RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dear Reader (and other victims of the pitiless Cromnibus!)

I learned from Twitter this morning that Gustave Flaubert, born this day in 1821, said, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” So, as Jay-Z says every morning he enters a music studio and as Joe Biden says every time President Obama gives him a fresh 64-pack of crayons, “Let’s make some art, bitches.”

Let’s start with Jonathan Gruber. I have to say I was disappointed by the hearings. Oh, sure, it was good theater-as-human sacrifice of the sort Washington does so well (though I am glad they stopped short of rectal rehydration).

But this was one of those moments where they really could have put the system on trial. Gruber’s consistent answer was that he’s a shabby, shallow, little man who belittles others, including the American people, to make himself look good. “I tried to make myself seem smarter by demeaning others.”

In almost every exchange, Gruber fell back on language you’d expect from a stockbroker tied up in an S&M dungeon. I did it because I am a flea! A worm! I am no master of the universe, I am nothing! Punnnniissshhh meee!

All that was missing were some riding-crop and melted-candle-wax welts, and maybe a shorn scrotum. But, hey man, it’s a defense.

But it’s not a good one. You can blame your arrogance for calling the American voters stupid, but you can’t blame your arrogance for claiming that the bill was designed to hide taxes and deceive the public. If I stab someone 34 times, the jury might want to hear about my arrogance, but whether I’m arrogant or humble, it doesn’t change what I did — and apologizing for it doesn’t clarify where the body is buried.

Gruber’s strategy of emotional self-abasement was very clever because it distracted from the central arguments of fact.

The so-called torture report is worthless as an investigation, but it’s valuable to our enemies.

Jihadists are still waging their war against the civilized world. Check that: Jihadists are currently winning their war against the civilized world. Thank Barack Obama, who fails to grasp the difference between being “the president who ends wars” and the president who retreats from wars, and thus surrenders while the enemy is on the rise.

What is the response of Senate sages to this predicament? Dianne Feinstein and her fellow Democrats saw it as the perfect time to savage the CIA, further burn America’s bridges with anti-terrorism allies, and hand jihadists a huge propaganda victory.

The Islamic State had a response, too: They beheaded four Christian children for refusing to renounce Jesus Christ.

You see where this is going, no?

The Democrats’ “torture” report is a gratuitous hit job — brought to you by the same party that, out of political calculation, aggressively undermined the American war effort in Iraq — only after voting to send our men and women into grave danger there, also out of political calculation.

To be sure, the report is a highly disturbing document. It graphically illustrates the severity of enhanced interrogation tactics used against a small group of top-tier terrorists — terrorists who were responsible for brutally murdering thousands of Americans and who, at the time of their capture, were actively plotting to kill thousands more.

Still, notwithstanding the revelation of a few new gory details, this is old news and its disclosure serves no useful purpose — it is just a settling of scores.

We are tired of hearing that withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will bring peace. We know and you know that it would bring another Gaza. So stop saying it.

We are tired of hearing that land beyond the Green Line is ‘Palestinian land’. The Green Line is simply an armistice line that has no political significance. You know this too.

We are tired of hearing about the “Palestinian people.” They are no different from the Arabs of Syria or Egypt, from which most of their ancestors migrated in the last 150 years or so. There is no Palestinian language or religion, and until very recently they considered themselves simply ‘Arabs’. Their culture is almost entirely defined by their opposition to the Jewish state.

We are tired of hearing that “the Palestinians deserve a state.” We are indigenous here, not them, and their behavior entitles them more to a trial at The Hague than to a state. And they certainly don’t deserve our state, which is the only state they want.

We are tired of hearing about ‘The Occupation’. As Naftali Bennett said the other day, you can’t be an occupier in your own land.

We are tired of hearing that “settlements are illegal under international law.” They aren’t.

We are tired of hearing that “settlement construction is an obstacle to peace.” Arab rejectionism and terrorism is the reason there isn’t peace. By the way, we are pro-peace. We are just not pro-suicide.

We are tired of hearing about the 5 million (or whatever ridiculous number there are alleged to be) ‘Palestinian refugees’ or the ‘Palestinian diaspora’. There were about 700,000 Arabs that left their homes in 1948, mostly of their own volition, more or less at the same time as the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. We resettled ours — resettle yours.

We are tired of hearing anything from anyone associated with the UN. The UN is a parasitic and criminal enterprise dominated by our mortal enemies.

We are tired of stupid post-colonialist rhetoric. We aren’t ‘colonists’ and Arabs don’t have the right to murder us in the name of ‘resistance’. Talking this way reveals you as moral imbeciles.

You can’t recognize a state that has no borders, no single government, and no economy.

We know we can’t depend on any kind of security guarantee from anyone except the IDF. So stop being insulted because we don’t trust you. And don’t ask us to give up any nuclear weapons we might or might not have.

We know that the left-wing parties in Israel are bankrupt of ideas. We aren’t going to vote for them, no matter how much you would like us to. So don’t bother trying to influence our election.

Don’t believe what you read in Ha’aretz.

Jerusalem, undivided, is the capital of the state of Israel. Get used to it, because you can’t change it.

Sincerely,

Ordinary Israelis

Dear Readers,

This is a hard one to write. After more or less 15 years of continuous newspaper syndication, this column you are reading is the end of the line. I am not ceasing to write, of course. All of my content — columns, essays, posts, and, of course, books — will continue to appear at my website, www.dianawest.net, and elsewhere.

But my weekly conversation with readers in good old-fashioned newsprint stops at the bottom of the page. In some ways, that’s too bad. For one thing, there is a kind of journalistic romance to appearing on the pages of a real paper that is still hurled at a front porch. Internet-generated email tends to pale next to the copy of a column that a reader has taken the trouble to cut out of the Sentinel, the Mercury, the Herald, the Register, and mail back to me, highlighted with comments.

There is also the fact that I have relished writing a very conservative column that has appeared not only in identifiably conservative outlets. This, in theory at least, has permitted the column to sing a little outside of the choir — liberal and conservative both, come to think of it — even if I know the tune hasn’t often been exactly catchy. Indeed, given the subjects I have chosen to probe — or, as it feels as each weekly deadline has rolled around, the subjects that have chosen me — I am sure it has been a tough column to read. It is hard to watch the world fall apart.

Back at the beginning, which nearly coincided with the attacks of 9/11, I do confess to writing my little column with the hopeful expectation that simple, direct, non-PC exposure of heretofore unknown facts about then-exotic Islam would eventually, if others and I stuck to it long enough, help shift public debate. This, in turn, would eventually help lead policymakers to enact measures to preserve our liberty, for example, by halting Islamic immigration to prevent sharia (Islamic law) from taking hold here as it has in Europe. I guess I was younger then.

Six or seven hundred columns later, I can’t see anything resembling victory, let alone much progress in moving the debate. Indeed, now the U.S. faces the world without a defended border, with increasingly cheapened citizenship and no lawful immigration policy, period (as they like to say in Washington). The prospects of exposing, winning, forestalling or staving off whatever it is that has drawn my bead each week does seem to me to have actually diminished. I know that’s depressing, but that’s the hazard of taking stock. It’s also probably a good reason to take a break.

Since I’m looking back over the past decade and a half, I will state what I think amounts to the most momentous story of our age, a story that begins with, as best I can judge, the near-certainty that Barack Obama’s online birth certificate and Selective Service registration card are forgeries. That this has been a non-issue in most conservative and Republican circles for the past six years is the biggest single and essential enabler of the war that Obama and his administration are visiting upon our nation and our Constitution.

Just for the record, I can’t say I hold George W. Bush in higher esteem. Just to go out on a high note, I will point out the greatest political hope for the Western world is the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. The fact that his Party for Freedom is currently No. 1 in Dutch polls is a bright spot on a dark stage.

Of course, I am probably not telling readers of this column anything they don’t already know — another reason I am happy to take a pause. It has been a writer’s privilege to develop arguments on a published, weekly basis outside the filter of conservative media and the Washington Beltway both. From this platform, I have been able to explore many topics that much of the media, right and left, tend to avoid lest they (horrors) risk missing a cocktail party.

Such patterns of denial, I began to realize over the years, lead to the suppression and inversion of morality. Or, is it that the suppression and inversion of morality lead to the denial of facts? Maybe more than anything else, such questions have framed the work of this column, my blog, and, of course, my books, “The Death of the Grown-Up” (2007) and “American Betrayal” (2013).

I am sure they will continue to do so — at least until I can solve the riddle.

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomatic-Conference/Danish-ambassador-JPosts-Caroline-Glick-exchange-verbal-blows-over-EU-attitude-toward-Israel-384438

Europe should apply a double standard to Israel when judging its actions compared to other Middle Eastern nations, Danish Ambassador Jesper Vahr said on Thursday, causing sparks to fly at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference in the capital.

“Israel should insist that we discriminate, that we apply double standards, this is because you are one of us,” Vahr said during a panel discussion on relations between Israel and Europe.

Israelis sometimes ask why Europe applies a different standard to its neighboring countries, such as Syria, Vahr said. “Those are not the standards that you are being judged by. It is not the standards that Israel would want to be judged by,” he said.

Israel should want to be held to European standards, not Middle Eastern ones, he said.

“So I think you have the right to insist that we apply double standards and put you to the same standards as all the rest of the countries in the European context.”

The Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic correspondent, Herb Keinon, who moderated the panel, asked Vahr if his statement couldn’t be seen as “patronizing” to the Palestinians.

Vahr responded: “I am not sure it is,” particularly given that Israel is the stronger party in the conflict and the Palestinians are the weaker one.

It is “natural,” Vahr said, to engage differently with Israel, a country with whom Europe, including Denmark, has an extensive cooperative relationship with in trade and cultural affairs.

Norah O’Donnell is called an “anchorwoman,” defined as “a television reporter who coordinates a broadcast to which several correspondents contribute.” However, would she not vet the material before airing erroneous contributions, or is there intentional complicity?

O’Donnell reported the brutal attack by two Palestinian boys in a Jerusalem synagogue, killing four rabbis and injuring seven. In fact, it was a massacre, with blood everywhere, including on the Torah – but she called the synagogue a “contested religious site.” Contested? Neither the Har Nof synagogue nor the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem is contested. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people, has been the capital of the Jewish people through most of history, and was declared the capital when Israel became a state; therefore, the neighborhood and the synagogue are indisputably legal. If it is contested, it is only a war tactic by jihadists, who will use any method to garner supporters when they fear the possibility of loss by modern warfare. Does O’Donnell also contest the Christian churches or Bahi’a, Buddhist, or Hindu temples in Israel? Does she contest the Al Aqsa mosque, over which dominion was ceded by General Moshe Dayan, whether out of generosity or naïveté and his hope for peace with barbarians. How could he have known that the courtyard would someday be a soccer field for boys who use severed heads for sport? Perhaps he should have been more aware of Islam’s bloody 1400-year history!

Ahhhh, the Al Aqsa mosque should be contested, because it sits on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, where King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem as a monument to God and a permanent home for the inner sanctuary, which contained the Ark of the Covenant that held the two stone tablets that Moses received at Mt. Horeb. The ground under the Temple Mount to this day contains artifacts that verify the existence of the Jewish people who worshipped in that Temple; the coins of the monetary system used by the Jews before the Christian Era, pottery, stones with inscriptions, an arch, a colonnade, a grand stairway, Solomon’s Stables, thousands of mikvehs (ceremonial baths), and the continuation of the Western Wall now leading to the city walls and the Lion’s Gate. It should also be contested because the imams have the audacity to preach hate and death to all the Jews from the mosque that sits on Jewish land!

I would like to hear from CBS’s Morning news show and Norah O’Donnell concerning her contesting the Har Nof synagogue; I believe a sincere apology to the Jewish people and a statement of correction are in order.

Louis René Beres, professor of political science and international law at Purdue University, is the author of many books and articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including several very early works on nuclear terrorism. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton.

It would seem preposterous to connect the United Nations General Assembly and genocide in causal terms, but this link is plausible today. On December 2, the world body overwhelmingly endorsed a plainly one-sided resolution, calling upon Israel to renounce possession of nuclear weapons, and, simultaneously, to join a Nuclear Weapons Free-Zone for the Middle East. Should Israel ever feel compelled to abide by such a carefully contrived proposal, it would immediately become complicit in its own planned disappearance.

Almost from the beginning, when first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion saw the primary need for a “great equalizer,” Israel’s core security as a beleaguered state has depended upon nuclear weapons. Although still ambiguous and still undisclosed, this Israeli “bomb in the basement” has managed to keep a substantial number of potentially existential enemies at bay. And while it was never a suitable deterrent against historically “normal” wars, or acts of terrorism, this available nuclear option has successfully thwarted what enemy states have expressly wanted most of all – that is, in the precise words commonly favored in such recurrent Arab and/or Iranian pleas, a “liquidation of the Zionist Entity.”

Significantly, from the standpoint of Israel’s enemies, there has never been any ambiguity. Presently, with Iran approaching full and effectively unobstructed membership in the Nuclear Club – a manifestly disingenuous approach, one assumed in stunning defiance of its nuclear non-proliferation treaty obligations – nuclear weapons and strategy have become indispensable to Israel’s physical survival.

“Mass counts,” wrote the classic Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, and only Israel’s enemies have mass. Each year, without fail, these determined enemies call sanctimoniously for some form or other of Israeli denuclearization. Now, it is high time to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are never truly evil in themselves, and that their potential harmfulness is contingent upon which individual state or alliance is in control. In certain circumstances, as should be cartographically obvious to anyone who can see that Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan, these weapons can be vital to self-defense and population survival.

ERIN GO ANTI-SEMITIC?…RSK

A furore has broken out in Ireland after organizers of the forthcoming Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 decided to ban any mention of Israel at the event.

“The trustees of Holocaust Educational Trust Ireland (HETI) have instructed the host of the country’s main Shoah memorial event in January ‘not to refer to the Jewish State or the State of Israel during any part of the ceremony,’” the London-based Jewish Chronicle newspaper reported.

The ban follows a similar bar imposed just days before this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day in Ireland, when long-standing host Yanky Fachler was told to avoid mentioning Israel, the JC said.

He reluctantly complied when his objections fell on deaf ears but, afterwards, complained in writing to the organising body, HETI – only to be told the rule will again apply at January’s event at Dublin’s Mansion House.

Six days later, Fachler received a letter from HETI chair Peter Cassells telling him he was being replaced after 12 years in the job.

“I felt like I’d been hit very hard in my stomach,” Fachler said. The HETI decision “plays directly into the hands of everyone who doesn’t like Jews or Israel and I find it very sad that apparently the two Jewish members of the board did this,” he said.

The JC noted that Alan Shatter, a Jewish politician and former Justice and Equality Minister, “emphatically denied” that he had asked for Fachler to be sacked at a meeting with HETI to review the Holocaust commemoration event.

“I’m concerned that board members of HETI have been influenced in how they’re approaching this issue by the hostility towards Israel in some sections of Irish public discourse and by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement,” Shatter told the JC, after describing Fachler as an “outstanding” Master of Ceremonies.

The liberal narrative is that fighting back against Muslim terrorists just makes them attack us. It’s best to just throw up our hands.

The Senate Torture report was supposed to prove their point by inciting Muslim violence. But no particularly special violence has arrived.

A desperate CBS based its entire claim of Muslim outrage on one guy from Twitter who wasn’t even outraged by it. It’s a sad state of affairs when CBS can’t even find an angry Muslim.

At the Daily Beast, Dean Obeidallah tries to explain why Muslims aren’t outraged.

There are two reasons why the torture report has resulted in nothing more—to date—than a few public condemnations and a slew of snarky tweets by ISIS supporters using the hashtag…

First, people across the Middle East have seen their own governments employ horrible forms of torture for years. It’s one of the oppressive techniques utilized by their respective leaders to remain in power…

The second, and what I see as the bigger reason for a collective shrug from the Muslim world, was what we didn’t see in the report. There were no allegations that the jailers engaged in desecrating Islam.

The common denominator in the most violent protests against Western actions has been when Islam had been insulted.

Dean’s various excuses and attacks on America and Israel aside, his two reasons are correct. What he doesn’t say is that…

Can any American who has been force fed videos of young men being beheaded by Islamic barabarians, who lived through the national grief of 9/11 be persuaded by McCain’s blather? He was a lousy candidate and a fool who paved the way for the victory of the worst president in American history….rsk
Senator McCain: ‘Torture is a stain on our national honor’
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) delivered the following statement on the floor of the U.S. Senate on December 9 concerning the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods:

“Mr. President, I rise in support of the release – the long-delayed release – of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s summarized, unclassified review of the so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were employed by the previous administration to extract information from captured terrorists. It is a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose – to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies – but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.

“I believe the American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values.

“I commend Chairman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort to again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from many members of the intelligence community, from officials in two administrations, and from some of our colleagues.