RUTHFULLY YOURS

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 capture of Sinjar brings IS to within 10 kilometers of the Mosul hydro-electric dam, the largest in Iraq.

The prospect of IS control of Iraq’s major dams is a chilling one. The Mosul dam holds back tons of Tigris River water which, if allowed to flow downstream, would cause mass flooding in Baghdad (though IS would need to think carefully before doing this, since populated areas under its control are also situated downstream). The coming days will see if the dam falls to the jihadis.

Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson have jointly penned a characteristically appalling op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine assigning primary blame to Israel for the war in the Middle East. The key to ending the violence, they contend, is for the United States and the European Union to recognize the Hamas terrorist organization as a legitimate “political force.”

According to the authors, the latest outbreak of fighting was triggered neither by Hamas’s murder of three Israeli teenagers nor its firing of thousands of missiles into Israel. Rather, they proceed from the premise that Israel is the culprit, for what Carter and Robinson deceitfully describe as:

[Its] deliberate obstruction of a promising move toward peace in the region, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April. This was a major concession by Hamas, in opening Gaza to joint control under a technocratic government that did not include any Hamas members. The new government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by the Middle East Quartet comprised of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia: nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has succeeded in preventing the new government’s deployment in Gaza.

This surely reflects Obama administration thinking, as well. Obama’s presidency has aptly been called the second (and now third) Carter term — a downward spiral from the shambles made of American foreign policy in the late seventies. Mrs. Robinson is the former president of Ireland and UN high commissioner for human rights, whose pro-terrorist sympathies and anti-Israel animus were ably chronicled several years back by Michael Rubin. (See “Mary Robinson, War Criminal?”) In 2001, she led the notorious Durban conference (the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Zenophobia and Related Intolerance”) that was so rabidly anti-Semitic the American delegation stormed out. Yet, eight years later under a new, hard-Left administration, there stood Robinson in the White House being honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Of course, anyone who grasps the details of the “unity government” and Hamas’s strategy in agreeing to it quickly realizes it is the antithesis of “a promising move toward peace.” In fact, Hamas is simply applying the Hezbollah model to the Palestinian territories. In Lebanon, the Hezbollah terrorist organization — Iran’s forward jihadist militia and oft-time Hamas mentor — agreed to participate in a unity government while maintaining the independence of its jihadist military and intelligence apparatus. That is exactly what Hamas has done.

Benny Morris has much to atone for. He was one of the first Israeli “historians” who slandered Israel, in his book “1948: History of the First Arab-Israeli War” thus, opening the floodgates for antagonists who were inhibited by fear of being called anti-Semitic. However, of late, he has had a sea change in attitudes. A very good column by him “The 1948 War Was an Islamic Holy War” http://www.meforum.org/2769/benny-morris-1948-islamic-holy-war is very informative.
I often walk my dog along the dusty paths of Khirbet Madras in the Judean foothills, just south of Beit Shemesh in central Israel. Occasionally, after the rains, an ancient coin—Hasmonean, Roman, Byzantine—will surface, testifying that here stood a small Jewish and then Byzantine town. Archeologists have uncovered the remains of a synagogue and a church. At the center of the ruins are entrances to an underground cave complex, which the Jews had hewn out of the rock 2,000 years ago.

Archaeologists say there are some 450 such cave systems in Israel/Palestine, 350 of them in the Judean hill country, especially in the foothills, at 1,000 to 1,600 feet above sea level, where the rock is soft and easily excavated. During the two Jewish revolts against Rome, in 66-73 and 132-135 A.D., which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem and in much of the population’s exile, the Jews used these cave systems to hide from the ravaging Roman legions and, guerrilla style, to attack them from behind.

Anti-Israel posturing is for many people the cheapest route to the appearance of virtue. So it is with British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the Tory peer Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. Both have in recent days called for the suspension of U.K. arms-export licenses to the Jewish state. The Baroness took the further step on Tuesday of resigning her post as a Foreign Office Minister over David Cameron’s “morally indefensible policy” on Gaza, as she put it in a letter to the Prime Minister.

The usual media suspects frame this minor rebellion as a heavy blow against Mr. Cameron: As the Liberal Democrat leader, Mr. Clegg is the junior partner in the coalition government; Baroness Warsi, meanwhile, is said to represent a groundswell of Tory discontent over Britain’s mildly pro-Israel policy.

All that may be, but Mr. Clegg’s and the Baroness’s gesture politics also expose their own inconsistent moral outrage.

London has over the years granted thousands of licenses to sell arms to authoritarian regimes. That’s according to a multi-committee Parliamentary report issued last month. With respect to Russia, the committees found that licenses worth £132 million were still in place even after the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea. They cover “body armour, components for assault rifles, components for body armour, components for small arms ammunition, components for sniper rifles, equipment employing cryptography . . . and weapon sights,” among other items.

The coalition government also approved two licenses for dual-use chemicals sold to Syria in January 2012—nearly a full year after Bashar Assad had commenced an industrial-scale slaughter of his people.

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.