RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the usual fanfare and self-regard we have come to expect from the New York Times editorial board, the prestigious paper has changed its mind about pot. It now believes that the federal ban on the substance should be lifted and that the whole issue should be sent back to the states to handle. Not only did it issue a big Sunday editorial (the equivalent of a secular fatwa in my native Upper West Side of Manhattan), but it has since been flooding the zone on the issue with essays from members of the editorial board.

It is a significant milestone, but not altogether in the way the Times would like. For starters, the Times is pulling a bit of a Ferris Bueller here. It is leaping out in front of a parade and acting as if it’s been leading it all along. It’s worth noting that the Times is 18 years behind National Review magazine and my old boss, the late William F. Buckley, and at least 40 years behind Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman, who wrote in Newsweek in 1972 that President Nixon’s War on Drugs should be called off even before it started.

And the libertarian flagship magazine Reason has been waiting impatiently for the rest of us since it was founded in 1968. (The left-wing Nation magazine didn’t get around to an editorial backing legalization until last year.) Many GOP politicians beat the Times to the punch by years, including former governors William Weld of Massachusetts and Gary Johnson of New Mexico.

Conservatives and libertarians should always celebrate when liberal institutions finally catch up with them.

Still, I am more ambivalent about the national-legalization craze than many of my peers, even though I’ve supported federal decriminalization (of marijuana, not narcotics such as heroin or cocaine) for more than a decade. I don’t think smoking pot — especially to excess — is a particularly laudable habit for adults, and it’s a very bad one for minors. There will be real social costs to legalization. But there are also real social costs to prohibition. Responsible advocates on both sides have recognized this for a long time.

Neither John Kerry nor the media show any awareness of the group’s stated goals and core beliefs.

One of the remarkable features of the recent Gaza war was the ineffectiveness of American diplomacy. Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire continually fell flat. One reason was that Kerry acted as if he were mediating between two friends of the United States and his task was to arrange a win-win outcome. His spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that he hoped to arrange for Israel to grant economic and other concessions to persuade Hamas’s leaders to accept a ceasefire. Kerry’s apparent assumption was that Hamas’s leaders prefer peace to war, care about the humanitarian and economic concerns of ordinary Palestinians, and are willing to compromise. What basis does he have for these views?

It would be hard for anyone to see Hamas that way after reading the group’s articles of faith as set out in its 1988 “Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” One can say nothing meaningful about Hamas’s ideas or goals without reference to the Covenant. Yet Secretary Kerry not only failed to refer to it, he appears to be unaware of it. Then again, where would he have learned about it?

He sure didn’t hear about it from the news media. Journalists from major news outlets virtually never mention Hamas’s Covenant. Since the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers on June 12, 2014, and the ensuing Gaza war, print journalists and television and radio reporters have produced thousands of reports on Hamas and the war. We searched on Google for the period June 12 to August 4 for “Hamas Covenant,” “Covenant,” “Hamas Charter,” and “Charter” on the websites of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Guardian, Time, and CNN, but there was virtually no mention of the Hamas Covenant. We searched news articles, excluding opinion pieces, letters, and comments. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Guardian failed to mention the Covenant at all. Time magazine referred to it in two articles, the Wall Street Journal mentioned it in one article, and CNN mentioned it in two. Only the Washington Post brought it up repeatedly—that is, in two articles and in four blog posts. But all of the references were brief, more or less in passing, without elaboration.

Nor was Kerry likely to hear about the Covenant from his own State Department or from the White House. Running the same search on the White House and State Department websites, we found no mention of it by any officials there in the last eight weeks. That’s not surprising, because journalists talk daily with U.S. and other officials, and if the officials consider a matter important, they highlight it for the reporters, who will usually then include it in their stories. The two CNN articles, for example, both use the same quote from Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon, in which he refers to the Hamas Covenant. And the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and the Washington Post quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, not any U.S. officials, talking about the Covenant.

A Masters of the Universe drawing hangs in a frame above the desk in the Capitol Hill office of Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. It stands out among dozens of pictures of his three children and seven grandchildren. The protagonist of the comic-book series, He-Man, is depicted mounted atop his heroic lion, Battle Cat. His muscles are bulging; his sword is thrust into the air. Battle Cat’s mouth is open, his fangs exposed. They are a formidable pair.

A small gold plaque sits below the drawing in the same frame. Etched on it are a portion of the remarks Sessions delivered on the Senate floor in June 2007, two days before the comprehensive immigration-reform bill championed by President George W. Bush and several prominent Republicans was defeated in the Senate. Sessions led the opposition to that bill, and his efforts were among the reasons for its unexpected collapse. “No one small group of people have a right to meet in secret with special-interest groups and write an immigration bill and ram it down the throat of this Senate,” he told his colleagues. “I oppose it. It is not right.”

The artwork was a gift from Cindy Hayden, Sessions’s former chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, after the 2007 bill was defeated. Sessions called the “small group” that had hashed out the legislation — the politicians, political strategists, and special-interest groups — the “masters of the universe.”

It’s one of his favorite political put-downs. He refers to the CEOs and corporate interests that support amnesty for illegal immigrants as the “masters of the universe in glass towers and suites.” Politicians like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who have repeatedly tried to push a path to citizenship through Congress, are the “Washington masters of the universe.” Economists, too, are masters of the universe, and former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was the “master master.”

Sessions, 67, is a low-profile guy. Though he is not well known nationally, he has for years now been the instrumental force in quashing repeated attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. He has a gentle, almost grandfatherly quality, but he doesn’t shy away from combat. He derided the 2007 bill as “no illegal alien left behind”; in a single press conference, he blasted it as a “colossal error,” an “absolute scandal,” and a “fiscal disaster.” He declared: “Good fences make good neighbors.” All of this prompted the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to call him the “Lou Dobbs of the Senate.”

As Vladimir Putin’s tanks begin to roll forth from Russia like Sauron’s legions from Mordor, a pair of American villains is working hard to undermine our resolve against the greatest threat from Europe to American values and power, and indeed to world peace, since Adolf Hitler.

Evgeny Feldman, a photographer for the maverick Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, recently visited a book store in Moscow and tweeted [1] a photograph from amongst its shelves. Among volumes on one topical shelf such as The Crimes of the U.S.A. and The Third World War and Forward to Victory, in which authors offered bloodthirsty attacks on America and her values and called for its obliteration, one tome stood out. Emblazoned on its cover was the Russian title Прокончит с ФРС by an author identified as Рон Пол.

This was a Russian translation of 2009′s End the Fed [2] by former Texas congressman and presidential primary contender Ron Paul, latched onto by Russian nationalists as an admission by an American that America is a fundamentally evil country leading the world down a path that leads to global ruin.

Days earlier another former U.S. presidential primary contestant, Pat Buchanan of the disgraced Nixon administration, published an opinion column in which he asked, seemingly on behalf of the Russian Kremlin: “How Would We Feel If Putin Told Us What To Do? [3]” Sounding just like Neville Chamberlain, Buchanan viciously attacked Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for proposing legislation standing up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, and urged the U.S. to simply ignore Putin’s bloodthirsty [4] reign of terror there.

Paul and Buchanan are two individuals who have been decisively repudiated — humiliated, really — at the polls by the people of the United States. More than two-thirds [5] of the American population currently views Russia as an enemy, precisely as Mitt Romney said during the last presidential campaign, and major magazine covers [6] bluntly and dramatically reflect the nation’s horror at Putin’s aggression. Indeed, signs of it are everywhere [7].

Yet the likes of Paul and Buchanan continue to beat the drum of appeasement and indeed collaboration with Putin’s evil, neo-Soviet regime. Time magazine called [8] End the Fed a “curious mix of the sensible and the delusional” and said that it teaches nothing about economics but much about what goes on inside Paul’s skull. The same can be said of Buchanan. Both men mix tiny bits of truth with great tidal waves of delusion to come up with policies that obliterate American values and world leadership and leave the field to despotic tyrants like Putin in the belief that nothing can touch Fortress America, which should simply watch the world burn.

The Islamic State organization is continuing to make gains on both the Syrian and Iraqi fronts. The advance and consolidation of the jihadi entity which today stretches from Mosul in Iraq to the outskirts of Aleppo city in Syria is a development of profound importance for the future of the Middle East.

Global media attention has been focused elsewhere in recent weeks, of course. The Gaza war — which has changed precisely nothing — has been hitting the headlines. The real Middle East action, however, is taking place far from Gaza. The Islamic State is on the march.

After its capture of the city of Mosul from the Iraqi government’s forces, IS began to integrate the weapons systems it had captured back into the Syrian battlefield.

An early attempt to destroy the Kurdish Kobani enclave stalled. But the organization enjoyed better fortune against the regime, as it sought to expel Assad’s forces from its positions in the Euphrates valley.

The base of the Syrian Arab Army’s Division 17 fell. IS celebrated in the fashion for which it has become known by massacring 200 members of the garrison who failed to escape in time. A number of their severed heads later appeared on spikes in the city of Raqqa, capital of the Syrian part of the IS domain.

Since then, IS has turned its attentions back to Iraq. In recent days it has captured the towns of Zumar and Sinjar from the Peshmerga forces of the Iraqi Kurds. Around 200,000 people fled after the taking of Sinjar. Most were members of the Yezidi minority, an ancient non-Muslim group whom IS have designated “devil worshippers.”

The only way to discover whether new interventions are effective is to test them during an epidemic.

A virologist carrying out mouse experiments in a lab in Hamburg five years ago accidentally pricked her finger. The syringe contained the Zaire Ebola virus, the same strain wreaking havoc today in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. There is no approved treatment or vaccine for Ebola, or even one that has passed the first phase of safety trials in human volunteers. Yet unlike those exposed to Ebola in West Africa recently, the Hamburg virologist was quickly offered an experimental vaccine.

This vaccine hadn’t yet been tested on humans, but it had been shown to offer primates some protection against Ebola infections. For the virologist, it wasn’t a good option, but it was the only one available in the face of a virus with an extremely high mortality rate. She chose to take the vaccine.

We expect it is a risk we would take if one of us were exposed to Ebola. The Hamburg researcher didn’t fall ill. It is unclear exactly how the vaccine worked, or indeed whether she was ever infected. What is important is that immediate access to an experimental vaccine allowed her to try something with the potential to protect her.

It is highly likely that if Ebola were now spreading in Western countries, public-health authorities would give at-risk patients access to experimental drugs or vaccines. Indeed, there are reports that two U.S. relief workers infected with Ebola in Liberia have been offered experimental therapies, which they have accepted.

Much of my research and writing has concerned World War II, and as a result I try to steer clear of discussing Hitler or Nazis in any context other than that era. Use either word in the context of contemporary politics at your peril: Invoking them almost invariably has the effect of trivializing monstrous crimes of the past in the service of scoring cheap rhetorical points—and cutting off all rational discussion.

Yet at some point most of us make exceptions to the rules we impose on ourselves. This is mine: What we are witnessing today in the surge of poisonous anti-Semitism around the world, particularly in Europe, would have delighted Hitler and his Nazi followers.

Cloaked in the garb of humanitarian concern for the Palestinian people, anti-Semitism is gushing with such ferocity that the power to shock diminishes daily.

That makes it easy for the far right, the far left, and a lot of people in between to attend rallies where others chant “Hitler was right!” and “Death to Jews”—even if they don’t do so themselves.

The UNRWA is on the front lines of the Hamas War in Gaza. In the headlines, its schools are forever being fired on or found to be stockpiling rockets. If individual Gazans are being used as human shields, the UNRWA often seems as if it is one big organizational human shield.

But the UNRWA isn’t Hamas’ human shield. The UNRWA is Hamas.

The “UN” part of the UNRWA, the blue logos and symbols, fool us into thinking of it as an international humanitarian organization. But the UNRWA in Gaza functions as a large Palestinian Arab organization with a smattering of foreign supervisory staff.

And those foreign staffers often tend to leave during a conflict.

The UNRWA is not an international organization operating in the Middle East. Effectively it’s a local Arab Muslim organization funded and regulated internationally. Since the UNRWA classifies 80% of Gazans as “refugees”, it administers the biggest welfare state in the world on their behalf. Like the Palestinian Authority, the UNRWA’s welfare state is run locally and funded internationally.

The UNRWA is the biggest employer in the West Bank and Gaza after the Palestinian Authority and the vast majority of its employees are “locally recruited”. Varying figures place the share of local employees at between 90 and 99 percent.

Even though there are more Arab Muslims living in the West Bank than in Gaza, there are more “official” refugees in Gaza, which means that more UNRWA funding and efforts are directed there. The UNRWA only runs 96 schools in the West Bank, but it runs 245 schools in Gaza. It employs less than 3,000 education staffers in the West Bank, but over 10,000 in Gaza.

Why does Hamas, which is obsessed with brainwashing the next generation into martyrdom, allow a foreign organization to run an educational system for 232,000 pupils?

It’s because in Gaza, Hamas and the UNRWA are the same thing.

If you want honesty from Muslim settlers in the West, you really can only get it from Hizb-ut-Tahrir. They will actually tell you what they’re thinking.

The media won’t.

Here’s how the Australian media covered a Hizb-ut-Tahrir pro-Hamas rally.

A group of about 100 protesters have rallied outside the Egyptian consulate in Sydney to call for the defence of Gaza and the destruction of Israel. The group including men, women and children gathered on Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills, on Saturday afternoon, waving placards calling for Muslims to support Gaza.

How touching. Here’s the real genocidal reality.

Now here’s actual video from that event courtesy of Memri.

“This nation has been and will continue to be a nation of Jihad until Judgement Day.”

“There is no god but Allah… and Jihad is a duty decreed by Allah”

“Palestine cannot contain the Muslims and the Jews.”

The Spanish government on Monday announced that it had “provisionally suspended” sales of weapons to Israel because of its supposed targeting of civilians in Gaza. This came a day after the Obama Administration declared that it was “appalled” by Israel’s “disgraceful” shelling of a UN school in Gaza. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called the shelling a “moral outrage” and a “criminal act.” The only problem with all this moral indignation is that it is wrongly placed on the victim rather than the perpetrator, and bears witness to the success of Hamas’s propaganda barrage.

These are just two of the most recent examples of the success of Hamas’s skillful manipulation of the mainstream media, and the eagerness of the media to be manipulated – an eagerness so great that amid the frenzy to demonize Israel in the court of world opinion, Hamas’s oft-reiterated genocidal bloodlust and brazen breaking of ceasefire agreements goes unreported and ignored.

The U.S. condemnation of the Israeli shelling of the UN school was a particular victory. Jeff Dunetz reported in Truth Revolt Monday that “evidence is emerging that the Israeli strike hit outside of the school and the bodies were moved into the courtyard to make it look like Israel hit the school.” This wouldn’t be remotely close to the first time that Palestinian jihadis have been caught faking Israeli “atrocities” – recently they even billed a still from a horror movie as a fresh Israeli killing of a Palestinian civilian.