motivated in part because films such as Juno and Knocked Up “rubbed [her] the wrong way.”

Dinesh D’Souza had a similar motivation in making America: Imagine the World Without Her, a new documentary love letter to his adopted country. He’s often described as the Right’s Michael Moore, but he’s aiming higher, hoping to contend one day with Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone in the feature-film business. He tells National Review that “the Left knows the power of telling a story.” Stone and Spielberg are “much bigger than Michael Moore. They don’t make liberal films — they just make films, and they have a point of view. I want to make films with a different point of view.”

D’Souza’s absolutely right about Spielberg (though too kind to Stone). One of my biggest complaints about contemporary conservatism — in and out of politics — is that it has lost sight of the importance of storytelling.

My late friend Andrew Breitbart liked to say that politics is downstream of culture, meaning that any truly successful political turnaround needs to start by changing popular attitudes. Adam Bellow, a storied editor of conservative books, has a similar conviction and is trying to launch a conservative revolt in the world of fiction.

Mr. Obama may imagine his red lines are still credible, but our enemies know otherwise. They get what the dwindling number of the president’s courtiers—namely, Tom Friedman and some New Republic editorial assistants—don’t: There’s no spine in this president’s speech.

Ours is still an American world, but it is presided over by a president who doesn’t believe in American power. The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity—and a sense that the moment is theirs to seize. We know how that story ended.”

In 2008 Fareed Zakaria wrote an influential book titled “The Post-American World.” It was, mercifully, not another lament about American decline. Instead, the book described “the rise of the rest”—China, Brazil, Turkey and other supposedly emerging powers—and made the case that the U.S. had to learn how to accommodate itself to a world in which its primacy was no longer incontestable.

I admire the book, but the title was missing a word. It turns out that we are not in a post-American world of diminishing U.S. influence. We are in a post-Pax Americana world of collapsing U.S. will. Britain, it was once said, gained her empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” Now Barack Obama is relinquishing U.S. dominance with about the same degree of mindfulness, and Americans seem content to go along with it.

Remember Crimea? Remember Syria’s Bashar Assad, and how he had to “step aside”? Remember Afghanistan, which Mr. Obama once called “the war that has to be won”? Remember him talking about core al Qaeda being “on a path to defeat”? Remember him celebrating Iraq as “stable and self-reliant”?

Whatever. All this seems to blow past Mr. Obama’s field of vision like some infomercial in Bulgarian—it means little in its own language and even less in ours. “The world is less violent than it has ever been,” the president told Tumblr users last month, a day or so after Mosul fell into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “Terrible things happen around the world every single day, but the trend lines of progress are unmistakable.”

Who needs a foreign policy when the arc of history is bending your way?

In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, yet Israel has since been forced to go to war twice to stop a rain of rockets and mortars fired from the territory by the terrorist group Hamas and its allies. Now Israel might have to fight a third time to protect its citizens from random aerial assault.

As we went to press Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looked set to launch a major military campaign as Hamas unleashed another indiscriminate volley of rockets that reached well into central Israel. A video posted on Facebook on Tuesday showed a rocket flying over a wedding, complete with shouts and a fleeing bride.

Maybe this time Mr. Netanyahu should address the cause of the problem rather than treat the symptoms. By “cause” we mean Hamas. When Israel left Gaza, it dismantled 21 Israeli settlements (along with four others in the West Bank) and forcibly evicted nearly 9,000 Israeli settlers. Western governments appointed high-level emissaries like former World Bank President James Wolfensohn to turn Gaza into a showcase of a future Palestinian state.

Gaza did become a showcase of a rather different kind. Within a year—and thanks in part to the absence of Israel—the strip descended into a civil war between Hamas and Fatah, the political party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The war was settled in 2007 when Hamas seized power by force. That was followed by a steady increase of rocket fire on Israel that only ended with Israel’s temporary re-invasion in 2009.

For its efforts to defend itself, Israel was vilified as never before, including with the U.N.’s Goldstone Report (later recanted by its principal author, South African judge Richard Goldstone ). The war reduced rocket fire into Israel for a while, but by November 2012 it had to fight again. Israelis were only spared from major casualties thanks to their Iron Dome missile defenses.

Now Hamas seems to have decided that starting another war will be politically opportune—never mind the consequences to ordinary Gazans. Regionally, Hamas has been on the back foot since it lost Syria’s Bashar Assad as a patron, and especially after the Egyptian army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi last summer. This is a chance to go back on the terrorist offense.

A Climate Activist Bags Himself
Tom Steyer ruined the planet before he offered to save it.

In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a Hemingway story, a man goes big game hunting who should have stayed home. Tom Steyer maybe should have stayed home.

The hedge-fund king has sought to propel himself to the top circle of Democratic money men and possible future officeholders on the strength of his concern about global warming. He wants to spend $100 million this year influencing the midterm elections. All the media lately wants to talk about, though, is his thoroughly postmodern hypocrisy.

The New York Times is the latest to investigate his former hedge fund’s investments to increase the output of Indonesian and Australian coal mines to feed China during a period when China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest carbon-dioxide emitter.

The Times report treads in the footsteps of a lengthy Reuters reconstruction, which follows the Canadian press’s detailed reporting of his firm’s tar sands investments. Many stories are festooned with environmentalist comments lamenting the damage Mr. Steyer did to the planet before he decided to save it.

Mark Tapson reviewed American Betrayal at Frontpage Magazine, Radosh called Horowitz, and Horowitz purged the review from the Frontpage website, and, bonus, withdrew his free-speech-championing Freedom Center’s co-sponsorship of a speech I was to give shortly in Los Angeles for the group Children of Holocaust Survivors. (The speech is here.)

The incorrect review was gone, or so they thought.

But Ruth King, the early bird at Ruthfully Yours, had already posted it, unknowingly saving it for posterity.

I mention this to mark the beginning of the Rado-Horo eruptions against American Betrayal. Like an active volcano, the two men still spew, as evidenced by the statements awkwardly appended to a recently attempted exegesis of their beef with my book. It’s all bitter ash and smoke at this point, but it does continue to draw the curious eye. Oh, and that’s “cockamamie” with two m’s, guys.

In honor of the day, then, the review that went Ka-Boom:

By Mark Tapson

Seven weeks ago at FrontPage Mag I reviewed Stalin’s Secret Agents, M. Stanton Evans’ and Herbert Romerstein’s book which demonstrated that widespread government infiltration by Soviet spies sabotaged our foreign policy and molded the post-WWII world in favor of the Soviet Union. Now comes a brand new book that serves as a sort of companion piece to that work, while being an even deeper, more detailed exploration of that infiltration and its consequences.

The author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character is the fearless, incisive columnist and blogger Diana West, who also wrote The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, and who is the co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America. With her characteristic fierce passion, West argues in her new book that the Communist infiltration led to a successful “assault on our nation’s character” during the Cold War that left us the “heirs to a false and hollow history” and “unwitting participants” in “a secretly subverted pageant.” In other words, perhaps we didn’t win the Cold War after all.

For West, one of the clear indications that something in the American consciousness had changed is the fact that, thanks not only to Soviet propaganda but also to domestic peer pressure, many Americans were more outraged by Ronald Reagan’s unapologetic phrase “evil empire” than by the evil empire itself. This is the result of “the hocus-pocus transformation of liberty-loving anti-Communism into a force of repression to be reviled” and its flip side: “the hocus-pocus transformation of totalitarian Communism into a force of liberalism.”

Among the many heartbreaking images associated with the kidnap-murder of three Israeli teenagers was a televised interview on June 29 with the mother of one of the Hamas terrorists named as a prime suspect in the killings. “If they [the Israelis] accuse him of this [the kidnapping], and if it is a true accusation, I will be proud of him until Judgment Day,” she declared. “If the accusation that he did it is true…My boys are all righteous, pious and pure. The goal of my children is the triumph of Islam.”

Not that she is the first Middle Eastern mother to rejoice at the thought of her son murdering innocent children. The fifth chapter of the biblical Book of Judges describes the mother of the barbaric Canaanite general, Sisera, anxiously waiting by the window for her son to return from his latest slaughter. Sisera’s mother was calmed only by her attendants’ reassurance that he must have been delayed because he was busy ravaging women and pillaging their homes.

Author and pundit Erica Brown, a scholar at the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, D.C. and columnist for the New York Jewish Week, this week invoked Sisera in a misguided comparison to the situation of the three kidnapped teenagers. Just as Sisera waited by the window, she wrote, “as a community, we have all been waiting by that window for weeks, checking the news constantly and asking if there are any updates, any developments about our three kidnapped boys.” All mothers have something in common, Ms. Brown argued.

It’s true Sisera had a mother who cared about him. So did Adolf Eichmann and Osama Bin Laden and presumably the Hamas terrorists who kidnapped and murdered the boys. But that does not mean that Jewish mothers “waiting by the window” should be compared in any way to the mothers of murderers waiting by the window.

No, not all mothers are the same.

In fact, the sad truth about Palestinian Arab society is that the mother of the kidnapper is only one of many Palestinian mothers who are proud of their murderous children and who have expressed delight when their children have died while killing Jews.

Just last year (on January 27, 2013), the Facebook page of Fatah, the movement headed by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, posted a feature about the mother of 23 year-old Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. She murdered one Israeli, and wounded over 100, by blowing herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket in 2002. The posting quoted Wafa’s mother as saying “She is a hero…My daughter is a Martyr (Shahida).” The Fatah page added: “Wafa’s mother said that she is proud of her daughter, and hopes that more girls will follow in her footsteps.”

There is an unwarranted “mystery” that surrounds the third branch of government: the Judiciary Branch. People understand – or claim, to anyway – how the Executive and Legislative Branches of our federal government work. But very few people understand the Judicial Branch: how judges are selected, what their purview consists of, how they can be held accountable to We the People. This comes as no surprise to those who understand and actively defend the United States Constitution and the Charters of Freedom. After all, the Progressive controlled education system has all but expunged US history and civics education from any and all curriculum. This reality serves to undermine our Republic; to enslave our “free” people to the tyranny of Progressivism.

Most people understand that there is a procedure for removing a sitting president. The requirements for engaging in this process – impeachment – are outlined in Article II, Section 4 of the United States Constitution:

“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

The definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is more complex than some would like to believe.

The Farlex free legal dictionary explains “high crimes and misdemeanors” thusly:

“[T]he Framers intended for removal from office to be the final step in a two-part process that began in the House of Representatives and, if charges should result, ended in a trial-like hearing before the US Senate. Thus, two goals would be achieved: a full public inquiry into allegations, and, if necessary, the adjudication of those charges requiring a two-thirds majority for removal…

“The generally accepted viewpoint…defines high crimes and misdemeanors as any serious abuse of power – including both legal and illegal activities. Supporters of this [definition] believe that because impeachment is a public inquiry, first and fore-most, it is appropriate to read the phrase broadly in order to provide the most thorough inquiry possible. Thus, a civil officer may face impeachment for misconduct, violations of oath of office, serious incompetence, or, in the case of judges, activities that undermine public confidence or damage the integrity of the judiciary.”

So, per the US Constitution, any “civil officer” was – and is – subject to impeachment. That means Attorney General Eric Holder is just as vulnerable to impeachment as President Obama, although this avenue is seldom traveled by politicians more devoted to the ballot box than their constituencies. Go figure.

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/?h=1

HAMAS ROCKET ATTACKS SKYROCKET AS UN & OBAMA ADMINISTRATION FOCUS ON “RESTRAINING” ISRAEL

U.S.: ASSAD’S ‘MACHINERY OF DEATH’ WORST SINCE THE NAZIS

ISRAELI ARAB CONFESSES TO MURDER OF 20-YEAR OLD ISRAELI JEW, SHELLY DADON Shelly Dadon, A 20-year-old resident of Afula whose body was found on Thursday in the woods near Migdal Haemek

SAUDI RIGHTS LAWYER SENTENCED TO 15 YEARS PRISON

SWASTIKA FLIES IN PALESTINIAN TOWN AS ARABS RIOT

29 PEOPLE KILLED IN OVERNIGHT ATTACKS BY TERROR GROUP AL-SHABAB

Iraq Militants Executed At Least 160 Captives

Where is the outrage over the bombardment of civilians in Israel?
Hundreds of rockets have been fired and a million citizens are forced to run for cover. Imagine if London suffered this bombardment

You see, as most people in the UK were waking up this morning, and those in Europe, United State and elsewhere around the world were going about their daily routines, here in Israel over one million people were running for cover from a hail of rockets being rained down by Palestinian Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

In the last 24 hours alone, over 120 rockets have been fired on southern Israel. That’s approximately five rockets per hour. By the time I finish this article, odds are that count will have risen to 125 rockets.

To put things in context: one million Israelis is roughly 13 per cent of the population. Thirteen per cent of the UK population equates to about 8.4 million people, or the entire population of London.

A number of Israelis have already been injured, though thankfully without fatalities. The only reason more have not been hurt is because Israel has invested millions of dollars in bomb shelters and the Iron Dome defence system. Meanwhile, Hamas, whose very raison d’être is the destruction of Israel and which is recognised as a terrorist organisation both by the EU and UK, has invested millions of dollars in foreign aid into more rockets.

So, where is the outrage?

Since the beginning of this year, Gaza terrorists have fired more than 450 rockets on Israel, with about half of them coming since mid-June, when two Hamas terrorists kidnapped and brutally murdered three Israeli teenagers.

Why is it that a majority of the international community only notices when Israel undertakes its sovereign right, and obligation, to defend its citizens? Can you imagine if even one rocket was fired on London, Washington, Paris or Moscow? This is simply intolerable and no country can, or should, tolerate such attacks on its people.

Where is the outrage from the United Nations, which does not hesitate for a moment to call a “special emergency session” on the “Question of Palestine” or pass the umpteenth resolution blindly condemning Israel? But 24 hours after the rocket attacks on Israel started, I am still waiting for even one syllable of condemnation from the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly or the Human Rights Council.

Where is the EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who repeatedly slams Israel over settlement building, but is yet to say a word about the Palestinians firing over 120 rockets on Israeli civilians in one day? Even 10 Downing and the Foreign Office are yet to comment.