RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. and Britain have long considered themselves the standard-bearers for freedom of expression. Can this proud tradition survive the idea that ‘hurtful’ speech deserves no protection?
On Feb. 14, 1989, I happened to be on a panel on press freedom for the Columbia Journalism Review when someone in the audience told us of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s religious edict for blasphemy against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. What did we think? We didn’t, as I best recall, disgrace ourselves. We said most of the right things about defending freedom of thought and the imagination.

But the death sentence from Iran’s supreme leader seemed unreal—the sending of a thunderbolt from medieval Qom against modern Bloomsbury—and we didn’t treat it with the seriousness that it deserved. I recall, alas, making a very poor joke about literary deconstructionism. My colleagues, though more sensible, were baffled and hesitant. Was it even true—or perhaps just a mistranslation?

We knew soon enough that it was true. The literary, media and political worlds rallied in defense of Mr. Rushdie. He became a hero of free speech and a symbol—even if a slightly ambivalent postcolonial one—of Western liberal traditions. But he also went, very sensibly, behind a curtain of security that was to last many years.

And by degrees—when it seemed that not only Mr. Rushdie’s life but the lives of his publishers, editors and translators might be threatened—his base of support in the literary world thinned out. Sensitive intellectuals discovered that, in a multicultural world, respect for the Other meant understanding his traditions too, and these often were, well, sterner than ours. Freedom of speech was only one value to be set against…ahem, several other values. Fear, cowardice and rationalization spread outward.

Twenty-five years later, we can look back on a long series of similar events, including: the 2002 anti-Christian riots in Nigeria, in which more than 200 people were killed because a local tabloid had facetiously suggested that Miss World contestants would make suitable brides for Muhammad; the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for his movie “Submission,” in which passages from the Quran were printed on women’s bodies; the riots in Denmark and throughout the Middle East in 2005 in response to the publication of cartoons of Muhammad by a Danish magazine; the murder threats against Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his 2008 film “Fitna,” which interleaved passages from the Quran with clips of jihadist violence.

Mr. Shapiro is a constitutional litigator at Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher in New York, and counsel to amici curiae members of Congress in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.
The State Department says no, Congress says yes. Now the justices will decide a case involving a boy’s passport.

Menachem Binyamim Zivotofsky is soon to become a bar mitzvah, but his place of birth is still in dispute.

This much is clear: He was born on Oct. 17, 2002, in Shaare Zedek Hospital, in western Jerusalem. His parents, Ari and Naomi, are U.S. citizens, which makes him a U.S. citizen as well. But when his mother visited the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport and birth documentation for her newborn son, and listed his “place of birth” on both applications as Israel, consular officials balked.

Since 1948, successive U.S. presidents have taken the position that Jerusalem is a city without a country, pending the conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Under State Department policy, personal-status documents of Jerusalem-born U.S. citizens such as Mr. Zivotofsky list only the city “Jerusalem” as the passport holder’s place of birth, and not Israel. That Jerusalem has, as a matter of fact, been the seat of Israel’s government for almost seven decades is of no relevance to the State Department.

In 2002 Congress stepped in and passed a law that directs the Secretary of State to permit U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem to choose to list “Israel” as their place of birth. The purpose of the law was to provide citizens like Mr. Zivotofsky the opportunity to self-identify as being born in Israel. But Presidents Bush and Obama have refused to implement the statute, citing what they called the president’s “exclusive” powers to direct the nation’s foreign affairs and to recognize the boundaries of foreign powers. His parents filed a lawsuit on behalf of their child, then a year old.

Fast-forward a decad

Liberals are fighting liberals over referenda that would make the health law worse.

Democrats keep saying that opposition to the Affordable Care Act is a spent political force, but not so fast. Senate Republican candidates have run more ads against ObamaCare than on any other issue, according to Kantar Media/CMAG. But perhaps more fascinating this election year are the state referenda that confront rising costs and declining patient choice.

The pity is that these states are trying to solve the problems caused by ObamaCare with more ObamaCare-like rules and government control. Leading this challenge from the left as always is California, where on Tuesday voters will consider Proposition 45, which would impose stronger price controls on health insurers.

The state’s individual and small-business insurance markets were reasonably functional, but now all coverage must conform to the White House’s income-redistribution goals, and premiums are headed up fast. Anthem Blue Cross—whose 2010 rate hikes President Obama infamously served up as a reason to vote for the bill—is raising small group rates 9.8% next year. The California insurance commissioner prefers 2.1%.

So Prop. 45 would give the commissioner the power to reject rates he deems “unreasonable,” with no reference to actuarial or solvency standards. Government would dictate what products consumers are allowed to buy and use its clairvoyance to decide what businesses can charge.

One irony is that the ObamaCare exchange known as Covered California already fixes prices via crony capitalism, albeit in the back room. Instead of promoting competition among many insurers to lower costs, the bureaucracy follows a practice called selective contracting: Insurers receive a list of demands and Covered California then picks a few compliant winners. The losers are excluded from the exchange’s subsidized consumers.

Bedfellows make for strange politics, and the double irony is that the campaign against Prop. 45 is led by Covered California and such ObamaCare supporters as Nancy Pelosi . They don’t want an interloper to disturb their discretion. With characteristic California unwisdom, Prop. 45 gives outside pressure groups and especially trial lawyers the right to challenge rates in court.

In Egypt, a young Coptic Christian man, accused of blaspheming Islam for simply “liking” an Arabic-language Facebook page, was sentenced to six years in prison.

One of the intruders in Uganda was shouting, “Today we shall kill you [for converting to Christianity] — you… are not respecting our prophet’s religion.” He then heard his 12-year-old-girl’s cries as the Muslim intruders were strangling her. Then they seized him.

Muslims in Germany were granted their own section of the cemetery. Now these same Islamic communities are demanding that, during Islamic funerals, Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery be removed or covered up.

During the Islamic State’s June invasion and consolidation of Mosul, Iraq — where Christians have been present since the first century — countless atrocities against them were committed. Accordingly, the region is now reportedly empty of Christian presence.

The Islamic State, among other acts, reinstituted the collection of jizya, the “tribute” conquered Christians (and Jews) were historically required to pay in order not to be killed in accordance with the Koran (9:29).

In one instance, three Islamic State members burst into the home of a Christian family, demanding the jizya-money. When the father of the house pleaded that he did not have the money, the intruders raped his wife and daughter in front of him. The man was reportedly so traumatized that he committed suicide. Four other Christian women were killed for not wearing the Islamic veil.

Soon after taking over Mosul, the Islamic State also announced that it would destroy all Christian places of worship. Several churches were burned, including the Armenian church near the Al Salam hospital, and the Church of the Holy Spirit, after first being looted and desecrated. A large statue of the Virgin Mary disappeared.

Among the many Christians missing are two nuns from the Daughters of Mary Order, who managed an orphanage for girls in Mosul. It is believed they have been kidnapped.

By Jed Babbin – – Thursday, October 30, 2014
The leaders of our uniformed military — the Joint Chiefs of Staff — have committed an act of common sense that exposes President Obama’s Ebola policy for its comprehensive lack of that commodity. According to a recent report on Fox News, they have called for all troops returning from the Ebola “hot zone” to be quarantined for 21 days.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that returning troops would be quarantined for the length of Ebola’s incubation period and asked the Joint Chiefs to propose a way to do it.

That not only conflicts with Mr. Obama’s refusal to impose any limitation on coming to this country for people who have possibly been exposed to Ebola, but it also conflicts directly with the pressure the president has put on the governors of New York and New Jersey for doing for Ebola-exposed health workers exactly what the Joint Chiefs proposed and Mr. Hagel has now ordered.

By sending troops to the Ebola zone in West Africa, Mr. Obama wrongly decided to put them in harm’s way against an enemy they can’t fight with bullets, rockets and bombs. Ebola is a disease that our best medical experts only begin to understand.

This week, Russian aircraft have probed NATO defenses to a degree unseen since the Cold War. Fighter aircraft from eight NATO members were reportedly scrambled to intercept more than two dozen aircraft just on Tuesday and Wednesday.
As the Wall Street Journal report details, the intercepts of Russian aircraft have occurred more than one hundred times this year, which is about three times the number of intercepts conducted last year.
Though those intercepts didn’t intrude on NATO airspace, they are consistent with the high number of Russian challenges to American air defenses and with the apparent intrusion of a Russian submarine in Sweden’s territorial waters I wrote about last week. It’s not obvious what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing, but these actions – coupled with his own explanation in a major speech – do lead us to a few conclusions.

Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, recounts the many historical world orders both before and since the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 which, by recognizing the sovereignty of nation-states re-ordered a world order that had previously been ordered by religions. Putin’s speech, delivered on 24 October, was alternately threatening, conciliatory and a statement of what Putin apparently wishes a new ordering of the world to look like.
Putin – who has said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century – emphasized his view that America’s actions since the Cold War denigrated national sovereignty in an effort to impose universally American ideals. He accuses the United States of destabilizing nations and supporting the rise of “neo-fascists and Islamic radicals.”

Putin’s alternative is to create a world order in terms of institutions such as the UN and regional alliances: “I am certain that if there is a will, we can restore the effectiveness of the international and regional institutions system. We do not even need to build anything anew, from the scratch; this is not a ‘greenfield,’ especially since the institutions created after World War II are quite universal and can be given modern substance, adequate to manage the current situation.”
In short, Putin’s view injects Russia as a regional power with influence everywhere. He would invest the United Nations with the power it had to deter American action and increase Russia’s influence – first regionally, and then globally – to essentially the same power it had during the Cold War.

Last week, the Obama White House finally clarified its Middle East policy. It’s détente with Iran and a cold war with Israel.Our new partners? OUR NEW PARTNERS?

To the administration, Israel isn’t worth the trouble its prime minister causes. As one anonymous Obama official put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, what good is Benjamin Netanyahu if he won’t make peace with the Palestinians? Bibi doesn’t have the nerve of Begin, Rabin, or Sharon, said the unnamed source. The current leader of this longstanding U.S. ally, he added, is “a chickens—t.”

It’s hardly surprising that the Obama White House is crudely badmouthing Netanyahu; it has tried to undercut him from the beginning. But this isn’t just about the administration’s petulance and pettiness. There seems to be a strategic purpose to heckling Israel’s prime minister. With a possible deal over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in sight, the White House wants to weaken Netanyahu’s ability to challenge an Iran agreement.

Another unnamed Obama official told Goldberg that Netanyahu is all bluster when it comes to the Islamic Republic. The Israeli leader calls the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program an existential threat, but he’s done nothing about it. And now, said the official, “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

In other words, the White House is openly boasting that it bought the Iranians enough time to get across the finish line. Obama has insisted for five years that his policy is to prevent a nuclear Iran from emerging. In reality, his policy all along was to deter Israel from striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The way Obama sees it, an Iranian bomb may not be desirable, but it’s clearly preferable to an Israeli attack. Not only would an Israeli strike unleash a wave of Iranian terror throughout the region—and perhaps across Europe and the United States as well—it would also alienate what the White House sees as a potential partner.

Jewish peers in Britain’s upper legislative chamber, the House of Lords, last night engaged in robust defense of Israel during a four-and-a-half hour debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi, told the chamber, “at the outset I declare an interest. I am a Jew. Israel is therefore for me the place where my people were born almost four thousand years ago, the place to which Abraham and Sarah travelled, where Amos voiced his vision of social justice and Isaiah dreamed of a world at peace, where David composed the Psalms and Solomon built the Temple – and this had consequences not only for Jews but also for Christians and Muslims, who claim Abraham as their ancestor in faith, and whose God they take as their own.”

Later on in his speech, Sacks declared: “The Islamists also know that the only way they can win the sympathy of the West is by demonizing Israel. They know you can’t win support for ISIS, Boko Haram or Islamic Jihad, but if you can blame Israel you will gain the support of academics, unions and the media and you will distract attention from the massacres in Syria and Iraq, the slow descent of other countries into chaos, and the ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the region.”

Another Jewish peer, Lord Mitchell, frankly told the Lords: “Around the world, atrocities are being committed and we all wring our hands and do precious little, but when Israel alone defends herself, everybody goes ballistic. At best it can be called hypocrisy, and at worst it is called something else.”

Mitchell added that he agreed with iconic British Jewish actress Maureen Lipman “when she says Labour and [party leader] Ed Miliband have got it wrong.” As The Algemeiner reported yesterday, in an article for the current issue of Standpoint magazine, Lipman, who had a starring role in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film about the Holocaust, The Pianist, excoriated Miliband for his support for British recognition of a Palestinian state independently of any negotiations with Israel.

Column: Deputy National Security Adviser: Iran Deal ‘Is Healthcare For Us’

Deputy National Security Adviser and MFA in creative writing Ben Rhodes likened an Iranian nuclear deal to Obamacare in a talk to progressive activists last January, according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The remarks, made at a since-discontinued regular meeting of White House personnel and representatives of liberal interest groups, reveal the importance of a rapprochement with Iran to President Obama, who is looking to establish his legacy as his presidency enters its lame-duck phase.

“Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said. “So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.”

Rhodes made the comparison as the White House was reeling from the botched rollout of the $2 billion Healthcare.gov. Polls continue to show that the health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, remains unpopular.

Rhodes also said the White House wants to avoid congressional scrutiny of any deal.

“We’re already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal so we don’t necessarily require legislative action right away,” Rhodes said. “And there are ways to do that.”

That is similar to what an unnamed senior administration official told David Sanger of the New York Times last week for a piece headlined “Obama Sees an Iran Deal That Could Avoid Congress”: “We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years.”