RUTHFULLY YOURS

Never mind the Islamic State and its boxes of heads. The consensus among politicians and the media is that the real crisis in the region is that the Jewish State is declaring itself a Jewish State.

Again.

Israel’s flag carries the six-pointed star that was the seal of the House of David. Its anthem speaks of the “Jewish spirit.” Israel’s Declaration of Independence declared “the establishment of a Jewish State.”

It couldn’t be any less unambiguous if Mel Brooks were made the President of Israel (which would also be a manifest improvement over the even more clownish President Rivlin.) Despite that the media and its politicians treated the Jewish State bill as a major development and the end of the world.

And that’s not an exaggeration.

The understated title of a Haaretz article was “The road from Jewish nation-state to the Gates of Hell.” It was only to be expected that the radicals of the leftist paper would lose their minds over a bill that reaffirms reality. Reality has always been the enemy of the left. But the level of hysteria and incitement was a bit much even by the standards of a paper that had called Israeli soldiers and officers “filth.”

The New York Times called the bill “heartbreaking.” This is the first time that the Gray Lady showed anything resembling a heart when it came to Israel.

The State Department, whose boss just decided to ignore the results of a democratic election and press on with his undemocratic agenda, warned Israel to maintain its “commitment to democratic principles.” The European Union, which rejects a democratic referendum, warned Israel to “protect its democratic standards.”

Obama, the EU and the Israeli left like talking about democracy. They just don’t like practicing it.

My e-pal David is so right about this role of language in the identity of Israel….The miracle is that at one time more people spoke Mongolian tha spoke Hebrew. It was the mettle and dedication of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (B.Vilna 1858-D. Jerusalem 1922) who was the architect of the renewal of Hebrew in the modern era. A miracle….rsk

“The main factor that redeemed the Jewish people in our time is the state of Israel. It made them an active, generative people again, not merely scattered minorities contending with the Scylla and Charybdis of antisemitism and assimilation.

But a close handmaiden of the Jewish state in effecting this transformation was the Hebrew language. Along with the magnetic pull of the Land of Israel itself, it was Hebrew that enabled the Zionist endeavor to coalesce and take on a distinctive, organic character.

Hebrew—that is, the revival of the Hebrew language in the context of the return to Zion—achieved that in four main ways.
1. It made unity possible for radically diverse immigrants.

From the onset of Zionist aliyah (immigration to Israel) in the early 1880s to today, when the phenomenon continues, Jews have come to Israel from all corners of the world speaking over a hundred different languages. They’ve come from Russia, Poland, Germany, Morocco, Iraq, Ethiopia, India, America—the list goes on. Although not a few of these immigrants had some degree of knowledge of Hebrew or other Jewish languages, the majority had a non-Jewish mother tongue. In other words, a Tower of Babel.

So the adoption of Hebrew as the dominant language of the prestate community, and eventually of Israel itself, was far from a fait accompli. Some championed Yiddish instead. In 1913 the “Language War” broke out over plans to make German the language of the Technion, a technical college in Haifa that thrives to this day. The Language War galvanized those most committed to making Hebrew the main official language of the emerging polity, and they eventually prevailed.

It was a strategic and wise choice; it not only made unity possible but also much else.
2. It connected the society as a whole to the Hebrew Bible and other sources.

A benefit of writing this piece is that it provides an opportunity for remembrance on how much of note transpires in a mere thirty or thirty-one days. This past November was no different.

The Grand Jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson consumed mountains of press. It also generated outrage among those fired up by the Reverend Al Sharpton and others who saw the lack of an indictment as the furtherance of racial injustice. The consequences included demonstrations and protests that turned violent and destroyed property, mostly of those who had scrimped and saved to open their stores, many of whom are minorities. Nevertheless, my guess is that Ferguson will be only a footnote when the history of this era is written. It wasn’t injustice that resulted from the Grand Jury’s decision; it was justice that did not conform to the preconceptions of those who had tried Officer Darren Wilson in the media. So, like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and his death will disappear from memory, a tragic and unfortunate victim of those who look for racism at every opportunity.

In other news, the President issued an Executive Order granting amnesty to millions of aliens who arrived here illegally from Mexico and Central America. The President has dared Republicans to challenge him by denying confirmations, cutting off funding or shutting down government – a challenge he expects to (and probably will) win. Apparently, breaking the law is okay if you can get away with it, just as upholding only the laws he finds convenient is okay with our President. What an example to set for our youth, especially those African-Americans who saw in the 2008 and 2012 elections the ultimate fulfillment of the Civil Rights movement!

With his poll numbers in the toilet, Mr. Obama is anxious to get good news wherever he can. He signed an agreement with China, which commits that country to do nothing for the next ten years, while imposing burdens on U.S. businesses and taxpayers. It reminds me of the promises made by royalty to their subjects of “air pudding with wind sauce.” John Kerry failed to strike a deal with Iran; so that country continues to barrel toward nuclear capability, which assuredly will create a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong-un had the temerity to condemn the U.S. for human rights violations! Putin persists pugnaciously.

Shortly after former Tory MP Mark Reckless had defected to UKIP and triggered a by-election (special election) in his Rochester and Strood constituency, David Cameron vowed that the Conservatives would stop Reckless from getting “his fat arse back onto the green benches” of the House of Commons. Well, the Tories did what they could, but there was no bum’s rush for the fat arse. On November 20, Reckless regained his seat with a lead of roughly 7 percent over his Conservative rival, a result rather better than generally expected at the time he announced his defection. Rochester and Strood was not thought to be natural UKIP territory. In preparing Revolt on the Right, an indispensable guide to the rise of UKIP, British academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin ranked every constituency in Britain for its likely receptiveness to UKIP. Writing in the Financial Times after the vote, Goodwin noted that Rochester and Strood sat quite some way down on the list, in 271st place to be precise.

Yet Reckless won. British by-elections are notorious for generating freak results. Turnout is low, and electors feel freer to cast a protest vote than they do at a general election, when the stakes are viewed as far higher. Reckless might find it tough to hang on to the seat when the whole nation goes to the polls in May next year.

But UKIP is not going away. Barring schism or major scandal, the party will be a serious player at the general election. First-past-the-post is cruel to outsiders, and UKIP may not win many seats (five or so, if I had to guess) in the 650-strong House of Commons, but it will grab a large number of votes across England, if not in Britain’s Celtic periphery. Opinion polls have been all over the place, with some even showing UKIP running north of 20 percent, but the party appears to have a solid core of support in the mid teens. The traditional assumption, based on UKIP’s historical failure to repeat at home the success it’s had in EU elections, has been that most UKIP voters will return to one of the establishment parties in a general election. In the 2009 elections to the EU parliament, UKIP took 16.5 percent of the British vote. In the general election the next year, that shrank to a little over 3 percent, a sliver, but still enough to cost the Conservatives some 20 seats and, with that, any chance of a clean parliamentary majority.

— Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

High-level officials of the United Nations are not known for their perspicacity, competence, or scientific acumen, but the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, is a particular embarrassment. With so much attention focused on the Ebola-virus outbreak in Africa, her exaggerations and petty scolding have made her a high-profile liability.

In a speech at a regional conference in Benin last month, she warned that the Ebola outbreak “is the most severe acute public-health emergency seen in modern times” and bashed pharmaceutical companies for not developing Ebola vaccines — products that could not possibly be profitable. “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay,” she said — a truism if there ever was one. “WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.”

Perhaps Dr. Chan is unaware of the U.N.’s own data on the infectious and other public-health scourges that afflict the developing world, Africa in particular.

Let’s consider first how Ebola stacks up against other public-health emergencies in developing countries. As the United Nations’ own data make clear, infectious diseases, many of them preventable and treatable, remain the scourge of poorer populations. In 2008, about 250 million cases of malaria caused almost a million deaths, mostly of children younger than five. In virtually all poor, malaria-endemic countries, there is inadequate access to antimalarial medicines (especially artemisinin-based combination therapy).

The incidence of malaria could be reduced dramatically by the judicious application of the mosquito-killing chemical DDT, but the U.N. and national regulators have curtailed its availability, owing to misguided notions about its toxicity (and no small measure of political correctness). Hundreds of millions suffer from other neglected tropical diseases, including lymphatic filariasis and cholera.

Although new HIV infections worldwide declined slightly during the past decade, 2.7 million people contracted the virus in 2008, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths. By the end of that year, more than 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving anti-retroviral therapy, but more than 5 million who were HIV-positive remained untreated. The number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide is increasing, and the growing emergence of multi-drug-resistant strains of the bacteria is especially worrisome.

Vermont’s incumbent governor, Peter Shumlin, wants his state to become the first to launch a government takeover of its health-care system. But the results of last month’s election could give him pause. He was unable to secure a majority of votes this November — after winning 58 percent of the vote two years ago. Now the state legislature will determine whether to send Shumlin back for another term.

What happened in between? Vermont botched the launch of its state-run insurance exchange. By 2017, the exchange is supposed to serve as the “infrastructure” for a single-payer system, with the state picking up the tab for just about every resident’s health care. That exchange hasn’t even gotten off the ground, and state officials have no idea how to raise the $2 billion a year they’ll need to operate a single-payer system.

Vermont’s struggle to implement single-payer health care shouldn’t be a surprise. Such systems are failing to deliver affordable, quality care all over the world. And ordinary citizens are starting to notice.

Shumlin’s administration announced last month that it would shut down the state’s Green Mountain Care exchange for repairs that could take weeks. One state senator said its rollout “has been pretty much a disaster” and “has shaken a lot of people’s faith in the ability of state government to put together something that would work.”

Even if the state could figure out how to operate a single-payer system, it wouldn’t be able to afford it. A 2013 University of Massachusetts study commissioned by the state concluded that Vermont would have to come up with $1.6 billion in new revenue every year to pay for the plan. Now the state estimates that single payer will take $1.7 billion to $2.2 billion in additional annual revenue.

Vermont collects $2.7 billion a year in taxes. How does it expect to boost its tax take by 80 percent to pay for single payer?

Vermonters should be thrilled that single payer has false-started in their state. For evidence that single payer doesn’t work, look no further than the United Kingdom and Canada.

The then-impending Republican takeover of the Senate “is excellent news for Democrats,” Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future opined in a Politico piece two months ago. His prediction—with which we had some fun at the time—was that the new majority, combined with the prospect of a wide-open race for the presidential nomination, would heighten Republican divisions: “Instead of another two years of the same old gridlock that has turned voters off of both parties, Democrats will get to kick back with a large tub of buttery popcorn and watch the Republican soap opera hit peak suds.”

The New Congress won’t take office until January, so Scher’s forecast has yet to be tested. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank holds out hope that Scher will be proved correct: “There will be many . . . tensions within the new GOP majority—and Democrats should be exploiting those.” But for now, he observes, it is the Democrats who are “having an intraparty food fight.”

Or as The Wall Street Journal puts it in a news story today: “Long-muted tensions within the Democratic Party over policy and strategy are beginning to surface publicly, a sign of leaders looking beyond President Barack Obama ’s tenure in the aftermath of the party’s midterm election defeat.”

One point of disagreement arose Tuesday, when “the White House surprised Democratic leaders in the Senate by threatening to veto a tax package negotiated by both parties. The White House said the deal would help’“well-connected corporations while neglecting working families.’ ’’

Another “flashpoint,” according to the Journal, is immigration: “Some House Democrats believe it was a mistake for Mr. Obama to wait until after the midterm elections to take executive action limiting deportations, a delay that the president agreed to at the behest of Senate Democratic leaders trying to protect vulnerable incumbents.” As we noted in September, administration officials touted the delay as a way of deceiving red-state voters into re-electing Democratic senators. It didn’t work: Four red-state Democrats were defeated on Election Day; the fifth, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, isn’t expected to make it past a Dec. 6 runoff.

The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.

The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.

To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief, because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming, as Andrew McCarthy has explained. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically impossible, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended — a legal arrangement.

All politics is local, and Saturday’s midterm elections in Taiwan mostly turned on local issues such as food safety, stagnant wages, education and infrastructure. But one factor behind the landslide victory of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party is rising fear that Taiwan’s de facto independence is threatened by the island’s increasing economic ties to China. As Taiwan moves toward presidential elections in January 2016, expect tensions to rise across the Taiwan Strait.

Saturday’s results give the DPP control of some two-thirds of Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties, including four of its six special municipalities. Taipei’s mayor-elect is a DPP-backed independent, so for the first time in 16 years the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), won’t govern the island’s capital and largest city. Taiwan’s last three presidents previously served as mayor of Taipei.

The KMT was quick to admit defeat. “I have heard [voters’] voices and I will not evade my responsibility to start reform,” said President Ma Ying-jeou, who may resign as KMT chairman at a party meeting Wednesday.

Though the scale of its losses is a surprise, the KMT has recently earned a reputation for bungling. A series of scandals over tainted food, including hundreds of tons contaminated with “gutter oil” made from waste and animal feed, led Mr. Ma’s health minister to resign in October. The economic affairs minister resigned in August after gas explosions killed 32 people in the southern city of Kaohsiung. The education minister quit amid a scandal over research fraud.

This year’s major political event, however, was the Sunflower Movement, which culminated in a 24-day student-led occupation of the legislature to block ratification of a trade deal signed with China. The cross-strait agreement, covering trade in services, would have been the 22nd enacted since 2008, when Mr. Ma initiated economic detente with China. Freer trade and travel have helped Taiwan’s economy, but in ways that could make the island dependent on Beijing. Cross-strait trade has nearly doubled since 2008, with some 40% of Taiwanese exports and 80% of outbound investment now going to China.

The Gangs of New York A union scam helps explain why Gotham hotels cost so much.

Tourists converging on New York City for the holidays are often stunned by how expensive the hotels are. Much of that is real estate and seasonal demand, but what may be less apparent to travellers is a shakedown engineered by Big Labor and assorted corporate cronies to force non-union accommodations to organize or leave Gotham.

In 2001 the major city hotels bought labor peace through a multi-employer collective-bargaining agreement known as the Industry Wide Agreement, or IWA. The New York Hotel Trades Council (AFL-CIO) and the Hotel Association of New York City, the trade group for the five boroughs, agreed that association members would be neutral when the union tries to organize a property and abide by “card check.” That’s the gambit that denies workers their right to secret ballots in labor elections.

Businesses tend to get the unions they deserve, and three of every four New York hotel employees now belong to a workplace with contracts governed by the IWA. More notable is that the agreement contains an unusual “accretion clause” that foists the IWA’s terms on every hotel that is directly or indirectly owned or managed by any party to the IWA.

Hotel owners in New York often engage third-party managers to run the business or as contractors to provide discrete services such as guest amenities or back-office due diligence. Under the accretion clause, a non-union hotel that hires one of these agents becomes a “joint employer” that must obey the IWA even if its proprietors never consented to the agreement, bargained with the AFL-CIO or joined the Hotel Association.