RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here is a note from my most witty and erudite e-pal and friend Professor Edward Alexander:

Opera-lovers draw the line: “Klinghoffer” OK, “Carmen” bad.

“Here is a bulletin from Down Under: “The West Australian Opera has dropped
‘Carmen’ from its scheduled 2015 run because the 140-year-old French opera
depicts smoking.” The Aussie prime minister, Tony Abbott, characterized
this as “political correctness gone crazy.”

http://dailyreview.crikey.com.au/where-theres-smoke-carmen-cancelled-due-to-smoking-concerns/13400

Where there’s smoke: Carmen cancelled due to smoking concerns by Ben Neutze

Sponsorship has been the hot topic of the Australian arts world ever since a group of artists withdrew their works from this year’s Sydney Biennale in response to the organisation’s relationship with a company involved in offshore detention centres.

But a sponsorship arrangement between West Australian Opera and some “good guys” is proving to be particularly bizarre. While the Biennale artists objected to their sponsor’s activities, this time the sponsor looks like it’s objecting to the arts organisation’s activities.

A WA Government agency called Healthway, aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles and discouraging smoking, has come on board as a major sponsor for WA Opera in a $400,000, two-year arrangement. WA Opera subsequently ditched its upcoming season of Georges Bizet’s Carmen because it contains onstage smoking, the West Australian reports. The opera, which is consistently in the top five most-performed in the world, will be replaced by another yet-to-be announced piece.

Acting in the manner of sorcerers’ apprentices over several decades, the makers of U.S. foreign policy have contributed to turning many of the tensions among the world’s peoples into disasters. These American-caused disasters diminish the respect for America upon which our own peace depends. The trouble comes not from any errors of detail, but rather from disregarding the fundamentals of statecraft. The remedy lies in paying attention to them. Herewith, a glance at the U.S. government’s responsibility for the disasters now unfolding along the Islamic State’s bloody edges.

For centuries, albeit uneasily, Turks, Kurds, and Arabs had lived alongside one another along the edge of the Fertile Crescent that runs between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Now, however, we see Sunni Arabs who have carved out a state from what used to be Syria and Iraq, making substantial progress in their effort to annihilate millions of Kurds in ancient communities along Turkey’s southern border. As Turkey’s mighty army watches, riots of resentment among Turkey’s large, long-suffering Kurdish population bespeak an estrangement that may not be reversible.

The radical-Sunni Islamic State’s use of superior weapons – which alone makes it possible for Arabs to make headway against superior Kurdish fighters in defensive positions – is due almost entirely to having captured American equipment from an Iraqi army upon which our government lavished vastly more resources than brains. That, in turn, is due to our bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s enduring, reality-proof commitment to a “united, democratic Iraq,” to be achieved by making nice with its Sunni minority, regardless of its efforts to rule Shia and Kurdish peoples. U.S. sorcerers’ apprentices were surprised and disappointed when the Iraqi government – necessarily led by the massive Shia majority – appointed Shia commanders to the army. They were surprised and disappointed again when Shia soldiers in this “inclusive” army refused to fight to defend regions populated by Sunnis who are friendly to the Sunni Islamic State, in the name of an Iraq in which nobody but the Americans believe. Dismayed to see the Iraqi army’s wonderful American equipment fall into the hands of the Islamic State, the U.S. government now resolves to pour more equipment into that army while making it even more “inclusive” than before.

Why is he always telling them what he’s not going to do?

This has become a constant refrain among President Obama’s Republican and conservative critics. And it is an excellent question. Why does the president tell jihadists from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda that the American campaign against them will be strictly limited to aerial bombing (sporadic, at that) and absolutely, positively will not involve the introduction of U.S. ground forces?

The theory behind the question is bulletproof: the only way you can hope to keep bad actors in check, to discourage them from acting roguishly in pursuit of their ambitions, is to indicate that you might respond with your superior powers. Even if you are reluctant to unleash those powers, the seed of doubt planted by signaling the possibility of decisive counteraction forces rogues to tread lightly. On the other hand, take your decisive weapons off the table and you’re sure to find ISIS mocking your impotence, sacking city after city, and poised to take Baghdad.

My question for my colleagues: why don’t we practice what we preach?

Back in June, my book Faithless Execution was published. Contrary to some of the commentary it provoked, I did not call for President Obama’s immediate impeachment. Indeed, I argued that the lesson of the Clinton impeachment episode was that it is a mistake to commence impeachment proceedings in the absence of strong public support for the president’s removal.

The point of the book was to address how presidential lawlessness — a threat to our governing structure over which the Framers agonized — is dealt with in the American constitutional system. Other than the ballot box, the Constitution provides only two ways for Congress to rein in presidential maladministration: the power of the purse and impeachment. That is, Congress can starve the administration of the funds needed to carry out its rogue practices, or it can remove from power executive officials — up to and including the president — who are lawless, derelict, profoundly dishonest, or incompetent in the carrying out their duties.

1,400 British non-Muslim children were gang-raped and brutalized by Muslims in the British city of Rotherham, in accord with the Qur’anic allowance for the sexual enslavement of infidel women that the Islamic State has pointed to in order to justify its exploitation of captive Yazidi and Christian women. But no airstrikes were called in Rotherham; rather, British officials there “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.” And now four years of key and highly incriminating files have gone missing.

According to the Mirror, “Professor Alexandra Jay, who wrote the bombshell report revealing 1,400 young girls were abused in the town over 15 years, said minutes from key meetings have disappeared. Rotherham Council was slammed in her report for ignoring the scandal and its leader and chief executive have both since resigned.”

These files almost certainly contain damning material about how British officials wouldn’t move against the rape gangs for fear of being stigmatized as “racists” and “Islamophobes.” But those officials are still in positions of power and influence in Britain, and so these missing files are unlikely ever to be recovered.

If anyone in Britain has the courage actually to search for them, has he or she checked Nick Lowles’s office? The people who have the most to lose here are people like Lowles, the leader of the far-Left group with the Orwellian name “Hope Not Hate,” who for years smeared anyone and everyone who spoke out against these Muslim rape gangs as “racist,” “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.” The Muslim rape gangs went unreported, unprosecuted, and in general unstopped because of organizations like Hope Not Hate, and others such as Faith Matters and Tell Mama, that waged relentless war against anyone and everyone who spoke out about these issue.

(Incidentally, when these groups led the campaign to ban Pamela Geller and me from entering Britain, one of the events we had discussed going to was a rally against the rape gangs. And despite smearing us as hatemongering equivalents of British jihadist Anjem Choudary, Lowles, when challenged on the BBC, could not come up with a single “hateful” statement I have ever made in 13 books, hundreds of articles, and over 40,000 blog posts.)

As Yom Kippur sermons go, Martin Indyk’s was a doozy. Speaking at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the former U.S. envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations accused Israel of showing “total disrespect” for the Obama administration.

Indyk said many things in his Yom Kippur address with which one might take issue, but one analogy in particular stands out as especially disturbing.

He said that he “discovered” in the most recent round of failed negotiations “that we would crack the whip, but no one was responding to our whip cracks. That’s a change.”

How disappointing for Indyk. Those who recall his days as U.S. ambassador to Israel no doubt feel a sense of deja vu when they hear Indyk talking about whips. Here is how he described his role in Israel to the Washington Post back on February 24, 1997: “The image that comes to mind is a circus master. All these players in the ring. We crack the whip and get them to move around in an orderly fashion.”

Ironic, isn’t it? The ex-diplomat who accuses Israel of being “disrespectful” has repeatedly compared the Israelis to circus animals who need to have some sense whipped into them. And when the dumb brutes don’t respond, Indyk the circus master is outraged and lashes out at his victims.

The irony goes further. Indyk served a president who has made almost a hobby of being disrespectful to Israel’s prime minister. Nobody can forget the time that President Obama deliberately left Prime Minister Netanyahu waiting for an hour and a half, while he went off to have dinner with Michelle and the kids. Or the infamous photo that the White House released of President Obama with his feet on his desk as he spoke by phone with Netanyahu.

Not to mention just last week, when Mr. Obama repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as “Bibi,” while Netanyahu, by contrast, appropriately referred to Obama as “Mr. President.” In an earlier era, perhaps someone could complain that it was difficult for an American president to pronounce a name such as “Menachem.” But how hard would it have been for President Obama to pronounce the name “Benjamin” ?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/not-naming-the-enemy-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dawn Perlmutter, the Director of the Symbol Intelligence Group and one of the leading subject matter experts (SME) in symbols, symbolic methodologies, unfamiliar customs and ritualistic crimes. She designed and developed Jihad-ID, a symbolic database of the signs, symbols and identifiers of global jihad.

Ms. Perlmutter came on the show to discuss Not Naming the Enemy, explaining how we surrender by not calling Islam by its name. The discussion occurred within the context of Why ISIS Beheads, in which Ms. Perlmutter took us into the dark world of Jihad’s key tactic and signature. She also focused on “How Beheading Raises Islamic State Street Cred,” “Beheading Videos as a Propaganda Tool,” and much, much more:

“Most significantly, Gibbon’s core thesis has long been controversial, to wit, that Rome ultimately fell through internal weakness and loss of civic virtue, owing in no small part to Christianity. This failure of the ruling class and its sclerotic governing mechanism allowed barbarian tribes to overrun Rome’s borders. Many authors now consider it definitively disproved, and there are many other more plausible explanations for the empire’s decline: from internal political fighting to the change in the nature of the army. Two and a half centuries after Gibbon, historians are still fighting over the causes, and two of the best recent books on the subject are Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.”

The greatest historian still has much to teach us about the empire-ending consequences of internal decay.

Rome — I am sitting on the steps of the Capitoline Hill, as close as I can approximate the spot where, exactly 250 years ago today, on October 15, 1764, the 27-year old Edward Gibbon was struck by the muses, leading to perhaps the greatest work of historical scholarship in the English language.

Though the anecdote in his biography recalling the moment has been called into question, it is both sufficiently famous and sufficiently inspiring to anyone with a historical bent to warrant retelling. Gibbon’s recollects the moment:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

That history would consume much of the rest of his life. The first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, became an immediate best seller, and vaulted its author into the most exclusive ranks of British letters. The final volume appeared in 1788, and the sixth edition of the first volume appeared in 1789, just five years before Gibbon’s death. There remains a historical poignancy that Decline and Fall first appeared the same year that the American Declaration of Independence was expressing perhaps the loftiest sentiments of Enlightenment political philosophy, while its last installment came on the heels of the French Revolution, which guillotined the hopes of liberalism.

Much of Gibbon’s work has been superseded by subsequent discoveries, though its sweep and grandeur have never been surpassed. Only half of his work, that dealing with the Western Roman Empire, is any longer read and known, and his dismissal of the Eastern (Byzantine) half of the empire no longer stands up to historical scrutiny.

Anti-American educational elites need a dose of reality.

Goddard College’s recent decision to have its students addressed from prison by a convicted cop killer is just one of many unbelievably irresponsible self-indulgences by “educators” in our schools and colleges.

Such “educators” teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain — American citizenship — that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times. If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who leave would get not only a substantial sum of money — probably $100,000 or more — they would also get a valuable dose of reality elsewhere.

Nothing is easier than to prove that America, or any other society of human beings, is far from being the perfect gem that any of us can conjure up in our imagination. But, when you look around the world today or look back through history, you can get a very painfully sobering sense of what a challenge it can be in the real world to maintain even common decency among human beings.

Living just one year in the Middle East would be an education in reality that could obliterate years of indoctrination in grievances that passes for education in too many of our schools, colleges, and universities. You could go on to get a postgraduate education in reality in some place like North Korea.

If you prefer to get your education in the comfort of a library, rather than in person amid the horrors, you might study the history of the sadistic massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the heart-wrenching story of Stalin’s man-made 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed as many millions of people as Hitler’s Holocaust did in the 1940s.

The Democrats’ “war on women” strategy has always been frivolous and intellectually dishonest, and it is now being revealed as ineffective, too.

Let us call the roll: Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state hoping to oust Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is trailing in the polls in spite of being a cause célèbre for the Hollywood Left — Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg have lavished Manhattan and Beverly Hills money upon her race — even after having engaged in such questionable shenanigans as attempting to portray Senator McConnell, an original cosponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, as an opponent of the law. In New Hampshire, where incumbent senator Jeanne Shaheen leads Republican challenger Scott Brown by a hair, Democrats have been reduced to braying that Brown is a sexist because he keeps running against female opponents, as though he had somehow ensured that Elizabeth Warren secured the Democratic nomination in his lost 2012 Massachusetts race. Colorado’s Senator Mark Udall, not content to let the ladies enjoy all the ill-gotten benefits of the so-called war on women, has deployed similar measures against his Republican challenger, Representative Cory Gardner, but is trailing in the polls and just witnessed the Denver Post, no Republican stronghold, endorsing his opponent. In Texas, Wendy Davis’s increasingly distasteful abortion-based hate parade is making the wheelchair from which Republican Greg Abbott performs his public duties the central image of its attack ads, and Davis is at the moment positioned to suffer a resounding rejection.

Including counseling and TV programming “with themes that reject violent extremism”; U.S. ambassador says it’s “hard to believe” terrorists “motivated by religion.”

WASHINGTON — Six months after Boko Haram terrorists seized more than 200 girls from the Chibok Government Secondary School, the Nigerian government is claiming it’s still trying to bring them home and the White House says it’s still helping the effort.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign saw its 15 minutes of prominence [1] in Washington circles, with a few dedicated lawmakers continuing the effort [2]. The al-Qaeda affiliate briefly became a household term yet has since slinked to the back-burner and continued its rampage [3] across Nigeria outside of the mainstream news cycle. At least seven of the girls’ parents have since been killed [4] in Boko Haram attacks and the terrorists, better equipped than ever, have been on a steady march through Borno state to claim more territory for the caliphate.

They’ve seeped into Cameroon, kidnapping the wife of Vice Prime Minister Amadou Ali. Sahara Reporters revealed [5] this weekend that Boko Haram got four of its commanders released from prison in exchange for her return and the release of other hostages, along with at least $400,000 and a nice cache of arms and ammunition.

Last week, Nigeria’s defense chief criticized [6] the U.S. for not helping the counterterrorism efforts in the region while publicly focusing on ISIS.

“Boko Haram is not different with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in fact our own people are more vicious, but everybody has gone to Syria, to go and bomb!” Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh said. ”Who has come to your aid? You have just been left alone to do it.”

U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James Entwistle fired back that the two countries have a “strong military relationship,” adding “the idea that U.S. doesn’t support Nigeria is not true.”