RUTHFULLY YOURS

The White House pushed back against the governors of New York, New Jersey, Illinois and other states that instituted procedures to forcibly quarantine medical workers returning from West Africa, deepening an emotional debate brought on by recent Ebola cases in the U.S.

A senior administration official said Sunday that new federal guidelines under development would protect Americans from imported cases of the disease but not interfere with the flow of U.S. health workers to and from West Africa to fight the epidemic there.

“We have let the governors of New York, New Jersey and other states know that we have concerns with the unintended consequences… [that quarantine] policies not grounded in science may have on efforts to combat Ebola at its source,” the official said.

It wasn’t clear what action the Obama administration could take to end the quarantines.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday night gave the first new details about how his state’s quarantine would work, noting that individuals would be allowed to stay in their homes for 21 days. State and local health-care workers would check on quarantined people twice a day to monitor for Ebola symptoms. Those with symptoms would be taken to a hospital. People whose jobs won’t compensate them during their quarantine would be paid by the state.

Travelers who have had no direct contact with Ebola patients wouldn’t be subject to confinement at home, but they would be consulted twice-daily by health officials over the three-week period.

New York officials said the new protocols still went further than those recommended by the federal government.

More problematic is that it reaches a point where discussion or debate is impossible because the questions themselves become a crime.

Such laws not only run counter to the basic principles of democracy; they are, in many instances, representative of a duplicitous selective application of the law. Why are the prosecutors not going after Yasmina Haifi, who tweeted that ISIS is a Zionist plot? Is the criminalization of hate speech now dependent only on whom you hate?

The people are entitled to a country in which they can voice their frustration and be heard.

Last March, Geert Wilders, the controversial right-wing Dutch Parliamentarian best known for his stance against Muslims and Muslim immigration, stood before supporters at a campaign rally and asked a simple question: “Do you want more Moroccans, or fewer?”

He expected the question to raise enthusiasm among the crowd, and drive his party to greater Parliamentary success. It has also possibly landed him before the courts, to be tried for “hate speech” — a crime in the Netherlands, which, despite its claims of “freedom of speech,” still criminalizes speech that “offends” on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, or even personal convictions and ideology.

Wilders, however, didn’t make a statement: he simply asked others what they wanted. It was the Dutch people themselves who, in response, cried out, “Fewer! Fewer!”

As in every dictatorship, the government’s only fear is of its own people.

Today, China’s authorities are going back on their promise of maintaining Hong Kong’s special political status, inherited from Britain. Hong Kong, however, is moving the Arab way: it is choosing democracy.

Such movements do not die; they just take shelter to let the storm pass. The Arab Spring will arrive in these lands with the sweetness of democracy, equal opportunity, and the promise of freedom for everyone.

In 2010, the tiny North African nation of Tunisia rejected patriarchy, nepotism and tribalism and opted for Arab democracy. Soon its call for overthrowing absolutism engulfed the Arab world and ushered in a new beginning — only soon to find itself undermined and overwhelmed, like Egypt, by organized, well-funded autocracies.

The democrats’ movement was often swamped by blood and atrocities, but still the hope for democracy and freedom is alive and waiting for the next wave of uprisings — sooner rather than later; no one can resist the call for democracy, freedom and human rights.

The Arab Spring Tsunami Goes Global

For the first time ever, an Arab-born movement reverberated in democratic countries such as Spain, with the Outraged Movement 2011-2012 (Indignados or Moviemente 15-M). It kicked off on May 15, 2011 in Madrid and 58 other Spanish cities, and called for more democracy and more youths represented in politics.

In America, there are also calls for more economic freedom and the opportunity for all Americans to make choices free of government incompetence, interference and control.

It’s only a matter of time before the Islamic State tries to attack Americans here at home. That’s according to James Chaparro, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security who spoke at length with National Review Online about the country’s vulnerabilities to the terrorist group, from the visa system to homegrown sympathizers.

Chaparro spent more than two and a half decades working in the federal law-enforcement and intelligence communities, where his duties included managing intelligence efforts across DHS. He left his position as the assistant director of intelligence at Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the summer of 2013.

“I think that we were caught flat-footed with ISIS,” Chaparro says. “I don’t think that we were nimble enough to organize ourselves in a way that would have allowed us to put together that sort of comprehensive plan of attack — and not just military attack, but with all the instruments of national power.” He says a plan could have included using the Treasury Department, intelligence community, immigration and customs authorities, and the military to strike back at the Islamic State.

Because the rapid ascension of the Islamic State caught the federal government off-guard, American intelligence agencies don’t know enough about the group, Chaparro says. The lack of intelligence has many ramifications, but chief among them, it has made it difficult for officials to effectively update the terrorist watch list to prevent terrorists from exploiting the visa-waiver program or applying for non-immigrant visas.

He’s not the first to sound the alarm about loopholes in the visa system. Ronald Colburn, a former director of law enforcement on the White House Homeland Security Council, told NRO in August that members of the Islamic State could use visa waivers to enter the U.S. “Members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and potentially in the near future, if not already, ISIS, [could come] over on visa waivers from places like Great Britain,” Colburn said. Many intelligence sources believe that the terrorist who beheaded American journalist James Foley has roots in Great Britain and, as a result, could enter the U.S. without a visa.

In the fall of 1991, the relatively small and quiet university of Alfred University in New York State was engrossed in controversy. Indignant professors led students in protests, heated debates raged throughout the divided campus, editorials filled the school and local papers. At the heart of the controversy was the newly-installed statue of King Alfred, the medieval English monarch after whom the town and school was named. Ten years prior, when the monument was commissioned, no one could foresee the controversy it would eventually cause. Yet, its placement offended the sensibilities of the university’s history professors.

By the strong and negative reaction one would think that Alfred must have been a tyrant, an oppressor of his people, a man deserving of the title Alfred the Terrible. Surprisingly, it is the opposite that that is true.

From 871 to 899, Alfred was the King of Wessex, one of the four kingdoms that would eventually become England. During his reign he revived the tradition of learning that had died with the fall of the Roman Empire. He required all of his nobles be literate and increased their education by translating the great Latin texts into English. Additionally, he has the honor of being the first king in English history to write a book, preceding King James by eight centuries. Thus, he is known as the “education king.”

More significantly, for the first time, English law would be written and would establish the tradition of England being a land ‘ruled by laws’ rather than by the whims of powerful men. Within these laws we find the genesis the principles of due process, trial by jury, and respect for the individual; no matter how lowly. His laws protected the commoner from arbitrary and excessive punishment. Even slaves were protected by his laws. There were limits on the number of hours they could be forced to work and were granted 37 work-free holidays per year. Furthermore, the slaves were allowed to work on their own behalf and retain all proceeds from their endeavors. Through the church, Alfred created a system that fed the poor and provided them with medical care.

It has been a good year for that misunderstood and once oppressed Zionist philosophy known as Revisionist- Zionism and the legacy of its protagonists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin. Aside from left-wing Israeli politicians like Tzipi Livni celebrating the legacies of Jabotinsky and Begin, two books were published this year on these two right-wing figures by centrist authors.

Yet those who still revere the master and teacher and his star pupil may have little to be happy about, since the mainstreaming of these two founding fathers appears to come at the price of the principles they fought for.

Published in May, Hillel Halkin’s concise and highly readable Jabotinsky: A Life analyzes portions of Jabotinsky’s life and thought which other Jabotinsky biographers paid less attention to, such as certain non-political themes in Jabotinsky’s writing and his relationship with his wife. Halkin also touts Jabotinsky’s literary achievements, commitment to individual rights and his interesting personality.

“If I could raise any of the great figures of Zionist history from the dead for an hour’s conversation,” Halkin writes in the epilogue, “I would choose Jabotinsky,” who “would chat affably over a beer… .”

With an emphasis on Jabotinsky the artist, Halkin thus makes the man once called “Vladimir Hitler” more palatable to the liberal American Jewish audience.

While lacking Halkin’s literary talents, Daniel Gordis’s Menachem Begin: the Struggle for Israel’s Soul, published in March, is still enjoyable and provides a more in-depth basic text on Begin as compared with Harry Hurwitz’s short Begin biography.

Gordis similarly proffers a Menachem Begin more acceptable to the American Jewish community that once denounced him as a fascist, by grounding Begin’s decisions, from his granting asylum to the Vietnamese “Boat People” to his fiery opposition to reparations from Germany, in his Jewishness or “Jewish soul.”

Israel cannot expect to earn the world’s respect until it learns to respect itself.

This murder would be different. So we thought. There can be no justification. A 3-month-old Hebrew baby was slain in Jerusalem.

Her sweet name runs longer than the coffin in which she was buried, Chaya Zisel Braun.

Her sweet name runs longer than the coffin in which she was buried, Chaya Zisel Braun.
Her killer was a Palestinian Arab who answered the call from his leader, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, a man who provokes a new blood libel each day with cries that grow increasingly shrill and hysterical as if coming from a raving lunatic who needs to be locked up.

This time Abbas shrieked about “Jewish encroachment” on the Temple Mount, referred to Jews as a “herd of cattle” and demanded vengeance “by any means.”

Chaya Zissel paid the price. (Most unbearable is to think of the parents and grandparents who waited and prayed for this precious child.)

Someone else drove the car that purposely bulldozed into a crowd, but Abbas needs to be arrested.

England is debating whether to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood, the religious, ideological and operative supporter of Hamas. Various political pressures, however, have prevented British security from designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. One can hope that the ISIS execution of American correspondent James Foley, carried out by a British-born Muslim, would be a wake-up call for not only the British, but all the European security services. The chilling similarity between the horror of Foley’s execution at the hands of a British-born ISIS operative and the Hamas execution of dozens of Gazans, as well as the ISIS slaughter of hundreds of virtually naked Syrian soldiers, should have sounded alarm bells regarding the dangers inherent in the fermenting Islamic enclaves in America and Europe. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.

The West’s decades-long apathy toward Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians turned into shock and horror when the Hamas’ sister organization, ISIS, used the same tactics on Yazidis, Christians, Shi’ites, Kurds and anyone else the group classified as “infidel.”

The activists of the Muslim enclaves in Europe, which bred volunteers for ISIS, are now demonstrating in the streets – not only against Israel – but against their host countries. They are testing the limits to see how far they will be able to go when they decide to organize riots. When that happens, they will not only be inspired by their political sheikhs, they will be supported by mujahedeen, volunteers who fought in Syria and Iraq and returned to the back yards of their home countries as seasoned fighters.

The whole world is slowly becoming aware of the situation, yet American Secretary of State Kerry still tries to promote Qatar and Turkey, which openly support terrorist organizations all over the globe, as “honest brokers” to negotiate peace between Israel and Hamas. State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf still actively defends Qatar, whose Al-Jazeera TV is shamelessly used for propaganda against Israel, Egypt and Jordan, and calls for rioting on the Temple Mount. It accuses Jordan of collaboration with Israel in Israel’s so-called attempts to “Judaize” Jerusalem and uses all means at its disposal to foment unrest in Jordan against the king and to dethrone him.

Real and wannabe censors are up to their old tricks again. Real censors are the Democratic members of the Federal Election Committee (FEC). The wannabe censors are also members of the FEC, and are Republicans. If the latter didn’t think anyone should be censored in any venue – print, radio, television, or Internet – they wouldn’t accept appointments to the FEC, nor wish to be in the same room with the real censors.

That being said, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, McCain–Feingold Act of 2002) is the typical miscegenational product of bipartisanship between Republicans and Democrats that advances further government controls. But then, that’s all one can expect of pragmatic bipartisanship efforts, in which the Republicans forget or discard their alleged principles, but the Democrats don’t and get some or all of what they want: More controls.

I happened by chance to hack into the personal blog of the Vice Chair of the FEC and discovered this startling and secret memo passed on to her fellow Democrats on the Commission. The text of it follows, and seems to be addressed, not to her ideological ilk, but to a hypothetical individual for whom Ravel nurtures a revealing, disturbing, if not psychotic animus:

My name is Ann M. Ravel, Vice Chair of the FEC. I’m a pal of Cass Sunstein. Remember him? And David Brooks? And Justice Stevens? They wanted to regulate your speech, too, or at least “nudge” you painlessly to politically acceptable and responsible speech. Now, don’t tell me that you, a lone blogger eking out an existence in Milord Obama’s trashed economy, aren’t a one-man political action committee, that you aren’t incorporated anywhere, not even in Delaware, you don’t sell your drivel to others or pay anyone to run it, and that your only expenses are your time and whatever it costs you to write and publish in the way of printer ink and paper. It doesn’t matter to me if you’ve spent a zillion dollars or the cost of a store-brand chicken pot pie, your speech ought to be regulated, and, if necessary, squelched.

And if you persist in running off your mouth about things you aren’t qualified to even think about, I can sic the IRS or the DOJ on you. All it will take is a phone call and a pen twirling between my fingers, just as my boss, President Obama, boasts he can do. He’s my guy!

I am sitting with Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, and the news has just flashed that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Canadian convert to Islam who terrorized Ottawa on Wednesday, had previously had his passport lifted by the Canadian government as an officially designated “high-risk traveller.”

That means that before Zehaf-Bibeau put a bullet through the heart of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a young reservist standing guard with an unloaded rifle at the Canadian war memorial, and before Zehaf-Bibeau rushed into parliament where, thankfully, he was gunned down by security before he could murder again, Canadian authorities had already identified him as someone likely to join the jihad in the Middle East. In fact, so likely was Zehaf-Bibeau to join a jihadist group such as ISIS that Canada did what many Western governments are now doing in the name of counter-terrorism: they took Zehaf-Bibeau’s passport away.

“That’s the same as the other one!” Wilders notes energetically, referring to Martin Couture-Rouleau, also an Islamic convert and “high-risk traveller,” who drove his car into two Canadian soldiers in Quebec earlier in the week, killing Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent. Couture-Rouleau, who was shot dead at the scene of his crime, had had his passport taken from him in July when he was arrested at the airport before he could travel to Turkey.

In other words, but for good Canadian police work, it looks as if both of these Islam-inspired murderers would have left Canada and disappeared into the bloody maw of the Islamic State. Phew — that was close?

No, that was insane. Such a policy, which the Dutch government also follows, frustrates Geert Wilders to no end.